It hits me. I’ve been listening to this. It’s been a story. I’ve been an observer—observing my father’s pain as he tells me, observing Laurie’s curiosity, Elizabeth’s quiet. But now I feel as if my whole life has been rewritten, and it’s the same pain as if all my bones have been rearranged.
I am not thinking about me.
I am thinking about my mother.
My father can’t stop now. “She escaped. She left the room and never saw her father again. She could feel his presence—she knew he meant his curse—but she didn’t want to stay any longer. What mattered the most was to get out of there. And to keep going. She was only sure it was over when her body let her leave. She kept going and going. She tried to erase her trail as best she could, because she didn’t want him to change his mind and follow. He’d want her back. She knew it. As soon as he was truly alone, he’d want her back. But she’d be long gone.
“I think he genuinely believed that his disappearance from her life would be a punishment, that she would regret her departure. But of course she didn’t. She went to college and got enough loans and scholarship money to make it through. She said her parents were dead, and nobody questioned it. She had her mother’s death certificate, and said her father had never been in her life. She put the past behind her. After college, she and I met at a party. We were happy. She didn’t tell me any of this—I got to know her without knowing her past. It was only after we were married, when we started talking about having children—that’s when she told me.
“I didn’t believe her. How could I? I was sure, from the way she talked, that something had been horribly wrong with her father. But curses? Invisibility? How could I believe that? She stopped talking about it. She decided, for a time, to love me anyway. She decided to risk it, to have a child. She got pregnant. Without telling me, she found a midwife who believed her. It was a home birth. God—I just can’t go back to that night. I had doubted it, and then there you were. Only you weren’t. And I discovered that your mother hadn’t been lying after all.”
He walks over to the couch. He can tell by the position of Elizabeth’s hand where I am.
“Stephen,” he says. “Look at me.”
I do. I look him right in the eye.
“Your mother loved you. From before you were born, no matter what, your mother loved you. She felt she had brought this on you, but she never loved you any less. If anything, she loved you more for having to bear the weight of her curse. I tried to tell her—really, I did—that just because you were innocent, it didn’t make her guilty. Some days she believed me. Some days she didn’t. But she always loved you.”
“I know that,” I say. “You don’t have to tell me that.”
But maybe he does. Maybe I feel more awful now than I ever have before. Maybe they were right not to tell me. Maybe this only makes things worse.
I am thinking, of all things, about the silent treatment. The same silent treatment that my mother apparently used on her father, I would sometimes use on her. Not often. But there were times when I was really young, when I was really angry, that I would just stop talking to her. She couldn’t see me, and then she couldn’t hear me either. It always upset her, and now that upset takes on another dimension. Five years later, ten years later, I feel so profoundly sorry. I understand that there was no way I could’ve known, and that she knew that I didn’t know. But still. The hurt I gave her. Not just in my very existence, but all the times I got it wrong.
I know she loved me. But I also know that her love took work. Lots and lots of work.
She’d told me all of my grandparents were dead. Instead of inventing new grandparents for me, she simply avoided talking about it.
“Are you okay?”
It’s Elizabeth, not my father, who asks me this. But everyone hangs on my answer.
“I don’t know what I am,” I tell her. “I have no idea.”
Dad paces away. Turns back to me. Wants to finish his story.
“We tried to find him,” he says. “After you were born. She went back to where she’d left him, but he was long gone. He didn’t leave a trail either. We hired detectives. They said it was like he’d never existed. Then she tried to track down other cursecasters, to see if there was any kind of antidote, any way of ending it. But we never found another cursecaster. Only internet crackpots, including one or two who were willing to string us along for months, even years. Nothing worked. Your grandfather was the key, and we had lost him.”
“So you think that’s it?” I ask. “That’s what it takes to break the curse?”
“Yes,” my father says. “To break the curse, you must find a man who isn’t there.”
Chapter 12
WHEN I WAS TWELVE and my family hadn’t yet disintegrated, we made our annual pilgrimage to the Minnesota State Fair. Laurie bet me that I could stomach three back-to-back trips on the Tilt-A-Whirl. While my mother tried to convince me that there was no honor in regurgitated cheese curds, I couldn’t bear to ignore the gauntlet my little brother had thrown at my feet.
I did it. I didn’t throw up, but the world felt like it was spinning for another hour at least.
I feel that way now, off-kilter and unable to stop the ground from shifting beneath my feet.
No one is speaking. Stephen’s father clears his throat, gets up, and leaves. None of us try to stop him.
“Wow,” Laurie says, no longer able to bear the weight of silence. “Okay . . . wow.”
Stephen drops his head into his hands and I let out a shuddering sigh. Laurie’s eyes meet mine and I realize he can see what’s happening to Stephen, that wrenching grief, because it’s written on my face too.
“Don’t,” Laurie says. “Don’t freak out.”
Stephen still hasn’t spoken. I put my arms around him, resting my chin on his shoulder.
Laurie gets up, pacing in front of the sofa. “We’ll figure this out.”
Stephen looks up, his hands balled into fists. “How? What is there to figure out? I’m invisible because my grandfather was evil. That’s it. I am the spawn of evil.”
“You’re not the spawn of evil,” I say, though my stomach is curling into a knot.
“A cursecaster?” Stephen says. “Placing wicked, cruel spells on people is my legacy, and you’re trying to say that’s not evil. That I’m not somehow inherently evil.”