The Secrets She Keeps

by Jolie Moore

  “What are you going to do, Apa, Oma?” She looked between the two of them. “Disown me? That’s so twentieth century,” I yelled back, trembling with the force of my fury.

  “Ye,” Apa said, turning away toward the sliding glass doors.

  “Andrew, I think we should go,” I said.

  He looked bewildered. Slowly it dawned on me, the exchange had been entirely in Korean. “We have to go now,” I said softly.

  “I don’t—”

  Of course he didn’t understand. His family had had three hundred years to get used to the American way of life. My parents were barely at a quarter century. He brought the bags outside while I found the keys and backed my car out of the garage. My dad had done what he always did. He’d kept the little BMW running and in pristine condition while I was away at school. God forbid I didn’t have transportation to get me to and from my hospital internships during the summers.

  Once he loaded the bags in the hatchback, Andrew slid into the passenger seat. His left hand grasped mine for a long moment.

  “Where to?” my fiancé had asked, ready to follow me anywhere.

  “Where to?” Lucas asked. The similarity of the question was jarring. It pulled me from the past to the present. When I didn’t answer right away, he followed up with, “Where were you?”

  I blinked and looked around. On the 405 freeway headed south toward San Diego was the literal answer. For a long moment I wondered how I’d gotten here. I knew I’d woke up, taken a shower, gotten dressed. Stepped into Lucas’ car. But how had I gotten entangled in his search for his mother is what I needed to know. On so many levels this was an excruciatingly bad idea. This man was not a way for me to work out my demons even though I was using him for just that both in and out of bed.

  When I didn’t say anything, Lucas smoothed his hand down my thigh. I looked down at his big hand and got all tingly thinking about ways I’d like him to touch me. The flood of guilt that followed squelched all good feeling.

  “Daydreaming,” I said flatly.

  “What kind of things do you dream about, Nari?”

  His deep voice vibrated across my chest. I sat on the fence half ready to lie. To do what I always did, make up something pretty, nice, socially acceptable. “I invited Andrew to my parent’s house during Thanksgiving of my senior year.”

  Lucas flicked the signal bar, harder than I thought was necessary, switched lanes, then did it again to pass a slow moving tractor trailer that was parting the stream of traffic like a rock in the center of rapids. “How did that go?”

  “Very badly,” I said. “I thought I knew them. Thought they’d be happy for me.” But I’d misjudged so badly that the weekend had me rethinking every decision I’d made since graduating from kindergarten. Feeling like I was on the verge of another maudlin woe-is-me moment, I changed the subject. “Do you want to talk about where we’re going?”

  Lucas glanced at a map he’d laid on the dashboard and moved over to the right lane. Ten minutes later, we were pulling up to a wide space in a tree-lined mini mall. Its beige stucco exterior was no different than the buildings across the six-lane expanse of roadway. “I need something,” he said.

  I followed him into the coffee shop. He stood and looked at the menu so long that the baristas moved away from the register and started polishing already gleaming surfaces.

  “Sit. I’ll order.” I got him a cappuccino and myself one of those blended ice drinks I could nurse for half the day. Bittersweet confections weren’t my thing, but I didn’t like to make waves. Lucas didn’t need to be worrying about my drink preferences right now.

  I brought back the coffees and joined him at the table. “How did you contact this woman?”

  Lucas looked down at the papers he’d gripped in his hand for much of the trip. “Laura Wallace.” He took a long sip. “One of the adoption websites. Our dates and hospital match up.”

  “Did you get a picture?” I didn’t say this time, but I’m sure Lucas got my implication.

  “No.” Lucas grasped and released the documents.

  “Give those to me,” I said. He handed me the papers he’d lifted from the passenger seat when he’d picked me up that morning.

  While he sipped from the tall paper cup, I looked. Other than a map to the woman’s house, he had a heavily redacted birth certificate and a print out of information from the adoption seeker website. Lucas didn’t have anything else in his short stack. I’d have asked for family pictures, I think. Make sure it was the right tall curly haired blonde. But maybe all of that would come later. There wasn’t a protocol, that I knew of, for finding your birth parents.

