There was silence on the line.
“Who’s that?” Lila asked.
Paul handed me the phone.
I took it. My hands were shaking.
“Lila,” I said. “My name is Tara. I’m Paul’s wife.”
“I know who you are,” Lila said quietly. “I’ve seen you. In your pictures. You’re the one who posts everything.”
“I am,” I said. “Lila, I didn’t know about you. I want you to know that. Until this morning, I didn’t know you existed. My seven-year-old found your note under the statue. That’s how I found out.”
She didn’t say anything.
“I’m not calling to defend him,” I said. “I’m so angry at him I can’t see straight. I’m calling because my father left me when I was six. And I wrote him a letter when I was sixteen. And he never wrote back.” I took a breath. “And I’m not going to let my husband be that man for one more day. So I’m coming with him. To make sure he shows up. And to make sure he doesn’t leave until you’re done asking him why.”
The line was quiet for a long time.
Then I heard something. A small sound. Like someone trying not to cry.
“Okay,” Lila said. “Okay. You can come.”
On Saturday, we left the kids with my sister. We drove two hours to Cincinnati. Paul didn’t say a word the whole way. He held the steering wheel with both hands. At a rest stop near Dayton, he went into the bathroom and stayed there for fifteen minutes. When he came out, his eyes were red.
Lila’s studio was in an old warehouse in a neighborhood called Over-the-Rhine. Brick walls. Big windows. A freight elevator with a gate you had to pull closed yourself.
We went up to the fourth floor.
The door was open.
The studio was huge. One big room with a concrete floor and high ceilings and windows all along one wall. Everywhere, there were sculptures. Clay ones. Some finished, glazed and shining. Some still raw and gray, wrapped in plastic to keep them wet.
People. All of them were people. An old man sitting on a bench. A woman holding a baby. A boy reaching up for something on a shelf.
And in the middle of the room, standing next to a big wooden worktable covered in tools, there was a young woman.
She was tall. Thin. Wearing overalls covered in dried clay and a gray T-shirt. Her dark hair was pulled back in a messy knot. There was clay on her hands. Clay on her cheek.
She had Paul’s nose. The little bump. Right there.
She had big brown eyes. Dana’s eyes, I guessed.
She was standing very still, with her hands at her sides. Looking at us.
Paul stopped in the doorway.
For a long moment, nobody moved.
Then Paul said, very quietly, “Hi, Lila.”
“Hi,” she said.
He took a step into the room. Then another. Then he stopped. About ten feet from her. Like he didn’t know if he was allowed to come any closer.
“You look like your mother,” he said.
“Everybody says I look like you,” Lila said. “Mike used to say it. When I was a teenager and I was mad at him. He’d say, You’ve got your father’s nose and your father’s temper.” She almost smiled. “I didn’t know what he meant about the temper. I’d never met you.”
“I don’t have a temper,” Paul said.
“No,” Lila said. “I guess you don’t. You just leave.”
He flinched like she’d hit him.
She asked him why.
She asked him standing there in the middle of her studio, surrounded by clay people, with her arms crossed and her chin up. She didn’t cry. She just asked.
“Why didn’t you come back? Why didn’t you ever write? Why did you stop sending money? Did you ever think about me? Did you ever wonder what I looked like? Did you know when Mike died? Did you care?”
And he told her.
All of it. The same things he told me on the floor of our front hall. Eighteen and scared. The scholarship. The pizza party at orientation while she was being born. Holding her once in the hospital. Her tiny hand on his finger. Dana telling him not to come back. The relief when Mike adopted her. The box on the shelf in the back of his head.
The drives to the overlook every August ninth.
“Every year,” he said. “Every single year. I’d sit there and think about you. She’s ten today. She’s fifteen. She’s driving now. She’s graduating.” He was crying. “I knew your birthday, Lila. I always knew. I just didn’t know you.”
Lila stared at him.
“You drove to an overlook,” she said slowly. “Every year. On my birthday. To think about me.”
“Yes.”
“For twenty-three years.”
“Yes.”
“And it never once occurred to you,” she said, “to drive two hours to Pennsylvania instead? To where I actually was?”
Paul didn’t say anything.
“I was right there,” Lila said. Her voice was shaking now. “The whole time. Same town. Same house. Mom never moved. You could have knocked on the door any day. Any birthday. Any Christmas. I would have opened it.” She pressed her hand against her mouth. “I used to sit on the front steps. Did you know that? When I was little. Before Mike. I used to sit on the front steps on Saturday mornings and wait. Because Grandma told me maybe my dad would come visit.”
