The year She Fell (47 page)

I hesitated there, not sure what I wanted, what I would do. Was this what I was escaping? My lost past?

Finally I said, “Okay, well, maybe sometime. Now I have to go.”

But he stopped me with a hand on my arm. “Here’s my cell phone number. I’ll be around for a couple days. You know, checking out nearby counties, and hospitals. Maybe someone will talk to me.” He shrugged. “Call me if you want a quick course in finding out who you are. Hasn’t worked for me yet, but you have more information.”

I shoved his number into my pocket, nodded my farewell, and watched him leave on his own quest.

Back home, I stood
for a while in the empty foyer, looking at the elaborate staircase banister. I closed my eyes and I could see my mother, my first mother, sitting on the steps and polishing each of the dozens of mahogany posts. I used to sit there on the preacher’s bench near the front door and color with my crayons and watch her.

She stopped working here as soon as I was adopted, I assumed because they moved. But I didn’t know . . . I knew so little.

There was a trunk Mother kept of my childhood belongings —I looked around to make sure I wasn’t being observed. Then I opened the door that led up into the attic and climbed the steep dusty stairs.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

I was a nurse and should have known better. But I couldn’t see Mother as anything but indomitable. I kept telling Ellen that those little lapses, well, they happen to healthy older people too. But a near-car accident was enough to wake me up to the truth: Mother wasn’t fine, and by the end of the week, it became clear that those little lapses were probably the effect of some mini-stroke.

It wasn’t till we got her safely ensconced in the hospital Friday that I was able to relax. Not that I have some mystical belief in the power of modern medicine. But with medication, they could stave off a real stroke. We’d caught it soon enough, and from now on, it was just a matter of prevention.

I was ready to collapse in bed when we got home that night from the hospital. But somehow I ended up sitting on the floor with my sisters, drinking wine and eating pizza and popcorn, and listening with half an ear to Laura’s insinuating questions about Ellen’s marriage— I couldn’t help feeling a little too pleased that my sisters weren’t quite as considerate of each other as they pretended. But I started listening, really listening, when Laura confessed that she really, really wanted to have a baby. Only she didn’t have a man to sire it.

“Why not adopt?” Ellen asked.

Laura looked disconcerted. “Because—”

“Because you don’t think you could love the baby enough?” I asked.

“No!” Laura shot a sharp glance at me. She didn’t like any suggestion that she might not be good at loving, I gathered. “No. Because . . . because I don’t think it’s fair. All those actresses, they go out and buy babies so they don’t have to ruin their figures being pregnant, or get stretch marks on their breasts from getting engorged with milk. Okay, they don’t do it illegally, I don’t think anyway.” She was gaining speed here. I realized she must have considered adopting a baby at some point and rejected the idea, because she had the arguments already marshaled. “But they’ve got enough money to get the attorneys and promise the birthmother a year in luxury, and promise that the baby will get Porthault linens and ski vacations to Gstaad and a Ferrari on their 16
^th
birthday. And the girls, they think somehow inside them that it means they’ll get that too, be compensated for being poor. Only once the baby is born, they’re packed off with a thank-you gift. A Kate Spade purse, maybe. And a Harry Winston bracelet with the birthstone of the baby they gave away.”

Surprised at her vehemence, Ellen said, “But at least the child gets a good life.”

“Who knows? Maybe the child starts thinking, when he gets older, that he’s just one more accessory. An expensive prop to a chic life. I don’t know. And anyway—” and she gulped down another half-glass of wine —“I’m not saying the girls are extortionists or anything. But I’d be scared for years, waiting for them to call. They’re usually very young and they had those months or so of being taken care of. And they miss their baby. And their boyfriend, the one who wouldn’t marry them or help them take care of the baby, is maybe still around. And they open People magazine and there’s a picture of the baby, their baby, with the new rich mom. And maybe it’s just him, or maybe it’s both of them, but they’d have to be pretty strong to resist the temptation to call up and make a few demands. It happens. I’ve seen it.”

Ellen said, “Well, I can understand that. But maybe an open adoption—”

“Same problem, really. Anyway, every baby that gets taken by some
Hollywood
actress who doesn’t want stretch marks doesn’t go to some infertile couple. And all things considered, well, I don’t think it’s fair on a cosmic level that a woman capable of having a baby would take one away from a family that can’t.”

“So adopt a child that others don’t want,” I said coolly. “An older child.”

“I don’t want—no. That wouldn’t work.”

“Why not?”

“Because she’d already have belonged to someone else. She wouldn’t really be mine.” Laura must have seen the warning look on Ellen’s face just as those last words came out, because she clamped her mouth shut and stared at me. I concentrated on projecting that otherworldly calm prized in the convent.

Laura now looked embarrassed. Or perhaps that was just an act. “I’m sorry. You know what I meant.”

“Yes, I do. I agree.” I didn’t bother to look at her. I didn’t care what she thought. “An older child would never really belong to you. Too alien.”

“I’m glad Mother didn’t feel that way,” Ellen said firmly. “She accepted you as her own.”

“Of course she did,” Laura agreed in that warm tone of hers, that implied all sorts of innuendo.

