Switched at Birth: The True Story of a Mother's Journey (11 page)

If only …

John had no choice but to take her at her word, but as “forewarned is forearmed” strategies go, it was a pretty flimsy one; we went into the deposition completely in the dark about what the hospital knew, if anything. I think, right up until the moment I sat down at the conference table, I was still holding out hope that it had all been a bluff, a legal smoke screen to throw us off.

But when I saw the glint in the hospital lawyer’s eyes, I knew that this was no bluff.

He knew something, all right.

And so, god damn her, did Regina Vasquez!

It was unthinkable. Unconscionable! Regina had
known
for thirteen years that she was raising a daughter who was not, rightfully, biologically, or morally hers to raise. She had found out more than a decade earlier that our girls had been switched at birth, and she’d held this secret inside her, like something awful and malignant, and allowed it to grow and fester into the unspeakable situation in which we now found ourselves.

On the ride home from the courthouse, John went so far as to throw out the word “psychopath.” I don’t know that I necessarily agreed with that term, but there was a certain B-word I definitely thought applied. “Liar”—that was another fitting word. “Kidnapper” wasn’t far off the mark either.

John and I confronted her the second we arrived home from the deposition. We did not take a moment to collect our thoughts, or wait for cooler heads to prevail. We assailed the woman, right then and there, and we didn’t pull a single punch. The regrettable thing was that Bay and Daphne were there to hear it all. I wish now that we had had the presence of mind to take Regina aside and handle this quietly, in private. But John was incensed; he was livid and out of his mind with the fury over having been played for a fool.

I was angry as well, but I felt something else, too.

What I felt was a crushing sense of betrayal. This woman whom I had begun to think of as a friend had administered a cut as unkind as there had ever been. She’d smiled in my face and stabbed me in the back at the same time.

She’d
known
. She’d known all along and she never said a word.

I felt betrayed. And very, very sad.

It was as though everything I thought I knew, things I thought were indisputable truths, were now being called into question. Was it all an illusion?

I don’t know anything anymore
, I’d said to John. And truly, that’s how I felt.

Regina knew she was caught. To her credit, she didn’t deny it.

She told us everything, all of it, from the beginning. And as angry as I was at her, as bewildered and hurt, I recall that in the middle of her explanation I stood up and offered her a tissue. It was a little thing, really, something reflexive—a lifetime of good Midwestern manners doesn’t go away just because you happen to be in crisis mode.

But I like to think it was more than that. When I look back on that moment, I realize that even then, even as Regina stood there explaining what she had done, I still could not bring myself to think of her as the enemy.

Kindness trumps all, even if it manifests itself in something as small as a Kleenex.

So she spilled her heart out. She gave us her reason. To John, I know, it sounded more like an excuse.

“I was an alcoholic, unemployed single parent,” she told us. “I was broke. I had nothing—nothing but this baby everyone thought was mine, who I loved
so
much. I was such a mess, I was scared if I told the truth, they would’ve taken one look at me and yanked her away—given both kids to the other family. I looked around at my life and saw how far I had sunk—drunk, alone with a deaf toddler I had no idea how to take care of.” Regina wiped at the tears that had begun to well up in her eyes. “And I made a decision. I’d clean myself up. I’d figure it out. I’d get myself back on my feet and
I’d be the best mom I could be
. And I did. I joined AA, I reconnected with my mother, I got it together. And I think I did a pretty good job.”

Bay’s voice startled me; in the intensity of the moment, I had almost forgotten the girls were there.

“What about me?” she asked. It was part appeal, part accusation. “You knew about me all along and never came for me?”

Oh, how my heart broke to hear her say that! She believed that Regina—her mother—hadn’t wanted her! But when Regina turned her tear-filled eyes to Bay, I knew by her expression that nothing could have been further from the truth.

“Oh honey,” she said, “I wanted you, of course I wanted you. I even hired a private investigator. He came back with photos and bios of your parents. That’s what was in the guitar case. Pictures of you … tons of pictures. I followed you constantly....”

This knocked the wind out of me. So my thoughts about Regina passing Bay and me on some department store escalator, or waiting behind us at the grocery checkout, or standing beside us at the swing set in the park had not been so ridiculous after all. She’d been there, watching. She’d seen her little girl.

So why hadn’t she given me the chance to see mine?

Bay had a more heartbreaking interpretation. “
I
was your daughter.
Me!”
She glared at Daphne. “Not
her
. And you chose her over me. All those years, you knew I was out there and didn’t come for me—”

“Please try to understand—” Regina’s voice was filled with regret, with contrition. “I did what I thought was best for you.”

“No,” Bay countered. “You did what was best for
you
.”

I didn’t disagree. Regina had had an opportunity to make things right more than a decade ago, and she’d chosen not to. How could I ever come to terms with that?

As Bay bolted from the room, I turned to look at Regina, helplessly clutching the tissue I’d given her, looking guilty, frightened, and alone.

But I still could not bring myself to tell her I understood.

Kindness may come naturally. But forgiveness takes a great deal more effort.

I went to bed angry that night. Angry and confused.

How in the world had this woman, this mother, kept such a secret all this time? And how, when we opened our home to her, did she not confess to it?

I couldn’t sleep. It was close to dawn when I grabbed my robe, stepped into my slippers, and headed downstairs to make myself a cup of coffee. When it was ready, I took it outside, thinking that witnessing the dawn of a brand-new day might be just the overly symbolic gesture I needed to clear my head.

I was surprised to see Adrianna power-walking up the driveway. She was wearing cross trainers and sweatpants and coming toward me at a good clip for a woman of her age. For a woman of any age, really. I quickly went over the events of the night before and recalled that Regina had said she’d never told Adrianna that she’d known of the switch. Which meant that the woman standing before me now was not technically a co-conspirator.