  I tried not to let my breath accelerate as I imagined myself in Laura Wallace’s shoes. Maybe I’d never have to face this. If she wasn’t looking and I wasn’t looking, one day I could forget.

  Smoothing out the papers, I looked at the map. “What time are you supposed to be there?”

  “I told her around eleven.”

  I stood. “Then…”

  I took over navigation while Lucas drove to Imperial Avenue. The squat home was goldenrod. That was the only way to describe the intense yellowness of the stucco. Unlike many of the other homes surrounding it though, it was freshly painted.

  With the engine off, the roar of the nearby 805 freeway almost drowned out the sound of our beating hearts. I knew why he was so nervous. My near panic, I couldn’t explain.

  The way I tamped down the panic was with action. So I didn’t wait for Lucas. I got out of the car and strode to the door. Before I could find and push the bell a tall, blond woman answered. Relief for Lucas flooded my veins. If this woman didn’t share his DNA, then I’d give back my medical license. It wasn’t a mistake this time.

  “I’m Nari.” I extended my hand.

  “Laura Wallace,” she responded out of politeness. Her screwed up features told me she hadn’t been expecting some Korean woman to wash up on her doorstep like driftwood from the nearby beach.

  I moved out of her line of sight, tilted my head toward the curb. “That’s Lucas.”

  “They kept your name,” Laura whispered. Lucas walked toward her, each step as slow as if he were walking through ankle high wet sand.

  Lucas hunched and leaned and looked like he wanted to hug this woman, but something censored him. Instead, he offered his hand. She grasped it instead of shaking. Turning it over, back and forth, examining every lifeline, every knuckle, every hair.

  I looked from mother to son. There was a connection there that had never been severed. Damn. I spied a neighbor watching us curiously. I wanted this moment to be private for the both of them.

  “Can we?” I gestured toward the open front door.

  “Of course, I’m sorry, I…”

  “No need to apologize,” I said.

  “Sit, sit.” A puffy butter yellow leather sofa and loveseat filled the small living room. I took a seat on the edge of one. I had to pull Lucas down next to me. The woman excused herself and came back with a small three ring binder. She sat on the couch cattycorner to us and opened the cover. With shaking hands she pulled apart the binder’s rings and pulled out a single plastic sheet. Within it was a single piece of paper.

  Even upside down, I could see it was a Certificate of Live Birth from the state of Hawaii. Shifting forward, Lucas took the page and laid it on the coffee table. He pulled out his own redacted document and laid them side by side.

  To my untrained forensic eye, they looked identical. For long minutes, we all looked at the papers. I took in the information like I was memorizing a medical history before presenting at rounds. If questioned I would certainly be able to give you his vitals: Pulse racing. Blood pressure elevated.

  “William Coates?” he asked, glancing up at Laura. He looked away quickly as if having his mother within his sight was simply too much to take in.

  “Your father.”

  “He was in the U.S. Navy?”

  “Yes. Stationed in Kauai, Norfolk, Korea for a stint, then here
last.”

  I knew where these questions were going. I wanted to get up and leave. Staying felt like foreshadowing. And this is a scene I didn’t want to play out for the future. I looked around, but saw little ornamentation in the place. There was nothing for me to impolitely fiddle with. It was as if she’d only lived here for a few months, or was staying in corporate housing. It was that impersonal.

  “Is he alive?”

  Laura hesitated. “Yes.”

  “Why did you give me away?” I looked away when I heard his voice crack. It took all my will to bury my fight or flight response. Because I wanted to run.

  Chapter 16

  Lucas

  Nari drove my car with the fluidity of a racecar driver. Her grip on the steering wheel was sure and her movements swift, darting around traffic with a confidence probably born of a lifetime of driving. I imagined California girls came into this world with a set of car keys in their hands instead of a rattle.