I couldn’t help but speculate about what the innuendo was—probably that I was again a replacement, something to fill the gap after Laura’s dad died, something to compensate for Laura’s refusal to be a good daughter or Cathy’s departure after college. But what plagued Laura—why I was chosen by Mother—was no longer the primary issue for me. I wanted to know why Mother even got the chance.

I said abruptly, “Do you remember when I first came here? Before—before I came to live here?”

“Sort of,” Laura said. “A little.”

“Why do you ask?” Ellen looked worried. We’d never spoken of this, of my earlier life. I had my reasons—maybe Ellen did too. It can’t have been easy to explain to her friends why she was suddenly sisters with the housekeeper’s daughter.

“I don’t know. Just this talk about adoption. And birth parents. Not too many kids knew their birthparents personally. But I did. For six years.”

This was, perhaps, the longest speech I’d given to them since I arrived. I wasn’t used to talking anymore; all those long days of silence in the cloister had stolen what little fluency I once had. But maybe the wine had loosened my tongue enough to embolden me—or maybe I thought my sisters would remember what I couldn’t.

Laura said suddenly, “When your mother worked here, you’d come over sometime, because you were too little to be in school. You liked Barbies.”

I drew in a breath and then let it go slowly. “Yes. You had a dozen or so, didn’t you?”

“I did have a lot, and a lot of clothes for them too. Remember, Ellen, we used to sew them up on the sewing machine.”

Ellen nodded, her gaze still on me. “The stitches were always set too large. Theresa probably remembers how clumsy the dresses looked.” She added, tentatively, “Your mother. Mrs. Price. She once crocheted a tiny little bed jacket for Sports Barbie. Do you remember?”

I felt Laura’s glance flick over me, and knew she was remembering too. Cathy had broken her leg skiing that winter, and so Sports Barbie had to be injured too. Laura always liked to draw on real life for her Barbie psychodramas. And my mother—Mrs. Price—spent part of an evening after work making that jacket. I could see her hands, veiny and chapped, with the crochet hook and the yellow and pink yarn. I could remember that now, but I couldn’t remember her ever making me doll clothes, or noticing my toys. But Laura was her employer’s daughter, a
Wakefield
, and—

Probably she would have treated me with the same deference, if she’d stayed around after I became a
Wakefield
myself.

I must have gotten drunk—
so weird! I don’t think I’d ever been drunk before. And I don’t think I handled it well, because the next morning, all I could remember was Mother coming home late that night and Laura looking like she’d been caught having illicit relations with the handyman on the porch swing. I didn’t know if this was evidence of an overactive conscience, or a long list of sins.

The next morning Ellen drove me and Mother to the Buckhannon hospital for more tests. As we passed through town, I saw Brian walking along
Main Street
, looking lost, his hands in his pockets. My heart went out to him. He was so young to confront the questions he was confronting. And from what he told me, his adoptive parents were resistant, and that made it even harder to look for answers. I wondered if he’d found any more information. I raised my hand to wave at him, and he looked up, as if I’d summoned him. He broke into a grin, and I found myself smiling back.

I wanted to tell Ellen to stop the car. I wanted to get out and go over to him and talk some more about our common connection—both of us adopted, both feeling alienated. I was so much older than he was, but he was so much further along in understanding. He dared to ask those questions, at least, the ones I never asked—who are those people who created me? And why did they give me up? And where are they now? And why does everyone think it’s so dangerous to want to know?

But I couldn’t just do what I wanted. So the day was spent ferrying Mother around to the CAT lab and then to each of the three computer stores along the highway. My concentration wasn’t really necessary, so I spent the time thinking about the past, that lost six years before I came to live with Mother.

At the last store, I told Ellen that I’d wait in the car. Once the door closed behind them, I reached into my pocket and drew out the copy of my birth certificate. My original birth certificate. I’d found it in the attic, in the photo album of my first year with the Wakefields. I studied it once again, puzzling over my parents’ names, wondering if that would be enough to find them. Wondering if I had reason to search. Wondering what they’d say if I showed up at their door.

The birthdate was the one I still used— that was a relief. I touched it with my finger— September 3. Right around Labor Day, my mother would have borne me, and a few days later brought me home from the hospital, to that little house on the other side of the river.

There was another date in the corner, the “issue date.” That one was November 13. Brian would probably frown at that, try to find some evidence there. But he’d grown up in a high-tech time, when you’d never wait such a long time to get an official paper filed. Now it was all probably done by computer, hospital to county clerk in one simple step. But thirty years ago, they probably held the forms for weeks, until there was enough to justify a trip to the clerk’s office.

I heard Mother’s voice through the open car window and guiltily shoved the page back into my pocket. She and Ellen were approaching, trailed by a teenage boy carrying a big cardboard box. As she got in the car, Mother exclaimed, “We found the perfect laptop! It has a built-in modem! So I can surf the web, just as Ellen does.”

Ellen gave me a glance of incomprehension. Mother and computers. But at least it had taken her mind off all those tests they’d run at the hospital this morning.

Sunday I walked down the hill and across to the old church I secretly attended in childhood. Ellen and Mother offered me a ride—the Catholic Church was only a few blocks from First Presbyterian—but I preferred to walk, just as I used to as a child. And I sat in the shadows behind a pillar, just as I used to as a child. And I found myself watching for my first mother, just as I used to.