What Was Mine (30 page)

“And she won't go to prison?” I ask to be sure. “Even with a crime as bad as kidnapping?” It's hard to believe. I've watched every
Law & Order
—they used to shoot episodes in our building—and no defendant ever got off like this.

Adele is back, stirring her cup with a straw.

“The DA just wants this case off the books.”

A few days later, I call the dean about going back to finish at Midd, to get my degree and go to law school, like I planned.

Maybe I'm the person I thought I was, after all.

S
onya says I have to make peace with the way things are. I have to come to a place of forgiveness. If I don't forgive, how will my life move on?

The woman who took my daughter also raised her with love. Like it or not, she is part of my daughter. Hurting her would be hurting my daughter. Mia has been through enough in her life. I don't want her to have to visit a prison. I want my daughter to walk in the light, as far away from that darkness as possible.

Maybe bringing Lucy face-to-face with the people she injured is a path to healing for all of us. Let her see the destruction. Let her be forced to confront the truth, instead of the lies she must have told herself all these years.

For Mia's sake, I agreed to ask them not to prosecute to the full extent of the law.

But the prosecutor warns that Tom must consent.

S
he ought to be put away.

She's a criminal. A felon. She has to serve time. She stole another person's life. She stole the lives of three people.

I'm not the same man I was when it happened. I'm doing entirely different work. I couldn't take my law degree to Costa Rica. I'm a businessman now. The woman I married is Costa Rican. I haven't been back to the States in years.

The way I see it is, bad things can't be reversed. Say, you get into an accident and lose an arm or a leg. It's not as if you can get that limb back by wishing. The fact is, I lost a child. It devastated me. It broke up my marriage. In the end, I adjusted. But it's still a monstrous crime.

The law says that when someone commits a crime—when you step forth and damage someone else's life, we need prosecution to deal with that. That person has to pay commensurate with the offense. She has to face consequences. If the state disregards this, if it lets her off scot-free—what are we saying as a society here—that taking away someone else's kid is no big deal?

M
arilyn gave me my dad's number, to see if I could change his mind.

My dad. It still feels weird to say that. I Googled him before calling, so I'd have a face to think of while we were talking. She said he didn't do Facetime or Skype. He wasn't on Facebook but there were pictures of him at dinners and such. His smile is like mine. He's got dimples, too.

It took a long time for me to press the last couple of digits. My heart was in my throat. What if he didn't like me? What if I didn't like him? What if I'm not his idea of a daughter? He didn't have another daughter. He didn't have any other kids. Something in me was glad about that.

It took a lot of rings for him to answer.

“Hello,” he said. He sounded tall.

“It's Mia.” My tongue felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. Then I remembered he'd known me as Natalie. “Your daughter.”

There was a silence so long at the other end that I thought maybe the call had dropped.

“Oh,” he said. “Hi.”

That's all? That's how he greets his long-lost daughter he hasn't seen in twenty-two years?

“Is this not a good time?” I asked. Maybe he was at work. But Marilyn said it was his home number.

“It's fine,” he said. “How are you . . . Mia?”

I loved hearing my name in my father's voice.

“Fine,” I said. “Well. Not really fine. A lot's been going on with me, as you've probably heard.”

“How can I help?” he said. “Do you need money?”

“No,” I said right away. “Is that what you think?” I felt insulted.

“I don't know what to think. I don't know what you're expecting.”

His voice sounded choky. He was worried about his impression on me!

“I'm not expecting anything!” I tell him.

He wasn't like Marilyn, who had practice being a parent, who knew what to say, what a parent should sound like. He was awkward with this as I was afraid I would be.

“I'm a different man than I was when I was your father.”

Was
my father? Did that mean he thought he wasn't my father anymore? That made me sad. For the first time in my life, I wanted a father. It wouldn't be complicated. He'd be my only one.

“No worries, I don't remember that man,” I said. “So you can totally be who you are. I don't expect you to be anything, really. And I get the same deal from you, okay?”

I heard a little breath. Maybe it was relief.

“Okay,” he said. “That sounds like something a kid of mine would say.”

And then we were talking, and when I hung up, we'd made a date in New York, and it was as if I'd never not had a father before.

W
e all decided that I should be the one to fly out and explain things to Lucy. I wanted to do that. I didn't want anyone else to do it, especially not a paralegal.

I want to see Lucy in person. I want to see Ayi.

I got my first passport. With my real birth certificate. But first, I had to go to Social Security and change my legal name to my real one, Mia Wakefield.

I bought a ticket for December 21, the date nobody in California wants to travel because it's predicted to be the end of the world. Doomsday. Planet collision. Foretold by ancient Maya. Marilyn says she doesn't think it will happen, yet she is stocking the basement with flashlights and batteries, water bottles and granola bars. Store-bought, with preservatives, breaking her rule against them, which is necessary, she says, in case it's a long haul.

I don't worry about this date. My end of the world has already happened.

I
called Mia to invite her for Christmas and to Jake's engagement party, which will be the day after. It was nice to hear her voice. It's been a long time. I knew she probably wouldn't come, that she'd be celebrating the holidays with her new family in California. But I wanted her to feel included.

She surprised me by telling me her plan to go to China and bring Lucy home. She said she wanted to reassure me that Lucy wouldn't go to jail. As she explained, I had to keep myself from sounding angry. Why was I angry?

I thought about it after we hung up.

Things have always come easily to Lucy. She got good grades without really trying. She was popular. She made the swim team. She got a scholarship to an Ivy League college. She got to leave home and get a glamorous job. When our mother got sick, I took care of her at the end. Lucy sent money, which helped, but I took on the brunt of her care so our mother wouldn't have to die in a hospital. Lucy has always been good at slipping off the noose of responsibility.

