Lost At Sea

by Erica Boyce

  Maureen had nodded along, but really, she felt a little smug about it. She may have dealt with the whispers at the grocery store, and her bookings may have gone down a bit lately. And when Lacey asked after various people around town during Maureen’s visits, she may not have known how to answer. But at least she had Diane. Diane would always stick by her and support her, no matter what anyone else said.

  And then gradually, over the course of the month, Diane grew more distant. She stopped calling to ask how Lacey was doing. When Maureen rehashed something her caseworker had said or fretted about a new medical study she’d read online, Diane no longer answered in full sentences. When Maureen told her about all the things she was doing to prepare for Lacey’s return, to “ease the transition,” Diane looked up from her phone and snapped, “She’s going to have to face the consequences of her decisions sooner or later, no matter what you do.”

  After that, Maureen stopped calling Diane and started texting excuses to get out of their standing coffee dates. Deep down, she knew Diane was right: Lacey was the victim of her own bad choices, and Maureen should not have let her make them. She couldn’t bear seeing the truth of it reflected in Diane’s disapproving eyes anymore. They’d barely spoken since Lacey got home.

  And Diane made no effort to reach out to Maureen, either. Whenever the guilt was replaced with an anger in Maureen’s stomach that simmered into a full boil, she told herself it probably wasn’t easy for Diane, either, watching a girl who was once so close to her own daughter spiral out of control like that. Maybe she was worried it would happen to Ella one day.

  * * *

  Ella opened her door for Lacey right away and scampered back to her desk so that by the time Lacey entered the room, her face was lit bright white by her computer. It was a hand-me-down desktop from when her mom used to work from home, and a growl rose from her while she waited for her search results to load.

  “Hey, kidlet,” Lacey said, her fingers still on the doorknob. “I heard about your dad.”

  “He’s not gone, if that’s what you think.” Ella shook the mouse one more time before meeting Lacey’s eyes, her chin jutting out. “He’s not.”

  Lacey sighed and finally walked over. “Ella, I know it’s tough. Your mom’s really worried about you—”

  “She should be. I know what she did.”

  “What? What did she do?” Lacey gripped the back of Ella’s chair.

  “She made my dad leave us, and now I’m going to find him.”

  Silence. Lacey inhaled, but before she could say anything, Ella groaned and spun around to face her. “Will you help me with this, please?”

  Lacey bent down to her eye level and lowered her voice so it was all soft. “Sweetie, Jess heard it all on the VHF radio. I think he’s really gone.”

  Ella grimaced at the pet name. “Please?” Ella clasped her hands below her chin. “I really need you. I’ve missed you.”

  Lacey stood up and paused. Her shoulders fell. “Okay. Fine.” It had been so long since someone had asked for her help rather than insisting that she needed theirs. And when Ella finished her search and finally accepted the truth—well, Lacey would be there for her.

  “Yes!” Ella clapped and turned back to her computer. “I heard my mom yelling at my dad the night before he left. He tried to sell his wedding ring, so I wanna find out where he went to sell it. Maybe he went back there, or maybe he told them something when he was there. But when I googled places to buy rings around here, it came up with, like, a million results.”

  “The pawn shop on Columbus gives the best prices in town. It was probably that.” Lacey sat on the edge of the bed and pulled the keyboard toward her. She took a deep breath before typing anything.

  “Hey, don’t worry,” Ella said. “We’ll find him. I know it.”

  Lacey smiled a little. “Here. That’s the address.” She pointed at the screen.

  “Wow. You’re really good at this.” Ella stared at the address for a minute. It was less than a mile away. She glanced sideways at Lacey. “Did you ever try to look for your real mom?”

  “My real mom is downstairs.” Lacey pushed the keyboard back into place.

  “No, no.” Ella rolled her eyes. “Your real mom. You know, the one who gave birth to you?”

