Keepsake

by Kristina Riggle

  I think I’ve accepted I can’t keep her. (For some reason I’m convinced it’s a girl.) For a while I would try to plan out what I would do to keep her, but it all falls apart without the support of my family. Where would I live if not here? Because I could never make enough money to support myself and the baby while paying rent, too. And even if I could find an amazing job paying all this money, who would watch the baby while I worked if not my family? If I had to pay a babysitter, that would erase so much of my paycheck I’d be back to where I started. So how would I feed myself, the baby? How would we survive? We wouldn’t, simple as that. There is no other choice.

  This baby deserves a nice mother and a real father who will acknowledge her and love her as his own, a comfortable house, and a good family. If I kept her, we’d be poor or even destitute and she’d be known as a bastard child.

  I get my mind all made up about this, and then she kicks me, and I rub her through my belly and I think I won’t be able to do it, they’ll have to saw my arms off to take her.

  I may not write for a while. This is getting too hard.

  February 15, 1962

  It’s a new year and it should feel like a fresh start. That’s what my father tells me. With a girdle my stomach looks almost as flat as it used to. I’m back in my old room with my Elvis records and magazines and books, and I’ll start school again soon, only a little bit behind the class, since I was doing so well before . . . well, before everything.

  Only I’m dead inside. I have to be, because if I feel anything, I want to scream and scream and run back to the home and beat on the door and threaten them with knives until they tell me where my daughter is.

  My mother said they’d be kind, but they lie to you. They don’t tell you that giving birth makes you feel like you’re going to split in two. They don’t tell you that giving up your baby will be like ripping out your own heart. They only tell you that you have to sign the papers because this couple has been waiting and this baby deserves a family and what kind of life could you give it anyway? That the only way to redeem your shame and mistake is to sign. And they stand over you and they make you sign. And so I did, and I let go of her. Every time I think of that moment, when I let the lady from the home take her, I think I might die from the pain of it, and I kind of hope I do.

  When no one was looking, I took some nail clippers and I snipped off a piece of her hair, which is dark and curly, like mine. I wrapped it in some tissue and now it’s in an envelope. It’s the only time—other than just now, writing here—when I let myself feel anything. Once a night I say my prayers, and I pray for Laura while stroking the only piece of her I still have. Then I cry myself to sleep and wake up dead again.

  I may have to stop writing. It was like living that moment all over again to tell it here, and I thought I’d feel better letting it out but I don’t. Not one bit. Plus I’m afraid someone will discover this book and Father will be angry with me again for being ungrateful about them solving my problem for me. Not to mention he’d be furious with me for keeping a record that might one day be discovered. In fact, if he found this notebook, or that lock of Laura’s hair, I’m quite sure he’d make me destroy it. See, I’m supposed to go back to normal now. Everything just like it was.

  Maybe I should burn it before anyone has a chance to find it. But if I did . . . I’d lose the last piece of my baby I can ever have.

  Everyone else might pretend she never existed. But I will never be able to forget her. Ever.

  Chapter 42

  A trumpet blast startled me so much that I dropped the diary on the grass.

  In our frantic reading, Trish and I had not even noticed the graveside ceremony beginning in another part of the cemetery.

  A bugler was playing “Taps.” The assembled small group clung to each other under and around the canopy. When the last bitter notes rang out into the air, the minister began speaking, but we were far enough way not to hear.

  Trish whispered, “Oh, my God” again and again. She paged rapidly through the rest of the notebook, looking for more writing, perhaps, or maybe even the lock of the baby’s hair. Nothing but clean, blank pages with blue lines bright as the first day of school.

  I tried to access the same feelings Trish had, and failed. I was not a mother. Had never been pregnant. I understood academically that a mother was attached to a baby even in the womb, could understand in a clinical sense that it must indeed be difficult to hand over a baby for adoption, even when the baby wasn’t planned.

  But Trish seemed to feel our mother’s pain as deeply as if it happened to her. I suspected she was also grieving her own lost baby. Lost differently, but gone all the same.

  Trish needed my sympathy for what we’d just read. But she was my mother, too. Our mother who’d suffered this secret pain.

  It hit me like a slap. We had a sister, whom our mother had named Laura, born in 1961 or 1962, sometime in the winter.

  “No wonder,” I said finally. Trish didn’t respond. “Christmastime, remember? She was always such a nut about it. Then right after she’d fall into a funk that would last until Easter.”

  Trish raised her head at last, wiped her face with shaking hands. “Yeah, I remember.”

  Our mother considered the merchandise of Christmas to be at least as holy as the birth of Christ, based on the way she shopped. We could count on almost daily fights with our father, most of which he lost because she could always counter with the fact she was creating a happy holiday for the girls. Cheerful decor, cookie cutters, snowman-shaped baking pans, wreath-making crafts, a football field’s worth of festive ribbon, more little houses for her Christmas village—it was all meant to make everyone happy.

  I wondered if Trish was now also remembering the postholiday depression that would hit when we went back to school and the tree came down. We always thought it was just some winter blues, sadness at the end of the season.

