What Was Mine (15 page)

My legs went wobbly. “I liked your book.” I handed the book to her, but she didn't take it. I couldn't decide what to say next. I was too focused on watching what was going on in her face. Her neck was flushed. She looked at me, but her eyes cut away again. And then, the podium started to buzz. It was her phone going off. The screen lit up with a face that looked remarkably familiar, someone who looked like a younger me! I felt certain—impossible as it was—that this girl was my baby, all grown up, even though the name on the screen wasn't hers. It was
Mia
. The author knew where my daughter was! Could she have had something to do with taking her? I felt this in a rush, as if she was in that very moment yanking my baby out of my arms.

Then Lucy Wakefield picked up the phone and turned it so I couldn't see the screen anymore and I wondered if—as had happened so many times before—my imagination had played a trick.

S
everal people lined up to have their books signed. I tried to prolong conversation with each, seeing that Marilyn—I was convinced it was her—was behind them, thinking she might grow impatient and be on her way.

Why was she here? Could she simply be another of Lance's fans? He had millions of fans. He'd even started doing ads on TV.

I took my time with each person ahead of her in line. One by one, I flattered them, asked questions, dragged out answers to questions asked of me, I signed not just my name, but long, flowery messages in the book I balanced on the lectern between us, rolling my pen across more than one page.

But all the while, Marilyn remained steadfast behind them. And then, suddenly, there she was. She said her name. Marilyn. I was face-to-face with the woman who'd given birth to my daughter. She said something else, but I couldn't understand what it was. My brain didn't work. I was just watching her lips, watching her face, which was so like the face of my daughter. Fear shot through me but I worked to keep my expression blank. I glanced from side to side, half expecting to see the approach of people in uniform.

I stood frozen in place, my pen motionless in the air. We looked at each other, across the lectern, like opponents gazing from opposite
sides of a boxing ring, sizing each other up. Did she know who I was? The bond between us felt palpable.

I saw how much she'd aged since the night I'd seen her on television. Her skin had dulled, her features softened. Her hair was gray. I saw the pain in her face. I was responsible for it. I had taken her baby, had inflicted on her the worst thing a mother can imagine.

But what could I do now? I couldn't undo it. I couldn't return her baby to her, make the intervening years of loss go away. Her daughter was my daughter. My daughter was grown. My child had been taken, too, in a sense. She'd left home for college. She'd turned twenty-one on her last birthday. Nothing could bring back the baby she had been, to either of us; that baby was lost to both of us now.

Marilyn handed a book to me, but I didn't take it, just stood dumb and stiff. I couldn't recall what to do with my hands.

And then my phone, still lying on the lectern, went off. It was on silent, but it started to vibrate and Mia's face filled the screen, along with her name in bright, identifying letters. The vibrations were moving the screen across the wooden surface, toward Marilyn. She looked down at it. Her features rearranged. Her face flushed and her eyes grew large, magnified by tortoiseshell half-moon readers she wore on a beaded chain. It took forever for my hand to close over the phone, removing my daughter from her line of sight.

“Hi, honey,” I said into the phone, trying to sound calm. I turned away, plugging my ear as if against the din of the store, but the store was now eerily quiet.

“It's over,” said my daughter.

My heart leapt to my throat.

“What?” I said.

“IT'S OVER!” Mia repeated. “MY LSAT!”

Only then did I remember the exam she was taking that day, the one she'd been studying for, for months, and as she told me about it,
I kept the phone to my ear, frowning to intimate that the call was some sort of emergency, shrugged apology, gathered up my bag, and took two steps at a time down the escalator and out the front doors, losing myself in the crowds on the sidewalk, hurrying back to the hotel.

W
hen the author had left, I looked down at the book and saw the dedication for the first time. It was dedicated to Mia, the name that had appeared on her cell phone.

That night, I waited until the kids were in bed, and Grant, too. When it was dark and silent except for their snoring, I tiptoed into the family room and fired up the computer. My heart was rocking in my rib cage, thumping so loudly, I was afraid it would wake up the entire house. I went into Facebook and looked up “Mia Wakefield.”

There were several Mia Wakefields. The book jacket said the author lived in Manhattan and I added that to narrow the search.

Three had blank female silhouettes next to their names. The fourth featured the face of a little girl. I clicked the photo to enlarge it, and as the spinning ball did its work of making the image big enough to see, the immensity of the situation took hold of me, making it hard to breathe. I sat perfectly still as the ball spun around, until finally it stopped and turned into the face of my daughter. I drew back from the screen as if something had pushed me hard in the chest. It was an old Polaroid picture, blurry, but I knew it was her. She looked to be about three. She was beautiful. I saw both Tom and myself in her face. I was glad she looked vigorous and healthy. I clicked on the two other photos in her public album. In one, she was about eighteen, bundled in ski clothes, her skin luminescent against the snow. I searched her
face, trying to take her in, literally trying to breathe her back into me. I enlarged her on-screen again and again, trying to see her every pore, trying to examine her for signs of damage, until her image broke into tiny unrecognizable boxes. I resized the boxes until it became her again. The last photo was of her at a party. I was glad she had friends.

I longed to reach out to her, but wondered how she'd feel about hearing from me out of the blue. Did she even know I existed?

I wanted to “friend” her, but at that time Facebook required categories and how would I categorize myself in the request? I wasn't her
classmate
or
colleague
or
acquaintance
or
coworker
. Needless to say, there wasn't an option for
mother
.

I decided to send the request with a message. But what would I say? There are no ready words for a situation like this. I didn't want to scare her or sound like some crazy stalker. I knew I couldn't write what I really wanted to say:
Whoever raised you weren't your parents, they were your kidnappers!
I sat there, drafting and deleting message after message.