  Lacey bent her head down between her knees and gathered her hair into a ponytail. When she came back up, her face was flushed. “No,” she said, but she avoided Ella’s gaze. She didn’t want her to see the lie.

  Chapter Ten

  It was no secret that Lacey was adopted. It never had been. She and Maureen almost could’ve passed as biological, though; they were both thin and pale with a little bit of grace in their limbs. Sometimes, Lacey wished Maureen had pretended they were biological so that she could live in a fantasy bubble where it was just the two of them with nobody else out there to tug on them.

  Maureen thought it was important for Lacey to “know her past” and to know that Maureen loved that part of her, too. When Lacey was small, Maureen bought her a picture book, On the Day You Were Adopted. It was cheaply made, with softly focused illustrations. Maureen had read it to Lacey over and over again until the binding admitted defeat. Maureen’s sister once asked her at a family Thanksgiving if she was sad she couldn’t have her own children. Maureen had stared at her and circled one arm around Lacey’s little shoulders. “What do you mean? Lacey is my own.” They didn’t see her sister very often after that.

  Adoption was such a part of her that for a while, she even bragged about it. On her first day of kindergarten, she asked the boy who shared her desk if he’d been adopted, too.

  “Adopted?” he said, his face all screwed up. “What’s that?”

  “It’s when your real parents go to the hospital and get you from your first parents,” she explained patiently. “I was adopted on my birthday. October 9, 1998,” she said, chest puffed out.

  The boy still looked confused. “I only have real parents.”

  “You’re not adopted, then.” She shook her head until the tip of her ponytail whipped at her face. “You’re not special, like I am.”

  Apparently, this was more information than the boy could take. He burst into tears. The teacher hurried over and knelt by his side to ask what was the matter. The story came out between his hitching breaths while Lacey drew a dog on her brand-new notepad.

  “Don’t worry, Brian,” the teacher said. “You’re right! You only have one mommy and one daddy. Most people do.” Lacey glanced up. The teacher looked over at her, and her eyes widened a little. “Which makes you extra special, Lacey!”

  Brian scowled. Lacey beamed.

  When she grew older, once a month, she allowed herself to google her birth date and hospital along with all the flecks of information she knew: Maureen’s name, her birth mother’s approximate age. It always came up cluttered with useless search results. She knew it would.

  One time, in fourth grade, her mom had caught her. “Whatcha looking at?”

  Her mom’s hand on her shoulder startled her. She didn’t have time to close the window. “We Can Help You Find Your Birth Parents!” it promised. She knew the words would hurt Maureen’s feelings. The company required you to be at least eighteen before they’d search for you anyway. They all did.

  Maureen sighed. “I wish it’d been an open adoption so we could’ve met her,” she said.

  “I know, Mom,” Lacey said. She leaned back into her mom’s arms. Closed adoptions were increasingly rare. More and more, adoptees were telling stories on the forums about birthdays spent with both sets of parents and update letters sent to the birth mom complete with photos. Lacey was one of the chosen few with a closed adoption.

  Maureen didn’t believe in God—“I’m an agnostic, not an atheist,” she said, whatever that meant—so her options had been limited. Most of the domestic adoption agencies mentioned Christ in every brochure and
on every page of their website. Many of them had told Maureen under no uncertain terms that they preferred their children to go to good, Christian homes with two parents. “We believe a child flourishes with both a mother and a father,” they’d told her primly during her screening interviews. By the time Lacey was born, Maureen had been on the agency’s list for three years and no longer felt she had any say over whether the adoption was open or closed.

  “I’ve got an idea,” her mom said, squeezing her close.

  Lacey smiled a little, waiting for her to suggest funfetti pancakes or her famous mint brownie sundae.

  Maureen said, “What if we take a trip back to Devil’s Purse, where you were born?”

  “Really?” Lacey turned to face her.

  “Definitely. One weekend this summer, okay? I want you to see where you came from,” Maureen said, and her smile wiggled almost imperceptibly.

