Grace
an excerpt

“Then why tell me now? Why not let me grow up and never tell me? Why did I have to know at all?” I was angry, but I had to know. How could they hide the fact that I was adopted from me? How could they hide my mother's death? It also made no sense to tell me now, long after the fact. Why couldn't things have stayed the way they were?

Uncle Jacob looked at me with a raised eyebrow. “Firstly, you asked. Secondly, I think you can handle it now. I think you have a right to know. Carson urged me to tell you when you turned sixteen, but I didn’t then – I didn’t think you were ready. I thought you were ready now.” Uncle Jacob shrugged, as if this should answer all of my questions, but instead it felt like I had been punched in the stomach.

“You still talk to Carson? You still speak to him?” My eyes were wide and I unfolded myself from my spot on the couch and stood up. “You still talk to my father and you didn’t tell me?” I practically screamed the last part, and Otis took off for the kitchen.

Uncle Jacob stood up too, and for the first time I saw something other than sadness in his eyes. There was a raw hurt now, one mixed with a fierce anger. “Yes, I still talk to him. I talk to him because he’s the only person who will talk about Emily. Laura won’t talk about her. Chris won’t talk about her. My parents are dead. You didn’t even know she existed. I talk to Carson because I lost my baby sister and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do to stop it. I know you’re shocked, Grace, and I know you’re hurt, but understand that you’re not the only one this has been hard on.”

I wanted to feel for him. I wanted to tell him it was okay, and that he could talk about Emily and I would listen. I wanted to tell him that I wanted to hear about the happy times that were obviously such a large part of an otherwise unhappy childhood. I wanted to tell him that I forgave him and that I understood why they’d hid everything from me. I couldn’t, though. The words choked in my throat and the anger surged up again. “So you told me because you needed someone to talk to? You told me because you’re sick of feeling alone? You couldn’t go talk to a therapist – no, you had to tell your seventeen year old niece that her parents aren’t her parents and her mother killed herself. Her mother didn’t love her enough to stick around.” I was yelling now, and shaking, my body overcome by a sort of rage I didn’t know I was capable of possessing.

“You asked me, Grace! What was I supposed to do?” His voice was pleading with me, and the anger had died from his eyes, replaced by a naked need to make things right between us. He wanted it to be okay, but I had spoken at least some truth. He wanted to not feel so alone, and he wanted to be able to grieve – something he hadn’t been able to do in the years since Emily’s death

“Lie to me! You all have been lying to me for seventeen years – I don’t see why you couldn’t just keep going with that! What am I supposed to do now? How am I supposed to go from here?” I was still yelling, but some of the fight had ebbed out of me. I just wanted it all to be a bad dream. I was sorry Emily had died and I was sorry it had hurt a lot of people, but at the moment, I wanted nothing more to go back to knowing nothing at all.

“Grace, I didn’t lie to you because I didn’t want to lie to you in the first place. I told Laura I didn’t want to lie to you.”

“Is that why you left the basement unlocked? I mean, if you’d really wanted to hide this from me, you could have. You wanted me to know. You wanted me to find out.” I had stopped yelling, but the anger was still there. I added accusingly, “You could have just told me, but you decided I should be confused first. You thought that me having to work out some of the details myself was a good idea? Why didn’t you just tell me if you wanted me to know?”

Uncle Jacob looked defeated. “Maybe I did want you to know, but it wasn’t something I was actually striving to have happen. It wasn’t some big conspiracy. I think, maybe, with everything going on with your mom – don’t look at me like that, she’s still your mother – with everything going on with Laura...if she didn’t make it, I didn’t want you to not know. I wanted you two to be able to talk about it.”

The idea of speaking with her at the moment made me ill. “Well, she didn’t want me around anyway, so maybe it won’t matter. Maybe they’ll just forget to come get me at the end of the summer. That would make things easier for everyone, wouldn’t it? They push me off on you, they get to not have to worry about me anymore and can concentrate on what their lives would have been like if they hadn’t been forced to adopt some illegitimate child from your slutty little sister!”

The anger came back to Uncle Jacob’s eyes and for a moment I honestly thought he might hit me. “Emily was not some tramp! Yes, she slept with too many people, but you don’t understand what it was like for her. She was just trying to find out where she fit in the world. She wasn’t doing it to...” Uncle Jacob faltered. It was clear he didn’t know why she had or hadn’t done it, just that she was unstable and out of control and there wasn’t anything he could have done about it. He felt the need to justify her actions because somehow that made him feel that he wasn’t responsible for what happened. If her actions had reasoning, then there was nothing for him to be forgiven for.

“Look. Whatever. I’m going to my room. I need to think. If they call, I don’t want to talk. Tell them I’m busy.” I put enough emphasis on the word “them” that it was clear who exactly I was talking about, if it hadn’t been apparent in the first place. I turned to go down the hall but Uncle Jacob reached out his hand and grabbed my arm, and held me, though not painfully.

“Grace, I know this is overwhelming and I know it’s a lot to take in, but please don’t think this means your parents don’t love you or that I don’t love you. Don’t even let yourself think that Emily didn’t love you – she did. She loved you a lot and she lit up whenever you were around. Please understand that she let them adopt you because it would give you a better life, and it did.”

I battled the tears that were threatening to come to my eyes again. “Then why wasn’t I enough?” I wrenched my arm away from him and ran down the hallway, shutting the door behind me once I entered my room.