Saturday, April 4, 2015
Kure Beach, North Carolina
Lana called Kate’s cell phone late Saturday night. Kate was half asleep, The Seat of the Soul splayed open on her chest. She’d taken to opening to random pages day by day, reading tiny, digestible bits at a time. “So,” Lana announced, “I’ve been trying for weeks to find something online on the McNaughton Children’s Home. And I finally did. Turns out, it was a place that sold babies.”
“What?” Kate struggled to sit up, wide awake now, shoving the book off herself.
“Yeah. All kinds of circumstances, but the article I found said it was basically a home for upper-class unwed mothers. They’d pay a pretty penny to hide out there during their pregnancies, and the Home would sell the babies very shortly after they were born. And most of what the adoptive parents were told about a child’s origins were lies—to keep things from being traced, I guess. So that bit about Mom’s bio mom being Sicilian, that might not even be true. But, anyway, I would think this proves Lola was telling the truth—about Mom being ‘adopted,’ I mean.”
“Oh. God,” Kate said. “How much did they sell them for?” The instant the question left her mouth, it seemed inappropriate.
But Lana was unperturbed. “Thousands. Like, five thousand dollars, back in the 1930s. That would be like eighty-five thousand today. No one was ever prosecuted. They covered their tracks really well. I guess the doctor who ran the place had a stellar reputation. It was only after he died that what he’d been doing came out. Falsifying records and selling babies to rich, desperate couples. Like Jack and Lola, I guess.”
Kate’s stomach had started to hurt. “Lana, that can’t be true.”
“God, I don’t know. It’s online, so . . .” Lana stopped. Sighed. “Anyway, I don’t know what the DNA test is going to reveal. Maybe we’ll never know the whole truth. But you’d better tell Mom about this. I’d call her, but I think it’s better if you tell her in person.”
That was BS. Lana was simply reverting to being the little sister, hiding behind Kate, letting Kate do the explaining and make the excuses and the requests. Which, actually, wasn’t so bad—it felt like Lana had cracked open a door, in some way, by trusting Kate like this.
But wasn’t Lana worried that news like this could make Kate start drinking again? Kate was worried it could.
Apparently not; Lana just went on. “Oh, and, get this: The place was in Wilmington! Like, thirty minutes from Mom’s condo. I’ll send you the article; it has the address. Maybe the two of you can go see the place. I checked Google Earth, and the house itself still exists. Of course, the McNaughton Home is long gone.”
Kate lifted her hair off her neck. “This is a can of worms, Lana.”
“You think everything’s a can of worms, Kate. When, in actuality, getting to the truth is what’s going to set us free.”
“And get you your new book.”
A pause, then Lana’s clipped I’m-above-fighting-you tone: “I don’t think I’m being selfish, trying to get to the bottom of this for all of us. I really think it’s going to help.”
Kate tried to think what it must’ve been like for Lana: rejected at the moment of her birth. No wonder she’d had to develop a thick line of defense. No wonder she’d spent her life trying to figure it out, pin down some reason why, so there was some other explanation than herself—some other explanation than that she was irrevocably flawed, unacceptable before she’d taken her first breath, almost. Kate sighed. “I hope you’re right about that.”
“Listen, are you going to be all right with this? Do you need me to come down?”
Kate was already envisioning a fresh batch of monkey bread. Yes, there were ways to get through. “We’ll be all right.”
“Good, Katie. I trust you. Talk to Mom.” Lana hung up.
I trust you. Kate was crying again.
“How are you liking the book?” Clarissa said, coming out to sit at the patio table with Kate late the next morning. The day was overcast and breezy, a pleasant-enough seventy degrees; in the distance was the constant roll of the waves.
Kate sat up straighter, startled out of the trance of wondering what was planned for her soul and if she was achieving it. “Good! It’s great.”
“Good.” Clarissa put on her sunglasses and gazed out at the water.
“No dolphins so far,” Kate said. She didn’t want to tell Clarissa about what Lana had found out. Nor had Kate told her mother the stirrings she’d had regarding Clayburn Montgomery, or about looking Tricia up on Facebook, though Dr. Alvarez had said she should. Dr. Alvarez had said this not-talking thing, this simple coexisting that Clarissa and Kate had settled on, couldn’t go on much longer, that it was actually a passive-aggressive form of “nonconstructive conflict.” (Kate had described the habit they’d fallen into of eating supper on the couch, watching Jeopardy!, competing to see who could shout out the answer first, before the contestants even buzzed in.) “Are you angry with your mother, Kate?” Dr. Alvarez asked.
Kate didn’t think she was. “Why would I be angry? She’s taking care of me.”
“Maybe this is an older anger,” Dr. Alvarez suggested, and into Kate’s mind had popped the image of Clarissa, long ago, shouting: No, you cannot change your mind, you cannot keep him!
She had almost fessed up to Dr. Alvarez—but not quite. Maybe next session. Maybe.
