What Was Mine (16 page)

“Yeah, I was amazing right from the start.” I wanted her to go on with the story instead of switching subjects like she usually did when we talked about things she didn't want to discuss. “So why'd she pick you?”

“At first, I really worried she wouldn't. I was the only single mother she was considering, but she was okay with that. She'd been raised by a single mother and was a single mother herself. I told her that not having a husband would mean I'd have much more time to devote to a baby. I so wanted a baby, Mia. You can't imagine how much.”

“What about my dad?” I'd always imagined my teenage birth parents, beautiful and in love, like Romeo and Juliet. I'd never asked directly about them. It was like some sort of unspoken agreement between us.

“He was a boy in another school who didn't even know he got a girl pregnant. He was very handsome, the girl said. And smart.” She wiped her hands on the back of the mom jeans she always changed into as soon as she came home from work.

“What was the girl's name?” Marilyn's last name was Mornay. Maybe she was my birth mother's mother.

“Kimberly something. She died a few years later, the lawyer told me. In a car accident.”

“What?!” This was new information. She'd never told me my birth mother was dead. In fact, through the years, I'd always thought of my birth mother on my birthday and wondered if she thought of me every April 26, too.

“I hadn't wanted to tell you when you were younger. I thought it would make you too sad. But now you're old enough to know.”

The phone rang and she searched for a handset like we always had to do when the phone rang. The ringing phone didn't interest me. None of my friends ever called on a landline.

I stood, leaning against the wet counter, holding the dirty, wet towel, waiting for the earthquake inside me to be over so I could put one foot after the other and walk out of the room.

Something about the story didn't feel right.

That night, I confirmed Marilyn's friend request.

M
ia didn't accept me on Facebook at first. But one day, I saw she'd become my friend. The first thing I looked for on her page was her birth date. The day was wrong, but the month and year were correct. Someone could have changed it, for obvious reasons.

After that, I began to post a lot more. Shots of the kids, our house, Grant, my ceramics. I became very aware of what I was posting because I knew I was introducing my daughter to her real family. But I didn't message her. I knew I should wait for her to feel ready to make that first move.

I spent hours absorbing her virtual presence—picking up details of her life from her funny photos, her wry posts, her musings, her frettings about tests, her love for animals. It was like I was trying to soak up my daughter, as if I could pour her from the screen. I knew she was still in college from her profile. I got her cell number from a comment she left for someone. My hands shook as I wrote down the numbers. These were the numbers that would let me hear my daughter's voice. But I knew not to call her. Not yet.

I clicked voraciously, searching each photo for likenesses, scrutinizing every feature. There were Tom's dimples, my blue eyes and disobedient hair. A picture of her at the beach revealed my complexion, always in need of sunscreen. It felt strange to stare at photos of my own daughter, feeling how deeply we are connected, yet realize
that I didn't know her at all. In one photo, the set of her chin (Tom's chin) made her look like a strong person. I was glad. She'd need to be strong.

A photo of her as a little girl sent a bolt through my heart. There she was, about five, a little straw-blond girl in a white nightgown, at night, running on a sidewalk, holding a lit sparkler. Who had taken the picture? Who had been watching her with a lighted firework in her hand?

In another photo, she looked to be about seven. I recognized my sweet, lost child. I was glad to see she was smiling, happy. She was holding someone's hand, the hand of someone who wasn't in the frame, the hand of someone who wasn't me and I got a strong burning in the center of my chest as I stared at her face, imagining all the milestones I'd missed, the birthdays, the firsts, the time she said “Mother,” and I mourned the loss of our years together, grateful that the Oneness was finally guiding her home. Of course, I'd been given the gift of other children, other childhoods to witness. But none could make up for the one I had lost.

For years, I had lived with constant worry about my daughter's well-being. Now here she was, grown, entirely different from my memory of her as a baby. I was glad beyond words, but it also hurt. With each piece of information, I was slapped in the face with the realization that I had not been part of her life for over two decades.

I clicked on another photo. She had a boyfriend! They were kissing and a sparkling sea was behind them. Were they still together? They must be, I thought, or she would have taken down the picture. Was he good to her? From what I could see of him, he looked like a nice boy, intelligent. But was he kind? Loving? Another photo was a close-up. He was pushing a strand of hair from her face. How serious were they? According to her profile, she was still at Middlebury, she hadn't graduated from college yet. My
heart filled with desire to hold her, to impart to her wisdom and love and maternal cautions.

O
nce I had seen all the photos, I cycled through them again and again, savoring them slowly, reclaiming my daughter bit by bit, but not reaching out to scare her away, until the joyous day when I received an answering message from her.

Who are you, really?

I didn't want to scare her. I didn't want to give her a reason to unfriend me. I didn't want to sound crazy, telling her she'd been kidnapped. But that is what I had to say.

T
he first night I friended Marilyn, I looked at her page. She did kind of look like me. Her eyes were the same. I could see that one of her front teeth was crooked, which is the reason I had braces for years.

She lived far away, in California. Her
About
said she was from New Jersey, there was no mention of Kansas. She seemed like a nice lady, but I didn't know that many mothers on Facebook to compare her page to. Lucy wasn't on Facebook. She was old school. She got pressured at work to set up a page and asked me to help her the few times she updated it. “Why do I need this again?” she'd ask, and I'd shrug. Honestly, I didn't want a mother on Facebook. I didn't need to share stuff with her that I do with my friends. My boyfriend's mom was on Facebook. That was bad enough.

Marilyn's profile said she did ceramics in the basement and homeschooled her kids. Her kids were who I was most interested in. I zoomed into pics to see faces better, and something pricked the backs of my arms. There were people around a birthday cake and one of the boys looked almost exactly like me. It was weird to see my face on a boy. I began to wonder if Marilyn's message was right. Could this be the woman who had given me up as a baby? But she couldn't have been fifteen when she did it—so, also, that part of the story didn't make sense.

