What They Left Behind

The first year of their marriage was a whirlwind for Gennie and Peter. To Gennie’s surprise, when Peter told everyone who worked on the show that they married, everybody was happy for them. Erik seemed a little bit sad, but not shocked at all. He congratulated them, telling Peter that he found himself a great wife. After that, any tension on the set eased and the ratings for the show went up. It was a huge load off Gennie’s mind. Everyone knew about their relationship and seemed to accept it.

  Peter was worried about Nanny because she was constantly in the hospital. He thought his dad might have something to do with it and wanted to get her away from the Davidson estate. The problem was they didn’t have enough room for her in their current house. Gennie had never thought she would move from the home she and Rory once shared but she suggested to Peter that it would be best if they found some place bigger. They looked for about a year but didn’t find anything in their price range that they liked. Finally, they decided to build their own home. They bought two acres of land in Canoga Park and began building their dream house. It was completed in 1983, along with a small guesthouse in the back with everything Nanny could need. The next year they built a full size pool and a tennis court. Now that they had plenty of room with four bedrooms and three bathrooms, everybody that knew them was asking when they would be having a baby. It was a daily thing on the set, and eventually Nanny joined in. With Michele being a teenager, Nanny had nothing to do and she told Peter that she felt ready to be a grandmother.

  The problem was Gennie and Peter put in long hours on the set. They needed to work to pay for the house and eventually, Michele’s education. Gennie also wanted to take some time off to take care of the baby. They decided they would work on it when Tech 2014 was finally over. Every year there were rumors the show was in its final days, but it was renewed again and again. By 1985, Gennie didn’t know how the writers managed to come up with story lines they hadn’t done before, but it was still happening. Some of them she thought were bordering on ridiculous, but Tech 2014 was still getting great ratings and the network wanted to keep it at least another year.

  In 1986, it was announced that the eighth season would be the show’s last. Peter had gotten extra work on a movie set which paid much more and wanted to concentrate on that. Gennie decided if she wanted to have another child, she should do it now. She was almost forty years old and didn’t know how long she had on her biological clock.

  Gennie didn’t think filming the last episode would bother her, but it did. She tried to hold back tears after filming wrapped. That night, they attended a party at the executive producer’s beach house in Malibu.

  Erik approached her while she was getting a cocktail at the wet bar and gave her a hug.

  “I’m going to miss you,” he said.

  “You too,” she replied. “I can’t believe I won’t be seeing you every day. It’s going to be so weird.”

  “I know, but you and Peter can visit me if you miss me bossing you around.”

  “Oh, we’ll definitely keep in touch.”

  “I’ve been looking for you,” Erik’s new wife, Sarah, said.

  “So, I have to ask you something, Erik,” Gennie stated. “Now that you’re finally married, when is that baby coming?”

  Erik laughed heartily.

  “Well, I’m doing my part,” Sarah chimed in. “Hopefully, Erik’s doing his.”

  “I’m old, but the equipment works just fine,” Erik said. “I’m sure it’ll be soon.”

  “I think that’s more than I wanted to know,” Gennie replied and they all burst out laughing.

  That night after the party, Gennie and Peter started working on having a baby. Gennie assumed it would take a while, but a few days short of the eight month mark of when the show filmed its last episode; on October 27, 1987, she gave birth to a girl. They named her Jamie-Rae, in honor of Gennie’s father. Michele was thrilled. She offered unlimited amounts of babysitting time, but Gennie told her she could do it only if Nanny didn’t want to. She wanted Michele to keep up her good grades at college.

  That night, while nursing Jamie-Rae alone in the darkened hospital room, she thought her new baby looked very much like her own baby pictures. She remembered seeing one of Ben, who looked relatively big and healthy at six pounds, and then of her. She was somewhat small, weighing only four and a half pounds and overwhelmed by the amount of blankets swaddling her. Jamie-Rae, being born a month early, weighed only five pounds one ounce, was very similar. Gennie thought about how her mother must have felt finally having a girl after two boys. She was probably more than thrilled. She wished poor Adelaide could have lived long enough to see her grow up and have her own children. Michele knew nothing about her own grandmother except her name and that she died. She never even got the chance to visit her grave. That’s when Gennie realized she had to bring her parents to California. She thought about doing it before, but life always got in the way. It had to be done though, and the sooner the better.

  When she returned home from the hospital, she began making arrangements for getting the graves exhumed and the caskets shipped to California. She made an appointment with Forest Lawn cemetery so she could secure a space for them there. She remembered her dad telling her that her mother loved going to the movies and reading about all the stars in Look magazine. She would be so happy to be in same place where a lot of them were buried. In May 1988, she booked a flight to Anchorage, Alaska.

  There was only one thing she hadn’t done yet and that was to get Bryan’s permission. As far as she knew, he still lived in their childhood home. She had all the papers drawn up already. She decided she would just knock on the door and compel him to sign them. After that, she would never have to talk to him again.

  The last week of May, she left Jamie-Rae for the first time in the care of Nanny and boarded a plane for Anchorage. Near the end of the seven and half hour flight, she looked out of her window and saw white capped mountains among many magnificent lakes and rivers. She had forgotten how beautiful Alaska was. Before they landed, they dipped low enough for her to see fields bursting at the seams with flowers and wild berries. She didn’t realize until now how much she missed it. If it hadn’t been for Bryan, she might still be living here.