I made a sound. I didn’t mean to.
Lila looked at me.
“I did that too,” I said quietly. “When I was six. For a year. In my good dress. Every Saturday.”
Lila looked at me for a long time.
“Did yours ever come?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “Never.”
She nodded slowly. She looked back at Paul.
“Then I guess that’s why she came with you,” she said.
We stayed for three hours.
At some point, Lila made tea on a hot plate in the corner of the studio. In mismatched mugs she’d made herself. Lumpy and glazed in blue and green. She handed one to Paul without looking at him. She handed one to me and said, “Sorry, the handle’s a little crooked.”
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
We sat on stools around her worktable. She told us about Mike. The firefighter. The real dad. Who taught her to ride a bike and drove her to art classes every Saturday and came to every single show she ever had, even the ones in tiny coffee shops with four paintings on the wall.
“He used to say I had magic hands,” she said. “He’d watch me work with clay and say, Lila, you could make anything. You could make a whole person.” She looked down at her mug. “After he died, I couldn’t make anything for months. My hands wouldn’t work. And then one night, I sat down and started making him. Mike. From memory. It took me four months.” She nodded toward the corner of the studio. “That’s him. Over there.”
We turned. In the corner, there was a sculpture of a man. Big. Broad-shouldered. In a firefighter’s coat. Kneeling on one knee. Holding out his arms like he was waiting for a little kid to run into them.
He had hands. Big, strong, beautiful hands. Open. Reaching.
Paul stared at it for a long time.
“After I finished him,” Lila said, “I thought, I want to make the other one. The one I never knew. So I found you on Facebook. Through your wife’s Instagram. And I started studying your face. And I made you.”
“Without hands,” Paul said quietly.
“Without hands,” Lila said. She looked at him. “I made Mike’s hands from memory. I knew exactly what they looked like. I held them every day for twenty years.” She paused. “I’d never held yours. I didn’t know what they looked like. I didn’t know what they’d do. If they’d reach out. Or push me away.” She looked down at her own clay-covered hands. “So I left them off. I figured you could finish them yourself. If you wanted to.”
Paul looked at his own hands. Resting on the worktable.
“I don’t know how to make anything,” he said. “Out of clay.”
“Neither did I,” Lila said. “Once.”
On the drive home, Paul was quiet for a long time.
Then, around Dayton, he said, “I have to tell the kids.”
“Yes,” I said. “You do.”
“How do I tell them? How do I explain it? Ella’s ten. She’s going to have questions. She’s going to look at me the way Lila looked at me.”
“Probably,” I said.
“What if she hates me?”
I looked out the window at the dark highway.
“Then she hates you,” I said. “For a while. And you’ll have to earn it back. Just like with Lila. Just like with me.” I looked at him. “That’s what you get for twenty-three years of quiet, Paul. You don’t get to skip the hard part.”
He nodded slowly.
“Are we okay?” he asked. “You and me?”
I thought about it for a long time.
“I don’t know yet,” I said. “I’m still so angry. I don’t know if I’ll ever stop being angry about it.” I looked out the window. “But I watched you today. I watched you stand in that studio and let her yell at you. You didn’t leave. You didn’t go quiet. You didn’t go back down to the basement.” I took a breath. “That’s something. That’s a start.”
We told the kids on Sunday.
We sat them down at the kitchen table. Paul did the talking. I sat next to him and held his hand under the table.
He told them he had a daughter. From a long time ago. Before he met me. That her name was Lila. That she was twenty-three. That she was an artist. That she made the statue.
He told them that he didn’t do a good job of being her dad. That he was scared, and young, and he made a really big mistake. That he left her and didn’t come back. That another man, a firefighter named Mike, was her dad instead. That Mike died. And that she’d come looking for him.
Rosie didn’t really understand. She asked if Lila liked dinosaurs.
Benny wanted to know if Lila could make a statue of him too. A cool one. With muscles.
Ella didn’t say anything for a long time.
She sat at the kitchen table with her hands folded in front of her. She looked at her father. That serious little frown.
“So I have a sister,” she said finally.
“A half-sister,” Paul said. “Yes.”
“A big sister.”
“Yes.”
Ella was quiet again.
“And you left her,” she said. “When she was a baby.”
“Yes,” Paul said. His voice was very quiet. “I did.”
