Page 147 of All These Beautiful Strangers

“I thought it was because you were angry with me,” I said. “Over what I’d said to Uncle Hank. And that story that came out afterward.”

My father shook his head. “I wasn’t angry with you, Charlotte,” he said. “I was angry with myself.

“When I think about the way I behaved that last summer with your mother,” my father said, his voice breaking slightly. “The things I did, the things I said to her, which turned out to be the last words I’d ever speak to her . . .”

I felt something warm slide down my cheek, and I realized I was crying.

“And then when everything came out today,” he said. “What you wrote about Margot, about Jake and the part I played that night . . .”

He trailed off and was silent. He just looked at me, his face, for a moment, unreadable. I noticed the crow’s-feet that peeked out at the edges of his eyes, deeper than I remembered them. The roots of his hair near his temples were tinted gray. For the first time in my life, I realized my father looked old. Tired.

“There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about that day and wish that I had done things differently,” he said. “I’ve wished for a long time that I could be a different type of person, but time and again, I’ve fallen short, lost my way. Today, thanks to you, I finally got to prove to myself that I can be different.

“I gave the officers out there a statement about what happened that night, with Jake,” he said. “I took the responsibility I should have taken a long time ago.”

“What does that mean?” I asked. Would my father be prosecuted? Would he go to jail? “What will happen now?”

“I don’t know,” my father said.

I wanted to forgive my father, I did. I just wasn’t completely ready to. But I knew that one day, I might be. So, I reached out and held my father’s hand.

It took them a few days of digging up the yard at the Daltons’ Southampton house before they found what remained of my mother in Margot’s kitchen garden. In the end, they found only bits of her, pieces of bone. I don’t know what exactly I expected them to find of her after all this time—something discernibly her, something to hold on to, something I recognized? When they showed me the bone fragments, worn smooth and pale white by the ravages of time, I held them in the soft palm of my hand, and I felt nothing but their coldness. Here she was—I held her in my hand, all of the parts of her that remained, and I didn’t recognize her at all.

I suppose, in some ways, that was only fitting. My mother had loomed large in my life. She was such an inextricable part of who I was, of who I would become. And yet, I had played only a small part in hers. Before I even existed, she had been many different things to many different people. If my investigation into my mother’s past had taught me anything, it was that no one can really understand the whole of a person. In many ways, my mother, my father—the people I was closest to, the people who meant the most to me—were strangers. Beautiful strangers.

We laid my mother to rest in the spring in the Calloway family plot in Greenwich. My father bought her a rose-colored tombstone on which they had engraved:

Grace Elizabeth Calloway

1974–2007

Beloved Wife and Mother

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters

compared with what lies within us.

Epilogue

Charlie Calloway

September 2020

“There’s a spot,” I say, pointing to a section of empty curb three houses down from my grandparents’ house. Their driveway is already full—I see my uncle Lonnie and aunt Caroline’s minivan and my uncle Hank’s rusted truck. We’re the last ones here because we stopped at the train station to pick up Seraphina after driving up from the city. She’s in her final year at Reynolds.

“Got it,” Greyson says as he pulls into it and puts the car in park.

We unload our trays of food—I picked up a tray of cookies at the store, Greyson made his famous pulled pork, and Seraphina brought a box of cupcakes with her from Reading.

We don’t knock; we just go straight in. As usual, my grandparents’ house is full of people and noise. We call out a communal hello as we come through the door. I spot my grandma and give her a hug.

“I brought Grandpa’s favorite cookies,” I say, handing her the plastic tray.

“You spoil him,” Grandma says, taking the cookies and retreating to the kitchen.

“There you guys are,” Claire calls out as she enters the living room, beer in hand.

Greyson leans down to give her a kiss on the cheek. “Hey, Mom,” he says.