  It took two flights and an hour-long car ride for them to get there from Minnesota. By the time Maureen pulled the car into the town beach parking lot, it was dark, and Lacey was hopped up on Twizzlers and the Cokes she’d ordered from the stewardesses while her mom slept.

  “Let’s get some air before we check into the hotel,” Maureen said as she parked.

  They left their shoes and socks by the asphalt path to the beach. Lacey watched the still-warm sand sift between her toes. There were only a couple of people left, everyone else gone back to their houses for dinner. They walked all the way down to the water. Lacey shivered, surprised, as the ocean coiled around her ankles—it was almost as cold as a Duluth winter, and her skin reddened instantly at its touch. She thought it would feel more natural to her. Even though she was born here, her body didn’t seem to know the ocean.

  Maureen wound her sweater tighter around her middle. “I came here while I was waiting for you to be born.”

  Lacey stared. She thought she’d heard every possible story about her birth, every moment, but this one was new.

  Maureen pushed a tangle of hair back from Lacey’s forehead, blown there by a damp wind. “When the agency called, I rushed straight to the hospital. There’s a lot of hurry up and wait involved with giving birth. The waiting room was making me nervous, all those balloons and the vending machine coffee. So I drove here for a break. I stood in this exact spot.”

  The water stretched darkly toward the horizon. The stars were a perfect, pure white. Maureen said, “I know it sounds crazy, but I felt like the waves were whispering something to me that night. They were telling me it was okay, that you were going to be fine. I felt so at home in that moment. So at peace.”

  Lacey listened hard, but the waves wouldn’t tell her anything. Just a quiet, constant hush.

  “And then my beeper buzzed,” her mom said, “and you were here.” She leaned over and tucked one arm behind Lacey’s knees and swept her, giggling, up to her chest, swinging her around while the water sloshed noisily at her feet. Lacey gripped her mom’s neck tightly, at first so she wouldn’t fall and then because she knew Maureen needed her to.

  When Maureen finally put her down, her smile went all the way to her eyes. “Maybe it’s time for us to move back here,” she said. “What do you think?”

  So they did. Before the school year even started, her mom had found a small house and a job, and everywhere they went, Lacey watched women closely. Was she the checkout girl who winked and snuck her a stick of gum? Was she the real estate agent whose face was posted on half the for-sale signs around town? Before, her fantasies about finding her birth parents were just that: fantasies. Now, though, her biological mom might actually be nearby—never mind that she didn’t know if the woman had been from Devil’s Purse or simply passing through or if she still lived in Massachusetts at all. She could be here.

  Maureen posted a countdown of the number of months until Lacey turned eighteen and the state would allow them to request information about her biological parents. There were ninety-seven months. During her study periods at school, she sometimes went to the library and paged through yearbooks from before she was born to see if she recognized anyone.

  And then, in eighth grade, they had their first sex ed unit. It was hard to learn much of anything useful with the giant, mysterious diagrams of private parts projected on the white board. The teacher did her best to stay blasé, but her class was, by turns, horrified and hilarious. Finally, she literally threw up her hands and said, “Just keep it in your pants for now, okay?” The students roared with laughter, and she shouted, “But know that you do have options if you end up with something…unwanted.”

  For some reason, Lacey’s stomach clenched at that. The beetle, by now a familiar presence, started to move, which she thought was silly, since she was hardly in danger of doing any of the disgusting things the teacher had told them about. The beetle never really listened to reason, though.

  The teacher began to hand stacks of brochures down the rows of desks. Most of the students stuck the pamphlets under their binders, to be left behind at the end of the class. A few slipped them into their backpacks when they thought no one was looking. Lacey fanned them out on her desk and stared. There were three of them, pink, with stock photos of thirtysomething models meant to look like distraught teenagers. They were titled “STDs and You,” “So You’re Pregnant. Now What?” and “Putting Your Baby Up for Adoption.”

