Page 64 of April Flowers

Margot raised her shoulders.

“To be honest, it was alarming for me to meet you,” Vic said. “I never imagined Lillian’s children would come back.”

“I never thought I would,” Margot said.

“Why do you think you came back and not the others?” Vic asked. “You were the one in the accident. It was you who Lillian blamed, wasn’t it?”

Margot felt her heart bruise. “How do you know she blamed me?”

“She told me that she chased you away,” Vic said.

Margot closed her eyes and felt the meaning of what he said rush over her like waves.

“I don’t think she remembers telling me,” Vic said. “But something I feel I need to say is this. I didn’t realize she was so sick till very recently. I hadn’t realized…” His voice became scratchy. “I knew she was a very angry older person. I knew she was lonely. But I swear to you, I didn’t know about the Alzheimer’s until right around the time you came back. She was funny and fine with me. I like to think she was more lucid when I was around.”

“How often were you around?” Margot asked, remembering that her mother had suggested she’d known Vic for years. “You said you met her, um, playing cards?”

Vic blushed and looked down. “That’s right.”

Margot couldn’t take the lies anymore. “Vic. Will you please tell me who you are?”

Vic let the silence stretch for what felt like a long time. Margot sipped her wine, waiting. She knew that sometimes the truth needed a bit of time to build upon itself.

She didn’t want to accuse him of being her brother.

She needed him to say it first.

“I was born in Nantucket,” Vic said. “I was born in 1982. Four years before you.”

Margot nodded. She’d guessed that.

“When I was a toddler, my mother moved me out to California,” he said. “She didn’t tell me anything about my father till I was seventeen or eighteen years old. I don’t think she would have told me if it weren’t for the diagnosis.”

Margot’s ears rang.

“She had cancer,” Vic said. “She was thinking about her life, about everything she might leave behind if she died. I think she felt really nostalgic. When I asked her about my dad, she told me his name was Frank Earnheart.”

Vic paused for dramatic effect, but Margot told him with her eyes that she already knew.

Vic touched the back of his neck. “Right. I look just like him. Lillian told me, too, although I don’t think she ever caught on to who I was. Not really.”

“It’s uncanny,” Margot said. “I knew you looked familiar when I first met you. But I don’t think my brain wanted me to know why.”

They looked at one another for a long time: sister and brother.

“My mother survived cancer,” Vic continued. “And life went on. I went to Berkeley and got a really good job, and everything was on the up-and-up. That is until my mother’s cancer came back at the end of 2004. It was fast. She died in March 2005.”

“Oh, Vic.” Margot bowed her head as the timeline clicked into place.

“I went crazy after that,” Vic explained. “I took a month off work and traveled all over the country in my junky little car. I had no destination in mind. And then, very suddenly and without planning it, I was at Hyannis Port. It was April 2005,almost exactly twenty years ago. I traveled by ferry to the island where I’d been born—an island I hadn’t returned to since I’d left as a toddler. I got a crappy hotel and holed up, and thought about how to approach him. My father. I knew his name, but that was all. My mom didn’t have any photos, and the internet then wasn’t what it is today.

“You have to understand how out of my mind I was,” he said. “I was grieving with a capital G. I was drinking too much. I was hanging around that place called Ralph’s. You know it?”

“Really well,” Margot admitted.

“One night, I got to talking to Ralph,” Vic said. “I was pretty drunk, and I mentioned my predicament. I explained that I had no mother and no father and that I needed direction. I think I even said his name, Frank Earnheart. Ralph is a cool confidant and never betrayed anything. But he did say that Frank had a family and a wife. I asked Ralph what he thought I should do, and he said that it wasn’t up to him to say. But when I asked where Frank lived, he wrote down his address. I couldn’t believe it. After all this aimless driving, I had an address.

“I was trying to get up the nerve to go out there. I gave myself a deadline. But it was like three or four days before that so-called deadline that I saw him by chance, out and about,” Vic said. “He was helping a teenage girl carry all this stuff out to a car. Soil and flowers and bulbs.”

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