But something about the experience, Mark said, helped him focus. He resolved to do something with his life, if only to prove to himself that he could survive without his parents. He was living in California, where he’d gone to college, and he got a job with a conservation group in San Francisco. Eventually, he got interested in computers and began designing the company’s software. It was the beginning of the computer revolution, he was in the right place at the right time, and he began to do well.
And then, he told me, he became obsessed. “I started thinking about that little girl,” he said. “The baby you and I had together. I don’t know what it was, Wynn. Getting some maturity, or having too many failed relationships, or being estranged from my family. But whatever—I knew I had to find that child.” He paused, frowning. “Even before the big blowup, my mom and dad weren’t the world’s best parents. They were always generous with money, but I can’t say there was much affection in our house. I was one of those kids who was always bringing home puppies and kittens. Not that I was allowed to keep them. But I was always looking for someone to love, something to take care of. And I was always looking for affection. I became good at it as I got older—at getting women. Keeping them was the problem. The smart ones always realized what an immature jerk I was. You were one of them. I still remember how you turned me down for the Junior Prom.” He smiled faintly. “Do you remember when I called you? You gave me the name of the hospital, the name of the place that handled the adoption. You told me what the baby looked like, how much she weighed, who the obstetrician was.”
“Yes,” I whispered. “I remember.”
“There are agencies that find children who have been given up for adoption,” he said. “I hired one. It was amazing—took them less than a month. Her name was Kathleen Bryant, and she lived in Cleveland with her mother. Her father had died when she was two, in a car accident. Her mother, Annie, was a nurse. They gave me the address, the phone number, the college where Annie went for her nursing degree, the names of Kathleen’s grandparents in Georgia. I swear, if I’d wanted their shoe sizes I could have had them.” He paused, sipped his drink. His smile returned. “So I went to Ohio and looked them up. I got to know them. And, to make a long story short, Annie and I celebrated our twentieth wedding anniversary last summer.”
I stared at him. For a moment I didn’t understand. “And you—you raised this child—Kathleen—”
He nodded. “My daughter. She’s been the joy of my life, Wynn.”
Around us, the Ramada cocktail lounge was busy, the low murmur of voices became louder, but I was aware only of Mark’s words—of what appeared to be, if I could believe it, the slow fading of a nightmare. Kathleen, I thought. Not poor Molly McCormick. Kathleen Bryant. Kathleen Erling. Who had not died. Who had lived. Who was alive.
Mark went on, “It was a funny thing with me and Annie. It wasn’t just Kathleen that brought us together. I mean, at first it was—God, the kid was everything. I can’t tell you what that was like, Wynn. Meeting my own child. I’ll never forget it. She was almost seven. She had on this little plaid dress, and she had these big green eyes, and she looked like me, she looked like you, she—” He had to stop and wipe his eyes, but he was smiling. “Anyway. I met them. And I really admired Annie and what she’d achieved, raising this great kid as a single mother, a widow, going back to college to get her nursing degree. Eventually, we found out we had a lot in common—her family was even more screwed up than mine, it turned out. Southern Baptists from Georgia who disapproved of her marriage to a Northerner, disapproved when they adopted a child, disapproved of her having a career. They didn’t like the way she was raising Kathleen, and they for sure didn’t like me. I still had that long hair.” He grinned. “They’ve gotten used to me over the years, though. I won’t say we’re best friends, but they’ve softened up some.” Then a thought occurred to him. He frowned at me across the table. “Wynn,” he said. “Did you ever have any other kids?”
“No. My husband didn’t want children.”
“You’re divorced?”
“We’re in the middle of a divorce,” I said. “Partly because of that. We were married for thirteen years.” My words were unreal; it seemed weeks since I had left Alec’s house.
“Oh God, I’m sorry.”
“It’s for the best, believe me.” I took another drink of whiskey. I didn’t want to talk about it. I wanted him to continue. “Please. Go on.”