Now it was as if Clarissa could read her mind. “Kate,” she said tentatively, taking off her sunglasses again, squinting slightly, her eyes very blue in this particular light. “I know we haven’t talked about this, but I’m wondering how you’re doing in regard to the DNA test. To what it might reveal, I mean.”
Kate knew what her mother meant. But she couldn’t go there. Just couldn’t.
She wondered if Lana suspected the utterly colossal amount of not-talking Kate and Clarissa were doing—if that was why she’d tasked Kate with telling their mother what she’d found online.
I guess we have to start somewhere, Kate thought, even as she wished for a glass of wine. A bottle.
But. No. She was going to be better. Do better. She was.
“Mom, listen, about that. There’s something I have to tell you. Lana called me late last night.”
As Kate began describing what Lana had learned, Clarissa sat up straighter and straighter, as if someone was turning a big screw at her back, winding her up like a doll. Still, Kate didn’t stop till she’d gotten it all out.
“Well, that is unacceptable,” Clarissa snapped, then, and she was pale; barely breathing, it seemed. Kate wanted to reach for her—but didn’t. “I simply cannot accept that,” Clarissa said. “Being adopted, okay. I guess I’ve probably known that for a long time. But bought? Sold?”
“I know, Mom. I’m sorry. It’s awful.” Kate wished she hadn’t told her; that there’d been no such news to tell. “But, listen, we don’t really know what will end up being true. And, well, I just—I just have this really strong feeling that you were always, always loved.”
Clarissa sniffed. “You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do. It said so in the letter, remember? Your parents were young and they wanted the best for you. They probably didn’t even know you were being sold. They evidently paid for the best possible care for your mother, right? And then they trusted this doctor to place you in a good home where you’d have everything you could possibly need. They probably didn’t even know it wasn’t a legal adoption.”
Clarissa shook her head. “You just said the Home falsified everything. So that letter probably isn’t true—just like I knew it wasn’t!”
“Oh, Mom.” Kate held up the Zukav book. “Remember? There are ways of knowing beyond knowing. Even if it doesn’t make sense right now, I know that you were wanted. That it was only a matter of the circumstances.” She swallowed, set the book down. “Just like with my son.”
Clarissa’s face crumpled.
Kate hadn’t meant that the way it had come out: like she blamed Clarissa, like Clarissa was “the circumstances.” “Mom, wait, I didn’t mean—”
But Clarissa had popped up and was opening the slider back into the condo. Kate watched from outside as Clarissa grabbed her hat off the sideboard and headed out the front door, slamming it behind her.
Kate swallowed. Maybe Gary Zukav and Dr. Alvarez would say this first stab at actually talking marked some kind of progress, but Kate did not feel, in this moment, that it was measurable.
She stood and went inside to the kitchen. She looked in all the cupboards, one after another after another. She got out the stepstool to look above the refrigerator. She searched the linen closet, underneath the towels and extra sheets. Nothing. Her mother had left nothing. Just as Kate had promised Dr. Alvarez, Clarissa would keep Kate in line.
In the kitchen again, she got out a tall blue glass, pressed it to the ice maker, watched the ice crumble down, poured herself some iced tea, and went back out onto the deck. Phone in hand, she scrolled through Tricia Montgomery Robinson’s Facebook page again. All the Montgomery girls together again!
Dr. Alvarez had said that some days would be harder than others. Had promised her, in fact.
Kate clicked to open her email. Sure enough, Lana had sent a message—subject !!!!—with a link to the article about the McNaughton Children’s Home. Kate’s finger hovered over the underlined blue text. And then she clicked it.
“Well, that doesn’t make any sense at all,” Molly said, peering at the screen of Caden’s laptop, where he had it sitting on the kitchen counter. It was Tuesday evening, and Caden had told her when she’d picked him up from track practice that he had something he had to talk to her about. His urgency was so unusual that she thought for a second: Did he get some girl pregnant? (She hadn’t even had a sex talk with him yet! Had Evan? Was she officially the worst single mom on the planet?) So, she was relieved, at first, to find it was just something about the DNA results he’d received in his email this afternoon.
He pointed to the line in the Ancestry family tree. “But, see, they don’t share any DNA. There’s no way Grandma Cecily and Grandma Liz are biologically related. Like, no way at all.”
“Well, that must be a mistake,” Molly said. “That’s my grandma and my mom.”
“I asked my teacher and everything. He said this shows you have about half of Grandma Liz’s DNA. See here? So she’s definitely your mother. And I have about a quarter of it, so your mother is definitely my grandmother. But none of us share any DNA with Grandma Cecily at all.”
Why did Molly feel suddenly that he was the adult, and she the child? “Caden, seriously. That is just impossible.”
“My teacher said it’s definitive.”
Molly shook her head. “They must have mixed up the samples or something. I’m going to call. Right now. Where’s the customer service number?”