Authors: Tish Cohen
C
an you read the inscription in the picture?” Isabelle shouts into the phone. In the background, from the comfort of her kitchen, Eleanor can hear the wind and rain pounding against Isabelle’s jacket. “Can you make out the name?”
It’s the eleventh cemetery Isabelle has visited this week. This is her favorite part of a search, she’d said. The stillness. The stories. She told Eleanor that sometimes she plays games with herself. Looks at the names of family members, especially the husbands and wives. Looks at who died first. Imagines the circumstance, whether sudden or ongoing. The surviving spouse’s feelings. Agony or relief?
The first place Isabelle went after getting off the plane on Tuesday was Women’s Hospital, where Eleanor was born. The usual procedure for obtaining birth records this old is to submit your request to the Medical Records department and wait three or four weeks to hear whether or not the desired record is still on file. But Isabelle’s years of sleuthing have earned her special status. A young man named Dwight Mason, thin and serious in his wire-framed glasses, agreed to drive out to offsite record storage some fifteen miles away,
in the sleepy suburb of Lansing, while Isabelle waited in the motel room. The file was over thirty years old. The chances of it being found, the chances of it even existing anymore, were slim.
But without it, the search couldn’t get started. They needed to find out if Ruth Smith was or wasn’t Eleanor’s mother’s name before any more work could be done. The answer, Isabelle told Eleanor, came Thursday morning at 8:37 when the phone in her motel room woke her.
“I think I’ve found what you’re looking for,” Dwight Mason said at the other end of the line.
Now, Eleanor stares down at the photo Isabelle has just texted her. The stony grave marker, soaked with rain. The inscription:
Woolsey
. Beneath that,
Estelle Jane
. She presses the phone to her ear and can hear the roar of wind. “Is this my mother? Her real name?”
“Her grandmother, I believe,” Isabelle shouts over the weather. “Can you read what it says below?”
Eleanor looks again. “Just
Beloved Wife of
…” She peers closer. “Below that it gets blurry.”
“I’ll try to take another.” There’s a pause, some crackling, then Isabelle is back. “Too rainy just now. I can’t do it without soaking my phone.”
At the kitchen table, Eleanor reaches for Angus, pulls his head onto her lap. “What does it say?”
“Says
1905–1979. Beloved wife of Herbert John Woolsey
. She’s too old to be your mother. Could be your mother’s mother or grandmother.”
Her great-grandmother. “What else does it say?”
“It says,
Loving mother to Brian.”
Isabelle pauses.
“And Janet.”
“So Janet could be my mother?”
“More likely your grandmother. Most women gave birth young back then.”
Eleanor looks at the photo again. “I’ve only ever thought of myself as adopted. Never as having been … born. Makes no sense, I know.”
“That’s common. Don’t go thinking you’re so special, buttercup.”
“What about my mom?”
“We don’t have her name confirmed yet.”
“But Woolsey. How did you learn this?”
“A friend of mine got hold of your hospital records. Apparently your mother came into ER because you were breach. Very lucky she did so because the girls’ home had a terrible record for live births from breach deliveries. The hospital was full. They didn’t want to admit your mother and were calling her a cab to go back to the home for girls. But your mom was scared enough, I guess, to call a family member. A woman named Estelle Woolsey. It shows in your file she paid for your birth, as well as a private room for your mom to recover in. My guess is Estelle wasn’t your mother’s mother. Her mother put her in the girls’ home. My guess it was an aunt or a grandmother. You know what this means, don’t you?”
“No.”
Isabelle pauses a moment. “Our search has narrowed dramatically.”
T
he light pouring through Isabelle’s curtains stretches across the wall like fingers. While Angus stares through the window looking for excuses to woof and growl, Eleanor sits on the floor beside the coffee table and twists the corner of her sweater around a finger.
“Get yourself up onto the sofa,” Isabelle says as she pours two cups of coffee from a silver urn. “Like one of the grownups.”
The yearbook lies on the table, navy leather faded to powder blue at the edges, gold embossing barely legible:
Trent Falls High School, 1973–74
.