“Good morning,” she said, with a cautious smile. “Couldn’t sleep?”

I shook my head. “Coffee?” I offered.

“Love some.”

I ducked back into the kitchen, poured a second cup, and came back out to find her already seated in the grouping of patio chairs.

“Thank you,” she said, taking the steaming mug.

“I didn’t know you went walking in the morning.”

“Every day,” she replied. “And always right at sunrise. In my old neighborhood it was the safest time of the day. You had to get up early if you wanted to get a jump on the muggers and drug dealers.”

I couldn’t tell if she was kidding or being serious. I figured it was probably a little of both.

“So I guess you heard …” I began. Adrianna nodded, so I went on. “I just don’t understand why she would lie.”

“Let me tell you a little bit about that point in Regina’s life,” Adrianna said, gently. She paused to sip her coffee. “And please know that I’m not defending her. I just want you to get a sense of what it was like.”

As the sun rose, Regina’s mother took me back in time. She told me about how bad Regina’s drinking had been, how it had actually created a rift between the two of them, and how volatile Regina and Angelo’s relationship had been. Mentally, I reached back through the years to wrap my arms around the three-year-old version of Daphne, who must have watched her mother’s self-destruction in wide-eyed terror. The image made me sick to my stomach; but at the same time I took some comfort in the fact that Bay had not had to endure it.

“Imagine the courage it took for her to come to me,” Adrianna was saying. “To arrive on my doorstep with her hat in her hand and her heart on her sleeve.” She glanced beyond me, to where the first ribbons of sunlight were dappling the rhododendrons, and her eyes were filled with sadness. “She’d said some horrible things to me the last time I’d seen her, and I suppose I’d been pretty rough on her, too. But when she came back, with this little angel in her arms … Regina is a proud woman, Kathryn, so you can only imagine what it cost her to come to me and ask for help. She didn’t do it for herself, she did it for that little girl.”

“And you took her back,” I said softly.

Now Adrianna met my eyes. “Of course I did,” she whispered, her voice catching. “Just like Bay was your baby … Regina was mine.”

I felt her words shoot straight to my heart. I tried to picture myself arriving, alone and frightened, on my own mother’s doorstep, admitting to her that I was an alcoholic, admitting that I needed help. Would she, like Adrianna, have remembered me as the little girl I once was? Would she have taken me in and helped me find my way?

As if reading my mind, Regina’s mother tilted her head and gave me a tiny smile. “What would you have done?” she asked lightly, although the question was a profound one. “And I don’t mean what would you have done as Kathryn, a woman who had no addictions, a woman who had, instead of a deadbeat boyfriend, a loving husband and a happy home. Would you have come forward, knowing that there was a very good chance that the one joy you had in the whole world, the little girl you would humble yourself to protect, might be taken from you forever if you did?”

I answered her as honestly as I could: “I don’t know.”

She nodded. “No, you don’t. You can’t know. And neither can I. Until we’re faced with something like that—no matter how much we like to think we’d do the right thing, or the brave thing, we just don’t know.”

“It’s just going to be so hard for me to forgive her. She kept Daphne from me.”

Adrianna traced the rim of her mug with her finger and spoke in a voice that came from somewhere far away. “There were days when she would ask me to sit with Daphne and she’d go out. She wouldn’t say where, and always, in the back of my mind, I was afraid she was going to drink again. She’d be gone for hours, and when she would come home—never drunk, never even with the slightest hint of alcohol on her breath—I remember she would look as though she’d just had a piece of her soul taken away from her.” Adrianna sighed, and despite the stylish haircut and jogging clothes, I realized she was not a young woman; she’d seen an awful lot in her lifetime, and it hadn’t been an easy one.

“I realize now that those were the days when she’d gone to see Bay. To just catch a glimpse, if even from afar, of the little girl she would never know. Can you imagine what it felt like for her every time she had to walk away?”

I leaned back in the patio chair and closed my eyes. I couldn’t imagine, and I was glad I’d never had to. When I opened my eyes again, I saw that she had tears in hers.

“Everyone hurts,” Adrianna said. “But when it’s your child that hurts …” Again the older woman’s voice broke. “When your child hurts, it is worse than any pain you’ll ever bear on your own. Do you know how many times Regina would say, ‘Why couldn’t it have been me who got sick?’ ‘Why couldn’t I be deaf and not her?’ And now I see my child hurting and …”

I reached over and held her hand. “It’ll be okay,” I said softly.

Here we were, two women, two mothers, with only the best interests of two little girls in our hearts.

And suddenly I was remembering a brain teaser book Bay had back when she was in elementary school. It had all the typical riddles in it, like
If a plane crashes on the border of the U.S and Canada, where would they bury survivors?
and
If a rooster lays an egg on a pitched roof …
and so on. We kept it in the car to pass the time on long road trips, and I remember one day Bay came across a riddle I’d never heard before.

“Two mothers and two daughters walk into an ice cream shop,” she read from the book.

“Are you sure it’s not two rabbis and two nuns walk into a bar?” Toby cracked.

“Shush,” I said, wondering where he’d been hearing jokes like that. “Go on, Bay.”

“Two mothers and two daughters walk into an ice cream shop. They order one chocolate cone, one strawberry cone, and one vanilla cone. And everybody gets their own ice cream.”

“That’s impossible,” John said. “For everyone to get her own cone, they’d have had to order four, not three.”

“Maybe they shared,” Toby offered.

“Nope,” says Bay. “It says they all had their own cone.”

“I know!” I said, as the answer—the surprisingly simple answer—arrived like a lightning flash in my mind. “There were only three women ordering ice cream.”

“Two mothers and two daughters …” Bay said. “That’s four.”