Keepsake

by Kristina Riggle

  She offered to help me sort in that room and I declined. Instead Ayana made arrangements for the charity truck to come get the things we’d purged so far, and for the trash company to come empty the Dumpster and start new. I hadn’t admitted that I’d lost my job though I imagined she’d figure it out. She was sharp, I’d give her that. Young, but sharp.

  “Bye, Miss Ayana!” called Jack from the kitchen table where he’d been eating a late breakfast. He’d woken up disappointed not to find his dad here, and I reminded him the magic wand wasn’t real. Ron had stayed for a while and we’d talked, but we only talked, and he left the house with a simple wave, just like a friend would.

  But before that, he finally told me how he grieved the baby we didn’t get to have. How he’d drive out into the woods and sit, smoking, and sometimes he’d drink, too, until he swerved his truck nearly off the road one time and took to making sure to leave the beer at home.

  So all the errands he was running back then had nothing to do with needing more milk, or a part for his truck. He could have told me, but then I didn’t talk to him, either. We stood on either side of a widening sinkhole and watched each other get closer to its crumbling edge.

  I listened for sounds from Drew’s room, hearing no stirring yet. He was still sleeping, in that hibernating way teenagers can sleep for hours upon hours. Together we’d tossed stuff off his bed and forged a path through shopping bags, changed the sheets. It wasn’t pretty, but it would do. I’d vowed to finish his room, to make space for him in my life, not just in my heart.

  Now I allowed myself a moment to savor the house looking almost like it used to, with both kids where they belonged.

  I noticed some papers scattered on the coffee table and scooped them up, starting to pile them on the kitchen counter—no. I have to sort, not just stack and ignore. One was about Jack’s school carnival and I set it in my wicker basket for school reports. The others went straight to the kitchen recycle bin.

  “Good job, Mom,” said Jack with a mouthful of Froot Loops.

  “Thanks, pal. Don’t talk with food in your mouth.”

  “I’m not perfect!” he said, garbled around his half-chewed breakfast.

  “Me neither, kiddo.”

  Two hours later, Mary and Seth walked in as I was scrambling up an egg for Drew, who was by then hunched at the kitchen table, scowling at his phone, his hair still crazy with recent sleep. “She’s texting me,” he said, punching the screen with his thumb, I hoped hitting Delete.

  When I saw Mary’s face, I knew it was bad.

  “What?” I demanded.

  “They took Mother’s ring.”

  The spatula fell out of my hand. I was betrayed when Father gave it to Mary, but at least it was in the family. Gone?

  “Why didn’t you have it hidden? Locked away? Or, I don’t know, wear the damn thing like she meant something to you?”

  Mary clenched her fists and pursed her lips, looking an awful lot like our prissy aunt Margaret just then. She started to turn around and I made to pick up the spatula, but then she whirled back and advanced on me, jerking her finger at me like I never could stand for her to do.

  “She did mean something to me, and stop accusing me of having no feelings just because I didn’t fill my house with garbage and go screaming into the woods.”

  “Mary . . .” Seth said.

  “Shut up!” we sisters chorused.

  “So that’s how it is,” I shot back. “Despite all my progress, that’s how you’re going to define me.”

  Mary grabbed the sides of her head. “Arrrrgh, just like with Mom, it’s always about you. Like you’re the only one who ever has problems.”

  “I didn’t say I’m the only one, but I’m tired of being treated like the freak.”

  “And I’m treated normally? You have so much contempt for me I’m surprised you even bothered to let me help you. But you were desperate. Last-Resort Mary. And now I’ve helped you clean out your house—except, of course, the most important room—you’re done with me. How convenient.”

  “Who said I’m done with you? I’m pissed at you over the ring.”

  “It’s not about the ring! It never was. It’s about you playing the victim and the martyr so we all feel sorry for you and no one ever confronts you, just like with Mom; all she had to do was cry and we’d all go to pieces trying to make her feel better. And look how much good that did.”

  “I don’t have to play the victim when everyone attacks me. It’s not playing then, Mary.”

  “So helping you is attacking you, but we leave you alone and then we’re shunning you.”

  “How about treating me like normal, huh? No helping, no shunning, just like normal?”

  “Because you’re not normal!”

  Sizzling and burning drew my attention. The egg was now blackened. A fire alarm started shrilling. Jack came screaming out of his room, and for several minutes there was the chaos of bashing off alarms until they stopped and comforting a startled boy.

  While Seth tried to scrape the egg out of the pan I saw Mary shaking her head and walking out the door.

  “Where are you going?” I asked her, following her out.

  She paused in front of the trailer. “Most of the house is clean. You’re not keen to do the last room, and you wouldn’t want me helping in there even if you ever decide to deal with it. So I’m packing up to leave, and you’re welcome.”

  “Now who’s being a martyr?”

  She slammed the door shut on the camper, but it swung back open again. As she banged it shut again, I caught a glimpse of her face, snarled up as if in pain, or anger.

  Seth had appeared behind me and walked to the trailer to knock.

  “Go away!” Mary called, sounding like a bratty preteen.

  “It’s Seth,” he called, his voice full of hope, almost a question.