Eleanor shakes her head. “I need to be on the ground for this.”
“You’re like my old spaniel. Anyplace higher than sea level and he threw up his boiled liver. Speaking of which, why does that animal of yours insist on making so much noise?”
“Can we open the book now?”
She points toward the window, massive twists of beige linen hanging over like bangs in need of a good trim. “What do you think of these curtains? Too fussy? I can never decide.”
“Isabelle!”
“Okay.” She shifts forward in her seat. “It shouldn’t come as any surprise that I was right about Janet being your mother’s mother and Estelle being your mother’s grandmother. Who better to save a pregnant girl from the shame of her overly conventional parents than her adoring and, judging from the fact that she upgraded the two of you to a private room, wealthy grandma? You likely owe Great-Granny your life.”
“Thank you, Estelle.”
“All right, then. Ready to see your mother?”
“I’ve waited thirty-five years. I couldn’t be more ready.”
Isabelle sets the yearbook on her lap and opens it to where a neon green Post-it marks a page. She turns the yearbook around and sets it on Eleanor’s lap. The page is filled with tiny black and white headshots. Isabelle points to one at the bottom right corner.
A girl. Longish blond hair. Shadows under the eyes, wide downturned mouth on a narrow face. The resemblance to Eleanor is unmistakable. She’s staring at a young version of herself. But the expression in this girl’s eyes—it’s as if she has control of the entire world and she knows it. As if she’s certain that every day after this one will unfold however she tells it to and she’s amused by the very thought of it.
Eleanor continues to stare, desperate to know this girl—what makes her laugh, what makes her cry, what amuses her, bores her, makes her want to scream. But the more she examines her, the more convinced Eleanor is that her mother is unknowable.
“Her name is Ruth. Ruth Woolsey.”
Eleanor stands, walks across the room to Angus and reaches for the comfort of his velvety ears.
Isabelle says nothing. She gets up, opens a cabinet and fills a shot glass with Johnnie Walker Blue. Hands it to Eleanor. “All in one gulp. Come on.”
Eleanor swallows, holds the glass out for Isabelle to refill. Swallows again. It isn’t until the burning stops and the blurred feeling starts that she speaks. “Ruth. Her name really is Ruth.”
“It really is. The Smith part was fictitious.”
“Are there any more pictures of her?”
Isabelle shows her two more photos, one a photography club group shot and the other a random one of campus life: Ruth perched on a brick wall, eating a sandwich by herself. She doesn’t appear lonely or self-conscious. She’s just fine on her own.
“Do we know where she is now?”
Isabelle flips to the Homecoming Royalty. The queen and king. Ruth, trying not to smile too wide in a cheap-looking tiara. And a boy named Daniel Leland.
“My father?”
She drains her coffee cup and reaches for her purse. “Many adoptions stem from teen pregnancies, so Daniel Leland is exactly where I plan to start.”
“Back to Kansas City?”
“Our Homecoming king lives on the Cape now.”
Eleanor gets up and trots after Isabelle, who is already through the front door. “Wait, you’re just going to show up? No calling first or whatever?”
Isabelle tilts her chin skyward and the light catches the tiny blond hairs on her skin. “See this face? It’s impossible to ignore.” She swings her purse over her shoulder and folds her arms. “Now, Eleanor Sweet. Are you coming or not? I despise driving my antediluvian car.”
The floor of Isabelle’s old Mercedes rumbles like a subway train under their feet as they stare at the ramshackle cottage. The peeling picket fence has fallen into the garden and one section of the house’s faded green siding has been ripped off by a storm. And what appears to have been an enclosed backroom has burned away and been left to tough out the elements. Out front, a rusted claw-foot tub boasts only sickly, yellow-legged geraniums covered with dead leaves.
“There’s no going back from something like that,” Isabelle mumbles.
“Hmm?”
