Dear Paige,
You and Molly are old enough now to know why we never got a proper goodbye. That last summer I came with you to Michigan, the one where I made you the pirate birthday cake filled with Fruit Loops necklaces and Blow Pop rings, and the loot of thrift store mini toys your mom would have bought new. The summer I took Molly out for walks in the umbrella stroller that snagged at every bump in the sidewalk and she’d say, “Go faster, Mommy,” because in our perpetual game of pretend, I was always the mommy.
In real life I would have taken you, had anything ever happened to your parents and you didn’t have family. That’s not to say I would have stolen you, the thing over which your mother blamed me.
I should back up.
That summer I had Friday nights off, most of which I was content to read my books or write or walk down to the water alone before going to bed early but your mom insisted I make friends with the other nannies and go out, have fun, date. It was the summer I drank my first beer. After several attempts to set me up with a preppy boy my age, I told her I didn’t want to because I wasn’t interested in dating boys, I liked girls. We were talking on the stairway. You were probably playing on the sun porch. Your mother’s whole body stiffened before she began to cry. It was as if I’d done something terribly wrong. I pictured my own mother, uncomfortable, initially convinced this was a stage and that I would only make things harder for myself. But your mother wasn’t sad for me, she was scared for herself.
We still had at least a few days until our plane ride home. That night, she didn’t want me to give you a bath. I won’t go into the shame I felt over doing nothing wrong, the shame of feeling somewhere inside me was a pervert capable of harming you.
I snacked to avoid the awkward meals to which I wasn’t welcome. My solace was your grandmother, who was forgiving of the whole thing, who perhaps had lived enough years to know I was young enough to mean no harm. But I wasn’t convinced I could have arrived as an adult version of myself and gotten out unscathed.
Do you remember making clover flower crowns? Do you remember wrapping scarves around one eye and standing on the couch like pirates looking out from their ship?
Do you remember when it was time to go home what happened in the airport? How our gate changed and your mother needed to do something with the tickets and you and Molly had to pee. So your mom took the tickets and we used the bathroom and then headed to the new gate, figuring it made the most sense to meet at the gate we’d be taking off from. When we got there your mother wasn’t there yet. Maybe there was a line at the ticket counter. We played guess what’s in my hand and any other waiting game I could think of. Just when I was about to go to the ticket counter to ask them to page your mother, she came flying through the airport on one of the security cars and jumped off before it stopped. She grabbed both of you from me, causing Molly, then you, to burst into tears.
“Don’t you ever,” she yelled at me. “Don’t you ever touch my babies.” As if I’d been fingering you in the bathroom. She kissed your heads. “Thank God you’re safe.”
We hadn’t boarded a random plane after all. She admitted to imagining I had stolen you when she didn’t find us at the old gate. The whole plane ride I sat rows away from you, per her reassignment. I kept replaying the scenes, including the boy I let flirt with me to say I did.
For years I would eat fish sticks with orange marmalade because I could no longer make them for you. I looked at pictures of you and Molly until I was scared someone would see and think something perverse. I wrote to you. I mailed stickers. Years later your mother replied with your brother’s birth announcement and some small admission like, “I should have written before now.”
I wonder where you are in the world, if you ever dug up real treasure, if Molly has babies of her own, and what about your brother I never met? I wish I could have said, I love you. Goodbye. I won’t see you next summer. Eat some Michigan cottage cheese with Pringles for me. Line up all the shells on deck.
I wish all of you well. Even your mom who broke my heart.
Love,
Katy
