Then she reaches the results of the DNA test.
“How did they get these DNA results?” she asks.
“I’m not sure. He worked for my ex-
boyfriend, I never met him. But I think he probably followed you and took it off a cup of coffee you discarded, or something like that.”
Josephine closes the folder slowly and looks up at me. It’s only when our eyes meet that I see the tears in hers.
“Olive,” she says quietly, pressing her index finger into her eye to make it stop. “I am your mother.”
I sit here, dumbfounded, until she throws her arms around me. “I’ve been looking for you for…so long,” she whispers into my ear.
Tears start to well up and stream down my face.
I wipe them off but more come.
After a few moments, I give up and just let myself cry.
We hold each other for some time before we finally pull away. This is so beyond the response that I thought I would get.
At first, she seemed quiet, cold even, but now I realize she just wanted to make sure that I was really who I was saying I was before confirming.
“Tell me about yourself,” Josephine says. “Tell me everything.”
I don’t know where to start but I take a deep breath and just begin.
I tell her about how I grew up and about my family. I gloss over the addiction and my brother being in prison.
We have just met and I don’t want to dump all the shit from my life directly in her lap.
I’m not family, so I focus on myself. I tell her about all of the studying that I did in high school and Wellesley College.
“Oh my God, you went to Wellesley!” she shrieks. “Wow, that’s such a great school.”
“I’m so relieved you’ve heard of it,” I say. “You’d be surprised how many haven’t.”
“It’s one of the best liberal colleges around. It’s steeped in history. I’m so proud of you!”
I give her a small smile but then my lips part on their own and I grin from ear to ear.
I don’t know how long I have wanted my mother to say that to me.
More tears start to collect. I sniff my nose to try to make them go away.
“What’s wrong? What did I say?” she asks, draping her arm around my shoulder.
“I’m just so…relieved that you are happy to see me,” I mumble. “I wasn’t sure how you would react with just some stranger coming into your life completely unannounced.”
She gives me a squeeze and a peck on the cheek.
I want to ask her what happened and why she gave me up but I want to know more about her first.
“Did you go to college?” I ask.
She nods.
“After I moved out here to California, I went to Santa Monica College, which is a community college, and then I transferred to USC. That’s where I graduated from.”
“Wow, University of Southern California. That’s a pretty big deal.”
“I liked it a lot. That’s where my husband and I met.”
She points to the picture on the wall. I look at him more carefully.
He has trustworthy eyebrows and a strong Roman nose.
“So, you have been together ever since?” I ask.
“We’ve been together since my second semester there, since I was twenty,” she says.
Suddenly, a gulf forms in between everything that we should be talking about and what we are actually talking about.
I try to keep the conversation going on this level but I simply can’t.
I look up at her and see her watching me.
“Why don’t you ask me what you came here to ask me?” Josephine says quietly.
14
Olive
When I ask her…
I sit back into the couch, trying to make myself as small as possible. I want to know, of course, but I don’t want to ask.
I don’t want this beautiful moment between us to dissipate.
“Why did you give me up?” I ask, swallowing hard.
“I didn’t,” she says quietly.
Then she moves to the edge of her chair and puts her hands on my knee. “You have to believe me, Olive. You were the only thing I wanted and what happened to you wasn’t up to me.”
I don’t know how to process this. My fingers go numb and my stomach starts to do somersaults.
“What do you mean?” I manage to ask.
“Your father and I were deeply in love,” she says, biting her lower lip as if thinking about him still gives her pain to this very day. “My parents didn’t approve. His mother didn’t either. We were rich. He was poor. According to my father, he didn’t belong in our prep school even though he was probably the smartest kid there.”
I nod.
“His name was Danny Lebold.”
From the folder, I knew his name but not anything else about him except that she took his name at one point.
Wait, a second.
She used past tense.
I look up at her trying not to let my mind go there.
“Danny died in a car accident,” she says slowly. “The night that we were supposed to run away together. I waited for him and he never showed up. I later learned that his car got pushed out into traffic by another car and someone going sixty miles an hour ran into his driver’s door, killing him instantly.”
I put my hand over my mouth and shake my head.
“Everyone said it was an accident but I didn’t believe it. Not then, not now.”
“What do you think happened?”
“I think my father organized the whole thing. I don’t have any proof but he would do anything to stop us.”
“You really think he did that?” I ask, trying to figure out if she actually just told me that my grandfather put a hit out on my father.
“I had my doubts before but after I ran away to California by myself to keep you safe, they found me. I started having contractions and I checked into a hospital. They had their investigative team all around the country working on it and they found me.”