“Like Grandpa Ray left Mom.”
I flinched. I’d told Ella about my father last year. When she asked why she only had one grandpa.
“Yes,” Paul said. “Just like that.”
Ella looked at him for a very long time. I could see her thinking. Ten years old. Turning it over in her head.
“Would you ever leave us?” she asked.
Paul’s face crumpled.
“No,” he said. “Never. Never, Ella. I promise.”
“How do I know?”
He didn’t have an answer.
Ella got up from the table. She went up to her room. She closed the door.
She didn’t talk to him for three days.
On the fourth day, she knocked on the door of the basement.
Paul was down there. Not hiding anymore. Working. He’d bought a big bag of clay from an art supply store. A set of sculpting tools. He’d been trying, every night after the kids went to bed, to make a hand.
He was terrible at it. Really terrible. He’d made eleven hands so far. They all looked like lumpy potatoes with sticks coming out of them.
Ella came down the stairs. She stood at the bottom and looked at him sitting at the old card table with clay all over his fingers.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Trying to make hands,” Paul said. “For the statue. Lila left them off. She said I should finish them myself.”
Ella came over. She looked at the eleven lumpy potato hands lined up on the table.
“Those are really bad, Dad,” she said.
“I know.”
She was quiet for a while. Then she pulled up a chair. She sat down next to him. She picked up a lump of clay.
“Ms. Hendricks taught us clay in art class,” she said. “Last year. We made pinch pots.” She started rolling the clay between her palms. “You have to start with the shape of the palm first. Then add the fingers. One at a time. You’re doing it all at once. That’s why it looks like potatoes.”
Paul stared at his daughter.
She didn’t look at him. She just kept rolling the clay.
“I’m still mad at you,” she said.
“I know,” Paul said.
“But Lila should have hands,” Ella said. “Everybody should have hands.”
It took them three weeks.
Every night after dinner, Paul and Ella went down to the basement. At first it was just the two of them. Then Benny wanted to come. Then Rosie, who mostly just made snakes and smushed them.
I’d go down sometimes and sit on the old couch and watch. The four of them around the card table, with clay up to their elbows, arguing about fingers.
“The thumb’s too long,” Ella would say.
“It’s not too long. I have long thumbs,” Paul would say.
“Not that long. Dad. Look at your own thumb.”
They made forty-two hands. Maybe more. Most of them were terrible. Some of them were less terrible. One of them, made by Benny, was a fist with only three fingers that he said was “a robot hand.”
Then one night in late November, Paul held up a pair of hands.
They weren’t perfect. They were a little stiff. The knuckles were too big. The fingers were slightly uneven.
But they were hands. Real hands. Open. Palms up. Like they were reaching out for something. Or offering something.
He’d made them by looking at his own hands. For hours. Turning them over under the lamp in the basement. Memorizing them.
The way Lila had memorized his face.
Ella looked at them for a long time.
“Those are good, Dad,” she said quietly. “Those are actually good.”
We drove them to Cincinnati the next Saturday. In a cardboard box full of wet towels, so they wouldn’t dry out.
Paul called Lila first. He asked if we could come. All of us. The whole family. He said he understood if she said no.
She was quiet on the phone for a long time.
“Bring the statue,” she said finally. “And the hands. And them.”
So we loaded the statue into the back of the minivan, wrapped in blankets and plastic. Paul drove. Ella sat in the passenger seat, holding the box of hands on her lap like it was full of eggs. Benny and Rosie were in the back, singing.
When we got to the studio, Lila was waiting at the top of the freight elevator.
She saw the kids. She stopped.
Rosie walked right up to her. Four years old. In her dinosaur suit, because she’d decided she was going to wear it every day until Christmas.
“Are you Lila?” Rosie asked.
“Yes,” Lila said.
“Do you like dinosaurs?”
Lila looked down at her. At this small, sticky, fearless little girl with her father’s dark hair.
She smiled. It was the first real smile I’d ever seen on her face.
“I love dinosaurs,” she said.
Rosie grabbed her hand. Clay and all. And dragged her into the studio to show her the tail.
Benny asked if she’d make a statue of him. With muscles. Lila said maybe.
Ella hung back. Shy. Watching. She held the box of hands against her chest.
Lila came over to her.
“You’re Ella,” she said. “You’re the oldest.”
“You’re the oldest,” Ella said. “Now.”
Lila thought about that for a second.
