Chapter 21

Melissa had been married two years when, in 1989, she and Kerry sold their trailer for the down payment on a starter home, a small brick house with three bedrooms in Amarillo.

Kerry had been faithful since the wedding. And he had not been violent. He was again the man Melissa had fallen for, a happy ham who had Melissa perm the back of his mullet. In 1992, he began counseling boys at the same residential Christian school where years before he’d been both cared for and abused. Says Melissa: “He was like a god when he went back.”

Social work, however, barely covered the mortgage. “We were penny-poor,” says Melissa. And so, she left haircutting for nursing, taking a loan of $15,000 to enroll in a course that taught her to immunize, to catheterize, to prepare a patient for surgery. A year later, she was a licensed vocational nurse, and she started in on a second degree to become a full-fledged RN.

The white coat suited Melissa. For so many years, she had tended to her family—her drinking grandmother, her schizophrenic uncle. To act as Norma had not: this remained for Melissa the great imperative of her life.

MELISSA DID NOT KNOW SHELLEY. But she knew of her. She’d read in the Enquirer that her youngest half-sister had been found. Filled with excitement, she’d asked Norma to connect them. Norma had refused. But now, four years later in 1993, Melissa reached out to Shelley through Norma’s lawyer, sending along her address: 5203 Royce Drive, Amarillo.

Shelley was shocked and thrilled, hopeful and sentimental. On the first of September, she put pen to paper.

“Dear Cheryl,” Shelley began, addressing her sister with the name Norma had told her instead of Melissa. “I am so so so happy that you want me in your life and you want us to be sisters. . . . Please God, let it be true.” Shelley wrote that she had dreamed of finding her sister even before she knew her to exist, adding, “There was never a single day that I haven’t thought of you.”

Melissa exulted. Here, at last, was a sibling! She was real, with favorite colors and foods and animals and TV soaps that she listed in a swirly script. She’d pined for Melissa as Melissa had for her, and had signed off with love and a phone number.

Melissa set the letter in her bedside drawer and telephoned her sister. All at once, neither was an only child. In the months that followed, the sisters gave each other a hundred answers to a hundred questions, twenty-somethings aching to make up for lost years. “I want to be with you so bad and get in your way and mess up your room and bother you on dates,” Shelley wrote to Melissa. “Maybe Kerry will pretend he’s not married to you and just taking you out to a movie and I can sneak in the back seat and then (of course, you’re going to the drive in) when he tries to kiss you I can jump up and yell, ‘I’m thirsty! I’m hungry! I can’t see! I have to go to the bathroom!’ ” She added: “I love you, Melissa!”

Melissa told Shelley that she loved her too. The sisters made a plan to fly Melissa to Washington with money they would earn stuffing mailings into envelopes.

Melissa marveled that her younger sister seemed so at ease. While her own marriage was volatile, and money short, Shelley had written to Melissa of her quilting and strong marriage. Says Melissa: “She had the love of her life.”

But Shelley was not at ease. Her hands were still prone to tremble, her mood to darken. She feared being outed as the Roe baby. And, as she told Melissa, she worried about their mother—that Norma might be angry that Melissa had found her, that Norma might reject her again. Shelley wrote to Norma asking her to confirm their relation. Norma did so. “She’s admitting that I am her daughter,” Shelley wrote to Melissa. Shelley added that Norma wished to meet her.

Shelley was unprepared to meet her mother. She wished to meet Melissa only. And she was right to worry about Norma. Though Norma confirmed her parentage, she was jealous of the relationship her daughters were forming, and phoned Shelley to say that she and Connie wished to join her and Melissa when they met. Shelley demurred. Norma grew angry, angrier still that Shelley and Melissa wished to find the sister between them. Norma could have helped them do so; it was her old doctor, Richard Lane, who had led the Kebabjians to Jennifer. But Norma had never shown interest in her middle child and told Shelley that she had no desire to have her found.