  The teacher had given up entirely and was sitting at her desk, flipping through her planner. While the classroom descended into mayhem around her, Lacey slowly opened the third brochure.

  There were more photos inside: one of a very pregnant woman holding one hand to her belly and the other to her forehead, evidently in pain or confusion, and another of that same woman standing in front of a middle-aged couple in khakis and polos. The man’s hair was copious and swept back, and the woman wore pearls. Lacey forced herself to focus on the text.

  “A child is a blessing,” it read, “but for you, it may not be a wanted one. Rest assured, there are plenty of hopeful couples ready and willing for you to put your baby up for adoption.”

  So that was it, then. That word: unwanted. That was her. She knew in an instant that was why she felt so ill. She knew the beetle would never let her forget that word and who she was. She folded the brochure up small until it was a pudgy little square she couldn’t fold anymore and tossed it on the floor. She ground the heel of her shoe against it until she could feel it through the sole, a sharp, dusty pebble.

  She hardly said anything at dinner that night. She shrugged when her mom asked her how her day was. When Maureen scooped three different types of pureed squash onto her plate—she was testing out recipes—Lacey drew the tines of her fork through them all so they were indistinguishable. Maureen took the hint and let her eat in silence, but after she’d loaded the dishes into the dishwasher, she pulled a chair up close to Lacey’s.

  “All right,” she said. “What’s the deal?” She leaned forward, elbows on thighs, hands clasped, ready to problem solve.

  Lacey stared down at her napkin. “Nothing,” she muttered.

  Maureen raised one eyebrow and waited.

  When the silence grew too full, Lacey burst. “Why did you want me?” she said.

  Surprise fluttered across Maureen’s face. She coughed. “I could lie to you and tell you I always knew I was going to adopt. That I was charity-minded and worried about the state of the world or whatever.” She reached for the salt-and-pepper shakers and pushed them together so their shoulders clicked, two little soldiers in the middle of the table. “But the truth is, I wanted a kid. More than anything in the world, I wanted one. And the minute they put you in my arms, I knew it was you. You were the one I’d waited for.” Maureen pulled Lacey’s chin up until they were staring at each other. It was cheesy, but Lacey nodded.

  “And besides,” her mom continued, wiggling Lacey’s chin back and forth, “my body was all busted up from all those years of dancing
. I didn’t want to spend all that money on treatments just so I could have a bio kid. You know you can lose your period if you exercise too much, right? It’s true. Your old mom can’t menstruate.”

  Lacey groaned. “Gross. TMI.” But she’d looked it up on one of the school computers. Adoption was just as expensive as a round of IVF. Maybe some part of her mom really had known she was meant for Lacey.

  She stopped looking for her biological mom after that. She decided she didn’t care. She lived in fear, in fact, of looks of recognition passing over strangers’ faces and out-of-the-blue questions about where and when she was born. She didn’t want to learn who had given her up.

  Her mom never let it go, though. She kept the countdown on the fridge faithfully. Once, Lacey overheard her on the phone, saying, “It’s not fair, you know? A kid deserves to know she’s loved, from every angle. I don’t want her growing up and feeling like she’s missing anything.”

  Part of Lacey wondered if it was all an act and her mom was only doing what she thought she should do. Lacey’d read so many stories online about adoptive parents who feared the biological ones would want to take their child back and burst into tears when their kids announced they were searching for their biological parents. One woman wrote an entire post titled “Am I Not Enough?” Lacey could only read it for five minutes before she closed it in disgust.

  On the morning of her eighteenth birthday, her mom was sitting at the kitchen table, grinning expectantly. There was a sheet of paper laid out next to her cereal bowl. “Happy birthday, baby,” Maureen said as Lacey squinted at it. It was an application to the adoption agency requesting non-identifiable information—the nameless, faceless facts that were the first step in any search for biological parents.

  One month later, in November, there was an envelope waiting for her by the front door when she came home from school. “Open it! Open it!” Her mom danced around her before she’d even taken off her backpack.