What Was Mine (23 page)

After that, we were glad to work with an IKEA public relations
person who reached out to us. He offered us his expertise for free. We realized what his motivation was, that IKEA was just as eager to keep out of the news as we were. But, still, we were grateful. To help us avoid any more press, he suggested we sneak away for a few days. We went to Mount Shasta.

In the mountains, the six of us began to learn how to be a family.

T
he first day I was there, Marilyn kept asking if I was glad to be home, and I kept saying I was. But it didn't feel like home. Everything was different from the place I grew up in. The light was different. The smell was different. The furniture was different. There was wall-to-wall carpeting instead of bare floors. There was color everywhere, and decorations that Lucy would think of as clutter: candles and little flowerpots and embroidered pillows and crystals and little mirrors dangling from ceilings, making rainbows on walls. There were framed family photos on shelves and walls and side tables—baptisms, weddings, graduations. Seeing them made me feel sad at having been excluded.

It felt good to escape to the mountains. Trees, stars, mountains, moon—those things look the same wherever you are. So I did feel at home during those days we camped out, even though I hadn't been camping before. I'd been to camp, but that wasn't camping. At sleep-away camp, I slept on a bunk bed in a cabin with a bathroom inside it and trails paved with cedar chips so you'd never get lost and a camp chef to make any omelet you wanted.

This was real camping, in actual tents. I was impressed that Grant and the boys knew how to put up the tents, without even having to look at instructions. They put up a tent for them, and one for us girls. We slept in sleeping bags on special mats so the wet
from the ground wouldn't seep through. We zipped up the tent at night, against mosquitoes and bears. The thought of bears didn't seem to bother them, but it terrified me and I made sure not to drink anything at night so I wouldn't have to get up to go to the bathroom. There was no bathroom, of course. You went in the woods, and I didn't want to risk it because I couldn't imagine being able to do what Grant told me to do if a bear charged: make myself stand there, waving my arms to look bigger. I knew I'd just run, which is the worst thing to do.

Grant's shoulder hurt from putting the tents up, and Marilyn rubbed peppermint oil on it, making the air smell like Christmas. I watched her, thinking this is what a normal family looks like. For the first time, I was part of one.

I loved waking to birdsong and the crackle of fire and to a mother toasting slices of bread on a stick, pouring tea from a tin pot heated over the flames, and it's like we are living in
Little House on the Prairie
, a book I was obsessed with when I was a kid.

Even here in the woods they say grace. We hold hands around the fire, bowing our heads, saying thanks for the food. They take turns saying the prayer and I bow my head to respect that.

“How come you don't ever say it,” Thatch wanted to know, and I told him I didn't know any prayers. I grew up in a house where we didn't say them. “But you can be a good person without praying,” I said as I was spooning apple quinoa from the pot into my bowl, and when I looked up, everyone had stopped eating. They were staring at me and I realized they were thinking my mom wasn't the greatest example of that.

“What do you believe in?” Chloe wanted to know.

“Herself,” said Thatch under his breath, and I realized I'd have to be careful with him.

“Believing in yourself is a good thing,” Marilyn said. “I'm glad Mia was taught that.”

She looked over at me and our eyes met. I was grateful to her for coming to my rescue. But I kept eating, just wanting the subject to change.

I'm sorry for the kids. Their life is turned upside down, too. Connor wants to know why I want to keep my kidnapped name and I tell him it's hard to change a name you've had for twenty-one years. To me, Natalie is like a twin who died at birth, someone I never met.

Chloe asked if I miss my other mom, and before I can answer, Marilyn says, “She is not her other mom! She's her abductor!”

Which makes me feel, for some reason, dirty. It's like Lucy was some big ugly car splashing by in the rain, leaving us all splattered with mud.

I got up and went to the edge of the woods and breathed deep for a while, like Marilyn has taught me to do.

I've never tasted air this clean before. I feel like I'm bathing in its purity, that it is cleansing away the ugliness of what's happened. But once a bad thing happens to you, it keeps happening in your mind, over and over.

