Origin

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  He shifts toward me, not speaking, his jaw set in frustration.

  I turn away to scowl out the window. Then the front door of the house opens and I put a hand on his arm. “Wait.”

  Through the glass, I see a small figure—a woman?—appear in the front door. Her hair is brown with silver threads, and there is something soft, almost mothlike about her face. The wind whips at her clothes and her body appears to ripple. She sweeps her eyes over the car, though I know the interior is dark and obscured by the glazing snow.

  THE HOUSE IS charming and elderly as a place in a Grimm’s tale. I’m tentative, afraid to come to the door—it seems wrong, to walk into this lovely spot, hunting for leads in such a terrible crime. And it seems almost incredible that this woman—who might’ve been my foster mother—is still living here, unknown to me for all these years.

  But the woman ushers us right into her house as if we were all old friends. We stand in the doorway, stamping our feet and brushing snow from our hair. She’s tiny, barely coming to my shoulder. When I start to introduce myself, she breaks into a roguish smile and says, “So, you’ve come for a baby!” When she sees my expression, though, she looks confused. “Oh, are you the Matsen couple?”

  “Who’re they?” Keller asks.

  The woman touches my forearm. She slides on the half-glasses hanging from a chain on her chest and now her eyes travel over me. “Wait a sec, now. My goodness.” She asks, “Which one are you?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “The fosters! Which one of my fosters are you?”

  “Oh.” My voice sticks in my chest.

  “This is Lena Dawson.” Keller slips an arm around my shoulders. “And I’m Keller Duseky.” I notice that he’s refrained from mentioning that he’s a detective: this was rumored around the Lab to be part of his approach to witness examination—avoiding disclosure till legally necessary.

  “Lena,” she breathes. “It can’t be.” She moves in closer and her face passes through a complex gradient of emotion. She’s close enough that I can see the softness of her mouth, her sueded lipstick. Her gaze is so intent, identifying me. It’s a sensation of extraordinary lightness, like the lifting of pain, like snow rising backward into the sky.

  “Oh, my Lena,” she says. She places one of her flat, dry hands on my face. “It is you, isn’t it?” Her eyes crystallize with tears. Such strange eyes, soft as moleskin. I don’t recognize her, yet, I can’t shake a powerful sense of magnetism.

  “Henry McWilliams—my foster father—gave us your name and address,” I say.

  She frowns. “Oh, the McWilliamses. So you stayed with them, huh? Him and that Pia? No adoption? All right. That’s all right. It is what it is. And my goodness, look at you. It’s a wonder. You’re a lovely, graceful, adult woman. Look at how you turned out!” She holds my hand between both of hers; pressing them together, she studies the lines of my shoulders, neck, and jaw.

  Keller clears his throat.

  She turns her head, looking at him from a bit of an angle. “Duseky,” she says slowly, testing his name. “A Czech boy, are you?”

  “My great-great-grandparents,” he says, drawing himself up. “And Swiss, French, Irish. . . .”

  “Good, good. I’m good at the nationalities.” She pats at her hair. “So you both know who I am, then, right? That I worked for the agency. You both know that.” There’s something elusive in her face; it filters through her eyes, a sprite. She steps backward and to the side, as if drawing us toward her, and we pass through a shadowy hallway. I see a line of square framed panes of glass—their images invisible beneath the reflection of light—until we end up in what turns out to be the kitchen.

  “Can I get you some tea, darling?” she asks. She puts a mug of tea on the table, copper-colored from overbrewing, the tea tag still dangling down the side of her mug. I touch the white bit of paper and feel something gathering in me. I pull out a chair and sit, knees collapsing.

  Keller says, “Lena, what is it?”

  A shower of sparks cascades over my skin.

  Myrtle moves the mug from the table to the counter and looks at me. “They didn’t ever tell you about me—I mean, back when you were younger—did they?” she says flatly, then shrugs again. “Do you remember being here?”

  I shake my head. Keller pulls a chair close to mine. “That’s what we came to find out—what there is to remember.”