Shelley was not only overwhelmed by Norma; she felt hurt by Melissa. Though Melissa was counting down the days to their meeting, she was cutting hair on weekends at a truck stop in Amarillo to earn extra money, and had less time for Shelley. Shelley pushed off their meeting to the following spring.

ALL HER LIFE, Melissa had craved family. And she was now in particular need of it. Her husband was increasingly aloof, quick to fight. Melissa wondered why. Couples therapy had offered no answers when Kerry confessed to a one-night stand.

Melissa was crushed. But Kerry said that the woman meant nothing, that she was a stranger in Dallas. He said he felt guilty. Melissa forgave him but then found panties under the floor mat of his car. Kerry said they’d fallen from the laundry bag of his secretary and told Melissa, she recalls, that the cheating she suspected “was all in my head, my hormones.”

Melissa then learned that she was pregnant. She told Kerry but, she says, “he looked disappointed.” Days later, she saw him pushing his secretary on a swing in a park. She left, taking their daughter to live for a week with Mary. Kerry moved out.

Melissa was devastated. She feared, she says, that all was lost—“a marriage, a family, civility.” More, she was shaken by the thought that she was becoming Norma. She’d had sex at fifteen to confirm that she was not gay, like Norma, and had forsworn birth control, she says, so as not to prevent, as Norma had tried to, the birth of a future child. She thus decided now to do what Norma had not, and remain with her husband.

Kerry moved back in. But Melissa was on edge. She began to take Lorazepam and returned with Kerry to therapy.

The counselor whom Melissa and Kerry saw at their local church in Amarillo told Melissa that it was her Christian duty to abide her husband’s indiscretions and make herself available for sex. “You need to submit yourself to him,” the therapist told her. “If he wants it in the morning, you submit yourself. If he wants it in the afternoon, you submit yourself.”

Melissa confided in her sister. But Shelley struggled to relate. She said, recalls Melissa, that were Doug to cheat on her, she would leave him at once. Melissa took no comfort in her words.

Shelley had meant well. And the next time Norma phoned, Shelley told her that she wished that she, Shelley, could be there for her sister. Norma, says Shelley, responded that Melissa had “other family” and didn’t need her.

IT IS A DAMAGING THING to be forced to carry a pregnancy one does not want. According to a watershed study begun in 2008, a woman denied an abortion is more likely, among much else, to live in poverty and suffer anxiety. Her unwanted child suffers too, at “increased risk,” one study noted, “for negative psychosocial development and mental well-being.” Shelley was not alone in being born unwanted. There were, alas, millions of such children. But only her conception had precipitated the legal right to abort those millions.

Shelley had not let go of the hope that Norma might yet seek to forge a relationship with her. Still, the daughter remained wary of her birth mother, mindful that it was the prospect of money and press that had led Norma to seek her out.

Somewhere inside, Norma understood Shelley’s caution, her bitterness. She’d spoken to one reporter of the cross her youngest child no doubt bore. To another, she wondered: “How could you possibly talk to someone who wanted to abort you?” Neither of those interviews, however, was published. And when, in the spring of 1994, Norma phoned Shelley to say that she and Connie wished to come visit her, the mother and daughter were quickly at odds after Shelley responded, she recalls, that she hoped Norma and Connie would be “discreet” in front of her child. “How am I going to explain to a three-year-old,” Shelley told Norma, “that not only is this person your grandmother but she is kissing another woman?” Norma yelled at her, and then said that Shelley should thank her. Shelley asked why. For not aborting her, answered Norma. Shelley was appalled. “I was like, what?! . . . I’m supposed to thank you for getting knocked up by some john in a bar and then giving me away?” Says Shelley: “I told her I would never ever thank her for not aborting me.”

It had been twenty-four years since Norma had first let Shelley go, five years since the Enquirer had tried but failed to bring them together. As mother and daughter now hung up their phones in anger, they seemed to be parting for good. “Norma gave me up again, a third time,” says Shelley. She adds: “This is when Norma and I called it quits.”