I
n this country, numbers are considered auspicious. Eight is the most auspicious of all, Ada says, informing me of my double good fortune in my draw of room number: 88. She was surprised that hotel management hadn't given the room to a Chinese, who might have paid more for it. She says phone companies impose surcharges for numbers containing that numeral. Four, she says, is the opposite, a number to avoid because the word for four is the same as for death:
si.

I sit with my pot of chrysanthemum tea at a corner table in my favorite place for breakfast, the Glad Cock Restaurant, and brace myself for my fourteenth day in this country, a day containing the unlucky number.

And then I walk to the Foreign Language Bookstore. At first, I think that nothing has changed. Steve Jobs and Henry Kissinger biographies are still in the window. But even before I make my way to the magazine section, I see what I've come for. The blood rushes out of me. There is Mia's face on the cover of
People
magazine. The headline in screaming tall type reads:
KIDNAPPED SURVIVOR BEGINS LIFE WITH LONG-LOST MOM
! My daughter, a survivor! As if I had done her physical harm. My eyes burn as I approach the rack. There is my daughter, pictured with Marilyn. The physical resemblance between them is striking: the same blue eyes, the same fair coloring, the
cheekbones and shoulder span of a runway model. I can almost feel Mia's eyes raking over me. Is she glad to be with the beautiful mother, the good mother, the mother she should have had all along, instead of with me, the mother with the kind of looks no one notices?

I look right and left before I reach for the magazine, not wanting to be seen with it, as if it is porn. When it's in my hands, I rub my thumb over Mia's glossy cheek, and feel a jolt as if I am touching her actual skin. I don't dare open to the article in the store. What if my photo is in it? Shoppers are everywhere. Bookstores in America may be going out of business, but they seem to be thriving here. What if someone looking over my shoulder makes the connection? I take all three copies from the stand, then glance through a
Newsweek
. The story hasn't hit that magazine yet. I take a
Herald Tribune
from the newspaper rack and fold it around the glossy issues of
People
to conceal them, and slink up the aisle to check out, and make the transaction with cash, not wanting to risk a credit card that might alert the cashier to my name featured on the pages of the magazine I am buying. Perhaps the cashier has already read it. Perhaps she has sounded out my name, practicing English, so that my name is on the tip of her tongue.

I hurry out of the store and back to my hotel. It isn't until I am safely behind the closed door of my room that I dare open the magazine. I barely see through tears to read of Mia's joy in getting to know her “real mother.” “Abductor” they call me. “Baby Snatcher.” Nothing about how well I raised Mia, nothing about expensive schools and private tutors and bedtime stories and a full-time nanny and trips to beaches and Disney World. Nothing about how well she was loved.

Marilyn looks hippie-ish in her flyaway hair and loose garb, her arm around Mia, gazing proprietarily at the poised young woman I carefully raised, as if she had fashioned her whole in the basement,
like one of her homemade ceramics.
The resemblance is unmistakable
, says the caption. But that kind of resemblance is only skin-deep.

The photo they used for me is an executive portrait used by the agency for pitches, in which I look stiff, my smile insincere.
Suspected to be hiding somewhere in China . . .

Then I read something that makes my heart thump
. . . . where she'll be safe from the law as long as she stays because China and the U.S. don't observe extradition.

I have a vague sense of what extradition is, but now I'm desperate to know its exact definition. I go to the computer in the lobby. I can't get Google, but I can get
Merriam-Webster
online.

Ex-tra-di-tion—the surrender of an alleged criminal.

So, if I stay in China, I can't be arrested? I type in “extradition of US criminals in China” (criminals! Typing the word brings tears to my eyes).

There is a blog post titled
The best countries for U.S. citizens to go to become invisible.
To my surprise, China is at the top of this list. According to the article (which was written by a lawyer), as long as I stayed in China (not Hong Kong), I'd elude the reach of the U.S. law. Unwittingly, I'd managed to escape to a place where I can hide in plain sight.

But I hadn't left home thinking that I was leaving forever. I'd thought coming to China was only an interlude during which I'd gain needed distance to gather my wits and figure out how best to face down my future.