  Myrtle pours the water from a steaming kettle into three mugs, then dunks the same tea bag into each cup: twenty seconds per cup. She gives herself the mug that was dunked last. She places a mug before me and I lean into the white vapor.

  Myrtle sits and pushes back her thin dark hair. Her face is smooth and unlined, but the backs of her hands are mottled and ropy with veins. First I think she is in her mid-sixties, then I think seventies, maybe older. She stirs several spoonfuls of sugar into her tea with a brisk, rattling sound.

  “I never expect this,” she’s saying. “I’m always curious, of course. I wonder about what happens to my kids, but I don’t expect anything from anybody, once I turn them loose.”

  I lean toward her, the bottom of my hands and elbows pressing the tabletop.

  “You mean your foster kids? How many did you have?”

  She waves a hand at me absently and I detect a discoloration of the web of skin between her index and middle finger: an ex-smoker. “I think it was thirty-four, all told. Sometimes it’s hard to say—I mean, if you count certain ones or not. I’ve had babies who were here for just a few days—before their adoption papers went through—that sort of thing.”

  “You haven’t kept any of your foster children?”

  She shakes her head and her fingers move along the rim of her cup—tea must be what she swapped for the cigarettes. “I always wanted to—every time. I knew I wouldn’t though—that’s not what I’m here for. I gave the babies and little ones a place to go before they were adopted or put with long-term foster parents. They call me the transitional-type step—from the agency to the family. Or, well . . .” She fluffs at her hair absently. “I used to be. I’m retired now. They started those ‘open’ adoptions—just ridiculous, tearing up everyone’s past. And it got a little hard on me anyway—giving you babies away.” She looks at me shyly. “You were one of the ones with me the longest.”

  Keller shifts in his seat, his expression hooded—he doesn’t like her, I think. “Why is that? Why didn’t you keep any of the kids?” he asks. “Why set yourself up to be a transitional place at all?”

  She studies him for a moment, her smile restrained. “Because some women aren’t meant to have their own children,” she says, then glances at me, briefly and delicately. “Though for some reason men hate it when I say that. It makes them furious.”

  Keller folds his arms over his chest. “I’m not furious,” he says. “But I just can’t imagine how anyone could just . . .” He waves one hand in the air.

  She looks at me again, her eyes bright, almost coppery brown. She does seem familiar to me, but in the way that certain strangers do—in that they remind you of someone else. Her voice is cool, though her face remains pleasant. “I had some female problems as a young girl and afterwards I found out I couldn’t have children. So I decided I’d help with other people’s messes instead. Oh.” She touches my hand. “No, no, no, no—I’m not calling the children messes. No, the kids are perfect. The mess is that people who shouldn’t be making babies make ’em anyway. Crank ’em out. It’s the problem at the heart of it all. The world’s raining babies, disposable babies. Doesn’t matter if you know your parents or not. So here I am, no babies, and no one who ever asked me to marry him, so I believed it was the best thing I could do—offer myself.”

  I find, though, as I listen to her, that my throat’s gone dry. I finally rest my hands on the table and say, “Then you knew my birth mother?”

&n
bsp; Her face goes soft. “What did Henry and Pia tell you about that?”

  “No—nothing.”

  She nods, “Ah. I’d hoped maybe something might have surfaced. I’m so sorry, sweetie. I wish I had more for you, but I don’t know a thing, Lena. Nobody does. You came to me with only cursory paperwork. I remember quite well. I picked you up at the hospital. Two years old and as pretty as a pearl.” Her eyes tick over me affectionately. “But for all the information I had, it was like you fell out of a cloud.” She takes a sip of her tea, looks at it, replaces it on the saucer. “You have to remember that back then, we had so little information about the kids because it was all closed adoptions. They were protecting the biological parents—and also, they thought, the children. Like there was this stigma on being an adopted kid and you couldn’t let people know.”

  I sense that there’s more to this than she lets on; some sin of omission. The whole house is like a blank space. The kitchen is spookily clean, the walls ceramic-white, and there’s an array of sparkling kitchen appliances. But I feel the presence of all those children’s fingerprints haunting the surfaces.

