Landon was still absorbing it. “My God. How are you able to pull that off? It has to be incredibly difficult for you.”
“I know this is going to sound strange. But Lilith makes it easy to forget the pain. We truly have become friends, connecting with each other on a human level, regardless of the roles we play in each other’s lives. She is amazingly smart…witty…and mature beyond her years. I’m extremely grateful to Beth for giving me the opportunity and not shutting me out because she very well could have done that. Perhaps I even deserved that.”
“So, you agreed not to tell Lilith your identity? Are you ever going to tell her?”
“Lilith knows she’s adopted. Her mother was always open with her about that from as early of an age as she could understand it. But Beth has not yet allowed me to tell her who I am. It’s unclear if she ever will let me, but I don’t want to press the issue right now out of fear that they won’t let me see her anymore. I wouldn’t ever try to steal her away. I only want to be in her life, to help look out for her, and to make sure what happened to me never happens to her.” A tear fell. “I love her so much. And I just want her to know that, even if I have to show her, rather than tell her. She’s the reason I can’t ever leave Michigan, Landon. I wasn’t completely honest back in California when I said the reason was that I couldn’t leave my father. It’s Lilith. Only Lilith. If it weren’t for her, I would’ve stayed in L.A. I would’ve never left you, wouldn’t have even come back here at all.”
Landon shook his head in disbelief. “Holy shit, Rana. This is—”
“I know. I know this is a shock.”
“Holy shit,” he repeated.
He was silent for the longest time. I couldn’t blame him. His girlfriend suddenly had a ten-year-old child. Not to mention all of the similarities between Lilith’s situation and his own.
“Say something, Landon.”
He just sat down and placed his head in his hands. I knew then that my revelation wasn’t something he was going to accept very easily, certainly not in the short time he had left in Michigan.The days that followed Landon’s return to L.A. were the hardest.
At my worst moments, I seriously wondered if I would ever see him again. I was looking for verbal reassurance that everything was going to turn out okay when he hadn’t exactly given that to me. I think the shock of my news was really too much for him.
The one good thing: he told me he started seeing a therapist. Landon assured me that it wasn’t only because of his need to deal with his feelings about my revelation. It was something that he felt was long overdue. He had never really dealt with his abandonment issues, nor had he ever spoken to anyone about the shame he felt over his past profession.
It was simply too much for him to absorb all at once, first the fact that I’d given up a child and then the realization that Lilith was, in fact, my daughter. I knew it just hit way too close to home. It was amazing how parallel situations could impact both of our lives in similar but different ways. We were on opposite sides of essentially the same life circumstance.
My story couldn’t have been more different from his birth mother’s, but the outcome was the same in his eyes; Beverly and I had each relinquished the rights to our children. And I imagined he had a really difficult time separating his own situation from Lilith’s. His mother was no longer around, however, to serve as the recipient of any lingering resentment.
I was.PRETTY DAMN MAGNIFICENTMy father came by one afternoon and caught me in the midst of a really down day.
He threw his keys on the counter. “You sad, Ranoona?”
My head was resting over my forearms on the kitchen table when I mumbled, “Yes.”
“I have warm pita bread.”
“Warm pita bread doesn’t solve everything, Papa.”
“No, but we have butter. Warm pita and butter solve a lot.” He winked, and I couldn’t help but smile as I lifted my head up.
My father split a large circle of bread in half before grabbing the butter from the refrigerator. He sat back down and buttered me a slice.
I took a bite. “So, I saw you went to visit Lilith recently.”
He was quiet and simply nodded.
“Yeah. She told me she got another envelope,” I said.
About six months ago, Lilith announced that she believed God had been leaving her money. For a while, I just listened to her stories without thinking anything of it. She said envelopes that had her name written on the front would just show up, either under her front door or sometimes tied to something in the yard. The reason she thought it was God leaving them was because of the religious pictures on each one. I asked her to show me one of them and immediately realized that they were the donation envelopes from my father’s church, St. Cecilia’s.