Year of Mistaken Discoveries (21 page)

I noticed that she talked about her kids as if I was completely unconnected to them. As if I wasn’t her child too.

“I wanted you to have the best life possible, and there was no chance I could do that. Your parents seemed perfect. I read
their bios and thought, who wouldn’t want them as a family? They were the kind of parents I would have picked for myself if I could have. I want you to know how important to me it was that you have a good home.”

“They’re good parents. It isn’t that they did something wrong, it’s just that something is missing for me. I wanted to fill in the gaps. I’m not asking you to step up and be my mom. I just want to know you. I thought you’d want to know me, too.”

She took one last puff of her cigarette and then ground it under her heel. “I chose adoption because I wanted you to have a good life, but I also wanted a fresh start for me.”

“Is that why you stopped writing? You wanted to start over?”

She flinched. “It sounds bad. I did what I thought was the right thing for you, but then I decided I had to do the right thing for me.” She seemed to avoid my eyes.

“What does that mean?” I hated how my voice sounded so needy. I wanted to come across as someone worth listening to, but I was failing. No wonder she didn’t want me around.

She sighed. “It means I deserved a fresh start too. I didn’t want to be the twenty-year-old who already had a baby. I wanted to be like everyone else. I was in college and dating and didn’t want to drag my past mistakes into my future.”

I winced—that was me, her past mistake. “I’m not trying to cause problems for you. It’s hard for me to explain everything, but I wanted to find you, partly because of this school
project, but it turned into so much more. It would really help me if you—”

She cut me off. “Don’t you understand? My husband knows nothing about you. I never told him I had a baby before I met him. I can’t tell him now:
Oh hey, by the way, I have a seventeen-year-old daughter I never mentioned.
How do I explain you to my kids?” She stopped suddenly and pressed her fingers to her temples. “And if I don’t tell them who you are, what are we supposed to do? Sneak around? Meet on the sly?” She looked afraid.

I stared at her. I hadn’t expected that she was living every day thinking about me, but it never occurred to me that she’d made a whole life without letting anyone else know I even existed. “You don’t want anything to do with me.” My voice came out flat and unemotional.

She shook her head, her eyes filling with tears. “It’s not that simple. I don’t know. I’m not trying to hurt you, but you can’t expect to show up here and have everything be fine. I can’t make this decision now.” Her face was flushed, and she was spinning her wedding ring around her finger. “You should go. This isn’t the time or place for this. I need some time to think, to figure out—” She looked around. “It’s almost Christmas. I can’t tell my family now.”

I knew she wanted to come across as firm, but I could tell she was scared. She was afraid of me. I was like a ticking time bomb in her house. A suicide bomber. Boom. I could blow up
her family just like that. “Do you want my number so we can talk about it later?” I pulled my bag open to get some paper out, but she waved my hand away like she was afraid to touch me.

“I can reach you through the adoption service.”

I stared at her. That was it? Don’t call me, I’ll call you? I considered trying to explain the issue with Duke and that looking for her had cost me Brody, and that I needed her help now, but I could tell it wouldn’t make a difference. She had her own family to worry about and I wasn’t a part of it. My shoulders slumped. As I walked down the drive, I heard the door from the garage to the house open.

“Mommy, who are you talking to?”

“No one, baby.”

chapter twenty-eight

I
t snowed on the drive home. Big, fat, mutant flakes. The kind that look like giant cotton balls falling from the sky. It was a holiday postcard, with the fresh snow the finishing touch. People had their colored lights on, and some had gone way over the top with full Nativity scenes, giant inflatable Santas popping out of chimneys, or dancing penguins. As I pulled into my neighborhood, there was a group of kids having a snowball fight. It seemed wrong that the holiday was going on for everyone else. My world had exploded, but it didn’t make the slightest dent for anyone else.

My mom was home. She’d already changed out of her work clothes and was making a batch of her famous peppermint snowball cookies. She whacked a Ziplock bag full of candy canes with a rolling pin, crushing them so she could sprinkle
them on top of the batch she’d just taken out of the oven.

“Hey, honey!” She smiled. “Guess who is off work for the next full week? I’m thinking we go on a cookie-making spree for the next few days. You in?”