  I still hadn’t gotten used to the six to twelve lanes of traffic that were considered normal here. No tall pines or leafy deciduous trees lined the San Diego Freeway. It was nothing like Vermont with one driving lane and one passing lane that sometimes expanded to three around big towns. New England was pretty and utilitarian at the same time. This dusty desert was all utility.

  Instead, big box stores and mini malls littered the exits. I tried not to feel maudlin about the distance, both physical and emotional, from my family. A single decision had changed my childhood from military brat to professor’s son.

  “I could have grown up here, maybe,” I said. “Like you.”

  Most doctors learned to hide their emotions. The whole day Nari had been more clinical than off duty. When she took a hand from the wheel and released her hair from its confines, it was oddly sensual and made her more vulnerable, approachable. The silken strands cascaded down to her shoulder, obscuring much of her face. She never wore her hair out. I took the action as an opening.

  “Were you born in California?”

  Her eyes left the traffic and assessed me. I didn’t know if I’d passed or failed her test, but she answered me nonetheless. “New Jersey.”

  I don’t know why that surprised me. She seemed Southern California through and through. “When did you move out here?”

  “I was two or three. I don’t remember being back east.”

  “What’s it like? California?” For the briefest moment, I was willing to indulge in my childhood fantasies of how my life could have been different. Of all the scenarios I’d considered, the child of a military officer had never crossed my mind. Lovers torn apart by war, a teenage mother hiding from her parents. But never this. This was too cold and calculating to have imagined.

  Nari’s “Nothing like television,” interrupted my thought process.

  “Didn’t surf to school in the morning?” I asked, trying to sound lighthearted when I was anything but.

  Her spontaneous laugh was low and delicious. I was suddenly very glad I’d brought her along. “Kind of hard to do in the IE.”

  Inland Empire, I translated in my head. Somewhere east toward the desert if not in it. No one here was from plain old Los Angeles. Everyone had something else to add—this valley or that one, the hills, the basin, the beach, the South Bay. Sometimes I felt like I needed to bring a map to every conversation. Maybe one day I’d get the geography, abbreviations and acronyms. Or maybe I wouldn’t stay that long.

  “What did you think of Laura?” I needed a clear-eyed opinion. Maybe I was being too harsh. I’d never been a woman faced with a choice.

  “She was…nice.” Nari pulled her diplomatic, dispassionate doctor’s voice.

  “Do you believe her?” Because I didn’t. Because it couldn’t be that simple. Her husband—my father—I corrected in my mind had said he didn’t want a child. And just like that, I went from being a Coates to a Tucker. Nothing in Laura’s, my biological mother’s—my real mother’s demeanor had cried agony or yearning.

  She hesitated a long time. I realized I’d probably asked her to cross a minefield, blindfolded.

  “I believe she thought what she was doing was absolutely necessary to save her marriage.”

  “She had parents, a sister. I think she could have taken care of me.”

  “Your father wasn’t faithful. She was far from the mainland, on a base. I’m sure her choices seemed limited.”

  “But surely she could have gotten a plane ticket home to Minnesota.” And chosen me. The first choice of my young life and she’d chosen her husband over me, her first born son.

  “Are you going to look for your dad?”

  “I don’t know.” Why would I seek out a man who hadn’t wanted me before I’d been more than a glimmer in his eye? “He had a part in this. He knew Laura was pregnant but didn’t give up the other women. Didn’t do anything to assure her that he was going to be there for her and a baby.”

  “She followed him to Korea.” Nari was so damned even handed. As if the choice between a man and a defenseless, helpless child weren’t a false one.

  “She made a single irreparable decision.” I hated people who blamed the mother. I hated the branch of psychology that said everything was the mother’s fault. But maybe the scale wasn’t exactly even. A mother had greater responsibility. It probably wasn’t fair, but it was unerringly true. “She changed my life forever,” I said with finality. I was squarely in the maternal blame camp now, and I didn’t give a damn about the rightness of it. About whether I was being a proper feminist ally. My mother had given me away like I was a purse or a pair of shoes she didn’t like.