She stops talking for a moment, trying to collect her thoughts. I want to urge her to keep talking but I give her some time.
“The labor wasn’t going well. It was taking forever and at some point my blood pressure started to drop and they wheeled me into a room for an emergency c-section.”
I nod.
“Unlike a planned one, for an emergency c-section, they knock you out completely,” she adds.
I nod again.
She looks up at me with tears in her eyes. She doesn’t wipe them away this time. Instead, she just stares at me and touches my cheek with her warm palm.
“When I woke up, they told me you had died,” she says.
Cold shivers run down my spine.
“What do you mean?”
She shrugs. “They told me you had died but they wouldn’t show me the body. Then my parents came in and my mom told me not to worry and how sorry she was about everything. No one would answer any of my questions. I even called the police but the doctor and my parents talked to them and I was underage, and somehow this whole thing got swept under the table. They told them that I was just upset about the stillbirth.”
“Oh my God,” I whisper.
“I tried to look for you but my parents were this vault. I couldn’t get anything out of them. Stillbirths don’t really get funerals, at least my parents refused to put one together. They just forced me to go back home with them and never talk about it again.”
“Is that what you did?”
“Briefly.” She nods. “I was so exhausted from the birth both mentally and physically, and then I was so overwhelmed by everything that happened afterward. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what happened to you. I didn’t want to believe that you had died but I had no proof. I felt like I was going crazy.”
I shake my head again, trying to internalize everything that she’s saying.
“I came back to California about three months later. I ra
n away again, only this time I took all of my money and I stayed quiet until I turned eighteen. Then there was nothing they could do to bring me back.”
“So…how did you find out about me?” I ask.
“I started school. I got a job at a library. I tried to move on with my life but I couldn’t let it go. I ended up hiring a private investigator but after months of looking, he didn’t find a thing. What he did confirm, however, was that you were never a stillbirth and that was something, at least.”
She gets up from her seat and walks around the room, looking at the pictures on the wall. There’s a vase full of daisies that she adjusts slightly by moving a few stems around.
“When my mom got sick, she passed really quickly,” Josephine says. “And a few days before, I was with her and she was on a lot of medication and I just asked about you. She apologized and said you never died. That my father had arranged for you to be adopted by some family up north. They weren’t wealthy so they were very much ‘motivated by money’ - his words. And as long as the money continued to come, they’d never tell you the truth.”
I put my head in between my legs and take a few deep breaths. My heart feels like it’s beating out of my chest.
“Are you okay?” Josephine rushes over to me.
“Yes, I’m fine,” I say looking up at her. “I just got a bit…overwhelmed.”
“My mom had a picture of you that one of the intermediaries involved with this so-called adoption had sent her,” Josephine says after a moment. “You were five and you look exactly like you do now. Grown up, of course, but you’re a carbon copy of that little girl.”
She pulls the picture out of the top drawer of the dresser. It’s inside a book of Emily Dickinson poems.
I look at it. I’ve never seen it before but I’m dressed in my favorite green dress and I’m smiling from ear to ear.
“I knew who you were the minute you walked into the house,” Josephine admits. “I just couldn’t believe my eyes. And when I saw the results of that DNA test… I don’t know why I needed to see them after all of this time but I guess it had something to do with all of the lies that I’ve been fed by my family.”
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper.
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” she says, hugging me and pulling me close to her. “I’m the one who is sorry. I am so sorry that I wasn’t there for you all of these years.”
We sob in each other’s arms for a long time.
After I dry my tears, something occurs to me.
“Why didn’t you find me after you learned that I wasn’t dead?” I ask.
15
Olive
When I don’t hear from her…
At first, the silence is deafening. She sits back in her chair and crosses her legs. I sit back as well and brace myself for the answer.
If she found out about me when I was five, why didn’t she try to find me again?
What could’ve stopped her from looking for me?
“I only found out about you a year ago,” Josephine says, the pupils in her almond eyes dilating.
“What?” I gasp.
“My mother held onto that picture all of those years but she never showed it to me. I had no idea who you lived with. I didn’t even know your name.”
I cover my mouth with my hand and shake my head.
I try to imagine how painful this must have been for her, but all I can think of is my own pain.
My heart tightens and pounds so loudly that I think it’s going to burst out of my chest.
“I hired another private investigator to try to find you but I didn’t know much. I didn’t know your name or where you lived. My father refused to talk about any of it. He still insists that you were a stillborn. All the PI had was this picture and it wasn’t much.”
We hold each other for a while after that.
When she pulls away, I don’t want to let go out of fear that I’m going to lose her again.
She asks me more about how my private investigator found out about her, but I don’t know any of the details.