But could I stay? Could I do it? Did I have the mettle to abandon my career, my future, my family—any chance of reuniting with Mia?

And who would I be, stripped of everything that made my life recognizable where I knew no one but Wendy—but how could I explain my troubles to her?

What would I do, in a country where I didn't have friends, couldn't get work, couldn't speak a word of the inscrutable language?
I was fifty-seven years old. According to research I'd read for an insurance pitch, chances were good, I'd live thirty-six more years. I didn't want to spend them all over here. But what was my alternative? Go home and rot for the rest of my life in a jail?

If convicted, she faces a maximum sentence of life in prison and a minimum sentence of twenty years.

I returned to my room and turned on the TV and spent the rest of the day staring at Qing Dynasty soap operas, alone on a narrow bed, in a fetal position, in a dark room that is numbered for luck.

I
wish we could have stayed in the mountains forever. But we had to come back and talk to lawyers, each of whom had a thousand questions.

They gave us a pile of letters from people we don't know. Some addressed to me, some to Marilyn. Total strangers saying they're sorry for us. Most of them share their own sad stories. As if they knew us. Some send money enclosed in the envelope, which Marilyn puts in a special account that we'll give away to charity or something. We don't want that money. The letters are heartbreaking. Awful things happened to some of those kids. The lawyers won't let us answer them, which makes us feel guilty.

I'm taking an anger management workshop with Marilyn. My homework is to write in a notebook and throw rocks into the ocean, getting rid of the feelings I have for the woman who stole me. Today, I drove out to Devil's Slide with Marilyn and we stood on a cliff and let rocks fly from our fingers, saying Lucy's name, letting the hate out, driving it out of us so it doesn't seep in and poison our bones.

It's been over a month and Lucy still calls sometimes, but I never pick up. What the fuck does she want me to say? That it doesn't matter she stole me? That she was still my mother, no matter what heinous, horrible crime she committed? I don't want to speak to her, ever again.

In psych, we studied signs of a sociopath and Lucy has them all: charm, cunning, pathological lying.

What arrogance to think she was entitled to me. How dare she treat me like hers for the taking, a toy to dress up to send to expensive schools and camps so she could show off what a good mother she was. I thought she was a good mother. She was a good thief!

Now that I see Marilyn in action, I understand what a good mother is: selfless and caring and always there for her kids, who she builds her whole life around, keeping them happy and safe. I was never Lucy's priority; her work was. Ayi was always there doing drudgery while Lucy was getting ahead at her glamorous job. Ayi is the one who actually took care of me, made my favorite dishes, listened to me, held my hair back when I threw up, sat on my bed telling me stories to distract me from picking scabs off my chicken pox so I wouldn't get scarred. Lucy cared more about her computer than me!

On the drive home, I open the window to let in the smell of salt water and stretch out my arm and let my hair fly in the wind.

I
thought I'd come to the place of forgiveness.

I've worked hard to heal the hole in my heart. I learned to live with my walking away from my child, which would turn out to mean walking away from her for twenty-one years.

I thought all the work I did with Sonya and others freed me from corrosive anger, resentment.

But every time I look at my daughter, I am overcome by new sorrow, realizing all that was taken from me. Today I saw a scar on her knee. Just a tiny scar, nothing disfiguring. Mia said she'd fallen, learning how to ride a bike. When she said this, my eyes went hot with tears. I should have been there, to steady her. If I had been there, I wouldn't have let her fall. I should have been by her side to see her first steps, her first word, her first day of school. I burn thinking of the woman who stole her from me. A woman with the mind-set that would allow her to steal an innocent child.

Detective Brown tells me they're on the case. An international arrest warrant has been issued for her. I ask why they can't just go get her in China, but he says they're not allowed to do that. They've frozen her passport. They've alerted Interpol. She can't stay in China forever, he tells me. The second she enters U.S. airspace, they'll arrest her. I don't want to hate people. There's already enough negative force in the world. But taking a child is taking a life. Someone who does that isn't deserving of grace or mercy.