When I went to get my diploma off the sideboard before we left, Ruth was standing there. She had it in her hands. She was holding it and looking at the front of it and her eyes were wet, and when she saw me she handed it over and said, “Your dad would have been in the front row.”
I thought she meant Perry-the-adoptive-father, in a general way.
She was crying because she was the only person in that house who knew what she had just said.
PART 3 — THE KITCHEN
I did not walk into that kitchen.
I have gone over that hundreds of times and I do not fully know why. Some of it was shock. Most of it, I think, was that I understood — standing in that hallway in my socks — that if I walked in there, I would get a version. She would give me a shape of it that suited her and I would spend the next ten years trying to work out which parts were true.
So I put the lilies down on the hall table, and the box next to them, and I put my shoes back on and I left, and I have never been in that house since.
I sat in my car three streets over and called my brother, and I could not get the sentence out, and Fletcher — who I have never once heard raise his voice — said, “Ellis. Say it slowly.”
We drove to Ruth’s the next morning. Both of us. Eight-forty on a Sunday.
She opened the door and looked at the two of us standing on her step and her face did something that I will not forget, and she said, “Oh, thank God.”
Not what’s wrong. Not what are you boys doing here.
Thank God.
She made tea that nobody drank and she told us all of it in about ninety minutes at her kitchen table, and she cried three times and apologized eleven, and I want to be fair about her because it would be easy not to be: Ruth Bakke kept her daughter’s secret for twenty-eight years and she has never claimed that was right. She said, “I was afraid of my own child. That’s the truth of it and it isn’t a good enough reason.”
Here it is.
In 1993, Perry Kessick had a relationship with a woman named Nesta Orlow. She was twenty-two. He was thirty-three and married five years.
She got pregnant. She told him. He told Wanda, because whatever else Perry Kessick was, he was not a man who could hold something.
Wanda was thirty-one and had been trying to have a child for four years and had been told the previous autumn that it was not going to happen.
So she made a proposal. Not to Perry. To Nesta.
Wanda drove to that girl’s apartment in Cordwell — Ruth knows this because Wanda told her afterward, proudly — and sat in her kitchen and laid out two options.
Option one: Nesta keeps the babies. Wanda and Perry file for custody, with two incomes and a house and a lawyer, and put a twenty-two-year-old with a part-time job and no family in the state through every proceeding they can afford, which is all of them.
Option two: Nesta relinquishes. The boys are raised in the Kessick house by their own father. No contact, ever, in any form. Sign here.
Nesta signed.
And then Wanda did the second thing, which is the thing I actually cannot get past.