  The day Bryan beat them up and left them for dead was still painful to think about, even twenty-five years later. She felt sick to her stomach as she took her carry-on bag out of the bin and said good-bye to the flight attendants. She was that much closer to confronting him now.

  She rented a car and drove to the closest motel to Willow, which was about thirty miles south and just off Route 3. When she arrived there, the first thing she did was go to the bathroom, splash water on her face and mentally prepare herself to encounter Bryan. She changed out of the t-shirt and jeans she had on the flight into a black dress with white pinstripes and a wide black belt. She wanted him to see that she had done fine without him.

  Forty minutes later, her heart was pounding as she drove down the wooded dirt road that led to her old home. She parked next to a red 1980 Ford F-150 in the driveway. The house looked the same except the light brown paint was peeling and there were several old appliances dotting the yard and near the garage.

  Gennie approached the house slowly, feeling like she took a trip back in time. She used the tarnished brass knocker shaped like the letter P to announce her presence.

  After the third attempt at knocking, someone opened the door. It was an extremely thin woman in her fifties with dark greying hair and chipped front teeth.

  “I’m not interested in becoming a Jehovah’s Witness,” she said in a lispy voice.

  “Neither am I,” Gennie replied, with a slight smile on her face. “Actually, I’m wondering if Bryan is here.”

  The woman’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. “What do you want with him? I’m his wife, you know.”

  “Well, I’m his sister. I have some legal papers he needs to sign.”

  The woman?
??s mouth gaped in shock. She took the chain off the door and opened it wider.

  “Bryan doesn’t have any brothers or sisters. He told me he was an only child.”

  “What Bryan told you was wrong,” Gennie said. “He has a younger brother and me. Not that it matters anymore. So, is he home?”

  The woman nodded. “Yes, but stay right here. I’ll get him for you.”

  A minute later, a man she didn’t recognize appeared at the door. He probably was fifty pounds heavier than the Bryan she knew, had a long yellowish-white beard and dirty hair pulled back in a ponytail. He looked at her with a slightly irritated expression, neither surprised nor angry. Gennie suspected he was too drunk to feel anything. He reeked of alcohol.

  “You again,” he said. “I thought you were dead.”

  “No,” Gennie replied. “I’m not.”

  He looked her up and down.

  “You look better than the last time I saw you.”

  “You know why?” Gennie said, anger rising in her voice, “It’s because you kicked the crap out of me.”

  “You’re still pissed about that?”

  “Yes, I’m plenty pissed about it and I always will be.” She stuck the papers underneath his face. “I want you to sign these.”

  He took the papers from her and squinted at them. “Gotta get my glasses,” he said. He took them out of the pocket of his threadbare brown plaid shirt. He put them on and glanced at the paperwork. Gennie thought he looked like he could be someone’s grumpy old grandfather.

  “Oh this,” he said flatly. “Waited long enough, didn’t you?”

  That comment made Gennie furious, but she didn’t say anything in response. She handed him a felt tip pen. “Sign where the X’s are.”

  He grabbed the pen and signed the papers.

  “Here you go,” he said, handing the clipboard and pen back to her. “Go dig those stiffs out of the ground. You want ‘em, you can have ‘em.”

  “I intend to,” Gennie replied.

  “I guess this is good-bye then,” he said, sounding a little bit sad.

  “Yeah, whatever,” Gennie replied. She turned around and walked away.

  As soon as she got into the car and drove off, she knew something was wrong. Bryan complied much too willingly.

  Well, she thought, maybe he’s mellowed with age. He probably realizes now that making other people’s lives miserable isn’t as pleasurable as it used to be and has gotten him nowhere. Or perhaps there is a slight chance he feels bad about the things he’s done. Gennie shook her head as she drove down Willow Fishhook Road. No, Bryan never feels bad about anything.

  She stopped at the Food Mart and called the undertaker to tell him the signed paperwork was in hand and digging could begin immediately. He told her he would meet her at the cemetery.

  About an hour later, she and the undertaker were standing near her parents’ cemetery plot, watching a small backhoe make the first scoop into the ground. About forty-five minutes later, a crane hoisted her father’s dirt covered casket into the air. Gennie’s heart was racing. Soon she would be seeing her mother’s casket for the very first time.

  The backhoe dug to the same depth next to her father’s plot but there was nothing. The undertaker thought that maybe she was buried in a wooden casket and things deteriorated, but he said he could see no sign of anyone having been interred there.

  “Keep digging!” Gennie yelled to the backhoe’s operator.

  They dug another three feet. Still nothing.

  “I don’t think we can dig any deeper than that,” the undertaker said to her. “Perhaps she’s in the wrong plot. That happens once in a while, we’ll dig the space next to where your mother’s supposed to be.”

  They did and there was nothing there either. Gennie just couldn’t believe it.

  “I’m so sorry, ma’am. Obviously, there has been a horrible mix up. Maybe your mother is buried with some other family members.”

  “Then why is her headstone here?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps your father wanted to make you feel better. You said she died in a snowstorm, right?”

  Gennie nodded.

  “Well, I know with hypothermia, people get confused and they wander off. Maybe her body was never found.”

  Gennie knelt down next to the giant empty pit and cried, her tears falling into nothingness. Why did no one tell her? For forty years, she thought her mother was here. Now she was gone forever.

  Chapter 73