“I guess I am,” she said.
Ella held out the box.
“We made these,” she said. “Me and Dad. And Benny, but his were mostly robot hands. And Rosie, but she just made snakes.” She swallowed. “Dad did the final ones. We practiced for three weeks.”
Lila opened the box. She unwrapped the wet towels.
She looked at the hands for a long time.
They were lying side by side in the box. Open. Palms up. A little stiff. A little uneven.
Reaching.
Lila didn’t say anything. She just picked them up. Carefully. One at a time. Like they might break.
She carried them over to the statue. Paul had unwrapped it. It was standing in the middle of the studio. Six feet of smooth white clay. His face. His shoulders. His arms reaching out, ending in blank, rounded wrists.
Lila stood in front of it with the clay hands in her own.
She looked at Paul.
“You want to do it?” she asked. “Or should I?”
Paul came over. He stood next to her.
“Together?” he said.
Lila looked at him for a long time.
Then she nodded.
They attached the hands together. Lila showed him how. You have to score the clay, she said. Scratch little lines into both surfaces. Add slip, which is clay mixed with water, like glue. Press them together. Smooth the seam with your thumbs until you can’t tell where one piece ends and the other begins.
Paul’s hands were shaking. Lila’s hands were steady. She put her hands over his and helped him smooth the seam.
It was the first time they’d ever touched. Except once. Twenty-three years ago. In a hospital. When she grabbed his finger.
I stood in the corner of the studio with my three kids and watched my husband and his daughter smooth wet clay together with their thumbs.
I was crying. I didn’t care who saw.
When they were done, Lila stepped back.
The statue was finished.
Paul’s face. Paul’s shoulders. Paul’s arms. Reaching out. And at the ends of the arms, two hands. Open. Palms up. A little stiff. A little uneven.
Offering.
“Now what?” Paul asked quietly.
“Now we fire it,” Lila said. “In the kiln. It takes about two days. It gets hotter than a thousand degrees in there.” She looked at the statue. “When it comes out, it won’t be clay anymore. It’ll be ceramic. Permanent. Rain won’t wash it away. Nothing will.”
She looked at Paul.
“Is that what you want?” she asked. “To make it permanent?”
Paul looked at the statue. At his own face. At the hands he’d spent three weeks learning how to make, in a basement, with his ten-year-old daughter telling him the thumbs were too long.
“Yes,” he said. “That’s what I want.”
Lila nodded slowly.
“Okay,” she said. “Then we’ll fire it.”
That was a year ago.
The statue is in our backyard now. Next to the treehouse that leans a little to the left. Lila glazed it after it came out of the kiln. Not white anymore. A soft, warm gray-blue, like the sky early in the morning. The hands are a slightly different color than the rest. A little darker. Paul says it’s because they were made later. Lila says it’s on purpose.
“So you can always see where you finished it,” she said. “So you remember you didn’t start with hands. You had to learn them.”
Rosie hangs her jacket on the statue’s hands when she comes in from the backyard. Benny tried to put a baseball cap on its head. Ella sits next to it sometimes with a book.
Lila comes for dinner once a month. On Sundays. She drives two hours each way. She says she doesn’t mind. She says it’s a good drive to think.
The first time she came, she stood in our front hall for a long time. Looking at the wall where the statue used to lean. Where Paul had sat on the bottom step with his face in his hands.
“This is where he dragged it in?” she asked me.
“Right there,” I said.
“Before the rain.”
“Before the rain,” I said. “First thing in the morning. In his bare feet. He didn’t even stop to think.”
Lila looked at the spot on the floor for a long time.
“I almost didn’t leave it,” she said. “That night. I sat in my car outside your house for two hours. I almost drove home with it.” She shook her head. “I was so scared he’d let it melt.”
“Why did you leave it?”
She thought about it.
“Because Mike would’ve told me to,” she said. “He always said, Lila, you can’t make somebody love you. But you can give them a chance to show you they already do.” She looked at me. “So I gave him a chance.”
Paul went back to work in November. Not to insurance. He quit.
He got a job at a community art center in Columbus. Running their after-school program. For kids. He teaches them clay.
He’s still not very good at it himself. His hands are still lumpy. His thumbs are still too long.
But he’s good at teaching. He’s patient. He shows the kids how to start with the palm and add the fingers one at a time. He tells them it’s okay if it looks like a potato at first. He tells them everybody starts with potatoes.
