When your father tells you his secret, that he is not really Stanford Solomon, and therefore you in turn cannot be Estelle Solomon, that your family does not even exist, you will have your answer. And it is perfect.
* * *
Say you are an eighteen-year-old college student named Caren who lives in a Harlem brownstone with your mother, who is a heroin addict, and your wheelchair-bound Jamaican grandfather who faked his own death, but you won’t know it for a few hours.
Every morning when you wake up, you remember that your grandmother Adele, the person you loved above everyone else in this world, is gone. She worked so hard to shield you from your mother. She loved you so deep it almost rendered your mother’s love supplementary—a bonus—so that the times when Estelle was lucid enough to pay attention to you felt like a holiday, a special occasion. Every child knows that holidays don’t last. By the time you were eight, you had stopped being disappointed.
You don’t begrudge your mother. You can see how hard she is trying. You know she hates living in your grandfather’s house, but in the month since your grandma died, she no longer vanishes for days at a time, returning with no explanation. For the first time in your life, with the exception of an hour a day when she sneaks outside to score, you know exactly where you’ll find her. Knowing should comfort you, but on the rare occasion when you go to the basement and stare at her, passed out on the daybed, you can’t help but wish it had been her who had a heart attack instead of your grandmother. You think, What a waste of a life. The same words you’d overhear your grandmother mumble when she talked about Estelle. You are ashamed of your thoughts. Most of the time Estelle invokes pity in you, and you conclude that’s worse than hatred, for a child to pity their mother.
Later, when your grandfather tells you that he was born Abel Paisley and not Stanford Solomon, you will understand why your grandmother was so disgusted by Estelle’s addiction. Other people are so desperate to make a better life that they are willing to steal one, while your mother is fine with throwing hers away. Perhaps, a life does not belong exclusively to one person, you learn. Look how easily it can be passed from one person to the next until every bit of it is put to good use. You will wonder if there is someone out there who would wear your life better.
But before that, you notice that from the moment you wake up, your grandpa is acting strange. You had been begging him to get a home health aide for the last year because caring for him was getting to be too much for your grandmother, and now it is too much for you. All of a sudden there is one sitting with him at the kitchen table. He is giddy as he says her name to you, Irene, and you wonder if it has been too long since he’s seen a woman he wasn’t related to.
You are about to smile at Irene when you notice that she doesn’t bother to smile at you, barely tilts her head in your direction, before she returns to reading your grandpa’s newspaper. If your grandmother were here, the two of you would go upstairs and talk about this woman. For a moment, you imagine all of the things you would say about her, until you remember that your grandmother is gone. Briefly you contemplate going down to the basement and telling your mother about Irene, but that would be as exciting as talking to a corpse.
Since your grandmother left you, you’ve found it hard to think about anything else besides getting away from this family. So much so, you’ve started sleeping with one of your professors at City College. It helps the fantasy of running away. The irony that you might be following in your mother’s footsteps doesn’t escape you. Your father had been a professor, but your mother had been a high school girl who’d just had a bunch of college friends. Your birth cost him his marriage and his reputation, and even though he was kind the handful of times you visited him, you know he resented you. You speak to him only on holidays now, even though he just lives in Queens. But still, you want him to be proud of you. You are actually going to get a degree one day. You are actually going to leave this house.
Sometimes you imagine a scenario in which your professor leaves his wife and four children and buys a condo for the two of you in downtown Brooklyn. You are not sure what you would say if he were actually to propose this to you. He hasn’t talked about leaving his wife, hasn’t said he loves you. You might think less of him if he did. Besides, you have no intention of trading your dysfunctional family for another, being the reluctant stepmother to four resentful white kids. In your family, you are known as the smart one for a reason.
* * *
Now let’s say that you are a dead woman, six years on the other side, whose husband let you believe he was dead. When you were alive, they called you Vera, but here there is no need for names. You did not know the truth about your husband until your own death, but the timing of the knowledge made it no less infuriating. You have analyzed all the years you spent mad with guilt, thinking you were the one who sent him to his grave.
Death is just one long therapy session. You have gone over every second of your life and divided them into the misery you caused and the misery others caused you. You have been waiting for six years for this motherfucker to die, and you know that the day has finally arrived.
You look at the elaborate theater that your former husband is producing and you laugh (or you imagine yourself laughing; you no longer have a mouth or a face). He has asked the women down to the brownstone’s parlor. He has your daughter—your daughter who he barely even knew—help him move from his wheelchair to his favorite rocking chair, which he thinks makes him appear wise. Clearly, none of the women want to be there. The three of them settle side by side on a crushed-velvet settee barely listening, unaware of their blood connection.
You are there in the room with them, waiting for Abel to gather up his nerve. You have decided to choose one person in his house to be the catalyst of his death, to be briefly possessed by you long enough to get the deed done, but the question of who has stumped you. Who will hurt him the most?
You look at your own daughter, Irene, think she’s owed the revenge, but you can see both the past and the future and know that giving her guilt to carry is not doing her any favors. There is a cruel impulse inside her, one that you gave her, that you do not want to feed. You know that most of her misery was brought about by you. When she dies, you will face your own reckoning, but for now you have no plans to ruin her life any further.
You look at the other two women, his daughter and granddaughter, the products of the weak woman he married after you. You have passed her in the other place, for she’s dead now too. You thought you’d have harsh words for her, that her day of reckoning would come, but you mostly feel sorry for her. You can feel her pining for Abel, pleading with you to spare him, until you’ve recently had no choice but to shut her out.
You are so close to Abel as he tells them you can smell the Wray & Nephew rum on his breath, but he can’t see or sense you. When he says the words I was born Abel Paisley, you see your daughter shake her head. It will take her a while to understand that her father was alive all those years and left her behind to suffer with you. After he says the words I was born Abel Paisley, his daughter Estelle exhales deeply, tears form in her eyes, but then she just bursts out laughing. For the first time in her life, she actually looks at her father with gratitude. She actually turns to the old man and says, “Thank you.” Estelle puts her arms around her daughter, Caren, who, after he tells them, begins to cry.