  “I don’t understand,” Nari said, sounding genuinely perplexed. As if she hadn’t just sat in the living room of the woman who’d tossed me away like a used tissue. “You love your mother and father right? The people who adopted you.”

  “I do.” I did. I would be forever grateful to Joyce and Matthew Tucker for essentially saving my life. Making me their own. Loving me even though we shared no genetic material.

  “You didn’t have some tragic upbringing where you were beaten or starved or shoved into the basement, right?” Nari said, her plain tone indicative of her train of thought.

  “No. Far from that.” I’d had nothing but love, acceptance, and encouragement. I pushed the last few months of nearly stony silence from my mind.

  “So maybe it turned out for the best. You had two stable parents who loved each other. You had a brother and sister who looked up to you.”

  “Christian and Brooke aren’t exactly speaking to me right now.”

  “The Tuckers paid for you to go to Dartmouth?” She plowed on, arguing the case for adoption.

  “At a discount, but yeah they helped with college and med school. No mortgage-size debt here.” Staying local had put me in a much better financial position than many of my med school classmates, many of whom worked a second job doing overnights in needy hospitals or shifts on the county jail ward.

  “That’s a lot more than most kids get. I’m not saying you should be grateful, or you shouldn’t wonder what might have been. But it probably turned out for the best. You heard what Laura said once you told her about your life. She said it was the best possible outcome she could have hoped for.” Nari paused for a long moment, weaving between slow cars. “I’m sure she went to sleep every single night wondering what had happened to you. Were you safe? Were you warm? Were you happy? Had she delivered you into the arms of child molesters or abusers? She probably worried whether you were hungry or somehow locked in a closet like those awful true crime cable shows. Be happy or at least content. You had everything. You had love. A mother who gives up the child of their flesh would only want to know those things.”

  Nari’s aptitude for empathy was unnerving. She sounded as if she knew of this particular agony firsthand. Her patients must love her ability to put herself in their shoes and understand their choices. Finally at my building, I pushed the overhead button and the gate opened. Hesitant for the first time
, Nari inched forward until she found my spot, then deftly backed the car into the narrow space. After turning off the ignition, she pulled the keys and dropped them in my hand.

  “You want to come up?”

  Her hesitation was not great for my ego. But I didn’t want to be alone right now. I didn’t know why. But the thought of hours alone contemplating my mother’s choice—or her sacrifice, depending on how I framed it—was as appealing as laying on a bed of nails.

  Eventually she said, “Sure, I guess.”

  We rode the elevator in silence. I turned on the lights and she followed me in, leaving her shoes and purse by the door, perching precariously on the edge of the couch cushion. My mother, my adoptive mother that was, had always asked if my siblings and I wanted to stay for dinner when we were like this, unsettled in our own skin, looking as skittish as kittens. If I made her this nervous, then maybe her feelings for me were growing like mine were for her. I watched Nari, who was lost in thought. Unguarded, she was so beautiful, fragile. I could easily fall in love with her. She was everything I hadn’t known I was looking for.

  Not wanting to be caught watching her, I stepped away. I brought us both cool glasses of water and sat next to her. The skintight jeans and a purple blouse that looked like it would fall off with a flick of my finger left little to the imagination. I nudged her with my knee and heat stole up my leg. I wasn’t usually someone who belabored a point, but I needed her to understand that something about Laura Wallace’s story didn’t ring true.

  “I know you don’t have any children. But could you imagine giving birth to a child and handing it off to someone taking him or her to parts unknown?”

  Chapter 17

  Nari

  The water I’d just drank, the lemonade Laura had served, and the overly sweet frou-frou coffee drink threatened to come up right then.

  “Excuse me,” I said and made for the master bedroom. I slammed the door and threw the lock on the en suite bathroom. I sat on the lowered toilet lid and swallowed profusely. I felt like my heart was going to come up out of my chest along with today’s drink menu.