“I considered getting in touch with you a couple of times. I thought maybe you ought to know about all this. But I had no idea where you were.” He shrugged. “I suppose I could have found you, but it didn’t seem urgent. I figured you had your own life. Maybe you didn’t want the past horning in. And Kathleen seemed contented enough. So we just let it be.”
And where was I? Poring over pictures of the wrong child. Shopping for carpets and wine with Alec. Putting clippings in a wooden box. Staring at other people’s children on the street.
I put my head in my hands. It was like a daydream I might have had as a young woman—a fantasy I might have indulged in as I lay awake in London listening to roar of the lions in the zoo. Those years when I mourned and hated myself and narrowed down my life—all that time, this other world had existed, in which my daughter’s happy childhood had rolled on: the doted-on daughter of loving parents. A childhood not unlike my own, probably. I remembered the dreams I had had when I was with Patrick, of having my daughter with us, of the three of us together—a family. A childhood like that.
I had to ask: “Are you—are they—this agency—are they sure this was the right child?”
“We actually have a copy of the birth certificate, with your name on it.”
I felt faint: The world, turned on its head, made me dizzy. Mark reached over and put my glass into my hand. The ice cubes rattled. I swallowed whiskey, thinking of Molly McCormick’s sad smile. The bitter arguments with Alec. The baby in the hospital asleep in my arms.
“Now it’s Kathleen who wants to find you,” Mark said. “She’s twenty-six—she’ll be twenty-seven next month.” He caught himself. “But hell, I don’t have to tell you that. Annie always told her she was adopted, of course, and when I came into the picture I told her the whole story, how young you and I were, how confused.” I stared at him. Was it so simple? Was it just that I had been young and confused? “I told her a little bit about you, and she seemed satisfied with that. She wasn’t particularly curious—never said much about it. Then last year, she got engaged. Nick Hayes. A great guy—we like him a lot. They’re getting married in the fall.” Mark started to speak, paused, studied my face for a moment. Then he said, with a tentative smile, “I think she’d like to have you for a wedding present, Wynn. If you’re agreeable. She says she needs to know where she came from. Who she is. That’s the way she puts it. I’ve done a lot of reading about adopted kids. It’s been great for Kathleen to be raised by her natural father, of course, but they never get over wanting their mothers. To see where they came from. Literally. The woman who carried them for nine months and then gave birth to them. And so Annie and I figured we’d better try and find you.”
Tears spilled over and ran down my cheeks. I finished my drink, and the waitress came over to our table. “Another round?” she asked impassively, as if weeping women were a dime a dozen at the Ramada cocktail lounge.
Mark ordered me another whiskey. “I was actually on the verge of hiring a detective,” he said. He paused again and then, slowly, he began to laugh. I stared at him: a large, garrulous man with a big belly and a mustache. “And then I hear your voice on the phone! God. It’s incredible.”
“Incredible.” I wiped my eyes. “That is exactly what it is. I can’t—I’m not—”
He looked at me suddenly with concern. “I probably didn’t handle this very well. On the way over here, I tried to think of the best way to tell it, but there didn’t seem to be one.”
The waitress brought our drinks. I knew I should say something else, but I couldn
’t, and I heard myself give a long, shuddering sigh that made people turn and look at us.
“Wynn?”
“I’m okay.” I blew my nose and took a deep breath, then another. “I’m getting used to it.” I kept wanting to cry—it was a distinct physical need, like hiccups or a coughing fit. I had to concentrate to keep the tears from coming. I stared at Mark’s shirt, the green checks and white buttons. My life, I kept thinking. My whole life.
Mark continued his story. He was a talker—I remembered that—and I was glad of it. I needed time to gather my wits. He told me about reconciling with his mother and his brother—belatedly, at his father’s funeral—and about coming back to West Dunster to live. He’d missed the forests, he said, and the snow. He started a small software business that had prospered from the first. His mother and Jeff had sold the paper mill, and when his brother moved to New Hampshire and his mother to West Palm Beach, Mark and his family had taken over the Castle.
