Page 76 of When I'm Gone
“I loved her,” he answered simply. The words burned Luke’s ears.
Defeated, the anger left him. He thought he’d want to hit Neal, or at least scream at him, but at that moment of admission, Luke was relieved to finally know the truth.
“How long?” he managed to ask, trying to calculate how many years she’d been living a double life.
“It’s not like that.”
“Donotlie to me, please,” Luke begged, suddenly exhausted and feeling more ready to go home and go to bed than to argue. “It’s obvious you two had a secret relationship. So, how long?”
“Twenty-three years.”
“She wasfourteen,” Luke half whispered, half yelled, forcing his voice down in case Jessie could hear them through her medication. He closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose. How had pedophile pastor never crossed his mind? “I think I should leave.”
“No, for God’s sake, no, that’s not what I meant.” Neal put up his hands in defense and then tapped his forehead as if his hands could summon the right words to say. “I was Natalie’s pastor, her professor, and eventually her friend, but I wasneverher lover. And you’re wrong. I hadn’t seen Natalie for years,years, until she found me at Eastern. This was her idea, not mine.”
“Well then, pastor”—he said the title like an accusation—“maybe you can tell me the one thing I can’t figure out: Why did Natalie lie to me?” Luke’s eyes clouded with tears, and his throat was so tight he could force out only one more question. “Why did she have you send those letters instead of just telling me the truth?”
“This wasn’t supposed to happen ...”
“Yes, I know, this wasn’t a part of your plan. But itishappening like this. Why all the smoke and mirrors? Was it guilt? Was she afraid of me?” This thought was the most painful, and after her letter about the day his mother died, how that one slap had kept her from contacting him for those six years, maybe she thought it was safer to tell the truth when she was dead.
“She had her reasons.” Neal shook his head and then slapped his hands on his thighs before standing up. “I’m notsupposedto be the one who tells you these things, but Natalie couldn’t have known any of this”—Neal gestured to Jessie asleep in her hospital bed—“was going to happen. I knew I’d see you here eventually, so I brought this in case ... in case I found a way to tell you.” He walked over to the nightstand and pulled open one of the drawers. It opened with a quiet whoosh, and Neal pulled out a blue envelope and offered it to Luke. “The answers are in here.”
The envelope had Luke’s name on it, as always, and the back flap read: “The End.” It didn’t feel like as many pages as he expected, one maybe two. Opening it he knew why. It was another typed letter, two pages single-spaced.
“Did you type this for her?” Luke asked, wondering how to trust a letter written by someone other than Natalie.
Neal nodded. “I did. She was too weak, and she wanted to tell you everything. I just typed what she said, Luke, I swear.” There had been a few typed letters. Neal must’ve typed those too.
“This one was going to be delivered on the one-year anniversary of her death. She thought one year would be enough to prepare you ...” Neal stopped himself. “But when your mother-in-law called me about Jessie, that you were headed to the hospital with her, I knew the time line would have to change. Just read it.”
Luke didn’t like the idea of doing anything at Neal’s bidding, but he’d waited long enough for the truth. He wasn’t going to wait longer out of sheer spite. He looked back at the page full of neat, black lettering and read.
THE END
Dear Luke,
Well, this is it. My final good-bye. It’s becoming clear that my time is close, so I’m going to tell you what I’ve been dying to say (no pun intended) for our whole marriage because you have the right to know. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. I was going to let my secret die with me, and by the time I changed my mind and decided you had a right to know, I knew my death was only a matter of months away. I didn’t want to poison the last few memories of me with anger. I guess I’m a coward, but I hope one day you’ll understand why I didn’t tell you sooner. So, here it goes, my secret.
