What Was Mine (20 page)

“She'll want to come home to her real family,” Grant said. I hoped he was right.

I looked around the room, with new eyes, imagining it through the eyes of a girl who'd been raised in New York. I loved this house. But what would Natalie think of it? I pictured myself explaining to her the power of the hanging crystals, the mirrors positioned for water energy. Or would she already know about them?

She was my daughter, I'd given birth to her, but I had no idea of the kind of person she was.

“We can make a big welcome sign!” Chloe said, and how grateful I was for her generous resilience, and for the calm sea of Grant beneath our children, there to steady their rocking boats.

T
he next morning, at Ms. Laniere's, I stood in front of her mirror brushing my teeth. My face looked different. I was a different person. But who was that person? I didn't know. I put on a black sweater, but took it off and put on a blue one, then a green. I was surprised at how nervous I was. What would my real mother be like? Would she like me? Would I like her? What if I wasn't what she expected?

Ms. Laniere told me how to get to Newark from Brooklyn: two trains and a bus from midtown. I had to leave early. Marilyn had taken a red-eye flight.

I waited for her at the airport, feeling more alone than I had ever felt in my life. I was at baggage, watching one red bag go around and around on the carousel, going into the tunnel, coming out again.

My phone kept going off. I knew who it was. No one else would be calling this early. I'd changed “Mom” to “Do Not Answer.” I wouldn't pick up.

Her texts were getting more and more pathetic:

Please!

I love you.

I'm your mother.

I need to explain.

I couldn't turn off the phone until I met up with Marilyn. If there was a problem, she'd call my cell.

I finally texted Lucy:

I'm at EWR, about to meet my mother.

That shut her up.

Suddenly there was Marilyn coming off the escalator. I knew it was her. She was tall, like me. There was something familiar about her shoulders, her walk. I felt like I was falling down a hole with no bottom.

She saw me and started walking faster. Her clothes were bright and flowing, not right for winter, and they flowed behind her as she hurried toward me. I couldn't move. I felt numb, frozen in place.

“Baby.” She smiled. I knew her voice. She dropped her bags and opened her arms and pulled me into them. For the first time I was hugging a person who was half of me. She ran her hands over my hair and my back. Then she pulled up glasses on a bead chain and put them on and stared at me through them. Her eyes were the same blue as mine. She touched my cheek.

“Look how gorgeous you are,” she said. “You are beautiful.”

She was beautiful, too. I was crying and so was she. She hugged me again and we stood like that. I could feel her back shaking. There was something about the way she smelled that seemed familiar. But maybe that was my imagination. We didn't let go of each other for a long time. I waited, letting her be the first to pull away. As we did, my hair got caught on one of her dangly dream-catcher earrings and we laughed, trying to extricate without hurting each other.

“It's like you're a dream and I'm trying to wake up,” she said, and it was good she wasn't wearing makeup. She kept wiping her eyes with a tissue she kept in her sleeve.

“I'm not a dream.” Her hair was like mine. It looked like fog around her head.

“You are the dream I had for twenty-one years.” And then, she started to cry again. The tissue was useless.

My phone buzzed. Another text:

Please call me. Please.

I swiped the phone off and slid it into my back pocket.

We walked to the carousel, not saying much. There was too much to say. She reached for my hand as we stood waiting for her bag to come out. As we stood, she took my hand in both of hers and stroked it with her thumbs. To the people around us, we must have looked like just another mother and daughter glad to see each other again. But they'd be surprised—and, I guessed, so would she—to know how awkward I felt about her grip on my hand. It was a gesture that made it look as if we had known each other forever, when really, we were as much strangers to each other as we were to everyone standing around us, all of us peering into a dark hole, hoping to recognize the next thing that came out.

“There it is,” she said, and reached for a blue suitcase. Its size surprised me. It was giant, even though she was only staying for a few days, just till spring term started at Middlebury and I went back to my classes, back to my life on campus, as if nothing was changed. I thought I could do that. I really did.

I
rented a car—I was stunned to discover that although my daughter was twenty-one years old, she didn't know how to drive. In my experience, kids got their licenses as soon as they could. I grew up in New Jersey and got my permit when I was sixteen. Connor got his on his fifteenth birthday. Thatch is counting the days until he can do the same. But I guess it's different for kids who grew up taking taxis or subways everywhere they needed to go.

When I asked how she got around in Vermont, she said there were plenty of kids with cars there. There were shuttle buses between campus and town. She told me that
not
driving has greatly enriched her life, has made her open to alternative ways to get places. “And you meet great people!” she said cheerfully, making me worry about her falling prey to strangers who take girls for rides. She had expensive educations, I knew. Why hadn't she been taught something so basic?

The hardest thing to do was calling her by her kidnapped name. I have to show respect for who she was now. But who was she? How painful to be deprived of knowing my own daughter. So many questions popped into my head as we drove. I wanted to know everything about what had happened to her in the days she'd been separated from me, what had she seen, what had she done, what sounds, what touch, what colors had been imprinted on her. But I was conscious of how upset she must feel—her whole world upended—and found
myself simply making small talk, to put her at ease. We had the rest of our lives to be together. There'd be time for real talk.

I'd made reservations at an Embassy Suites in Cranford, New Jersey. It hadn't been there when I'd lived in this area years ago—Grant had looked it up for me on the Internet. But before we went to the hotel, I wanted to show Mia the house where she was born. Well, the house she came to after she was born in a hospital. I thought seeing the house would help her connect with her essence, her self that had been subjugated for years.

I didn't tell her where we were going, I didn't want to stir up any preconceived notions in her. I wanted the reconnection to be organic.