  I press a bit. “Then where did I come from before I came to you? How did you come to have me?”

  She pauses, so I suspect that she’s formulating an answer. “This bitty children’s hospital. Catholic. They used to do a lot of placements, adoptions, so I was on their roster—took several of their kids. But the place got sold and torn down years ago, there’s nothing there anymore.”

  “A children’s hospital? What was it called?”

  Her eyes flatten a bit; she might be about to lie to me. She looks at her mug, gives it a quarter-turn to the right. “Something funny—Tigers? Lions? Something like that. I think it was Lion’s Children’s Hospital.”

  Keller looks at me across the table.

  “Myrtle—we should tell you something,” I say briskly. “We’re not really here for me. Well—not exclusively. I’m a forensics investigator.” I watch her face stiffen as I speak. “We’re working on a case that may be connected to my childhood.”

  “I’m happy to help in any way I can, dear.” Her face is taut.

  “Just—as much as you can give us—whatever you remember of me—my time here—anything.”

  She looks around blankly, then says, “Well, my God, Lena. It’s been years. Would you like to see your old room again? Would that help?”

  Myrtle leads us up a short staircase lined with photographs of children—a few spacey studio portraits, grinning boys with model airplanes, but mostly it’s home shots—a baby beaming in its crib, children jumping up at a ball. We enter a long rectangular room with three narrow beds, each covered with sheets decorated with blue Elmo faces. The walls are painted pale blue and the window curtains are printed with race cars. There’s a framed poster of World War II airplanes and another of famous shipwrecks.

  Keller keeps his arms folded tightly across his chest; he nods at a poster of a baseball player. “So this is the boys’ room,” he says. “You waiting for someone new?”

  Myrtle fluffs at her cropped hair again. She looks over the room, gazing at something invisible. “It’s silly. I really don’t know why I keep it decorated like this anymore.”

  She leads us farther down the hall and shows us into a bright doorway. “This is my favorite room, naturally,” she confides. There are curtains like ballerina skirts on the windows, bedspreads painted with French poodles. The walls shimmer, all pink. “This is the girls’ room, obviously,” she says, then takes my arm and brings her face close to mine for a moment. Her breath smells sharp, as if she’s been eating sugar. “You lived in this room for almost a year, Lena,” she says.

  I sit on the narrow pink bed pushed against the far wall and sweep my hands over the spread. She comes to the foot of the bed, folds her arms, and gazes at me with satisfaction. “Yes, yes, that’s the bed you slept in! You remember, don’t you? It’s starting to come back?”

  There’s something very persuasive about her: I want to agree. But it isn’t true. “There’s nothing. I’m sorry. I suppose that must seem really strange to you.”

  Keller is still in the doorway; he shakes his head. “Lena, it was, what? Thirty years ago? You were practically still a baby.”

  Myrtle gazes over the row of empty beds, her mouth curved, her expression unfocused, and again, disarmed.

  MYRTLE SHOWS US the rest of the house—her room (large and drab) the living room, the three baths (boys’ and girls’ and Myrtle’s). From time to time I sense—or imagine—a vibration like a shimmer of heat descending from walls. But if this place were a crime scene, I’d come away empty-handed. It’s so impersonal in its decoration that it could be any place at all—a generic home.

  In the foyer, Keller bends to study another row of framed photographs. Myrtle seems wistful now. “It’s funny. You were so young when you came here—of course, it doesn’t mean anything to you, but to me, it meant everything.”

  Keller makes a low sound and I see he’s leaning in to study a black and white image of Myrtle and a young girl. The girl has a full, voluptuous expression, her eyes narrowed with pleasure like a cat’s, and Myrtle cradles her inside her arms.

  “Oh, now, that was little Sara Gableson.” Myrtle moves beside me to look. “I had her for years—my longest on record. She was my little sweetie,” she says with a twist in her voice.

  Keller continues studying the photo, slightly stooped. “What’s she doing now?”