“I once rented a little house in Vermont. There was a bathtub out front that the owners had left sitting there, having replaced it with a Home Depot special. My sister suggested I plant in it.” She shakes her head, deep in thought. “But I said no. Once you plant nasturtiums in an abandoned bathroom fixture, there’s no going back. There’s no undoing who you’ve become.”
His rump on the seat and front feet on the floor, Angus pushes his great head between the two seats and starts to pant.
“My adoptive mother planted in a rain barrel. And her garden won awards every year.”
“That doesn’t make it right, darling.” Isabelle applies plum lipstick and winces at the malodorous puff cloud that is Angus’s breath. “All right. Let’s find you a less-foul-smelling family member than this creature.”
They pick their way along a cracked cement path and onto the porch while Angus woofs his discontent from the
backseat of the car. It’s hard not to peer through the living room window before they knock. There, in a tweedy recliner, wearing gym shorts and a stretched-out T-shirt with stains on the belly, is an overweight man with the chubby, hairless legs of a toddler. Light from the TV flickers across his face as he eats from a bag of Cheetos.
Eleanor’s concern must show because Isabelle winks. “We don’t know he’s your father. It’s just a place to start.” She pulls a bottle of merlot from her bag. “Always best to arrive on a stranger’s stoop with a gift in your hand.” Eleanor raps once on the screen door. The Cheetos disappear behind the chair and the man who may or may not be her father gets up.
The screen door squeaks open to a chin stubbled with white and pale blue eyes spidered with red veins. Right away the eyes shift hopefully to the bottle. “Yeah?”
“Are you Daniel Leland?” Isabelle’s voice is all business.
“Who wants to know?”
“I’m Isabelle Santos. I’m looking for a woman named Ruth Woolsey. You went to high sch—”
“What the hell you need Ruth for?”
“Do you know anything about her?”
“Can’t be trusted is what I know.”
Isabelle puts her hand on Eleanor’s arm as if to say,
It’s all right
. “When was the last time you saw her?”
“Senior year. Back when she told me she was pregnant with my best friend’s baby. Bitch is still with him. Married now, over somewhere in Upstate New York. Albany area, I think.”
He’s not my father
. Eleanor is both saddened and relieved.
“What’s his name?”
“Ricky Pantera.”
He holds out his palm. Isabelle fills it with the bottle.
“Ricky Pantera, Richard Pantera, Rick Pantera …” Back in the car, Isabelle pulls out her iPhone.
Eleanor waits, barely daring to breathe, while the phone searches the New York State Yellow Pages.
The screen fills up and there it is.
“Richard S. Pantera. 701 N. Broadland Street, Hampton Manor, NY 12144.”
Isabelle watches Eleanor, holds up her phone to show the number. “We could call her right now. Up to you.”
Eleanor turns to watch as a wasp zigzags toward her open window, slips inside to inspect her shoulder. She waves it away. Somewhere nearby, the sound of a leaf blower drones. “Not here. I think I’d rather be home.”
“All right. I’ll be there tomorrow night at eight. Just have ready a couple of lemons and a zester.”
“Excuse me?”
Isabelle starts the engine. “Rule number one. Never question the search angel.”
R
uth Woolsey’s existence, her address, her husband’s name (maybe that of Eleanor’s father?), it doesn’t have the impact on her she’d thought. She feels no joy the next morning. More like terror. Eleanor hasn’t eaten since before they visited Daniel Leland’s house yesterday. What if Ruth doesn’t want to be found? What if she gave up her baby and walked away determined to live her life as if it never happened? It could easily be the case. Eleanor doesn’t know if she would survive that pain.
Besides these possibilities, there’s also the possibility that Isabelle is wrong. That they call this Ruth Woolsey and she says they’ve got the wrong person. Or that she’s no longer alive.
Eleanor adjusts the front window display—a black crib with the side rail lowered to allow for a rumpled gray linen duvet to spill out in an artful imitation of real life—and adjusts the sun and moon mobile hanging overhead. Angus, mercifully, is asleep in the window after spending the afternoon yelping at Faith, Death by Vinyl’s sleepless upstairs neighbor, as she moved out of her apartment.