“It’s crazy,” he said cheerfully. “Now that Kathleen’s grown up, the two of us just rattle around in there. I suppose one of these days we’ll sell it. But we love the old place, and I can’t imagine who’d want to buy a white elephant like that. Maybe Kathleen and Nick will want it someday, who knows? It was a good place to raise a kid. Great for birthday parties. We used to have an Easter egg hunt every year for the kids from her school, and we threw a fabulous party out in the garden when she graduated from college.”
I tried to imagine, but all I could remember was how cold the living room was on a hot summer day, and how his parents’ indifference had frozen me even more.
We were quiet a moment. I felt Mark’s gaze on me, and I looked up to meet his eyes. He said, “So Wynn—maybe you should tell me why you came here to track me down.”
“Oh God,” I said. “Where to begin.”
“You don’t have to—”
“No—I do. That’s why I’m here. I have to tell this to someone.” I drank some more whiskey. For a mad moment I couldn’t remember what I had come to say. The old story was buried under this new, staggering tale. I had brought with me the photographs of Molly McCormick with the idea that I might show them to Mark, and I considered getting them out, letting them explain. But now those clippings I had wept and cursed myself for seemed unimportant: absurd.
“Take your time,” Mark said.
I collected my thoughts. “There was this other child. It was years ago—1975. Summer. You may not even remember. A child was murdered by her adoptive father. Abused for years, then killed. It was on TV, in all the papers. Her name was Molly McCormick. She lived in the Midwest. She was exactly the age our daughter would have been. And there were pictures of her in the paper, in all the news magazines. She resembled me.” As I talked, the story became real again. How could it stop being true? In the space of a whiskey on the rocks? I had to stop and steady myself before I went on. “That little girl,” I said, “I thought she was our daughter. For all these years I’ve lived with this. That I gave her up—to that. To those people. I came here to talk to you about it. I never told anyone else about it, and finally I knew I had to, or go crazy.”
“Are you saying that all this time you thought you were responsible for that kid’s death?”
“Yes.” My voice broke.
“And you never talked about it with anyone? My God, Wynn, what a mess. I wish we’d gotten in touch with you years ago.”
I thought of the barren years with Alec. What would have happened if the Erlings had come into our lives? If Mark had sent me a letter at the loft on Lafayette Street telling me he had adopted our daughter?
I couldn’t even think about it. And yet I knew I would think about it, constantly, compulsively.
Mark said, “You know what it sounds like to me, Wynn? If you can forgive the amateur psychology. And the presumptuousness. I mean, it’s just my opinion. But it sounds like you felt so bad about giving the baby up in the first place that you tortured yourself with this other thing. I mean—you didn’t check it out or anything. You just went off the deep end.”
What he said startled me: It made such perfect sense. He reached across the table and gripped my hand, hard. “It’s okay, Wynn. It’s going to be okay now.”
I stared at him. Mark Erling. For a fleeting instant, I remembered lying with him on the sand at Osmar Lake. That, and now this. Eighteen years had been kicked out from under me. I closed my eyes and let the tears run down my face.
Mark continued to hold my hand; he gave it a little shake. “Hey. Wynn. You all right?”
I opened my eyes. “I’m all right. I just feel—” I made a futile gesture.
“All of a sudden you’re somebody’s mother. It must be like giving birth all over again.” He squeezed my hand. “Kind of different, though, this time. Isn’t it?”
“Very.”
We looked at each other for a moment, and then he said, “Is this okay with you? I mean—hell, I don’t even know if this interests you, this reunion. If you even want to be in touch with Kathleen. I didn’t even ask, I just assumed—”
“I do,” I said quickly. “Please. Believe me, I want this more than anything, Mark. More than anything else I’ve ever wanted.” I didn’t even have to reflect: I knew that was true, it had always been true. I managed to smile at him. “But I think that what I need is to go sit down for a while someplace quiet and take this all in.”