There’s a kid in his class named Marcus. Eleven years old. Quiet. His dad’s in prison. He comes every day and sits in the corner and makes the same thing over and over. A man. Just a small man, about six inches tall. Standing. With no face.
Paul asked him once why he never puts a face on it.
Marcus shrugged. “I don’t remember what he looks like,” he said.
Paul sat down next to him. He didn’t say anything for a long time.
Then he said, “You know what? You don’t have to finish it. Not yet. You can leave it like that. And someday, if you want to, you can add the face. Or not. It’s your sculpture. You decide.”
Marcus looked at him.
“Did you ever make one like this?” he asked. “Of somebody you didn’t know?”
“Somebody made one of me,” Paul said. “Once. Without hands.”
“Why without hands?”
“Because she didn’t know what I’d do with them,” Paul said.
“What did you do with them?”
Paul looked at his own hands. Covered in clay. A little lumpy. Thumbs too long.
“I finally figured out how to reach for her,” he said.
I’m not going to pretend everything is perfect.
I’m still angry sometimes. When I think about it. Twelve years of marriage and he never told me. When I think about the August drives to the overlook. When I think about a little girl on the front steps of a house in Pennsylvania in her good dress, waiting, every Saturday.
Paul and I go to counseling now. Every other Thursday. A woman named Dr. Abernathy. She asks hard questions. Paul answers them. He doesn’t go quiet anymore. He doesn’t go back to the basement. That’s what I hold on to.
And I wrote a letter.
To my father. Ray. Thirty-one years after he left. I found him on Facebook. He’s seventy-three now. He lives in a retirement community in Fort Myers. He has a wife and a boat and a profile picture of himself holding a fish.
I wrote him one page. I told him about my kids. About Ella and Benny and Rosie. About Lila. About the statue.
I told him I used to sit on the front steps every Saturday in my good dress.
I told him I wasn’t asking for anything. I just wanted him to know I existed.
He hasn’t written back.
Maybe he never will.
But Lila says that’s okay. She says the letter wasn’t really for him.
“It’s like the statue,” she said. “You make it. You leave it on the porch. And then whatever happens, at least you know you gave them the chance.” She looked at me. “The rest is up to them.”
Last Sunday, Lila came for dinner. It was raining.
After dinner, while Paul and the kids were doing the dishes, she and I went out to the backyard with our coffee. We stood under the edge of the porch roof and looked at the statue.
The rain was falling on it. Running down the gray-blue glaze. Down the face. Down the shoulders. Down the arms. Pooling in the open palms of the hands.
It didn’t wash away.
It just stood there in the rain, reaching out, with water gathering in its hands like it was holding something.
“Do you ever think about what would have happened?” Lila asked. “If he’d let it melt?”
“Every day,” I said.
“Me too,” she said.
We stood there for a long time, watching the rain.
“You know what I think about most?” Lila said. “That morning. When he dragged it inside. You told me he didn’t even stop to think. He just saw it and grabbed it.”
“That’s right.”
“I spent twenty-three years thinking he didn’t want me,” she said. “That he’d thought about it and decided. That he’d looked at me in that hospital and chose to leave.” She shook her head. “And then you tell me that when he saw my statue in the rain, he didn’t think at all. He just grabbed it. Barefoot. Before anybody could stop him.”
She looked at the statue’s hands. Full of rain.
“I think that’s who he really is,” she said. “Under all that quiet. Under all that fear. A guy who doesn’t think. Who just grabs.” She smiled a little. “He just took twenty-three years and a six-foot clay statue to figure it out.”
Behind us, the back door opened.
Rosie came running out into the rain. In her dinosaur suit. She’s five now. It’s too small for her. She wears it anyway.
She ran straight across the wet grass to the statue. She stood in front of it and looked up.
Then she reached up and put her small hand in the statue’s open palm. Right in the little pool of rainwater.
“Hi, Clay Daddy,” she said.
Lila laughed. A real laugh. The kind that surprises you.
The back door opened again. Paul came out. He saw Rosie standing in the rain holding hands with the statue. He saw Lila laughing on the porch.
He didn’t say anything.
He just walked down the porch steps into the rain. Barefoot. In the cold. Without stopping to think.
He went over to Rosie. He picked her up. He held out his other hand.
To Lila.
She looked at it for a long moment. His real hand. A little lumpy. Thumbs too long.
Reaching.
Then she put down her coffee cup and walked down the steps into the rain and took it.
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