I had a baby, Luke. Our baby. I was nearly fifteen years old when she was born. I only saw her once. Hours upon hours of pain, months upon months of regret and embarrassment, all that ended when I looked on our daughter’s face. She was so beautiful, but had so much hair I thought she might be a mutant. I looked right in her eyes and told her how much I loved her and that her daddy loved her too. I told her we were too young to raise her and that you were so far away. I kissed her twice, once for you and once for me. Then I passed our little girl off to Mrs. Townsend at Maranatha House, the maternity home and adoption agency where I stayed. I prayed she’d be happy and safe. I kept that little girl in my heart every day after that, praying she’d found a new home with wonderful parents who would love her and raise her in a way I wasn’t equipped to.
Okay, so why didn’t I tell you about her when we met at the University of Michigan? That’s a fair question. My reasoning was—she was five and had a new mom and dad, we couldn’t get her back, and who knows what you’d think about being a dad. You said you didn’t want kids, afraid you’d be like your dad. To be honest, I was a little afraid too after what happened in the shed. By the time I was sure of who you were and who you weren’t, we were married. When I got pregnant with Will, I made a plan. I would tell you the whole story after his delivery.
Then I got some horrible news. I found out that when our daughter was only three years old, she “disappeared” from her home and was presumed dead. Remember the Mallory Witling case I was so obsessed about? That was our Mallory.
She didn’t live far from us, actually. Just over in Lansing. I had no idea that the pigtailed little girl from the news who’d gone missing from her home during my senior year of high school was our daughter. She’d been reported missing by her parents, who woke up one morning to an empty toddler bed, a pool of blood on her pillow, and no sign of Mallory.
A hunt for the little girl ensued; the whole town pulled together to look for her. But as the investigation went on, Mr. Witling soon brought up concerns about his wife, about her behavior with their first child, who’d died only four years earlier. After exhuming Mallory’s sister’s body, it became clear that Mark Witling was right. His wife, Eva Witling, suffered from a psychological disorder called Munchausen syndrome by proxy. She had been making her daughter sick, probably with poison, slowly, to get attention from hospital staff, friends, and family.
With the help of Mark Witling and the evidence from their first child’s death, the prosecution was able to get a confession, and Mrs. Witling ended up in prison. It’s a small consolation for such a horrific crime. I wanted to go visit her in prison, scream at her, say, “She wasn’t even your child!” but I didn’t. Instead, I tried to bury my regrets and myself in work and in our growing family. Those were some beautiful years.
Then cancer came into our lives, and I decided to finish up my master’s degree. I was going to finish at UM but it was beyond our budget, so I researched a few programs in the area. That’s when I saw a picture of Dr. Neal Townsend, associate professor of education at Eastern Michigan. I knew who he was right away—the pastor from Maranatha, he and his wife had helped place Mallory. Suddenly I didn’t care about any of the programs, ratings, or even tuition. I knew I had to see him again.
First day in his Math Methods class, and there wasn’t even a twinge of recognition from my old pastor. Twenty-odd years and three kids later, I’m sure I looked far different than the fourteen-year-old girl he knew at the maternity house. Then I saw him talking to a girl in the hallway; there was something about her that made me look twice. He looked at her differently than the other students at school, and she bounced when she talked to him. She reminded me of someone. So, I followed her. Yes, I was losing my mind; I’d become a crazy stalker, but I didn’t care. I started studying in the same vestibule where she liked to sit and read. Slowly we became friends, and soon I found out this girl, Jessie, was Neal’s daughter.
I’ll spare you all my secret agent moves, but Dr. Neal, as his students call him, and I became friends, starting with him rescuing me from that confrontation with Tiff. Either way, it wasn’t until my most recent, devastating diagnosis that I had the courage to tell him the truth. In return, he told me something I’ve felt in my heart for a long time: our daughter isn’t dead.
Neal told me Jessie’s story that day. It actually all goes back to Mr. Witling. Neal said that he showed up one morning on the steps of Maranatha House with three-year-old Mallory in her pj’s. Maria, Neal’s wife, was working the desk at the time. Mallory was sick, very sick, her kidneys severely damaged from the ethylene glycol, the antifreeze, he’d discovered his wife adding to Mallory’s juice cup.