  “Not now,” she called out.

  Seth stood there on the other side of the door, arms limp at his sides, hanging his head. When I walked back in to finish Drew’s breakfast, he was still standing there on the other side of her door.

  Don’t hold your breath, I thought. We’re all on the outside.

  Chapter 48

  In the end, I called a maid service to clean the place up.

  Each time I tried to bend down to scrub the carpet, I would retch to imagine a filthy stranger—in my mind’s eye he was grubby, long-bearded, cackling like a crazy person—touching my things. It felt like he was touching me.

  I had just enough energy for introspection to realize this connection between self and objects was something in common with Trish. But not enough energy to call her and tell her about it. She had cast me aside, again, just like when we were teenagers and I moved out, just like after the funeral.

  So that’s how I found myself sitting again alone at my kitchen table, everything back to normal except for a potted plant where my television used to be. I prepared to make another round of job searches online, with no hope whatsoever. It’s a lot of work to hope, after all.

  Seth had gone back to his sabbatical, doing whatever it was he was doing before. When I’d packed my bag to leave Trish’s house, he was standing on the other side of the trailer, knocking to be let in, but I couldn’t bear it. Every nerve was jangling, every inch of my skin felt prickly and hot. He later left me a voice mail, asking how I was. His voice sounded cool, professional. I replied by text I was fine. He asserted that he, too, was fine. Ayana seemed to be fine with the progress Trish had made.

  Jack’s arm was fine, too, I was told later via text from Drew.

  We were all just gloriously fine.

  Before I clicked on the online want ads, my mouse arrow aimed at another bookmark I’d made: an adoption registry. It was the most passive form of attempted reunion there could be. You just had to fill in a profile and wait to be found. Or you could search
other profiles, to see if your relative had already sent out her own version of a note in a bottle, cast into the cybersea.

  I had not, as yet, filled out a profile of my own. This Laura person could end up being just another relative to argue with and feel awkward about, more so because we’d lived wholly separate lives. And, as Trish had pointed out, it’s not like we would come bearing such wonderful news. It also seemed hopeless with the little information we had. On one site alone, dedicated to Michigan, over three thousand adoptees and parents were trying to find each other.

  Yet I’d looked up this information. And there it remained, on my computer.

  I had also called Aunt Margaret, which turned out as badly as Trish had predicted, and worse yet. At first she denied knowing what I was talking about, until I started reciting bits from the diary that were too detailed, too personal for me to have made up. Then she seemed to get angry with my late mother for leaving this, as she put it, “shameful record.”

  Then she’d relented, at last. I took grim satisfaction in how difficult it was for her to speak about it.

  “We just didn’t know anything else to do,” she insisted to me. I would not give her the satisfaction of agreeing with her, or making sympathetic noises, so she went on. “It wasn’t like it is now, where it’s less of a problem, where there are programs and education and such. You didn’t raise a bastard child yourself. You made another couple happy and that was that. I didn’t know . . .” Here she made sort of a strangled, coughing noise. “I hadn’t had my own children yet. I didn’t know what it was like to carry a child. I was just a kid, and it wasn’t my decision.”

  Here I thought, No, but you certainly relished your position as the favored, virginal daughter.

  “And she seemed to be fine, Frannie did. She went to work in a steno pool, and then she met your father on a blind date and she seemed to be a contented bride, and she was a very good mother to you girls. And none of that would have happened if she’d kept the baby. Remember that before you go and judge us. You would not even be here to judge me.” She paused, and I thought I heard her breathing hard into the phone. I wondered if she’d imagined this conversation before. If somehow she knew we’d find out and she’d prepared her defense in advance. She was probably right, I thought. I doubt anyone would have set my father up on a blind date with a single mother in the 1960s.

  She wasn’t going to say anything else, so I continued. “Yet you never told a soul. Even as Mother started hoarding.”

  “That had nothing to do with the baby. Your mother was always emotionally fragile, very excitable.”

  This did not sound like the mother I knew. To us, when Mother wasn’t fighting with one of us about the hoarding, she was solid as a rock. Maybe because of the hoarding. Because that was the way she coped.

  “Even after she died, you never said a word.”

  “Why would I? And she’d sworn me to secrecy.”

  “She had? Or your parents had?”

  “We all swore to keep it a secret.”

  “Yes, and stuff her down in the backseat so no one would know.”

  “I tell you I was just a kid, too! Our parents, rest their souls, did the best they knew how to do. It wasn’t our fault your mother opened her legs on prom night.”

  Here I’d made some sort of shocked noise.

  “Well, it’s true. This wasn’t a lightning bolt out of the sky. It happened because she had sex out of wedlock.”

  Without any preamble, I repeated the story of that fateful night, about how that boy kissed her so hard she couldn’t speak and was inside her before she knew what was happening.

  Margaret cleared her throat. “Well. That was some detail she never shared with her sister.”

  “Would it have mattered? Or would you have blamed her anyway?”

  “I don’t know.” And then again, softer: “I don’t know.”

  Before we hung up, I pried the name of the unwed mothers’ home out of her.