There was only one thing Lucy couldn't do that she wanted to do: have a baby. So she took someone else's. Try as I might, I can't forgive her for that. I can't pretend she never did what she did. She deceived our family for years. She deceived that poor girl who she deprived of her parents.

Restorative Justice? How could she restore what she took from those parents? She took their baby. She took their marriage. She took the lives they were meant to have.

Lucy is my sister. I'm sorry for her. But I can't forgive her. I'm sorry, but I can't.

I'm glad the district attorney didn't reach out to me.

W
e all take Mia to the airport. Grant parks the van as we escort her in, Thatch carrying her backpack she'll take on the plane, Connor shouldering her duffel, Chloe carrying the bags of treats that I packed her: almonds and kale chips, figs and rice cakes, so she won't have to fill up on what they serve on a plane.

The airport isn't crowded, because of the Doomsday scare. I woke up this morning, my heart weighted by the prospect of Mia's departure, but also full of gratitude for the uneventful dawn.

Mia has been with us for ten months, the amount of time she needed to begin to heal. Mia is a Horse. She needs to keep moving. Her sun is in Pluto, the planet of profound change, which pushes you toward your destination, unaware as you are of what that fate is.

This morning Grant asked me if I was sorry to lose her all over again. The answer is no. I am not losing Mia. She began in my body. She will always be part of me, no matter where she is in this world. Even when we were separated, I felt her with me. I've learned that loss is part of life; it reminds us to appreciate what we have now.

I will never stop being grateful for her return. Do I wish her return had been earlier? Of course I do. But I've stopped arguing with the universe. I've stopped arguing with Mia.

Yesterday, we planted a tree. All six of us gathered in the backyard. Wherever Mia travels, wherever she goes, the tree will be here,
representing her roots in our family. It's a weeping willow. I made that choice. Because part of me will always be weeping for what I have missed. And yet willow energy is healing, too, helping the spirit move through sadness to joy.

I try to imagine what it will be like, months from now, face-to-face again with the woman who took her, this time knowing what she did, in some room somewhere dictated by the court of New Jersey. They'll ask me what I think restoration should be. Restoration! Nothing can restore the years I lost with my daughter.

But I will forgive the woman who took her.

I've thought a lot about what I will say. I will take her hands in mine and look in her eyes and thank her for raising my daughter to be the beautiful person she is. I hope I can do that. When you forgive, the prisoner you set free is yourself.

W
e wait with Mia as she stands in line for China Eastern, passport ready, luggage unlocked. I wonder when we will see her again. She'll spend Christmas in China. Then go back to Vermont to finish up her last semester. Will she come visit in the spring, as she says she will? She's invited us to her graduation in May.

There's some problem with Mia's luggage, I see her gesturing to an attendant. I go over to help. The bag is overweight. Mia bends down, unzips the duffel, rummages around, brings out some things, including the little 8 Ball Chloe gave her for her birthday.

“Keep it safe for me,” she tells Chloe, then zips the bag again. The attendant places the bag onto a conveyor belt behind her and it disappears.

One by one, we say good-bye to her. Thatch, Connor, Chloe. I wonder when I'll see my four children together again. Grant gives her a bear hug. I saw him slip bills into her backpack, earlier, while it stood by the front door. When it's my turn to hug her, her face is wet.
I tell her I have something for her and pull out the tiny red, silken box from my pocket.

“I'm already overweight,” she says, wiping her cheeks.

“No, you're thin as a rail.” I smile. This was true when she came here. But I'm pleased that she's not quite as angular anymore. I'm sending her off healthier, nourished.

She opens the box.

“Two necklaces? Did you make them?”

I nod, picking up one of the delicate silver strands, then the other. Hanging from each is a tiny red half-moon. The two moons come together, forming a heart. I put one around her neck, the other around mine.

“When we're together, our hearts are one,” I say.

We hug for a long time. I am conscious that soon she'll be in a different country, hugging the woman who stole her, who, without a thought on a summer day, changed all of our destinies.

But I have to let go of remembering that. I have to let go.

“I love you,” I say.

Mia nods as we pull apart.

“I love you, too, Mother.” She bends to pick up her carry-on, not looking at me. Something catches at my throat. She has never called me
“Mother” before.

I watch her as she drifts away, toward the long line for security. She is the daughter of my past who stopped growing at four months; and also the daughter of my present, whose past I'm slowly getting to know. Both are equally precious to me.

“She's gone, c'mon,” say the boys, the kids following Grant, who's already striding away, in the direction of parking.

But I stand there, watching the place where she was.

I
n the greeting hall of the Shanghai Airport, red LED letters above me announce in both Chinese and English that Mia's plane has landed. I feel current in the linoleum, so highly polished it shines like marble—as if it has acquired an electric charge. For the first time in almost a year, Mia's feet and mine are touching the same part of the earth.

I wait for her in a sea of searchers, almost crushed by others seething forward in a crowd straining against railings that hold us back from frosted-glass doors marked
Arrivals
. Cabbies and drivers in uniform are in front, leaning over the railing, holding signs scrawled on cardboard, most in Chinese characters. Others carry signs, too, and I duck to prevent the corner of one of them from nicking my eye. Security police, men and women in blue shirts with epaulets and black caps with gleaming visors, wave us back again and again. When some eager greeter succeeds in thrusting himself past the rail, a guard speaks harshly, pushing the offender back with white gloves, not gently, putting him back to his, to our, designated place. Whatever you do in China, wherever you are, there's a crush of others beside you, doing it, too.