Then, one day, I messaged her and almost instantly, a reply message came back. The message was so long it took up almost the entire screen. She said her baby was kidnapped in 1990 and she was convinced that I was the baby kidnapped from her. She sent me links to newspaper reports about it. But I didn't look like the kidnapped baby in the pictures.

She told me my real name was Natalie. I tried to imagine being a baby named Natalie. I couldn't.

The only evidence she was going on was that my mom had written a book about kidnapping. I replied that my mother wrote books about murder and bank robbery, too, I said, but that doesn't mean she's a murderer or a robber.

I began to think she was crazy, which was kind of a relief. I liked my life. I didn't want it to change. And having a birth mother would definitely change it.

I
t was days before my retirement party when the call came in. I didn't know who Mrs. Mornay was at first. Then she said she used to be Mrs. Featherstone, and of course, I remembered. Her case haunted me for decades. She said she'd kept my card in her wallet all these years. She said she'd found her daughter on Facebook and asked if I could help.

I told her not to get her hopes up. Chances were, this girl on Facebook wasn't her missing daughter. It's rare that victims of non-family abductions show up after this many years. If a child isn't found in the first twenty-four hours, the chance of recovery goes into low percentages. If the child is still missing after four months, the chance of recovery is down to almost nothing.

So when she wanted me to push for a DNA test, I was reluctant. But I decided not to hand in my papers just yet.

A
detective called me on my cell. He said he was calling on behalf of a Marilyn Mornay who had contacted him because she had a daughter who'd been abducted in 1990 and thought I might be her. Now she was sending the cops after me? That made me freak.

At first, I refused to take the test. The detective told me the chances were slim that I was the baby. He just wanted to rule me out. He said I could take my time about deciding whether or not to take it, I didn't need to give him an answer right away. But I told him he shouldn't wait around for a yes.

What made me decide to take the test was getting into a fight with Lucy.

She wanted to go to a beach for New Year's, but I wanted to go out with my friends and my boyfriend. It was nice of her to offer a trip to Puerto Rico and all, but New Year's was important to me! It would be the last one I had while I was in college. Who knows if I'd even be able to celebrate next year. I was applying to law schools, and if I got into a good one, I wouldn't have any time to party. Also, this would be the last New Year's with my friends before we all graduated and started real lives. We had a thing for New Year's. My best friend and I always wore gold outfits. I loved my mom but I really didn't want to spend New Year's with her.

When Lucy gets mad, she looks like an alien—her eyes get small,
her forehead crinkles, she pushes her tongue into her cheek and makes it bulge out, which is how she looked when I told her to go to Puerto Rico without me.

Around eleven that night, I was on my way out. I'd just gotten home for winter break, I was going out to meet friends at a club. Lucy was in ratty pajamas and fluffy slippers and her hair was a mess. She was yelling at me for what I was wearing! She was saying my skirt was an invite to trouble on the subway, and as I watched her mouth move, I thought, This woman has no idea what she's talking about. This woman who raised me is actually crazy.

T
he next day, I was still mad at Lucy and went into Marilyn's albums again. There were new pictures of kids opening presents under a tree. I got a jolt of recognition seeing that boy again, and now there was a girl who looked like me, too. Part of being adopted means you always want to “belong.” I used to watch families walking down sidewalks and think how like a club they were. These people looked like they were in the same club as me.

I called the detective back. He told me where to get tested. It would be free and I didn't even need to make an appointment. But it was weeks before I could make myself go there.

F
ebruary 1, 2012. The day that changed my life forever. I was sitting at my favorite place to work when I'm home—Starbucks on the corner. J-Term had just ended—Middlebury gives you January to take classes on campus or intern or volunteer somewhere. I'd spent it interning for a law firm downtown, something my prelaw adviser had arranged. I was working on the write-up, when suddenly the results of the DNA test came in. I'd forgotten I'd signed up to receive
results by e-mail. The subject line was
Personal and Confidential.
I stared at it for a while. It was snowing out and I was sitting right by the door and cold gusts blew in on me each time it opened, but suddenly I was sweating. I kept staring at the
Get Results
icon, unable to click. My heart was pounding, even though I knew—or thought I knew—that the results would be negative. I closed my eyes and pressed. When I opened my eyes, I saw the word in big green letters:
POSITIVE
. Next to that word was “99.9%.” But the number I focused on was a number that wasn't there. The number I saw in my mind was .1%. That was the chance that the test results were wrong. I wanted them to be wrong. I wanted the whole thing to be a mistake. It was important to think up an explanation for the existence of two things that couldn't coexist:

1. The results were correct
and at the same time

2. My mother wasn't a liar and a kidnapper

B
ut I couldn't think up an explanation right away. I gathered up my papers and went out into the cold. The flakes were sharp and cut into my eyes. I was glad for that, so that when the doorman opened the door for me, he didn't realize that I was crying. It was around six, too early for Lucy to be home.

All kinds of stories were going through my head, stories that would explain the unexplainable. If the
Positive
turned out to be true, how could I have come to Lucy without her having stolen me? That my mother had stolen me was, frankly, unimaginable. She was a good person. Stealing was something she was totally against.

If I
was
the baby stolen from the Facebook lady, I decided that Lucy wasn't the one who had stolen me. She probably hadn't even known the baby she was adopting had been kidnapped. I'd seen a
CSI
episode about this. I knew I'd been adopted through a lawyer in
Kansas. Was the lawyer still around? I could do a search. The lawyer's name was probably on my birth certificate.