FOR MY DAUGHTER

My dear daughter,

I know this might be the only chance at an apology I get, so I had needs make it a proper one, if a plain one. After all, I’m not a writer or a poet, just a waitress. You guessed right, darling, I’m still waiting tables at the same greasy-spoon of twenty years ago, even though I blamed you for my lot in life and thought that once you had left, everything would go better. I always said you had stopped me from living my dreams. They seem silly now - teenage fantasies of wanting to be rich, famous and happy; of wanting to be swept off my feet by Prince Charming; of receiving that big break that would make me the next Bacall. Didn’t you know, my sweet daughter? I wanted to be a movie-star - my face on every screen, my name on every person’s lips.

Life is ironic. I saw you on the television last night, although not in the manner I had expected. You were on the news, said to be on the X-Men who had saved some children from a fire in a hospital. I was shocked, to put it mildly, because I believed you had been killed. That’s what Pastor told me anyway, after you didn’t return from the woods that you ran away into. There’s a tombstone in the corner of the Caldecott cemetary that bears your romance novel, movie star name - Sabine Therese Hicks - and date of birth. In a sense, it’s appropriate. Your past is buried there. My baby was laid to rest there, so the woman, the heroine, could be born.

You know, you look like I imagine one to be. How Wonder Woman seemed to an eight year-old me. You’re brave and beautiful, darling Sabine. You have grown into the woman I wanted to be since I was a child and it pleases me that I can see one or two parts of myself in you. My eyes, for one. People always called me an odd, green-eyed cat. I wonder if it was because I waved my wild tail and roamed my wild way. Do you remember that story? You used to love it as a child. Mind you, you read anything you could get your chubby paws on, ranging from Little Woman to a cookbook to a well-loved copy of Anna Karenina. Outside of Cody, the few friends you had were words on paper. I guess it was my fault for not being around more in a town where Christian charity went as far as a few tight-lipped smiles at the church door. I knew they gossiped about me, about us, and I hated you for it. I saw you as my living brand of shame, my red letter, because, if giving birth to an illegitimate kid was bad, a mutie bastard was worse.

You never knew your daddy, did you? He came to see you once, when you were just a baby, and smiled and said that you were as pretty as I was. It was a charming lie - you get most of your looks from him, down to that weird, odd streak in your hair. You know, before you were born, I never thought he was a mutie. I’d like to believe that was why he never married me. He wanted to spare me the inevitable backlash from marrying a mutie.

However, even with my rose-tinted view of life, I know that’s not true.

Truth is, your daddy was married.

Truth is, your daddy wouldn’t leave his real wife and real baby.

Truth is, your daddy didn’t love us enough to risk the scandal.

I still see him around the town at times. We pass in the street without a nod or word of acknowledgement. I serve him in the greasy spoon like he’s any other customer, and bring sundaes for his children. Sometimes, the worst times, I sit behind him at church and watch him nod piously while the pastor thunders thou shalt be faithful to the wife of your youth and thou shalt not commit adultery. It’s easy for him. He’s got no red letter stitched to his soul, like I do. And I hate him for it. Every time I see him, I want to claw off his face. I want to show him for the hypocrite he is, the lying worm beneath the smooth smile. So, I try not to see him, but Caldecott’s a small place - I know it’d be too small for you now, my darling - and you can’t avoid somebody forever in it.

Memory is funny, though. When I look back on the years I spent hoping, it’s not him I hate. It’s myself. I hate myself for believing all his smooth lies, all his sweet promises. As we lay in bed on lazy, summer afternoons and watched the fan swirl shadows on the ceiling, he would tell me that we would go to California. He would tell me that we would get married in Hollywood, and that I would be a star. In those afternoons, I could almost see myself walking down the red carpet in a fancy gown with everyone applauding and cameras flashing all around me.

I hated you for making me wake from that dream.

I hated you for making me too fat and ugly to be a star.

And I hated you for taking him from me. I hated you for making him break all his promises about leaving his wife, his child and eloping from Caldecott with me. When you were born, he began to speak about responsibility. Be reasonable, Alice. You can’t take a baby along with us. I can’t leave my job here and support you and a baby. You can’t leave yours now she’s born. Be responsible. Think of your daughter. She’s not going to go away.

But you did.

Even after all these years, I still have the hope that I will round a corner and you will be standing there. Or I will be sitting on the porch and you will come up the driveway home. Or I will walk into a shop and bump into you in the canned goods aisle. Wonder Woman. Movie Star. Beautiful with your brave smile and your feline eyes. My daughter.

I have written this letter many times since I saw you on television. I will probably write it again many more times. I don’t know why, because I don’t have your address and can never send it to you. I don’t even know if your name is the same, so I can never find you. The telephone directory has no record of you; the phone companies have never heard of you. Even if I could find you, could send this letter to you, I don’t know if I’d have the courage to do so. Nonetheless, this letter has to be written. So far, it contains all the words I should have spoken twenty-two years ago, except the three, little ones that I could never say.

I love you,

Alice Hicks