Maggie felt her stomach twist in on itself. “Is that what you think?”
Savannah didn’t answer, just kept fiddling with her hair.
“I don’t believe—” Maggie was about to say she didn’t believe Bess hadn’t wanted her children to find their father someday. But she stopped because, really, what did she know? She had asked, but Bess hadn’t told. Then she died and left Maggie alone to improvise.
That’s not exactly how it went, Bess whispered.
Maggie hushed her.
Savannah, still playing with her hair, put a few more thoughts together. “I’ve always been curious, but that’s different than wanting to find him. What if he’s awful? Like one of those idiots on Cops who tries to use a Super Soaker to rob a liquor store?”
“I doubt Mom would have been dumb enough to get involved with someone like that.” Thomas looked to Maggie for confirmation. He always seemed to do that with her, even when he’d been young. Like he knew the real answers to his questions but didn’t trust Maggie to give them. Once, he had asked her what time it was and when she answered, “Three o’clock,” he’d said, “No, it’s two fifty-five.”
“Well,” Maggie said to them now, “as her mother, I would hope not. But you know I can’t say for certain.”
“I will admit to wondering about him,” said Savannah. “How Mom met him, whether they would have been good together, or if he was an awful human being.”
She looked at Maggie with her dark, chocolate eyes. “You really don’t know anything about him? Or them?”
Oh, how Maggie wished she did. Eighteen years ago, Bess had gone off on a ski trip her senior year of college. Two months later, she had driven home holding a diploma and a white stick bearing two pink lines.
“I want to keep it,” she’d said.
“Trust your instincts, lovey,” Maggie’d answered and hadn’t pried further. Her daughter had seemed happy—that was enough.
Savannah sagged in her chair. “Anyway, I’m curious about all the random stuff, like the lactose thing. You guys can eat whatever you like. And Mom, too. Remember how much toasted almond fudge ice cream she ate? I’d love to do that, but I can’t.” She smiled. “And the way I look. Mom used to say to me, ‘Let’s imagine you’re a tasty little chocolate drop and I eat you all up!’ But you?” She poked Thomas’s arm. “You’re like the Jolly Green Giant.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to say—” He stopped, the words refusing to come. This was the Thomas Maggie knew. Bold to a point, then suddenly fearful. The owlet who needed a push before leaving the nest to fly.
Savannah surrendered, quiet for a moment. “It’s just...she never talked about him. It’s like she was giving us a clue, or something. Like she was saying it’s better not to know.”
And there it was, Maggie realized. The key question in their puzzle, pulled from the shadows into the light. Was it better to know, or not? There would always be pieces of Bess’s story that Maggie wished she hadn’t learned. Maggie was no ostrich, not one to bury her head in the sand to avoid hearing the truth, and yet what good had knowledge done her back then? It hadn’t changed the trajectory of her daughter’s fate.
Sometimes, the answers just led to more questions.
Maggie reached for Thomas’s hand and he let her take it. “When you were little,” Maggie said, “we spent our mornings watching Sesame Street and eating bowls of Cheerios. Do you remember?”
Thomas gave a half smile.
“And they’d sing that song about one of the things not being like the other, and you and Savannah would shout and try to beat the other to point out which one it was—like the red balloon or the baseball hat.”
Savannah laughed. “I nailed that game. It’s my directorial eye.”
Maggie nodded but kept her eyes on Thomas, desperate not to lose the connection with this unhappy, searching boy. “And do you remember the day I found you looking at our family pictures and singing the same song? We’d just gotten the proofs back from the photographer and I was trying to choose one for our Christmas cards. I left for a minute to do something and came back to find you there, holding up a photo and singing.”
Thomas said he remembered.
“Do you know what you pointed out to me? Which one you said was not like the others?”
“Me.” He paused, tripping over the memory. “I said me, didn’t I?”
Yes, that’s exactly what he’d said.
Maggie had long forgotten that moment, tucked it away with so many other anecdotes from busy days filling busy years. When it had happened, she’d assumed he was merely pointing out that he was a boy in a family of girls.
Now, though, it struck her.
“I suppose it feels as if you’ve spent your entire life as the odd man out.”
Thomas turned his face to the ceiling, as if not wanting to consider anything but the white expanse above. “Yeah,” he whispered. “Maybe.”
“Being different is difficult.” Maggie gave his hand a reassuring squeeze. “I know how important it is to belong, Thomas. But before you decide anything, I want you to consider this—sometimes it’s easier to settle with a little bit of mystery, than to not like what you discover when you dig.”
* * *
The decision to find their father wasn’t, as it turned out, entirely theirs. Eugenia Banks’s twin-eating anecdote exploded like a bomb through their small podcast audience. Listeners told their friends, who listened and told their friends, and suddenly, Eugenia’s cannibalistic father went viral. From listener emails to friends on the phone, everyone wanted to know where Maggie had met a character quite as unique as Eugenia Banks. It was all Maggie was hearing about. The previous episode, number twenty-four, had three hundred-some downloads. Episode twenty-five had over four thousand.
As if that weren’t surprising enough, just two weeks had passed and already Thomas and Savannah had taken to spending their family dinners trading anecdotes about what the internet was now calling the Zombie Baby. Even people who never had any intention of listening to the McClair Dinner Salon knew about Zombie Baby.
“I can’t believe it,” Thomas said. “Something that happened in this very dining room has become a meme.”
“Did you see the one of Zombie Baby eating Tide PODS?” Savannah said.
“Yeah, saw that. You see Dancing Zombie Baby?”
“Yep. Unicorn Zombie Baby?”
Maggie cleared her throat—to no avail.