I'm bad at directions. My kids—my other kids—often navigate from the backseat, and I was surprised I didn't need the GPS to tell me where I was going, though it had been nearly two decades since I'd been to Cranford. The car seemed to know just where to turn, up this road, down that, almost without me steering the wheel, until we pulled up in front of the house that Tom and I had bought with such hopes, the house that was the embodiment of so many memories I'd tried to forget. The house was still there. They'd painted the white porch gray. They'd changed the front window and added a basketball court near the driveway. But other than that, it looked the same. I eased the car by the curb in front of it and put the car into park.

When I left this house, I'd been a different person. I was glad not to be that person anymore. I wished I could commune with my self who had lived there, the woman going through dark, panic-filled days, reassure her that things would turn out in the end.

My daughter sat next to me on the front seat. She didn't say anything. We both just sat staring up at the house on the little snow-dappled rise. I felt the Oneness flooding me, and when she closed her eyes, I guessed that she must be feeling the force of it, too.

So I was startled when she turned to me and asked where we were.

I
t was important to Marilyn that I saw my first house. She wanted me to feel a connection. She thought something in me would recognize the house. But I didn't recognize it. There wasn't anything special about it, to me, it looked just like any other house in the suburbs like houses upstate where my aunt lives.

When she told me it was the house where I'd lived as a baby, I was interested. I wanted to get out of the car and go see it. Marilyn didn't want me to, she was afraid it was bad karma. But I had to feel what it would have been like to live there. When I got out, Marilyn did, too. She stood at the curb as I walked up the driveway. I wanted to get as close as I could to the house. I wanted to touch the place I was meant to grow up in.

I walked off the asphalt and onto the lawn. I breathed in the air I would have breathed growing up here. I stood by a shrub that was shrouded in burlap. I put my hand on the stucco. There was a white wishing well in the side yard with a pail on a rope. I felt how my whole life would have been changed if this were my house. I would be a different person. I would be someone who didn't live in the city, who would have gone to a normal school, like on
Dawson's Creek
. I'd be a kid from the suburbs, a cheerleader, maybe, someone who only came into the city for field trips or museums or shopping, a kid who a city kid kind of looks down on, and I immediately hated myself for
feeling that way, for being glad that I wasn't raised here because that would mean—I was glad I'd been abducted.

I looked back at Marilyn, checking out the mailbox, staring at the name that was on it now. And I hated Lucy for thinking that it was okay to take an eraser and rub out the people we were meant to be.

I
didn't want to get out of the car. I didn't want to expose either of us to the bad energy that I thought might still be lingering there. But when Mia insisted on going, I got out and followed. I didn't want her going into that force field alone.

Years ago, just after it happened, there'd been yellow ribbons tied around the dogwoods and maples, which were much bigger now, and tied around the post of the mailbox. The mailbox was different, but the cedar post was still there. I found myself drawn to the cedar, to see if there were any vestiges of those ribbons on it, any traces of what I'd gone through twenty-one years ago. There weren't, and I took comfort in that. All that survived of our search for our baby . . . was our baby. She was here. The pain had subsided. For that, I was grateful.

It gave us both a start when the front door of the house opened. A woman stood behind the storm door with a baby. She poked her head out and asked if we needed help. I fibbed, saying we were looking for Longston Road and she pointed directions. I apologized for bothering her and we got back in the car.

I noticed that Mia looked very pale.

“Are you all right?” I asked. She said she felt faint.

I always travel with my bag of medicinal herbs and was glad to have the cayenne with me. I found it in my purse and reached across
and held the red packet under her nose. “Breathe,” I said. And she did. In a moment, the color returned to her cheeks.

“Have you fainted before?” I asked her, and she said that she had.

“But only once,” she said, brighter now. “When I was in a store, having my ears pierced. It's not like it's a habit or anything.”

“Twice,” I said quietly.

She handed the packet back to me.

“You fainted in the birth canal.” And I told her the story. She'd been born floppy and gray, and terrifyingly silent, and they'd whisked her off to a corner of the room. I couldn't bear to ask what was happening. I just lay there, looking at Tom. His eyes were damp. He was looking at me and squeezing my hand. Finally, we heard a tiny cry and I recognized that sound; as known to me as the beat of my own heart.

The next day, a neonatal specialist gave us the news that she was perfect. Then the doctor surprised us by thanking us. “I rarely get to deliver good news,” she said, which told us just how lucky we were.

“I didn't know that,” my daughter said quietly. There was so much she didn't know. I wanted to hug her again, I wanted to wrap my arms around her elbows that had once been enfolded inside me. But I was driving.

W
e shared a hotel room, which felt weird at first. We each had our own bed, but mornings it creeped me out to wake up and see her staring at me from across the nightstand.

Marilyn is warm and sweet and caring. She is very emotional. I've been with her three days, and she's already hugged me about a million times.

She is a very sensitive person. She sometimes knows my feelings before I do. “How are you feeling?” she asks every morning, and really, she wants to know. Not like Lucy, who never liked her real feelings to shine through. She was always kidding. When I was little, she'd do things like, when drying me off from a bath, say, “Oh no! There are purple blotches all over your back!” Then, when I was about to cry, she'd say she was joking.

We've been living on Chinese food for three days. Marilyn is vegan but vegan choices in Cranford are lame. We go to Moon Palace breakfast, lunch, and dinner. They are always happy to see us. Marilyn is impressed I can speak Chinese with the woman who owns it, but really what we are saying is only baby talk in Chinese. I can't really speak it. My year of Mandarin at Midd taught me how much I don't know. I wanted to go on a year abroad in China, but Lucy talked me out of it. Now I know why. I'd never have been able to get a passport with fake documents.