We had leftovers for lunch. Looking at Lilly’s packed fridge, I had a feeling she could serve up leftovers for weeks from the oversized meal she’d cooked us the day before. I didn’t miss the way her face lit up when I asked for the pierogi. Ted and James were engrossed in discussions about the timing of harvests and the impact reduced rainfall in recent years was having. Lilly and I made small talk about the recipes she’d prepared.
‘Time for a grandpa nap, I’m afraid,’ James yawned, when he’d finished eating. He stretched back in his seat as I’d seen him do several times the night before and rubbed his round tummy. ‘Did Lilly tell you we need to head into town tonight to meet the others?’
‘Oh no, I forgot,’ Lilly sat up straight suddenly. ‘I hope you don’t mind. Simon and Emmaline are trying to get into a routine with the twins, they asked if we could head into Orange instead of them coming all the way out here. We’ll have dinner at the bistro, so they can be home early.’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘That’s no problem.’
‘I might take a nap too,’ Ted said suddenly, and to my surprise. ‘That sunshine this morning has tired me out. Do you mind?’
I shook my head, and accepted the kiss he brushed against my lips as he left the room.
‘He reminds me of James,’ Lilly murmured. ‘I’m so glad you found yourself a good one, Sabina. They aren’t always easy to come by.’
‘He found me,’ I laughed softly, and automatically started packing up the plates from lunch.
‘Leave the dishes. Let’s go sit out on the veranda. Do you want to see some photos?’
I cleared my throat.
‘I’d love to. And would you . . . like to see some of mine?’
I brought my box of albums in from the car and found Lilly on the veranda, resting on a swinging chair. We sat side by side, and she lifted the first album from the box.
‘I keep everything,’ she murmured. ‘You could probably see from the house, I’m a bit of a hoarder.’
‘It’s a beautiful house,’ I protested, but I knew what she meant. Mum and Dad had lead a streamlined life – everything had a place, or its place was in the bin.
‘I just like to be prepared. I like to plan ahead, it makes me feel peaceful,’ Lilly explained quietly. ‘I think it comes from my Tata. He used to terrify me with stories of not having even the most basic supplies when he lived in Poland. He never could stand to see waste . . . I guess I’m the same these days,’ she rubbed her stomach and grimaced at me, ‘I know I shouldn’t but I’d much sooner eat something than put it in the bin.’ Lilly opened the top album to a page of aged baby photos. ‘So you’ll see, I’ve kept the silliest mementoes, and it’s all a bit of a mess. You’ll have to bear with me.’
‘Is that Simon?’ There were several photos of Lilly and a tiny baby on the first page, and a few with James too. They had obviously been taken soon after the birth – she had that worn-out look of satisfied excitement that new mothers often wear. But there was also an unmistakeable sadness in her gaze as she stared down the barrel of the camera.
‘Yep, this is my boy. Developing photos was so expensive back then but I didn’t dare miss a moment.’ There was an extraordinary amount of photos – not by today’s standards, now that it cost virtually nothing to take a dozen photos and pick out only the best; but Lilly had taken that same approach in the film age. The album held photo after photo of baby Simon, and I watched him grow in slow motion, as she flicked through page after page.
‘So many photos of the three of us together,’ she murmured, running her finger over a candid shot of her, James and Simon. ‘I was so scared I’d lose him somehow and I wouldn’t have a recent photo with him.’
The pain in that simple statement gripped me. I stared at a page of photos of my family and although they were posed in a natural triad, I could almost see the space I should have filled.
‘What year was he born?’
‘We married in ‘75, a few weeks after my eighteenth birthday, and I had Simon at the end of that year. I thought if I had a baby I’d stop missing you quite so much. And Simon was a wonderful, beautiful baby, as you can see . . . but that was just lunacy. You don’t ever stop missing your child.’ She brushed impatiently at the tears on her cheeks and turned to a new page. ‘Here’s Charlotte, she was born the year after Simon. She has my sister’s hair, these wild and crazy ringlets from the time she was a few months old . . . although you wouldn’t know it these days. Charlotte is built like James, even now, she’s taller and skinny as a rake. You were unlucky in that gene lottery,’ Lilly winked at me, but a wink through tear-filled eyes is not heartening at all. Impulsively, I slid my arm around her waist and leant against her. Lilly drew in a shuddering breath and returned my embrace. We stared down at the page together, at the photos of the siblings I’d never known.
‘. . . after Charlotte, we decided that was enough kids.’ Lilly continued unevenly. ‘I’d have had more, if I’d ever found a way to deal with the constant anxiety . . . but I never really did. I love being a Mum, but it’s still the most terrifying aspect of my life.’
She turned to the back page of the album, and there was a single photo, on the only decorated page of the book. There was pink cardboard, and a lace frame, and right in the middle was a faded Polaroid. Lilly was holding a newborn tightly in her arms. Her shoulders were bare. I could see blood and bruises on her wrists and the back of her hand. She was white and gaunt and even in the slightly perished photo I could see the shadows under her eyes, but she was beaming. There was no sadness to the Lilly in this photo, only joy and pride.
