I.
1.
In the dark smelly place beneath the sink. Behind the drainpipes. She has made herself small enough to hide here.
Strands of a broken spider’s web sticking to her skin. Her eyes wet with tears. Hunching her back like a little monkey. Arms closed tight around her knees raised against her small flat chest.
She is just a little girl, small enough to save herself. Small enough to fit into the spider’s web. Smart enough to know that she must not cry.
Must not breathe. So that no one can hear.
So that he can’t hear.
The door to the hiding place is opened, she sees a man’s feet, legs. She sees, does not see, the glisten of something dark and wet on the trouser legs. She hears, does not hear, his quick, hot panting. With a whoop of wild laughter he stoops to peer inside. He has discovered her. His face is a blur of tears. His mouth moves and is talking to her, but she hears no words. But then the door is shut again and she is alone.
In this way, it is determined. In the spider’s web she is allowed to live.
2.
Phone rings. Unexpectedly.
Not her cell phone, which Clare would (probably) answer without a second thought, but the other phone, the landline, which rarely rings.
Seconds in which to decide: Should she lift the receiver?
Seeing that the caller ID is not one she recognizes. Calculating that the call is likely to be a robot call.
Yet this rain-lashed April morning—out of curiosity, or loneliness, or heedlessness—she lifts the receiver. “Yes? Hello?”
One of the shocks of Clare’s life.
For it seems that a stranger has called her, introducing himself as an attorney with a law firm in Cardiff, Maine. Informing her that she is the beneficiary of an individual of whom she has never heard—“Maude Donegal, of Cardiff, Maine. Your grandmother.”
“Excuse me? Who?”
“Maude Donegal—your father’s mother. She has passed away at the age of eighty-seven . . .”
Not sure what she is hearing. Thinking it might be, must be a prank, her first instinct is to laugh.
“But I don’t have a grandmother with that name. I don’t know anyone with that name—did you say Douglas?”
“Donegal.”
A pause, and the voice at the other end of the line continues, disembodied and matter-of-fact, as a voice in a dream: “But Donegal is your birth name. Didn’t you know?”
“Birth name! But—where is this place”
“Cardiff, Maine.”
Clare has never heard of Cardiff, Maine. She is sure.
Having lived in Minnesota for much of her life—at first St. Paul, then Minneapolis. A very long distance from Maine.
In more recent years Clare has lived in Chicago, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Bryn Mawr (where she is living now). Still a considerable distance from Maine.
“. . . any questions?”
“N-no . . .”
“I hope I didn’t upset you, Ms. Seidel.”
Of course not! You have only torn a rent in the fabric of my life.
Clare thanks the attorney. The conversation ends. She has been too distracted to ask Lucius Fischer what the bequest from Maude Donegal is, how much money, or property—whatever. Now she is too embarrassed to call him back.
He’d asked for her address. He will be sending her a document via UPS that should arrive the following afternoon.
Also, he will be including, at their request, the phone number of Donegal relatives in Cardiff. If Clare comes to Cardiff, they have expressed the hope that she will stay with them.
Relatives! But these are strangers, and Clare can’t imagine herself staying with strangers.
She values her solitude, privacy. Her aloofness might be mistaken for shyness, her reticence for secrecy. She is not by nature a suspicious person, but she is (certainly) not naïve and so wonders if this sudden “good news” is to be trusted.
If it is a ruse of some kind, she will soon be enlightened: someone will want money from her.
Clare is not familiar with wills, bequests—“probate court.” Never in her life has she been a beneficiary of anyone’s will; it has not even crossed her mind that her adoptive parents have (possibly, probably) named her in their wills, as she is their only child and their only likely heir . . .
So taken by surprise when the attorney called, she’d failed to express regret for the death of Maude Donegal. She fears that she has forgotten the name—no, here it is written down: Maude Donegal.
How callous Lucius Fischer must think her, unmoved by a grandmother’s death.
But she isn’t my—grandmother! I have no grandmother.
Clare’s (adoptive) grandparents are no longer living. And when living, they had not figured much in her life.
How strange it seems to Clare, such syntax: Grandparents are no longer living. As if not-living were something the grandparents were doing at the present time.
Clare had envied classmates who’d spoken casually of their grandparents. Totally taken for granted—Grandma, Grandpa. What did these tender words mean, exactly? Both her mother’s parents and her father’s parents, elderly at the time of the adoption, had not much warmed to their granddaughter, it seemed.
Clare scarcely remembered them. Strangers, staring at the little mute adopted child across an abyss.
(Oh, had Clare been mute? Surely not. Not most of the time. Only dimly she remembers—something . . .)
(A kind of net, or web, over her mouth. Sticky threads against her lips, caught in her eyelashes. Breathing in, in shuddering gasps, the broken cobweb is drawn horribly into her nostrils.)
Clare scarcely remembers at all. That is a fact.
Too young at the time to realize that if her parents had been able to have children, probably—well, certainly—they would not have adopted her. Their love for her, their intense interest in her, would never have sprung into being if they’d had children of their own.
In high school biology Clare learned that DNA is everything. Individuals care for their own—offspring bearing their DNA. Male animals in many species are prone to destroy the offspring of other males, mating with the mother animals to replicate their own DNA. A desperate mother may try to hide her young from a predatory male, but once she comes into estrus, she is compelled to mate with the male animal bent upon killing her young to make way for his own.
Compelled to mate. Why?
Her parents’ parents hadn’t warmed to their (adopted) granddaughter, for that reason perhaps. Clare was not one of theirs.