Home > The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames(2)

The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames(2)
Author: Justine Cowan

I sat solemnly beside her, watching her die. My father and sister were in the room, too, but we rarely spoke. The stillness was broken only by the quiet wheezing that emerged from the back of my mother’s throat as she struggled for air. Once she’d heaved her last, gasping breath, I rushed from the room and huddled on a small bench in the hallway, sobbing wildly, struggling to breathe, my head between my knees. The wails erupted from deep inside, one after the other, as if they had a life of their own.

During the days that followed, I would be bewildered by the strength of my feelings for a woman who had caused me so much pain. Eventually I transitioned into a heavy fatigue, palpably weighed down by the emotions that had overtaken my body. I found it difficult to perform even the most mundane tasks, and sought escape in sleep whenever I could find it. When I did leave the house, I was prone to weeping at inopportune moments. Strangers would approach to ask if I needed help. The woman who took my dry cleaning came from behind the counter just to hug me.

“My mother died,” I told her as she wrapped her arms around me.

But she was comforting a fraud, a cheat. Would she have held me with such compassion had she known how I truly felt about my mother?

We buried her in the town of Rogersville, where my father was born, in a small cemetery near the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. She was laid to rest beside long-deceased family members of his, people she had never met, in a town where she had never lived. My father had picked out their plots long ago, and my mother didn’t object, having no family of her own.

A year later he joined her, in a grave not far from where his own parents had been buried.

I never spoke to my mother about Dorothy Soames, or the day she’d taken off through the winding streets in her shiny black car. Not even as I watched Alzheimer’s whittle away at her brain, stealing a few words here, a memory there.

I didn’t want to know her secrets. Perhaps I suspected that her story would be too painful for me to carry. More likely, I feared that knowing the truth would give her a power over me that I couldn’t bear.

She had tried to tell me, but only years after I had left home. Once I’d graduated from Berkeley, I moved as far away as possible. I traveled to Asia on a whim, living for a year on the wages I earned teaching English to schoolchildren, then on to Washington, DC, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia, always ensuring that there were thousands of miles between us.

I was living in Nashville when I got the letter. It was brief, with few details. She wanted me to call her. It should have been an easy thing to do—pick up the phone, ask her what she meant by the cryptic phrase she’d dropped near the end of the letter.

She wanted to tell me about her life as a foundling.

It was an old-fashioned word, not one I’d ever heard uttered in our household. But it soon slipped my mind as I tucked my mother’s letter under a stack of unopened mail. I had long since stopped caring about her secrets or her motivations, a mode of self-preservation I’d refined into a precise form of science.

She called me later that week, asking if I had received the letter. “We can go to London if you like, together,” she said. “I can show you where I was raised, and where it all happened.”

Instead of piquing my curiosity, her call aroused my suspicions. It had always been understood that my mother’s past was off-limits. To bring up the subject was to risk a swift rebuke—or, worse, a retreat, my mother disappearing into her bedroom and emerging hours later, eyes red and swollen. Now she was proposing a visit to her homeland? Lunch would have been a stretch. A girls’ trip to London seemed as distant a possibility as a quick trip to the moon.

“I want to tell you everything,” she added, her voice filled with an unfamiliar buoyancy. Her willingness to talk seemed sudden, to say the least, and I was dogged by the fear that whatever she had to say would somehow be used against me.

“It’s too late,” I told her.

She didn’t need me to expand to understand what I meant, and her disappointment was unmistakable. But I was unmoved, resolute in the stance that my mother’s past meant nothing to me.

And that was true. Until twenty years later, when I went to London with the man who’d recently become my husband.

The trip was a belated honeymoon of sorts, a monthlong tour of Europe. Our actual honeymoon to Costa Rica had been cut short—a car accident on a curvy mountain road, followed by a tropical illness that sent Patrick to the hospital. It was just as well. In the months surrounding our wedding, we’d buried Patrick’s mother, his sister-in-law, and both of my parents.

Our trip to Europe was supposed to be our fresh start, the beginning of a promising life unburdened by the past or our mutual grief. Our ambitious itinerary reflected our hopes, with stops planned in London, then Paris, Bruges, Amsterdam, Florence, and Rome.

A visit to London would be no different than traveling to any other city, I tried to convince myself. We would visit the sights, sample the local food, and come home with full bellies and a spring in our step, ready to begin our new life together.

My husband didn’t understand why I’d avoided England so stubbornly. He’d heard stories from my traveling days—how I’d pedaled a bicycle from Salzburg to Vienna with my belongings strapped on a rack, stopped alongside the Danube to eat cheese and bread, crisscrossed Europe on high-speed trains. Once I’d seen enough of Europe, I traveled to Southeast Asia, flouting government warnings to venture into conflict-ridden jungles, and through western Africa, braving military checkpoints to discover villages untouched by modern technology.

But the thought of London tied my stomach up in knots.

It’s going to be different, I remember Patrick saying. She’s dead now. She can’t hurt you anymore.

We’d met late in life, as adults, and married in our mid-forties. We were an unlikely pair, at least on paper. Patrick was a laid-back jazz musician and animation artist, while I was a driven public interest environmental attorney hell-bent on taking down polluters. Yet our connection was instant.

He was quick-witted and handsome, with curly hair, an infectious smile, and kind brown eyes. I could hardly believe my luck. He could have his pick of women, I thought. Why had he chosen me? He showered me with compliments, told me I was perfect, beautiful, and brilliant. I chided him, accusing him of flattery, but he continued, undeterred. And so I learned to keep my doubts to myself, silently answering his praise with a ready-made list of my imperfections.

We were matched by one of those online services that promises to find your soul mate based on answers to a series of questions. If your friends could describe you in four words, what would they be? What are you thankful for? What’s your favorite book? I’d answered dutifully and earnestly, hopeful that my responses would bring me the love I yearned for. Instead I spent my evenings reviewing seemingly endless profiles of men who didn’t appeal to me, or vice versa. An early match who’d seemed promising asked me outright about my relationship with my family, his line in the sand. If you didn’t have a good relationship with your family, then how could you have a good relationship with your partner? His reasoning filled me with anxiety, my troubled relationship with my mother casting a pall over a process that was already difficult.

The issue continued to gnaw away at me as things with Patrick got more serious. The last thing I wanted was to scare off a prospective partner by introducing him to my mother. So I tested the waters slowly, gradually revealing eccentricities like her belief in ghosts, or her inside scoop on government plots to poison our water supplies. I carefully watched his reactions, fearful that if he had any inkling of the sickness that afflicted our family, he would run for the hills.

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