‘That’s me, isn’t it?’ I whispered. Lilly squeezed my shoulders.
‘That is one of my most prized possessions in the whole world. I have a copy in our safe, and a copy at my brother’s in case there was a fire, and a laminated copy in my wallet. But I put the original into this book with the other newborn photos, so that no one could ever forget that you were a part of our family.’ Her voice broke.
Staring down at myself in that photo was eerie, recognising my own form in the arms of the woman who knew me before anyone else – but who was also somehow a stranger. I fought and lost a battle against tears, and when I looked down at the page, through my blurred vision Lilly really could have been me. Soon I’d be sitting up in a hospital bed holding a newborn, soon I’d be the one beaming into a camera with exhausted joy.
But that was where the parallels would end.
‘Mrs Baxter took that photo,’ Lilly whispered.
‘Can you tell me . . . about what happened?’
‘What do you want to know?’
It seemed that we’d arrived at the moment that I’d been longing for since I learned about Lilly’s existence. We were neck-deep in a conversation that had no filters and no hesitation; the truth was within my grasp.
‘I really don’t know anything,’ I admitted. ‘Just that you were very young.’
‘I turned sixteen just a few weeks before I was confined,’ Lilly confirmed. ‘James had just gone off to university, and it took me a while to realise I was pregnant. And then Tata bundled me up and dumped me in the maternity home. Do you know much about those places?’
‘Only what I read on Wikipedia.’
‘It was not a nice place, and they were not nice people.’ She was tensing, her breaths becoming shallow and hurried. ‘I’ve been going to a support group for the last few years, for other victims of the forced adoption era. I sit sometimes with the women to help them record their stories, but until I started on that project, I’d almost blanked the worst of it out. The pressure and the lies, and the endless days of back-breaking work – God, it would have been a nightmare for a healthy adult, but pregnant teenagers? It seems inhumane through modern eyes. Then to remove the babies like that . . .’
She shook her head and looked down at the photo in the album again.
‘In my case, I really did have no choice about you, you know,’ she whispered. ‘I was only sixteen. Tata had signed the relinquishment paperwork when he admitted me there. I had no say at all, neither did James, or even James’ parents. We all tried, in our way, but nothing worked and so they took you.’
‘M-mum took me?’ I wasn’t even sure if it was insensitive for me to call her that, and I suddenly decided that from that moment on I’d refer to Mum as Megan.
Lilly looked up at me, and her brown eyes searched mine.
‘What do you know, Sabina?’
‘Not enough,’ I whispered. ‘I barely know anything at all.’
‘You know that she was a social worker at the hospital?’
‘Yes.’
‘There were two of them, her and her boss, Mrs Sullivan. Mrs Sullivan was a vile, cruel monster with a God-complex. But Mrs Baxter – Megan . . .’ Lilly released me gently, and then sat back in the chair and rubbed her eyes for a minute. When she’d finished, she looked to her lap, back to the photo album. ‘She was kind to me – at least, while I was a resident. She was wonderful, actually. I never could remember much of the labour, but I remember her coming in and acting as labour coach when things got really nasty toward the end. But it was more than that. She broke the rules for me, a lot. She’s probably the only reason I made it out of there sane at all.’
‘But?’
‘But she tricked me,’ Lilly said, and she started to cry, her voice rising and then breaking. She sounded like a broken little girl. ‘I can only assume that the k-kindness was an act, part of some cruel game that she decided she would play with me, God only knows why.’ Lilly fumbled in the pocket of her jeans and withdrew a tissue, but she only held it in her hand, playing with it almost nervously. ‘I’ve spent nearly forty years trying to f-figure it out and I just can’t make sense of it even now.’
‘But how? How did she trick you?’
‘It looked like it was all over, and that I’d lost you,’ Lilly explained slowly. She was fighting to keep her tears mild, I could see the way that she held it back, forcing a stilted rhythm to her voice. ‘I knew that you were going to be taken, and then you were taken. I saw you only for a second or two before the nurses took you out of the room, and as terrible as that is, that would have been the end of it.’
Lilly’s face crumpled and she drew in several terse breaths through her nose, before she glanced at me again and whispered,
‘But Mrs Baxter came back the next day, and she brought you to me, and she had come up with this marvellous plan that would allow us to keep you. She quit her job, and she took you home, and once we were married she was going to give you back. I’d always liked her, but for a while after that, she was my hero.’
There was rising static in my ears, the buzzing of dread. I felt like she was describing the mother I’d always known – but I knew that what came next would reveal a side to Mum that I did not want to know, as much as I needed to.
‘What went wrong, Lilly?’ I whispered, when the silence began to stretch.
‘I don’t know,’ Lilly said. With the admission, sadness overwhelmed her, and she started to sob. ‘All I know is that after a few weeks, she rang me and told me she was keeping you.’