“I understand.” Mark signaled the waitress and paid the check, and we stood up. “You know, Wynn,” he said, shrugging into his jacket. “All these years you thought you did something wrong. But you didn’t. All you did was what any sensible kid would have done. You gave up your baby for adoption. And that was the right thing to do. She was adopted by a couple of great people, the Bryants. She’s had a wonderful mother, a good life. You don’t need to reproach yourself for a damned thing.”
Suddenly Mark put his arms around me and folded me in a bear hug. “You’re part of our family now,” he said when he let me go. He got out his handkerchief and blew his nose, beaming at me. “You’ve got to come up to the house, meet Annie. I’ll call Kathleen as soon as I get home. She’s living down in Portland, but maybe—what’s today? Friday? Maybe she and Nick could drive up tomorrow and we could all get together for dinner.”
This was unimaginable. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, fine.”
“And take this,” Mark said. He put Kathleen’s picture in my hand. “To make it real. So you won’t think you dreamed the whole thing.”
I stared at the photograph again. “Mark? There’s no doubt about this?”
“Are you kidding? Look at her! Look at that chin, and that hair.”
My curly-haired daughter. Mark’s eyes. My mother’s arched eyebrows and narrow nose. Absolution in a school photograph.
“Wynn.” I raised my head. Mark’s smile was full of affection. “She’s our daughter, honey. Believe it.” He leaned down and kissed me on the cheek.
• • •
The next afternoon I drove up to the Castle in the middle of a snowstorm.
I had slept heavily, and, when I woke, it was late. I went to the motel coffee shop and forced myself to eat breakfast—still feeling shaky, as if I were recovering from an illness. I kept in front of me the photograph of Kathleen—this girl who was my child. I couldn’t stop looking at her face. Kathleen—not Molly, but Kathleen. I tried to get used to it, a name I never would have chosen. I recalled how I had held her in the hospital, kissed her warm pink cheek and whispered: Remember me, remember me, while she slept in my arms. How I had felt my self slipping away, leaving behind some other self. And now, after this other birth—Mark’s little joke had been exactly on target—now, who was I? I studied her face as if she could tell me, but all I saw was a pretty young girl in pearls. The idea of meeting her in person terrified me.
As I sat over my pancakes, it began to snow—big, fluttering, wet flakes. “Doesn’t look like much now, but they say we’re in for it,” the waitress said. “Another five or
six inches at least.” She grinned as she poured me more coffee. “All we need—right?”
Driving, I realized how horribly nervous I was—not about driving in the snow but about what was ahead. She could hate me. What if she burst immediately into recriminations? Or what if I looked at her and felt nothing? At the very least, the encounter might be awkward, unpleasant in ways I couldn’t even imagine. I had dressed as well as I was able to in what I’d brought with me—boring black sweater, gray slacks, the unavoidable knee-high boots. My hair was forced into a precarious bun, I had no jewelry but the big silver hoops in my ears. I felt inadequate, not pretty enough for a long-lost mother; I imagined my daughter’s disappointment.
I also hated going empty-handed, and wished I had something to take with me, a gift for Kathleen or something for Annie—a few family photographs, even, so I could give my daughter a piece of her history. She wants you for a wedding present, Mark had said. It didn’t seem nearly enough.
I was glad there was the snow to think about, and the slippery driving conditions. Visibility wasn’t very good; I had to drive slowly. But the winding mountain road lined with pine forests was as starkly beautiful as ever. The familiarity was a comfort. I felt a surge of well-being, and, as I got closer to Mark’s place, of pure anticipation.
The Castle wasn’t as ugly as I remembered it; the harsh gray stone looked blue against the whiteness, and the two absurd turrets, capped with snow, were romantic. The long driveway had been cleared but was rapidly filling up again. I parked by the garage, then made my way to the house through fresh snow up to my ankles.
The door was opened by a small, brisk woman with graying brown hair, brown eyes, and an unexpected Southern accent: Annie. I was surprised that she seemed older than Mark, but then I realized that of course she must be, she had been adopting a child while we were teenagers in high school.
Five Questions Page 21