LIFE WAS DIFFICULT for Melissa. She was pregnant with the child of a cheating husband. And because money was tight, she left nursing school to get a job. She wanted to work at Planned Parenthood but, as the daughter of Jane Roe, feared the press it might generate. She went to work at a mental health clinic instead.

Still, Melissa was excited. Her sister was at last coming to visit in May.

Shelley, though, was having second thoughts. She wished to have nothing to do with Norma and it pained her that Melissa did. “I told Melissa, ‘I can’t do this,’ ” recalls Shelley. “ ‘She is still in your life.’ ” Countered Melissa: “She’s still my mom whether I like it or not.”

Shelley needed more time and again postponed her trip. “I was shocked,” says Melissa. “I was just fucking disappointed.”

Shelley apologized. “The more we talk (and fight) the more I realize we are family and sisters through and through,” she wrote to Melissa. “I love you and I should tell you that more often.” Shelley rescheduled her trip for July. But Melissa could not reschedule the days off she had taken. And when Shelley flew to Texas in July to see her old neighbor, she didn’t visit her big sister six hours west on Route 287. She didn’t phone. A relationship had unraveled.

Melissa laid Shelley’s letters in her bedside drawer. It was soon hard for her to recall what had troubled Shelley. All she could remember was that her sister had been trying to decide whether to spend money on a sewing machine or on having another child or on returning to school. She wondered which Shelley chose. As the months passed, she wondered too about the sister between them, the one she and Shelley had resolved to find.

JENNIFER THOUGHT OFTEN OF FAMILY, of its frailties and fractures. Her marriage to Ricky had ended with a punch to the jaw. Her boyfriend James, unstable and prone to drink, offered little hope of a more stable home. And she had lost all hope of discovering her past when, in 1988, her father told her that he did not have any records of her adoption.

A year later, divorced and drinking ever more, Jennifer moved in with James. The couple settled into an old brick house just south of Dallas, empty save for a shag carpet.

James volunteered at a fire station. Jennifer was not working. She’d broken her foot at the auto body shop and was still collecting workers’ comp. Home in her empty house, she steeped her nights in alcohol, drinking with James and alone too, quietly wondering, at age twenty-two, if she was gay.

Jennifer also wondered all the more about the unknown genes she had inherited when, in the summer of 1990, she found herself pregnant. Jennifer did not consider abortion. “I wanted the baby,” she says. As her March due date approached, she swelled, gaining sixty-six pounds. She married James and took his name, the new Mrs. Jennifer Ferguson determined to live healthily for their child. She quit drinking and smoking and drugs. Says Jennifer: “I followed everything to the tee.”

James, though, remained depressed. He still drank, and was prone to sorrow and anger; he suspected his pregnant wife of cheating. One night, he slapped her while they were playing cards. Jennifer found herself in a second bad marriage, caring not only for a baby with a cleft palate but a volatile husband.

Their son was just a few months old when, one day, James jerry-rigged the exhaust pipe of his old Ford to the hose of a vacuum cleaner. Jennifer found him inside the house, she says, “throwing up and acting all irrational.” She called 911. James went to an ICU. Jennifer returned to work.

The Texas Workforce Commission had just pointed Jennifer toward a course in a flower shop some sixty miles south of her duplex in Garland. She got a job fashioning bouquets. She had never enjoyed anything so much, and was good at it, too, setting lemongrass among bundles of long-stemmed liatris and lilies. Stargazers were her favorite, white and magenta and fragrant.

Jennifer worked alone and tirelessly, arranging and selling flowers. The shop, in the Texas town of Italy, was one room. But it felt boundless, an escape, and Jennifer quickly fell for the woman who delivered her bouquets, a teenager with spiky hair named Tamala. She was the first person Jennifer had ever met who identified as gay. The question of whether Jennifer was, too, burned inside her. Wishing to make her crush clear, Jennifer cut down her mullet to short spikes. Soon after, she cornered Tamala in the bathroom and kissed her.