Darling Daughter, I am your mother who's been searching for you for years.
Too emotional. It might scare her.

I am so happy I found you here. I have never stopped looking
. Too stalkerish.

I went to bed. Then woke up with a start, having finally been given the right words, in my sleep. I eased out of bed, careful not to wake Grant, and tiptoed out of the room, to the computer.

I think I'm your mother
, I typed.
This is not a joke.
It was honest. Direct. Unthreatening, I hoped.

I stared at the message a long time before sending it. One thing I've learned, and something I've taught my kids, is not to do anything on a computer before you take a deep, cleansing breath. You can't take back anything you sent into the Internet, which is as futile as trying to put a broken egg back in its shell.

I inhaled deeply, as Pranayama breathing practice has taught me.
But still I didn't send the message. Instead I got up and made myself some valerian-root tea and returned with the mug warming my hands.

I sipped while staring at the words I'd typed on the screen, wondering about the reaction it would provoke in my daughter. Surely the message would be confusing to her. Would she be curious? Dismissive? I was praying by this time that it was not wishful thinking, that it wasn't another lead that proved to go nowhere.

And what impact would my reaching out to her have on my family, our family, hers and mine? People she hadn't met, who hadn't met her, yet who were bound to her by blood, by bone. I worried about Connor, just turned sixteen. Could he accept an older sister into his life? And what about Thatch, two years younger and having a hard time adjusting to high school? Would this discovery make him feel even more unmoored? And how would Chloe, just ten, react to not being the only girl in the family anymore? What about Grant? How would he feel about bringing another child—not his child—into our fold?

But all of these questions were moot, I realized. There was no way I'd resist reaching out to my daughter, no way I could put off the urgent need to see her. To hold her again in my arms.

I waited until the tea was down to its dregs. I set down the mug. I took a deep, clarifying breath, in and out, deep, from my diaphragm, reached out a damp, shaking hand to the keyboard, and pressed return.

N
othing happened, not right away. But what if Marilyn showed up again? What if she was following me, had alerted the authorities to make an arrest? I braced myself at the airport, flying home the next day, sweating when security lingered over my driver's license, expecting, at any moment, to be whisked into a holding pen. But all proceeded as if nothing had changed.

After I was back in New York for a few weeks, and still nothing happened, I convinced myself that my fears were unfounded, that my imagination had run rampant, that Marilyn just happened to be another Lance Orloff fan and that things would go on as they always had.

And then, I came home and found the apartment ransacked.

G
etting that message really made me freak. It was late at night; I was trying to finish a paper. Now I could hardly read. The words jumped on the screen. I'd heard about kids Facebook-searching their birth mothers, but I'd never heard of a mother looking for a kid this way. I'd thought about my birth mother, of course, and wondered about her, but never so much that I wanted to find her. I didn't want to be rejected twice. Also, I figured that looking for my birth mother would be hurtful to my mom. I always thought I'd be the one to look for my birth mom someday when I was ready. I wasn't sure if I wanted to connect with someone who thought it was okay to take that right away from me. Even if she turned out to be my actual birth mother. I didn't friend her. But I didn't delete her friend request either.

Then came Thanksgiving at Aunt Cheryl's and then came exams and then I was home for winter break and working on a paper again, and just to distract myself, I pulled up pending friend messages. There was Marilyn's. For the first time, I clicked into her albums. They were mostly of her kids. Something about those kids looked eerily familiar. Without knowing why, I started to cry. Probably part of me must have guessed I was looking at pictures of people I was genetically related to for the first time.

That night, I asked Lucy about my adoption. I didn't want to ask
her directly about Marilyn. If she was my birth mother, something told me to keep it from Lucy. Lucy was my mother. I didn't want her to think that I wanted another one.

We were in the kitchen, doing dishes. She was bringing up a pot from the dishwater, handing it to me to dry.

Ayi had gone back to China by this time, so we didn't have Chinese for dinner anymore. I'd made the spaghetti and Lucy was supposed to clean up, that was the deal: whoever cooked didn't have to clean up. But sometimes I stuck around to help because really, I felt kind of sorry for her. She worked hard. She didn't have any friends. She didn't have time for anybody but me. I used to ask why she didn't try to meet someone. She said she worked too many hours to have a relationship. Her only friends were work buddies and they had families of their own to be with on weekends or nights when they weren't at the office working with her. I couldn't imagine how it would feel not to have friends to hang out with. But Lucy seemed fine about it. She liked working, she said. I guess, after her marriage didn't work out, her work was what she wanted to be married to.

I'd burned the sauce a little, and some of it was still stuck on the bottom of the pot. I handed it back to her.

“What was the name of the adoption agency?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

She took back the pot and examined my face.

“I didn't adopt you through an agency, don't you remember?”

“No,” I lied, though of course I remembered. She hadn't told me the story in years. I wanted to hear the details again. I didn't want to tell her about the lady who friended me. She didn't get social media. She was all about privacy.

“A girl in Kansas answered my ad in the paper. She was fifteen, too young to be raising a baby. She tried it for four months and didn't want to give you up, but she knew you needed a better home than the one she could provide.”

She'd never before mentioned that my birth mother was so young. That would make her thirty-six. In the Facebook photos, Marilyn looked older than that. So I guessed she wasn't my birth mom, after all.

Now Lucy was scrubbing the bottom of the pot with a copper cleaner, something she hardly ever bothered to do. I saw that the conversation was upsetting her, which made sense. She was my mom. She didn't want to talk about me having another mother.

“Did you meet her?”

“Who?”

“My birth mother!”

“Yes, I met her just the once. I can't believe you don't remember this story. We met in a lawyer's conference room, so the mother could interview me and see if I was the right mother for you. Lots of other people wanted you.”