  She must have been trying to bury her grief in the holiday, but when the holiday ended, she would not be able to beat back the pain anymore, having all those empty hours again, just as her baby’s birthdate approached.

  My phone chimed for a text, and I regretted not switching it to vibrate. I glanced at it. It was Seth, saying the boys were anxious to see their mother, and worried about her.

  “We should get back,” I said.

  “There is no ‘back,’ ” Trish muttered.

  “What?”

  She pointed at the letters. “Back from that. From knowing that.”

  I paused. Considered. My world didn’t feel so different. The fact that her hoarding may have been motivated by the pain of giving up a secret baby did not change the fact that she did hoard, and then she died.

  “Regardless. We need to get back to the house. Your boys are worried about you.” I stood, brushed grass clippings off my pants. “Trish? It’s time to go.”

  She looked up at me, her eyes bright and wet. “Why didn’t she tell us? She should have told us.”

  I pulled her gently to standing. “She was ashamed; it’s all over that diary. That was years before the sexual revolution. Before the pill. Married couples had twin beds on TV.”

  “I can’t believe Grandpa would have acted like that,” Trish muttered, and I nodded. The father portrayed in the letters was harsh, unforgiving, in an Old Testament biblical kind of way. We’d known Grandpa Van Linden to be a sweet old man who ruffled our hair and called us “his girls.” He never seemed fazed by Trish’s big hair and miniskirts.

  We walked back toward the stolen bike, at the same time as the mourners began to file to their cars. I picked up the bike and we stood back to let them pass, my car being away at the bottom of the hill. Their faces were somber, still.

  “I don’t feel any better,” Trish said.

  “Take a shower, get something to eat. That will help.”

  She huffed. “I don’t mean right now. I mean .
. .”—she pointed at the last car as it rumbled over the gravel past us—“any better than those people in those cars. Fourteen years later. Wasn’t it supposed to get better?”

  Trish looked askance at me, and I shrugged, having no explanation to give her.

  I deposited the bike at the police station and joined Trish back in the car. She’d been slumped in the backseat in case anyone had seen her ride off with the bike. As we got back out onto the road, I assured her the officer had been only barely interested, taking down my name and asking a couple of questions about where I’d found the bike.

  Trish remained prone in the back. She said, addressing the roof of the car, “Mom rode around like this when she was pregnant. They made her hide like some kind of fugitive. Made her stay in the house like house arrest.”

  “It was a different time.”

  “Don’t defend them.”

  “Who said I am? The time was, however, different.”

  She sighed loudly. “Fine. Different. Whatever.” A few beats of silence, then, “I wonder if she knows.”

  “Who?”

  “Laura. The baby. She must be . . . gosh, almost fifty now. Kids of her own maybe. I wonder if she knows she’s adopted.”

  “Probably so. I knew adopted kids in school. It wasn’t a big deal.”

  “Not to us. To them, maybe.”

  “Yeah. Maybe. Trish? Not to change the subject, but . . . OK, I guess I am changing the subject. What are you going to do about that room?”

  “I don’t know.” Her voice sounded strangled.

  “Other than the basement, which we can probably ignore for now, or at least clear a path to your washing machine and leave it. And we should finish up Drew’s room. But . . . it’s the worst space. By far.”

  She didn’t answer except to prompt me to turn right onto her street.

  “What are we going to do?” I asked her, hearing my own irritation creep into my voice.

  “Give me a freakin’ minute here,” she snapped. “Some of us are just a wee bit shocked by the idea we have a secret half sister. Some of us who aren’t emotionless robots.”

  When I got out of the car, I tried to slam the door to broadcast my irritation, but in my exhaustion it only thunked quietly closed and didn’t even latch.

  Chapter 43

  I walked in on the men in my life arrayed around my dining room table, a newspaper fanned out in the middle, with coffee mugs plus Jack’s McDonald’s cup dotting the surface.

  At the opening of the door I saw their faces click from expectant to relieved to varying degrees of pissed off.

  I looked to Ron first. His face had that resigned sag that always made him look like a hound dog. He looked like that when I busted him talking to an old girlfriend, later when he walked out the door, later yet in court for the divorce decree, and at every exchange of our children. Drew’s face—what I could see underneath his hair—was snarled up in a tight scowl. He refused to look at me.

  Jack was running to me and already clinging to my leg before I could fold down to hug him. Even he, though, was angry.

  “Mom! You scared me when you left. You shouldn’t do that.”

  Seth excused himself and said he and Mary would go for a drive. I just nodded as they wafted past me, silent. I met my father’s eyes. They were damp and red.

  “Patty Cake, I’m glad you’re back.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said to all of them, stroking Jack’s hair. “I shouldn’t have done that.” I untangled Jack from my leg and crouched down to him. “Especially to you. I didn’t mean to scare you. But—”

  “Ah yes,” my dad interjected. “The famous ‘but.’ Like Mom would always say she didn’t mean to get so angry at us, but we didn’t have the right to touch her stuff. But she worked hard and deserved a few nice things. But she meant to read those magazines when she had time. But she was tired and couldn’t keep up.”