The only customer in the store is an elderly woman in pressed navy pants and cardigan. She glances up at Eleanor
and raises a crooked finger. The older ones often get confused. Taking care of baby used to be so simple. A bassinet and a glass bottle. A rattle. Pacifier. A few nice outfits for when the neighbors came to call. It’s these customers Eleanor takes special care of. She imagines them going home, wrapping their gift (chosen with painstaking deliberation), writing out the card in wavering script, then waiting for the baby shower, where they will be guided to a chair at the edge of the room, just on the outside of the excitement that comes from young women who believe they’re the first ones in history ever to have given birth.
Eleanor doesn’t want these senior relatives—most often women—to show up with an unwanted gift that provokes a false exclamation of joy, followed by the item being tucked away in the back of the hall closet.
“Do you carry Dr. Spock?”
Spock. His methods, in Eleanor’s opinion, spawned the baby boomers’ reactive and overly permissive attitude and, eventually, the resultant pamperedness of today’s teens. Parenting through love, she understands. Parenting through indulgence—or neglect—is nothing short of dangerous.
“We’re all out, but there are a few great ones here, one by Dr. David Austin. This one by K.C. Bowery—it’s a good one for strengthening the bond between infant and child. Research has proven that a mother’s reactions to baby’s—”
“It’s all so overwhelming these days, isn’t it? I don’t know how you young women do it. So much to think about now.”
“There’s also this one about baby sign language written by—”
“Sign language … for babies?” The lines in the woman’s chin deepen. “I’m not sure I understand.”
“They think it eliminates tantrums. Babies can be taught simple signs for, say,
eat, more, cookie, bottle, hug
. That kind of thing. They say speech lags behind cognitive development, but hand–eye coordination doesn’t. So baby learns a few signs and suddenly she can tell you what’s wrong. Can you imagine how much less frustrating that would be for new mothers? To know why their baby is crying?”
The woman wiggles gnarled fingers by her ears. “Signing? Like for the deaf?”
“That’s right.”
The creases in her face grow complicated. “I really don’t know …” She glances at her watch, then toward the door.
Eleanor looks around, determined to keep this woman in the store. She needs the sale. She doesn’t want to walk her past the exit, make it too easy to leave. “Have you thought about music? Researchers say listening to classical music builds an infant’s brain.” When her customer appears confused again, Eleanor adds, “And calms the mother during times she’s all alone. Sometimes I suggest as a gift something useful like an infant gym, then we slip a nice CD by Bach into the box with a ribbon. Makes for a wonderfully layered presentation.”
Music. Now this makes sense to the woman. She moves over to the CD section and lets her fingers worry through the Genius Baby collection, stopping to examine this one or that. So much rides on her choice.
Close to the dividing wall that separates her store from Noel’s, Eleanor notices a trickle of water coming from ceiling tiles that appear to be soaked. The water starts to drip on the floor, slow, steady, then pour out in one thin stream, then another. And another. Eleanor excuses herself and races to the storage closet for a roll of paper towels to mop
up the floor. Another trickle, this one fatter than the rest, sprouts from the front of the store. And another. Four, five, six leaks now.
“Ginny!” With this, Angus wakes up and lopes down the aisle, woofing at the ceiling and slipping on the wet floor. Ginny pokes her head out of the break room. “What the …?”
“Just grab pots, bowls, teacups. Anything!”
Ginny vanishes into the back closet and reappears with an armload of plastic bathtubs and empty diaper pails, which she arranges beneath the closest dribbles and streams. She might as well not have bothered, as the water now buckets down in too many places to control and ceiling tiles are dropping in soggy clumps onto a rack of Italian sleepers. Angus is energized by the action, and takes a sopping pillow between his teeth to shake the life out of it. Or maybe into it. Ginny and Eleanor rush to push strollers, Baby Bjorns, and fabric bouncy chairs out of the way as more of the sky falls. The three pails are no longer enough; the entire rear right corner of the store is under deluge.
