A few seconds of silence passed. “What do you want from me, Vanessa?”
Vanessa took a deep breath. “I want…I want you to be a good girl. That’s all. While I figure out what to do with you.”
Vanessa took her mother firmly by the elbow and guided her slowly back up to the house. When they reached the deck, Evelyn said, “I’ll be good. I promise. I’ll do whatever you ask.”
“Hubert St. Germain is coming soon with supplies. I’m going to have to keep you locked up and quiet while he’s here.” Vanessa glanced back and checked the glimmering horizon for Hubert’s boat. No sign of him yet.
“Please don’t tie me up again. I swear, I’ll stay out of sight and will be quiet as a mouse. Please, Vanessa.” The ropes had burned Evelyn Cole’s wrists and bare ankles, and the scarf over her mouth had made her feel as if she was suffocating. She meant it, she would do exactly as Vanessa wished. She would stay in the bedroom with the door closed while Hubert was at the camp, and she would not call for help. Vanessa would have to come to her senses eventually. She couldn’t be mad. She couldn’t be capable of killing her own mother. “Vanessa,” she said, and waited until Vanessa’s gaze came back to her. “I am your mother.”
“Stop saying that!” They stood at the closed door of the bedroom side by side. “Come,” she said and held out her hand. “Let’s go in now.” With her free hand Vanessa turned the key and pushed the door open.
“You don’t understand. You’re my child, Vanessa. I’m your mother.”
“Stop saying that! I’ve got to think. I’ve got to think about what’s next.”
“I’m afraid, Vanessa. I’m afraid of what you’re going to do next. Please, remember, you’re my child.”
“Don’t say that again.”
“Vanessa, you are.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“I’m trying to tell you the truth.”
“Right. If you want to tell me the truth,” Vanessa said, drawing her mother into the room and leading her to the chair, “you can tell me who my real mother was. And my real father. Not that it matters much now.”
“I’m your real mother,” Evelyn said simply.
Vanessa turned and looked closely at her. She looked away again. “No. No, you’re not. My real mother never…a real mother wouldn’t treat her daughter the way you’ve treated me,” she said. She put her hands on Evelyn’s shoulders and pushed her down into the chair and gathered the strands of rope from the floor. “A real mother wouldn’t steal her daughter’s inheritance and try to have her locked up in a mental hospital. A real mother would fight tooth and nail against anyone who’d try to do that. A real mother would protect her daughter.”
“It’s true, Vanessa. You are my child.”
“Oh, no, I’m not. Because a real mother wouldn’t lie about it for thirty years. She wouldn’t tell her daughter she was adopted if she wasn’t.”
“Daddy didn’t want you to know. Because he was ashamed of me, and angry. For a long time he was very angry. And I was scared. Scared that, if you did know the truth, other people would find out.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. What…what is the truth?”
Evelyn looked up at her daughter’s anxious face and sighed. This was a conversation that she had longed for and had imagined having a thousand times, but now that it was actually taking place she was very frightened, and for a few seconds she wanted to end it, wanted to say, No, you are not the child I bore before your father and I were married. You’re some other woman’s child. You are not the baby all grown up that I conceived one drunken spring night at a Williams College mixer. She wanted to say, You’re not the child whose father I could not name, a college boy whose face I could not remember the next morning, when I stumbled still drunk down the stairs of the fraternity house and out the door into bright sunlight, my party dress stained and half buttoned. You are not the baby I bore in North Carolina that fall at the home for girls like me, girls whose parents could afford to send them into hiding for six months and claim they’d gone abroad for a semester to study French or Italian or music appreciation, returning to college and proper society in the spring, slim and fresh faced and all but virginal again. Evelyn Cole did not want to tell her daughter that her parents had paid to keep the baby, their grandchild, in the home, which was in fact a posh private orphanage in Asheville, North Carolina, while Evelyn finished her junior and senior years at Smith, where she was courted by the very promising Carter Cole, a Yale man from a distinguished old New England family, a well-born man bound for medical school and inherited wealth, a man who, to the delight and relief of her parents, did indeed marry her. And one night a year later, when he was interrogating his bride about her past sexual experiences, as he often did that first year of their marriage, demanding to hear every last detail, wanting to peer into her sexual past as if it were a set of pornographic photographs, she broke down and finally told him everything she could remember about that terrible party at the fraternity house at Williams College. He had known that his bride had not come to him a virgin — she couldn’t lie about that, he was training to be a doctor, after all — but now he learned that her past, and thus his own, was further tainted by the birth of a child, a little girl who was three years old, a child never put up for adoption and old enough now to be aware of a little of her own mysterious and illegitimate origins, thanks to the sentimental indiscretions of Evelyn’s parents, who had made semiannual visits to the home to visit the child and make sure that she was receiving adequate care, who had indulged themselves by staying with the child alone for hours each time they visited.
“I have no memory of that,” Vanessa declared. “None.”
“Daddy was always afraid that you did. You were so precocious a child, so intelligent, that he kept waiting for it to come out. He was afraid that somehow you knew I was your real mother, and it would become known to other people. And he didn’t want that.”
“But I didn’t know! I have no memories of any visits from Grandma and Grandpa way back then. All I remember of the orphanage are the big lawns and my room there. I remember the bars of my crib and the lawns outside. Nothing else. No people. Not even other children. Except for my crib and the endless lawns, all my earliest memories are of you and Daddy and the house in Tuxedo Park and the apartment in the city and the Reserve. Were there other children?”
“At the home? There were only a few, maybe two or three. Little babies waiting to be adopted. It was very exclusive,” Evelyn said. “Vanessa, I really am thirsty. May I please have a glass of water?”
“As long as you stay in the chair where I can see you,” Vanessa said and went into the bathroom where, watching her mother in the mirror, she filled a glass at the sink and returned with it. She handed the glass to her mother, who drank it down and asked for another. When she came back with the second glass, Vanessa said, “But I don’t understand. Why didn’t Grandma and Grandpa let me be adopted when I was a little baby? Was there something wrong with me? Something that made it so nobody wanted me?”
“Lots of people wanted you. You were beautiful and intelligent and charming. They wouldn’t sign the papers.”
“Who? The people who ran the home?”
“Your grandparents. My mother and father. They would come back from North Carolina and tell me how beautiful you were, as if to punish me. Over and over. And how they were just waiting for the right people to come along and adopt and raise you. I think they meant that. Your grandparents were proud. Proud of their bloodlines. As you know. And even though no one knew for sure who your real father was, they knew he was at least a Williams boy. Which was something, I suppose. They wanted to be able to choose who would adopt you. So they just paid to keep you there and never signed the papers. I don’t know what they were thinking, what they were hoping would happen, because nothing could happen. Except that you would grow older and eventually grow up there.”