  There’s a pause and I turn from Keller to see Myrtle examine the tips of her nails. “I’m not sure. She moved out of state. To Maine, I think it was. For years she sent me cards on the holidays.”

  I move along the line of children’s images, backing toward the door. Many of these children look unsettled, as if they were in the middle of a hectic journey and someone told them to smile. Myrtle follows me, listing names proudly, “There’s Heather Feffer, Tina Samuelson, Ted Manheim, Cathy Daniels, Jerry Egan, Erin Billings, Jessie Stinton . . .” Then, three photographs in from the one of Myrtle and Sara, I stop.

  It’s a shot of a child with eyes closed: the entire body is retracted, closed up, so the hands are tightened into hard little nuts against its chest, the knees also clenched up into chest, fetal, screwed together. It’s so weird that it’s otherworldly and beautiful—in the way that photos of the architectural swirls of shells and rocks are beautiful, cool and geometrical. Keller comes to gaze at it with me. “God, is that a kid?” he asks.

  I look at Myrtle. “What’s wrong with her?”

  “How can you tell it’s a girl?” he asks me.

  I turn my head slightly. “Educated guess?”

  Myrtle asks softly, “Don’t you recognize it, Lena?”

  She waits a moment and as I turn back, an uncanny feeling settles over me. I understand what I’m looking at the same moment she says, “That’s you.”

  Keller touches my hand. “Is it really?”

  My eyes move slowly from one side of the photograph to the other, staring. I’ve often wondered if it’s normal to feel such a longing for one’s childhood—the green canopies of leaves and succulent jungle flowers. But the face of this child is a mask—eyes shut, hands clenched—unreadable. It’s hard to believe this is me.

  Myrtle stands beside the photograph. “When you first got here, you were just like this—for weeks, months. You barely spoke. Sometimes you’d go for a day or two without opening your eyes.” She hesitates. “Actually—we thought you were autistic, you know? You were really such a strange kid.” Myrtle looks at me and lifts one finger, as if she will stroke my cheek; I sway back.

  “I don’t remember any of this.”

  “How could you? Your body was switched off—you were all inside that little noggin, like a clam in a shell.”

  “Where did you say she came from?” Keller asks again.


  Her eyes open slightly, the lashes damp. She says, “The Lion’s Children’s Hospital—I already told you—it was a long time ago—the hospital isn’t even there anymore. I’ve fostered a lot of kids—practically ran a dormitory, so you’ll have to excuse me if I’m foggy on some of the details.”

  “But just out of curiosity . . .” He faces her squarely. “Where did you say it used to be located?”

  She smiles in the hesitant layered way that I’ve seen both suspects and witnesses smile—the way people smile when their innocence gets called into question. Much as I want the information, part of me is a little afraid of hearing it. I want to shield both of us from Keller. She seems frail to me. I shift closer to her and say, “I think she’s already said she doesn’t exactly remember.”

  She looks at me gratefully, and Keller’s face goes blank. “There would, of course, be some records,” he says. “From the hospital and from the court, when Lena came here.”

  Myrtle puts one hand on her hip and she looks at him through lowered eyes. “You’ll have to forgive me, but I didn’t expect someone to walk in my door today and begin interrogating me about something that happened thirty years ago.”

  “Of course not,” I say pointedly, staring at Keller. I touch her shoulder, feel the soft slope of it through her nylon blouse.

  Keller looks away, his jaw working.

  “You didn’t stay like that, you know,” Myrtle says, tapping the edge of the photograph. “It took a while, but you could see it—like that trick photography? You know, where you can see the flower opening? One day you sort of just . . .” She makes a bursting motion with her hands. “You opened your eyes, started looking around. It was wonderful! I sang to you when I gave you baths and you loved that.” She slides next to me, slips her arm around my back. She begins to hum; I can feel the reverberation rising along my bones. “Mmmhmm,” she hums. “You loved that. You’d open your eyes and let me bathe you whenever I did that. Do you remember?” She hums again and again; the feeling is visceral and synaptic, nearly dizzying. I close my eyes and smile.