  And with this information I sat as spring gathered strength and daffodils gave way to tulips, and the forsythia exploded in yellow then faded into its stately rich green, each day passing with neither Trish nor I picking up the phone.

  I was filling out an application for a retail manager position at a clothing store when my house phone rang. I’d taken to screening the few calls I got.

  I glanced casually at the caller ID, then seized the phone.

  “Yes?”

  “Mary Granger? This is Officer Sherman.”

  “Yes! Did you find the thief?”

  “No, ma’am, but I believe we found the ring at a pawnshop. Could you come identify it, please?”

  I ran out the door so fast I had to come back for my purse. And my shoes.

  I drove straight to Trish’s house, hands shaking on the wheel, with a wide smile on my face. They’d found the ring. It was indeed hers.

  It was Mother’s wedding ring, and engraved inside, thus unmistakable. And it was going to Trish. It had nothing to do with any deal we made earlier, but only to do with a powerful and rare intuition that I needed to drive there, right this minute, and give it to her. I’d never felt more sure of anything, and this confidence made me giddy.

  I rolled the window down and listened to classic rock on the way.

  I was struck with another impulse. I punched Off on the radio and used speakerphone to call Seth. Voice mail, but I sang out to his phone: “Seth! They found the ring! I had to tell you. No one else will get how much this means to me. I’m driving to Trish’s house right now to give it to her.” I paused, realizing I had no exit strategy for the message. “Well. Bye then.”

  Trish’s car was in the drive. I realized I’d forgotten what day it was, the calendar rendered moot in the world of the unemployed.

  As I stood on her porch and waited for her to answer the bell, I bounced on the balls of my feet.

  She yanked open the door hard, the gesture already advertising irritation, frustration. My giddiness popped like a child’s soap bubble, my presumption looming huge.

  She froze with her hand on the door, gaping at me.

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  Chapter 49

  I walked along a twisting path through the clutter, until I reached the inner sanctum of the room in which I’d tried to bury it all. Now it had been exposed to the air, and despite closing the door, I could no longer pretend it didn’t exist.

  So each day when the boys headed out—Drew in his beat-up noisy car, Jack dropped off at school—I’d allow myself to be pulled inside, too weary from all those years of stuffed-down emotion to resist. In the back of the room was the crib, in the exact spot Ron had set it up all those years ago, when I was young and fertile and happy.

  I ran my hand along the plastic guard on the top rail, remembering how first baby Andrew, then Jack, had teethed on it. We’d put the crib up in an early burst of nesting, a whirlwind at twelve weeks along when we’d gotten encouraging results back on a test called AFP, which showed a likelihood of a strong, healthy baby. I already had an adorable baby bump, and everything seemed fine, so I set Ron to the task of assembling while I started shopping in earnest. I went out and bought baby outfits, both for a boy and a girl, keeping the receipts. I bought a brand-new yellow baby blanket and draped it in the crib. There were duckies parading around the edge of it. I’d lugged in bag after bag of diapers, nipples, stuffed animals, wanting new things for this baby, not just hand-me-downs. This baby would not get stuck with a bunch of leftovers like poor Jack had to deal with: faded, worn-out things Drew had worn years before.

  Then the active baby seemed to slow down and stop moving. And the ultrasound tech got those grim lines on her face. And I slammed the door to this room, opening it only to throw things inside.

  And now, I was looking at those duckies again. To my left was a baby swing. Scattered around my fe
et were unopened packages of pacifiers, diapers, clothes—all those things I’d bought in a frenzy back then, feeling secure in the second trimester, the odds on my side.

  Ayana and my state shrink say I should stop living so much in the past, to enjoy my children in the present. And I have tried, especially now that I can see both their faces at the table every day. I even promised Jack that when I find a permanent job we can see about getting a dog, though that means he has taken an unhealthy and irritating interest in my job hunt, which so far has only resulted in part-time temp work filling in for a lady on maternity leave at Michigan State.

  Drew has developed his own unhealthy interest in my habits: asking me every day about my cleaning progress. I choked down my outrage, reminding myself that I drove him out in the first place; this is his home too. I cast myself back to my own teen years, with garbage all over the front yard, all the inner surfaces.

  The doorbell rang and yanked my attention back to the present moment. I ignored the first chime, staying with the crib, but the evangelist or salesman stubbornly leaned on the bell. I cursed and stomped back to the front of the house.

  And I yanked open the door to find my sister, of all people.

  Her hair looked ragged and overly long. She was wearing plaid shorts, plastic flip-flops, and a top that didn’t match. But she was grinning at me like a lunatic.

  “What the hell do you want?” I asked.

  By way of answer she rummaged in her purse and stuck something so close to my face I had to grab her wrist and back away so my eyes could focus.

  The ring.

  It had been years since I’d seen it, and it had been on Mom’s finger then, before the divorce. I’d written it off twice: first in the fire, and recently with the theft.

  “I’m glad they found it,” I said, not taking it from her fingers, wanting to shove her off my porch for flaunting this at me.

  “It’s yours.”

  “Be serious.”

  “I am.”

  “You look like a nutcase, frankly.”

  “I feel like one, a bit. Something told me I had to drive here and give this to you now.”