I tried to summon some excitement for her plan. “Sure.”

“Your friend Brody stopped by this afternoon.”

My mouth dried up. “What’d he say?”

“Not much.” She motioned to the corner of the counter. “He dropped off a CD for your project. He said you knew he was going to bring it by.”

I picked up the case and turned it over in my hands.

“Did you find what you were looking for today?” Mom asked.

I looked up quickly. “What do you mean?”

Her eyebrows went up at my tone. “You said in your note you were doing some Christmas shopping.”

“Oh. Right.” I swallowed hard. I was going to start crying. “Nope. I didn’t find it.”

Mom came around the kitchen island, wiping her hands on the kitchen towel. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

She took me by my elbows and twisted my body so we were facing each other. “You’ve always been a sensitive person, but I refuse to believe you’re this upset by shopping. What’s going on?”

I swallowed again. I couldn’t meet her eyes. “I found Lisa,” I whispered.

Mom let out a low breath. “Okay. This is a sit-down conversation.” She led me over to the sofa and we sat side by side. “Start at the beginning.”

I explained how Brody and I had figured out who she was and how I’d gone to the school to get her address. “Are you mad?”

She shook her head. “I’ll admit, I’m impressed. I’ve seen lawyers with less creativity in the research department. I shouldn’t have closed the door when you told me you were looking for her. Then we could have talked about this. You shouldn’t have had to go by yourself today.”

“She’s married now and has other kids. She never told her husband about me.” My lower lip was shaking. “She’s ashamed of me.”

Mom pulled my face up so she could see me. “She is not ashamed of you. She doesn’t know you. She’s ashamed of what she thinks people will think of her. There’s nothing about you that is shameful.”

“It doesn’t feel like that.” A tear fell from my eye and dropped onto my jeans, leaving a perfect dark blue circle.

“Is this about Nora?”

“Partly,” I admitted. “I wasn’t a good friend to her. Not as good as I could have been.” The words felt like explosive grenades that I’d thrown into the middle of the room.

“Nora let herself down.” Mom squeezed my hand.

I picked at the hem of my sweater. “But I wasn’t there for
her. She thought I’d changed, that I wasn’t who I used to be, and she was right. I found her embarrassing sometimes. I didn’t want her to mess up my life. Ironic, isn’t it? Maybe meeting Lisa is the universe’s way of teaching me a lesson.”

“I’m not sure the universe took time out of its busy schedule for that.” She tapped my wrist. “I’m not saying that there isn’t something you can learn and take away from what happened with Nora, but you also have to accept that Nora was a complex, complicated girl. You can’t expect perfection from her or yourself.”

“I feel pretty far from perfect these days. I lied to Brody.” I swallowed. “I didn’t think he’d want to help me if he knew it was about getting into Duke. That’s why I started all of this. I wanted to get into Duke so bad, and all of a sudden this seemed like the ideal answer. I told him what I knew would convince him to help me. What’s everyone going to think if I don’t get in? They’ll all shake their heads and feel bad for me. ‘Poor Avery, she didn’t quite measure up.’ If I don’t get in, what else can I do?”

Mom shrugged. “Go somewhere else.” She patted my knee. “Part of life is dealing with what happens and trusting that things happen for a reason.”

Easy for her to say. She’d gotten into Duke with no trouble.

“No one gets what they want all the time,” she said, reading my mind. “I always wanted a baby, to be a mom. It wasn’t something that I thought I needed to plan; I just assumed it would happen. After your dad and I got married, I figured
I’d get pregnant right away. When it didn’t happen, I didn’t panic. I figured it was just a problem that had to be solved, and I prided myself that problem solving was something I did really well. I read up on what foods I should be eating. How to time things so we were trying on the best possible dates. I went to see my doctor and did every test modern medicine could dream up. I made your dad stop riding his bike. I rearranged our bed so it was in line with feng shui principles in case that made a difference.”

“Really?” My mom usually made fun of that kind of thing.

“Ask your dad about it sometime. He broke his toe one night coming to bed because I’d moved the dresser. He couldn’t wear shoes for a couple of weeks. He had to wear slippers to work.”

