“Does it make you stop blaming her for having me?” I asked, and held my breath.
“You think that—I don’t—” Ellie sputtered, and came to a stop. “I don’t ‘blame’ anybody for you! I’m happy every day that you’re my sister!”
“I feel the same way.” More tears. Both of us hiccupped a lot before she spoke again.
“I do understand why you asked me that,” she said. “It’s something I’ve been talking about with Teddy and with my therapist, a lot. It’s this thing where I’m always trying to excuse what Warren Wilde does. For my whole life, I’ve tried to make everything he did, every mean thing he said, every mistake he made…everything, I’ve tried to excuse everything. I watched him bully teammates but said to myself that he was just trying to get the best out of them. I let him belittle and pick at me and I blamed it on the pain he was in from his football injuries and from losing my mom.”
“He’s pretty much a douche,” I said.
“Pretty much,” she agreed. “He really is working on it in therapy, but also, he is who he is. The problem with me is that I love him anyway.”
I nodded at the phone. That was a problem, because despite everything, I did, too. I hated Warren Wilde, but I loved him anyway, also.
“Neither of our moms were very strong women. They each had so many issues that they didn’t ever deal with,” Ellie said. “I could definitely believe that Soleil was in love with him, and that he led her on or just got infatuated with the idea that another woman worshiped him like he worships himself.”
“Why were they all such basket cases?” I asked her, and I heard her laugh again, just a little. We were both fully bawling by this point, so laughter was hard.
“I don’t know, but your baby is going to be lucky to have you, because you’re not. You and César are going to be great parents.”
“Do you really think that?” I asked, my voice quavering.
“Absolutely,” she said staunchly. “You guys are going to be wonderful parents of baby Eleanor, named after her favorite aunt.”
I actually laughed, too.
“By the way,” Ellie said, “do you know what time it is? When are you supposed to be at work?”
Yeah, I was trying very hard not to be late to this new job, so after we hung up, I spent only another few minutes searching through the stuff I had dumped out onto the floor. It was mostly crap, but there were some funny things, like cards I had made in school for Soleil that she had saved, and a note home from my first grade teacher about how I was too ‘social’ in class. Soleil was supposed to have signed and returned that.
Besides the envelopes from the taxman, there were other letters from various lawyers and bill collectors, which she had probably ignored. That had always led to problems for her. I picked up another envelope, a blank one, and pulled out the paper inside.
I read the first line: “Soleil, you have to stop…”
That was Warren Wilde’s handwriting, the crazy, cramped scrawl that Ellie had worked for months on recreating so she could fake his autograph for his fans who were desperate for a Warren Wilde signature. I kept reading, feeling so dizzy that I had to reach out and hold onto the side of the bed to steady myself.
“You have to stop writing to me and calling to talk about this. You have to leave it alone. Stellina has been able to forgive us for what we did, but she’s so fragile…”
My Aunt Stellina had known? She had known that her husband and her sister had slept together?”
“I made an enormous mistake,” Warren Wilde had written. “I fell into a trap that I suspect you planned for a long time. I’ll support you and the baby, but I won’t be her father. If you want financial assistance from me and continued contact with your sister, you will not share our encounter with anyone. Take this as my final words on the subject. My lawyer will be in touch with the details.”
I thought about my mother reading these words from the man she possibly loved. What would I have done if César had reacted to our baby with a letter saying that his lawyer would be in touch? I probably would have gone to his house and kicked him in the balls, and then I would have moved on and taken care of my baby, because she was the most important person. I thought of how Soleil had acted after Warren rejected her: the men, the drinking, and the neglect of her child, me. I knew that no matter what, I wouldn’t have done that. Maybe I wasn’t as much like Soleil as I had thought.
My phone rang as I went down the stairs and I held on to the railing as I answered, still feeling like the ground was shifting a little under my feet.
“I was calling to catch you before you left the house,” César said. “How are you this morning, honey?”
“Late for work,” I said, my voice scratchy. I cleared it. “I was looking at stuff and I want to talk to you about it. I’ll call you when I’m on the road.”
“Ok, I want to hear. But before you go, can you see if I left my computer in my office? I forgot to grab it yesterday morning. I was distracted.”
I remembered why he had been distracted, how he had bent me over the dresser and made me come as he poured himself into me. It made me reach out and lean
