CHAPTER 9 Nancy

SPRING 1980

2—5—0—4—6—1.

The leather case opens easily with this new combination of numbers. Nancy’s stomach does a little flip. She carefully lifts the lid.

It’s a set of pale yellow baby booties, hand-knitted, in perfect condition.

Nancy sits there, puzzled. Why would such an ordinary item need to be hidden away like this? Maybe they were her first pair of booties, she thinks. Maybe this box is just for safekeeping, and nothing more. Nancy turns them over in her hands, inspecting them, and feels something hard in one of the toes. She sticks her fingers in and fishes out the culprit—a tiny piece of paper, folded in on itself multiple times.

She unfolds it.

Jane—My name is Margaret Roberts, and I am your mother. I love you. I did not want to give you up. I will never stop searching for you. I hope you have a beautiful life. For the rest of my days, I will always love you.

Nancy’s fingers are shaking so hard that she drops the note.

Shock crashes over her in cold waves. Her ears buzz in the stunning silence of the room and her eyes blur. She feels sick and numb and breathless. Her grandmama’s comment wasn’t a slip of the tongue. She’s been in on the lie, too. Who else knows? How many of her loved ones have been keeping this secret from her?

Nancy snatches up the note, holds it and the booties in her cupped hands like a bomb, steadying her balance. She can sense them heating up, growing heavy. Maybe if she can just keep still enough, lock her gaze, and not even dare to breathe, she can tuck them back in the box and avoid the explosion.

How stupid she’s been. How did she not realize how dangerous it was to open this box? To come looking for it in the first place and idiotically—childishly—set her world spinning on all its axes? She curses her own stubbornness.

Just keep yourself to yourself.

Trying to swallow the sharp dryness in her throat, Nancy lays the booties and note down as gently as she can on the carpet beside the open box, wincing as she pulls her hands away, still waiting for the detonation.

She wipes the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand and stumbles to her feet, lurching to the dresser to pluck a tissue from the box hidden underneath a shiny pink plastic cover. As she blows her nose, she studies the little pile of evidence on the floor. The box is opened wide, like a man’s chest on an autopsy table. It’s glowing in the yellow light flooding into the room from the big window at the end of the hall.

What do I do now? Nancy wonders. Gather up the box and wait downstairs for her parents to come home? Ambush them with a reality they thought was thoroughly hidden? She wants answers to the geyser of questions that just erupted in her mind. What lengths did her parents go to in order to adopt her? What reproductive hell had they been through? Or had they? Was her adoption a gesture of Christian philanthropy, and nothing more? Nancy’s stomach turns into cold steel as it hits her now why her mother has always been so overbearing, so protective.

“Oh, we tried and tried, and then you came along,” her mother had told her once. “Our little gift from God.” Nancy cringes at the memory of what she now knows was a lie. Or a cleverly crafted truth. Looking at the small leather case, she can hardly believe it held a secret this enormous.

She doesn’t know what to do with this information. She can’t hold it in much longer, but she doesn’t know where to put it. It’s taking up every inch of emotional real estate she possesses. It threatens to choke her as it climbs its way up her throat, an insect she’s swallowed whole. She’s feeling everything all at once. She wants to scream at her parents—her parents?—rail against them for keeping her identity a secret for so long, with no indication they were ever planning on telling her.

She can hear children playing out on the street, riding their bicycles in the spring evening. She thinks about her own childhood, full of love and joy and homemade jam. Pretty dresses and teetering piles of gifts at Christmas. Bedtime stories and summer sleepover camps. The best childhood a girl could ask for, really. Her parents are still her parents. They raised her and love her. Has she actually missed out on anything?

Nancy picks up the note in one hand, the yellow booties in the other. She reads the note four more times, the one sentence searing itself on her heart like a brand.

My name is Margaret Roberts, and I am your mother.

Margaret Roberts.

She repeats it over and over in her head, sees the letters appear in her mind’s eye like the leading lady’s name on a movie screen. Only they’re in Margaret’s unfamiliar handwriting. Her mother’s handwriting.

“Who are you?” she asks the walls.