The customer, who’d been bent down examining a Baby Bach CD, stands tall now and looks around, astonished, then reaches into her purse and pulls out a collapsible umbrella. She gives it a shake and, once it has bloomed in full, holds it over her head and marches out of the store.
Eleanor is now soaked. She pulls off blazer and silk scarf, the blouse, vest, and boots, until she’s down to camisole and khakis, which she rolls up to her knees.
She marches past Ginny, who has bits of wet pink insulation dotting her head and shoulders. “I’m going to check upstairs and next door.”
Her apartment was dry and quiet, but it’s as if a tsunami has hit Death by Vinyl. A few of Noel’s shelves are knocked over, likely from the huge metal fan that has fallen from the ceiling. Records and magazines and T-shirts lie in a chunky swamp on the floor. Noel sloshes through the water, which is still pouring from above, his pants soaked to the ankles, his boots blackened with wet. Beside him, face down in the lake: Sasquatch. His go away sign has drifted away.
“Oh no,” she says, surveying the devastation.
“Bohemian Rhapsody” plays on but the sound has gone drunken and squishy. All that painstaking work on speakers that are now waterlogged.
His countertops are dripping with pooled water and Eleanor rushes to lift files and flyers and masses of mail, reaching down to retrieve what’s fallen into the pond. As she sorts it in her arms, she notices piles of unopened envelopes. Three notices from Boston Water and Sewer, countless letters from TD North and a credit bureau. Four, maybe five, from Chickadee Investments—the company Birdie owned with her husband, now run by their grown children. They owned nearly the entire block, including Eleanor’s building. One of the envelopes is marked in red “Third Notice.”
It doesn’t look as if he’s paid a single bill.
She looks up to catch him staring at her shoulders. Suddenly she feels naked. He lunges down to her feet and picks up a dripping-wet picture frame. He stares down at it, immobilized. A jagged crack criss-crosses his wife’s face.
Eleanor takes it out of his hands and unlatches the back
of the frame to remove the photo. “This will dry.” She looks around for a safe place and leans it up high on a shelf behind the cash. “It’ll be fine if you don’t touch it.”
He nods, his face completely devoid of expression.
“Should we get to work? See what we can save around here?”
Noel points at red and blue plastic milk crates running the length of the store on a long wooden shelving unit. They’re still dry. “Start with these?”
“Sure. Just set everything on higher ground.”
Lift.
Stack.
Splash.
Repeat.
Water continues to gush from above and Eleanor helps him move dry crates from the epicenter of the storm. They stack them at the store’s perimeter, alongside a mound of concert T-shirts, record players, and DVDs. At the back of the store, the old floorboards are higher, creating a safe zone for a rolling rack of posters, the milk crate full of Britney and Posh Spice.
“Must be one of the apartments above you. It’s not nearly as bad in my place.”
He stops. “Wait. You’re flooded too?”
“Why do you think I arrived half naked and soaked?” Without waiting for an answer, she asks, “Any access to the second floor from here?”
He motions toward a poster-covered partial wall at the rear. “Birdie had a staircase built.”
The black iron circular staircase wraps tightly around a center pole and Eleanor, being wet, holds onto it for dear life
as she climbs in bare feet to the second floor. At the top, she pushes open a flimsy door and scans the hall, which smells like water.
There’s no answer when she knocks at the back unit. No answer at the front either, but Eleanor hears splashing from inside. She turns the knob and the door swings open.
The apartment is empty, all dingy white walls speckled with nail holes and dark-stained floors faded where furniture used to be. Orange batik fabric hangs from the living room, giving the room a weird, coppery glow. With the painted flowers on one wall, the vibe is distinctly hippie-ish. And the floor is covered in water.
Water gurgles out from the galley kitchen, where the tap is on full and the sink is overflowing. She splashes across the room to turn off the tap, then races to the bathroom to do the same for sink and bathtub. All the drains are stoppered.
Which means Auntie Faith followed Ginny’s advice. She went drastic. And then some.