I almost laughed, picturing my dad hobbling around his office in giant fuzzy slippers.

“When everything I tried still didn’t make a difference, I got upset. More than upset—mad. Every time someone would tell me that it was sure to happen as soon as I stopped worrying about it I wanted to smack them. I’d see all these people who were pregnant who didn’t want to be, and I wondered why it was so easy for them and so hard for me. How could I pray for something like that and not have my prayers granted? I wasn’t praying for money or a job, but for a chance to have a baby. I even went to a psychic.”

My mouth fell open. My mom was really not the psychic type. “Why?”

“I thought maybe she could tell me what I’d done wrong. Maybe I’d tortured kittens in a previous life or something. Maybe my chakras, or whatever, were off. I would have done anything to get pregnant. Talked to anyone. Done any strange thing that I thought would work. That’s when your grandma asked me something important. She asked me if it was about being pregnant or about being a mom.”

“So you decided to adopt.”

“Yep. Your dad and I went to see someone that same week to start the process. A little over a year later we brought you home. The instant I looked at you, I knew you were mine. More than if you’d been born from my body. Getting pregnant is biology, but the fact that out of the whole world we came together was about destiny. I loved you from the moment I heard of you, and the second I held you I knew you were my daughter. You were always meant to be my daughter. You can’t make things happen in life. You can only move toward what you want and have faith that life will lead you to what is meant to be. If I’d kept trying to do it my way, I wouldn’t have you.”

My throat felt full and tight. She smiled, and I threw myself into her arms and we held on to each other. She rubbed my back in small circles, the way she had when I was small. I felt myself unwind. The tight band that had been around my chest since I’d walked away from Lisa melted away. “So, do I stop trying to get into Duke?”

Mom laughed. “Of course not. Not if you really want to
go. Our family is known for being annoyingly focused. I’d blame your dad, but I do the same thing. You didn’t stand a chance. You were doomed from the start to be stubborn. You work your butt off to get in, but you remember that if it doesn’t happen, then you’re going to be okay. Getting into Duke isn’t about what other people think of you, it’s about what it lets you do.”

I sat quietly, thinking about what she said. “The whole focus of my project is wrong.”

“Lucky for you, you’ve got a couple of weeks off to work on it.” Mom smiled. “I can keep your energy up with a nonstop flood of Christmas cookies. Never underestimate the power of candy canes.”

I felt a flicker of excitement. Ideas started to rattle around in my head. I pictured the photos that Brody had done. They’d still work. “Brody’s mad at me.”

“Do you think he has a reason to be?”

I nodded. “I let him down.”

“That’s the hard thing with some people. They see us not just for who we are, but for who we could be. They hold us to a higher standard. They make us better because they believe we can be better, and that makes us believe it too.”

In that moment I began to believe.

chapter twenty-nine

T
hey were calling it Snowmageddon. The news anchors were practically giddy as they predicted that we could get up to three feet overnight. They’d already forced the weatherman to do his segment while standing outside with the wind nearly blowing him over and the snow pelting him in the face. They always stick the weatherpeople in the shitty weather, as if you couldn’t imagine how bad it was unless you saw someone standing in it. Being a weatherperson ranked pretty high on the “shitty jobs I don’t ever want to do” list. Right around being a spa aesthetician who does bikini waxes on other women all day. Some things can’t be unseen.

The police had issued a warning that if you didn’t have to be out on the roads, you should stay in. Places all across town closed early and canceled their New Year’s Eve parties. I’d
talked to Lydia and Shannon earlier in the day. Shannon felt the storm was out to ruin her life. She’d found an amazing dress to wear, and the idea of sitting around with her parents and younger brother watching movies instead of going out dancing wasn’t her idea of a perfect way to ring in the New Year. I acted as if I was equally annoyed about the storm—
how dare Mother Nature ruin our last New Year’s as high schoolers
. The truth was I didn’t mind staying home.

I’ve always loved New Year’s Eve. Some people are crazy about Halloween or Christmas, and even Fourth of July has its big fans, but for me there’s something appealing about the idea of a new year. It feels like anything is possible as long as you put it on your resolution list. Life gives you a do-over.