And why did Margaret give Nancy up for adoption when she’s claiming in this scribbled note that she wanted to keep her? Her stomach lurches on a new thought: Why hasn’t she ever tried to find Nancy? If what she says in the note is true, and she never wanted to give her baby up… Nancy’s heart falls at the thought. Maybe she changed her mind after she wrote the note. Maybe she didn’t really want a baby after all.

But her parents did want her. They went out of their way to adopt her, didn’t they? Haven’t they shown Nancy how much she means to them, how much they love her? Do they deserve the pain of knowing their only child distrusted them so much that she snooped around their bedroom to uncover their lie? Maybe they never found this note, hidden in the booties. Or maybe they have and they’ve tried to contact her birth mother. Maybe they’re just trying to protect her.

Maybe.

The sun starts to set. Nancy continues to sit frozen on her parents’ bedroom carpet as the glowing orange light streams through the window.

The room has grown dark by the time she folds up the note and shoves it back down into the toe of the bootie. She places the booties gently back in the box and shuts it, rotates the dials to random numbers.

She walks back over to the open drawer, the contents carefully laid out on top of the dresser, reflecting their placement inside. Nancy lowers the leather box and slides it into its former place in the dusty back corner. She sighs deeply before replacing the other items and closing The Drawer. She leaves the room on legs that don’t quite feel like they belong to her. She can smell her mother’s perfume still. It follows her out of her parents’ bedroom like an accusatory lover.

She pauses at the top of the stairs to listen to the ghosts.

Her mother calling her name from the sitting room, beckoning her down to walk the six blocks to mass on Sunday mornings. Her father’s gruff but loving voice muttering, “Good night, Beetle,” as he turned off the light and closed her bedroom door, leaving it open just a crack so the moonlight from the hallway window could creep into Nancy’s room, soothing her fear of the dark. The creak of the floorboard right outside her bedroom, so inconvenient for sneaking in after curfew.

Nancy runs her hand along the banister, remembering how she screamed down at Frances from this very spot during their first blowout argument. It was about Nancy moving out to go to university.

“But it’s only a few streetcar stops away!” Her mother protested. “You’re not even married! Why do you want to leave us? What will people think?”

Nancy’s father calmed her mother down eventually, reminding her that Nancy was an adult and would be leaving home sometime soon anyway. He understood Nancy’s need for independence, for time away from her mother’s constant supervision. He isn’t a man of many words, and runs his household in the manner of a good-natured health inspector. But he loves Nancy deeply and she’s always known he would do almost anything for her.

Nancy descends the stairs in a trance and wanders into the kitchen, flipping on some lights that flicker to life, illuminating the gleaming countertops. She fills up the kettle and busies herself with some Earl Grey leaves, spilling them when she misses the edge of the tea ball. She absently sweeps them off the counter into her hand and shakes them into the garbage bin beneath the sink. A minute later, the kettle’s whistle makes her jump and she nearly burns her wrist in her haste to get it off the stove.

Tears are welling in her eyes now as she watches the brown tea bloom inside the porcelain cup. She shoves her hand into the box of Peak Freans on the counter and stuffs a whole raspberry cream cookie into her mouth, immediately hears her mother’s admonishment in her head for demonstrating such appalling manners.

Her mother. Her mother is Margaret Roberts.

Nancy lets the tears slip down her face. The only sound comes from the grandfather clock in the hallway. It ticks in time with Nancy’s thoughts as they fall into place, one after another.

“My name is Jane.”

She says the words aloud to the empty kitchen. No one heard. No one will know.

When Nancy finishes her tea, she washes the cup and sets it in the drying rack. The kitchen now smells like the lemon dish soap her mother has always used, and it takes Nancy back to childhood Saturdays, watching Frances clean the floors while she helped with the dishes.

She can’t confront her parents about this. At least not tonight. She needs to get back to her apartment, where ghosts don’t lurk in every corner and she can think clearly, rationally about this.

As she heads for the front door, she holds her breath against the citrus scent. For the rest of Nancy’s life, guilt and betrayal will smell like lemon dish soap.