Page 37 of Love Conquers All

“Sylvie, what have you done?” her father said.

Sylvie’s thoughts stalled. She swallowed. She remembered.

“Sylvie, you’re a selfish child,” her father continued, his words coming faster. “You’re a selfish monster of a child, andwe never should have had you. We should have listened to the doctor when he said we couldn’t have a child.”

Sylvie nearly threw the phone. She hadn’t known this part of her origin. She hadn’t known that she shouldn’t have even been born.

Was this something she’d felt beneath the surface her entire life?

Sylvie gritted her teeth.Don’t hang up. You’ve made it this far. Ask him the question you called with. Force him to tell you.

“You never told me,” she began, her voice wavering. “You never told me how my mother died.”

There was silence on the other end. Another siren screamed past.

“Where in God’s name are you?” he demanded.

Sylvie gritted her teeth. “Tell me. How did she die?”

“I won’t tell you unless you tell me where you are,” he shot.

Sylvie realized she could lie. She could say whatever she wanted.

“I’m in Providence,” she said.

“That’s a lie,” he said. “You were never an honest child. You were just like your mother.”

Sylvie’s eyes widened. All her life, she’d longed to be compared to her mother.

But not like this.

Tears were streaming from her eyes, hot and salty.

“Please,” she whispered. “I’ll never ask you for anything else.”

Her father scoffed. “Good. I hope you don’t.”

He hung up the phone.

It took Sylvie six months to get her journalism career started and another year before she could afford a room of her own. The room was in Chinatown, of all places, directly above a place that sold the very best dumplings she’d ever had. On the day she moved her single backpack and few belongings into the room, she bought as many dumplings as she could for ten dollars and sat on the floor to eat them, marveling at how far she’d come. By then, she’d had eight articles published in small revolutionary presses, and people were paying attention to what she had to say. She was only eighteen, but she was telling everyone she was twenty-one, and they believed her for now. She’d never graduated from high school. She wondered if she could get away with this.

By then, Sylvie had developed rather keen research skills, which were required for her journalistic career. She knew what she needed to research next. But she wasn’t sure if she had the will.

It was the end of summer 2003 when she braved the call to the Nantucket Historical Society to ask about her mother’s death. She was seated at the desk in her bedroom, watching the rain with the phone pressed against her cheek. She’d opted for a separate landline in her bedroom so that her roommates weren’t bothered by her numerous daily phone calls, and she wasn’t bothered by the fact that they sometimes needed to use the phone to call boyfriends or girlfriends in faraway towns.Come on, Sylvie, I need to call her now!

In talking to the Nantucket Historical Society, Sylvie used a fake name. The man on the line sounded bored and eager to pore through old death documents and newspaper articles to find theincident of her mother’s death. Sylvie had been seven; it had been eleven years ago. October.

“Here it is,” the man said of the obituary. He read it aloud. “Sarah Bruckson passed away on October 7th, 1991. She was the longtime owner of The House on Nantucket and a beloved member of the Nantucket community. She is survived by her husband, James, and her daughter, Sylvie.”

Sylvie waited for the man to go on. The silence was ponderous.

“That’s it?” she asked.

“That’s it.”

Sylvie was floored. Sarah Bruckson had lived and worked and gotten married and raised a daughter. She’d had thousands of thoughts a day and been a very real, three-dimensional, complex person. And someone, probably James Bruckson, had whittled down the events of her life to a few sentences. Sylvie was irate.

“What about the death certificate?” Sylvie asked.

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