Janice Johnson - From This Day On

Oh, Mom. Had she felt anything when she packed these things away? Or had she briskly assumed Amy might want them someday when she had her own children, and never given them another thought?

There were other toys here, too, including a couple she didn’t remember at all. One was a plastic rattle with tiny tooth marks in it. Hers. Finally, at the bottom of the box, were the baby book and a photograph album. Those, she decided to take downstairs to the kitchen table.

She had trouble making herself open the cover of either book or album. Seeing the contents with new eyes was going to hurt.

Baby book first. There was a time she’d thought the fact that her mother had filled it out so carefully meant she must love her daughter. By the time Amy was a teenager, she knew better; the precise entries, the school pictures glued to appropriate pages, were only another manifestation of Mom’s anal personality. Give her a form to fill out, and she was a happy woman.

The details were undeniably all there.

The card from the hospital was attached to the first page. Yes, Baby Girl Nilsson had indeed weighed six pounds fourteen ounces.

Before she went further, Amy booted up her laptop and went online to a site that had a chronology of child development. Then she compared the dates Mom had noted for “first smile,” “rolled over,” “sat up alone” and so on with the chronology. Amy had been early each step of the way. Perhaps because she was little and wiry, she’d barely bothered with crawling, instead walking at eight months and running not much later.

She closed her eyes momentarily. How could she ever have believed she was premature?

She flipped back to the first page, where her mother had written her name, the hospital where she was born, her birth date. Amy’s gaze snagged on two lines that were blank. Mother. Father.

Yet another thing she’d never noticed. A huge thing, given Mom’s personality.

She was almost numb by now. Not entirely; a tsunami was building somewhere deep inside, ominous in its power, but it was still subterranean enough to be ignored.

There were lots of photos of her in the album, mainly, she knew, because her father—oh, God, not my father—had enjoyed taking pictures and had adored her.

A few included Jakob, fewer still Mom or Dad himself. Those were the ones she stared at the hardest, with eyes that burned. She didn’t look like anyone else in the family. A part of her had always known that, but justified it. There was the aunt with red hair. She did have brown eyes, like Mom...only they weren’t at all the same shade of brown as her mother’s. Kids didn’t always look like their parents, she had told herself.

She bore absolutely no resemblance to anyone else in her family, including her only biological relative, her mother.

The tsunami lifted, as if launching itself. She must look like him. The horror was more than she could hold inside. Amy shoved away from the table, staggering to her feet when the chair crashed backward. She felt filthy, contaminated, ugly. Why hadn’t her mother aborted her?

But she knew that, too. Mom wasn’t a regular churchgoer, but she still wore a gold cross on a fine chain around her neck. She had been raised Catholic. Abortion wouldn’t have been on the table as an option.

The part of Amy that was still thinking understood what her mother had gone through, how she had reasoned. She couldn’t take her disaster to parents who had been stern and strict. The only truly acceptable choice to her was marriage. So she had latched onto the first guy who came her way, slept with him, lied to him, let him think the monstrous thing she was going to bear was his.

And then she got lucky, because Amy was small enough that Josef hadn’t guessed the baby wasn’t his. But somewhere along the way he had begun to wonder.

Or had he? Amy asked herself with near-clinical detachment. Perhaps instead something had happened. Blood type would have been a dead giveaway. Amy had given blood and knew she was B positive. She was willing to bet that Mom wasn’t...and neither was Josef Nilsson. Yes, that would have done it. So then came the yelling that the adults had silenced when she came into a room, the intense, hissing arguments that she could almost hear clearly through her bedroom wall at night. Only a kindergartener, she had pulled her covers over her head and huddled, not wanting to make out words.

No wonder the man she had believed to be her father had gradually lost interest in her! Looking back, she knew he had tried. Really, he had been kind. It was for her sake that he’d maintained the facade. But even then, at six and seven, at ten and twelve and fifteen, she had known something was wrong.

She had known that neither parent truly loved her.

And her brother Jakob sure as hell hadn’t.

Oh, God, she thought in shock. He knew. He must know.

He’d endured her weekend visits, and she wasn’t even his sister. No wonder he’d resented her. Despised her.

She stood in the middle of her mother’s kitchen, almost catatonic. A soft, keening sound came from her throat. Her very existence felt like an abomination. She wanted to wipe herself out.

Every time her mother looked at this child born of rape, she must have felt violated all over again.

Able to move again, Amy backed away from the table that held the baby book with all those careful notations, the album filled with pictures that reinforced how different she was. Empty stomach or not, sickness rose inside her, pushed by the huge swell of emotions she couldn’t let herself feel.

This time when she ran, it was for the shower, where she scrubbed herself over and over, not stopping even when the water ran cold.

* * *

JAKOB CIRCLED THROUGH the alley and saw Amy’s small white car parked beside the garage that he assumed held Michelle’s and Ken’s vehicles.

So she was home.

He had started calling yesterday. Her phone rang, but he always ended up at voice mail. She ignored messages. He tried email. No response. He hadn’t gotten a damn thing done at the office yesterday or today, worrying about her. By last evening, he’d been pissed. To hell with her. He’d offered his support, she didn’t want it. Her privilege. No skin off his back.

That didn’t keep him from trying to call his father. Who didn’t answer, either.

Jakob kept remembering the way Amy stared down at the women’s panties in her hand, and anger vaulted back into worry and then into something even more compelling. He was going to feel like an idiot if she was absolutely fine, didn’t need him. She might have been busy, that’s all, entertaining friends or working.

Feeling like an idiot was a risk he was willing to take.

He rang the doorbell and got no response. After an interval he rang it again, then started pounding. An old guy was out in the front yard next door, using hand clippers to nibble away at a hedge that was already trimmed to perfection. He straightened and glared. Jakob didn’t care.

“Amy,” he bellowed. “I know you’re in there. Open this door.”

He heard noises inside at last. Fumbling with the locks. Then the door opened a crack.

“What?” she snarled.

Oh, man. She didn’t look good, even though he was seeing only a slice of her face. What he could see was wan, freckles he’d hardly known she had standing out like splotches of paint.

Jakob planted a hand on the door and pushed her inexorably backward despite her obvious alarm.

“What are you doing?” she cried in panic. “I told you, I want to be alone.”

“And I’ve left you alone,” he said grimly. “Apparently, for longer than I should have.”

He slid inside the opening and felt a new jolt of shock. “You’re sick.”

Her glare was surly. “I am not.”