Jennifer knew they could not be; Tamala was in love with another woman. And of course, there was James and her kids; Jennifer had given birth to a second child that fall of 1993. But the kiss, her first with a girl since high school, told Jennifer at last that she was gay. She began to speak over the phone to a friend of Tamala’s named Misty.

Misty lived ninety minutes north, not far from the JC Penney where she worked. She was also gay and married to a man, a tugboat captain who cheated on her. After a few months, she drove south to meet Jennifer, and a night together at Tamala’s confirmed what they had both sensed on the phone. “I’m a lesbian,” Jennifer recalls telling friends. “I’m with a girl.”

To come out in small-town Texas in 1994 held much the same peril for Jennifer as it had for her birth mother a generation before. Cops in paddy wagons no longer raided gay bars. But sex between men was still illegal, and she remembers the gasps: “You’re what?!” Says Jennifer: “I lost a lot of friends.”

Jennifer drove with her kids to Misty every weekend, when Misty’s husband was off on his boat. Misty was pregnant, and Jennifer told James that she was helping a pregnant friend. James was suspicious and showed up one weekend unannounced. Misty’s parents told him their daughter was gay. He wondered if Jennifer was, too.

Jennifer had always been up-front and blunt; her friend Crystal’s mom had nicknamed her “bitch.” And it was vivifying to be out as a lesbian. But confronted by her husband, Jennifer lied. She feared the truth might take her kids from her.

Jennifer also said nothing to her parents. She was certain that her homosexuality would only deepen her mother’s disappointment in her. “I was always the bad,” says Jennifer, “the black sheep.” Worse still, she says, her parents would no doubt wonder what she had been wondering ever since junior high—if her genes were to blame, “if there was anybody else in my family I didn’t know who was gay.”

THE FIGHTS FOR the legal rights of women and gay people had long overlapped. Just as Coffee had helped McCluskey fight the Texas sodomy laws, Jane Roe had begun to publicly denounce homophobia, responding in the spring of 1994, for example, to a “Dear Abby” letter in which a woman worried that a gay babysitter might harm her granddaughter. “Homosexuals, in my opinion, are caring, nurturing loving people,” Norma wrote, adding, “we love children and have other things to do when we’re alone with children, like find the right kind of ice cream.“

Norma was comfortable speaking about homosexuality in a way she’d never been about abortion; she’d known she was gay long before Roe. She had been beaten for it by her mother. And, working on her memoir with Meisler, she saw anew that amidst the rubble of her life, Connie was her lone constant. The book was due out this summer when Norma wrote her a note expressing pride in their having come back together.

I Am Roe got excellent reviews. The book was brave and urgent, said Kirkus, “a compelling exploration of how one woman negotiates being a symbol and being herself.” The New York Times named it a Notable Book of the Year, Norma honored alongside Ken Kesey, Doris Lessing and the late Bertolt Brecht. Wrote the Times: “Norma McCorvey’s powerful account of her difficult journey from private woman to public symbol underscores the gulf between myth and reality in American politics.”

Roe was indeed awash in myth. But the “reality” that Norma presented was anything but real, her book twenty chapters of traumas imagined. Those who knew Norma were bewildered. Says her former girlfriend Hower: “It was a pack of crap.”

The lies were purposeful; they rid Norma of sin. Sex enjoyed with a female student became rape by a nun. The relinquishment of her child became a kidnapping. And she who’d fought to abort her third pregnancy asserted that her mother had sought to abort her. The claim was baseless. But Norma, who remained ambivalent about abortion, was essentially stating that she was not to blame; she’d only sought to do what her mother had sought to do to her. As she wrote now on a piece of yellow paper: “Why didn’t my mother ever teach me how to be a mother?”