I told her that the man I dated at the time had a lot of connections and he worked for him.
“Well, he did one hell of a job,” she says.
Suddenly, my body begins to shake.
“What? What’s wrong?” Josephine puts her arm around me.
“I’m so, so sorry,” I whisper. “I was just so worried about coming here. I thought I was going to have a panic attack. I thought that for sure you were going to slam the door in my face.”
“No,” she says categorically. “No, I would never do that.”
“I know, now,” I say with a whimper.
I give her another hug and ask if we can talk about something else. A big smile comes over her face.
I spend a few more hours there, taking turns telling her about my life and listening to hers.
Not wanting to overstay my welcome, I tell her that I have to go.
I don’t want to.
I want to stay and spend as much time with her as possible but I want to pace myself.
I don’t want to be one of those annoying guests that is fun to spend time with at first but who never knows when to leave.
I make a general suggestion that we should get together again this week, and she surprises me by asking if I want to have lunch tomorrow.
Driving back home, I feel almost lethargic.
All of the anticipation and anxiety has put a big stress on my adrenal system and now that the moment has passed all I want to do is sleep forever. When I get back to the Airbnb, I head straight to the bedroom and curl up under the covers.
I review everything that’s happened over and over again, somewhat unable to believe my own experience.
I thought that she would take her time accepting me.
I thought she would be more suspicious.
I’d prepared myself for that because that’s what all of the online forums said, no matter how much you may want to just run into her arms, she’s a stranger who feels bad about what she has done and you want to respect her boundaries.
The following day, things shift.
Josephine calls and says that something has come up and she has to reschedule.
“I’m free tomorrow,” I say a little bit too eagerly.
“No, actually tomorrow won’t work either. I have a lot of work to catch up on. I’ll get back to you in a few days. Hope that’s okay.”
There isn’t much more to the conversation than that. I stare at the phone for a very long time after she hangs up. What did I do? What just happened?
The following few days pass in a daze. I don’t have the energy to do much so I just stay at home reading, watching television, and looking through old magazines that the owners have laying around.
As much as I try to put it out of my mind, my thoughts keep circling back to Josephine.
Did something happen after I left? Was she just being nice when I came over? Did I imagine the whole interaction altogether?
Five days later, my phone rings while I am swimming in the pool. Enough time has passed that I’m no longer rushing to it to answer it.
The only person who has called me this whole time was Owen and I have no intentions of talking to him.
When I get out and dry myself off, I look down at the screen. It’s Josephine. She doesn’t leave a message but a text arrives a moment later.
Sorry I’ve been MIA this week. Had to catch up on a lot of work. You want to get some lunch?
I stare at the phone reading the words over and over again. Did she really send this?
Sure, where? When? I text back.
An hour later, we meet on the main drag of Palm Canyon Drive at a place called Tac/Quila, a modern Mexican restaurant. Much to my surprise, I am not particularly nervous to see her again.
I probably would have been if we had met up a few days ago like we had planned but after all of this time, I am just annoyed. I don’t want it to show so I keep my feelings bottled up and p
ut a smile on my face as I follow the hostess to her table.
Josephine sits leaning over the menu to a vertical garden that spans the entire wall behind her.
“Wow, what a beautiful spot,” I say when we embrace.
“It’s so good to see you,” Josephine says. “I am so sorry for cancelling before but I just had so much work to catch up on.”
I nod and give her a slight smile. Suddenly, I realize that I don’t even know what she does for a living.
When we order drinks, I ask her about it.
“Oh, you don’t know who I am?” she asks, raising her eyebrows.
She puts her elbow on the edge of the table and plays with the back of her hair for a moment.
“Should I?” I ask, tilting my head to one side.
“Well, no, I’m not that famous. But I just thought you knew because you knew about me.”
16
Olive
When I don’t hear from her…
I’d gone through the contents of the folder that I had received but none of the information had anything about what she did for work.
“I’m a writer,” she says, smiling. “I don’t know if you like to read or not, but I write romantic suspense novels.”
“Really?!” I ask, leaning closer to her. “I love to read. Romance and thrillers are my favorite.”
“Good.” She smiles. “Me, too.”
“But I never saw your name anywhere. Oh, I guess you don’t write under Josephine Jemisin though.”
“No, I actually write under a completely different name. Lauren Hart.”
My mouth drops open.
My ears start to buzz.
“No,” I say with disbelief. “No, you’re not her!”
Josephine laughs, tilting her head back.
“I love Lauren Hart! She’s one of my favorite writers. I read everything she writes.”
I don’t know why I keep talking about her as if she’s not her except that I am still having trouble processing this revelation.
Tell me to Fight Page 6