  With every “but” he’d knocked his fist against the top of the table.

  It took effort to straighten myself carefully and choose my words, when I really wanted that broken vase back so I could hurl it again.

  I looked again at Ron, who was pretending to read the newspaper. “Ron and Drew, please take Jack outside to play.”

  “Mama . . .”

  “Jack, your grandpa and I have some things to talk about.”

  Ron told Jack they would go walk in the woods and look for bugs under rocks, and like any good country kid, Jack went along. Drew stomped past, never meeting my eyes.

  I folded my arms and regarded my father, still seated at the table, one hand holding the newspaper as if he had to get back to the sports scores. “So how does the moral high ground feel? Are you light-headed from the altitude?”

  “Come off it, Trish.”

  “It just seems to me that from where you sit, I don’t get a vote in how I’m treated. Because I screwed up, I get to be wrong forever, is that it? I have to take what’s coming to me.”

  “What’s coming to you is some responsibility, and I’m sick of hearing the ‘but.’ And so were you, the whole time growing up. Don’t tell me you believed every apology she ever gave. She wasn’t ever sorry.”

  “Don’t you dare act like you knew her mind.”

  “Like hell I didn’t! We were married for thirty-five years and I knew her in ways you couldn’t possibly. I knew everything about her!”

  “So you knew she had a baby at seventeen years old and was forced to give it away? And that she wished she was dead from the pain of it?”

  My father jumped back from the table like he’d been bitten by a snake. He knocked his chair over in his haste to stand. “What?”

  When I’d spit out this piece of news, I was playing Gotcha! and thought I’d feel smug. Instead, I felt sick.

  “That’s not true,” he said. “She would have told me. . . . Oh, God, Trish? Is that true?”

  “I shouldn’t have said it that way.”

  “How do you know this? And why are you only telling me now?”

  “I found a diary . . .” I began.

  As I told Dad the story, he slumped back to the kitchen table and rested his head in his hand.

  “Oh, Frannie,” he murmured, eyes down on the table, not seeing the newspaper anymore. “Frannie, honey, you should have told me.”

  He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, grimacing. The moment felt intimate, and I turned to go find the others, to let him sit with this knowledge and fresh grief.

  “Patty Cake.”

  I stopped in the living room, turned back.

  “Yeah, Dad?”

  “Do you think she really did all that because of that baby?”

  “Yes. Maybe. Not everyone who gives up a baby hoards, so . . . I don’t know, it’s complicated, I think.”

  “She never did want to let go of you girls. She carried you so much people joked you’d never learn to walk. She must have thought . . .”

  He trailed off, folding his arms and resting facedown, like a kid at school told to put his head down on his desk.

  I finished his thought in my own head. She must have felt someone was coming to take her new babies, too.

  He picked his head up off his arms. “Patty? Do you . . . ? I mean . . . Did something . . . Other than what we know . . .”

  “No, Dad. I don’t have a deep, dark secret. You knew about losing the baby.”

  He wiped his face. He was looking older by the minute now, his complexion pale and eyes red and watery. “You seemed OK, though. After. You and Ron.”

  I shrugged. “We weren’t.”

  “It wasn’t such a mess in the house then, was it?”

  “Not as bad. Not right away. It’s complicated, Dad. I don’t understand it myself.”

  He stood up and came around to me. When he folded me in his arms, I smelled a
ftershave and coffee and the laundry soap we always had at home. Ellen must still use the same kind, or it’s a trick of my memory. His scratchy flannel shirt on my cheek felt the same as ever.

  “Oh, Patty Cake. I’m sorry. So sorry.”

  I let him hold me and pretended I was little again and hadn’t started ruining my life yet.

  “My girls,” he muttered into my hair. “My poor girls.”

  When my sons and ex-husband came back in from their walk in the woods, I silently prayed gratitude for this truce with my father, this moment where he put aside what’d happened and was simply Dad again, taking care of me.

  They all got their waters and Cokes and sat around the living room. Drew stared at me with one eyebrow cocked, his face a challenge: Well?

  “I’m still sorry. Genuinely sorry I got so upset. I need to explain something,” I said, careful not to say “but,” trying harder than Mom ever did to not make excuses.

  As I spoke, I wondered if Mom had only ever been trying to explain, in her way. The only way she knew, because she didn’t have an Ayana or a Seth or a state-paid shrink.

  “We do have to deal with that room. But not today. This isn’t something . . . It’s not like ripping off a Band-Aid, where faster is better. It’s more like . . .” I closed my eyes. Mary was always better at this, coming up with a good metaphor for something. It was all that reading she did all the time. “It’s like a dam. A dam built holding back a river. If you blow it up, the water will explode out and destroy everything. We have to take it down slowly. Let things seep out gradually.”

  My father began, “You have a point,” preempting Drew, already sitting up straight to argue with me. “I should’ve known better than to start ripping stuff out. Me especially, considering. I was . . . upset. Worried. I don’t want you to . . . to end up . . .” He cleared his throat, heavily, twice. “Anyhow. Slow it’ll have to be.”