In the end, she wanted to offer this baby, her child, every chance in life she could have. And she questioned—every day she questioned—whether or not she could give that child her every chance. It was with those very questions that she found herself in an adoption agency in downtown Savannah, her heart almost dead inside, seeming to beat as little and as slowly as possible.
The small blond counselor, Barbara, leaned forward on her desk. “Kate, I know it’s incredibly difficult to talk about this. We can move as slowly as you’d like. I am here to listen and I’m here to help you answer all of the questions you have to help you decide whether parenting or adoption is the right plan for you and your baby. You want to consider adoption?”
Katie nodded and with that acknowledgment, she began to weep, bent over with the force of her own admission. “Yes,” she stuttered. “I need to talk about it … consider it…”
For what seemed like hours, but was probably much less, Barbara talked to Katie, going through “parenting plans” and “adoption plans.” The counselor asked questions Katie could barely answer. “What does parenting look like to you?” “What does adoption look like to you?” “What is the life you envision for your child?”
Confusion blurred her mind, and Katie finally said. “I want to keep this baby. I want to … keep it. That’s what my heart says.”
Barbara smiled. “I know. I know what you want to do. Of course you want to keep this baby. I can tell how much you love her already. But are you prepared to parent this precious baby, to give this baby the life you so desperately want her to have? Sometimes, just sometimes, being a ‘good mother’ means choosing adoption.”
For the first time since she’d entered the office, Katie’s tears stopped. She exhaled and saw as clearly as she did the moon on a cloudless night—there was a difference between keeping and parenting. What she wanted to keep was this part of Jack, to keep what remained of their love. But could she actually be a parent?
“What are my choices?” Katie asked, dry-eyed, staunch, her voice not sounding like her own. “What happens if I choose adoption? What kinds of adoption are there?”
She returned home that afternoon, and it was Katie’s mother who set her mind in direct opposition to adoption. “We can raise this baby, Katie. Your dad and I can do it. Please don’t give her away. It’s not nineteen sixty. We don’t have to hide.”
The words—give her away—tore every last piece of fragile flash in Katie’s soul. “Mom, you know that can’t be—my child in your house thinking that I don’t want her. I could never do that. You have no idea what it does to a young girl if she thinks she’s not wanted. It is by far one of the most devastating beliefs in the world.” Katie fought for control.
“Don’t use your wilderness-therapy psychology speech to explain what you want to do.”
“What I want to do? For God’s sake, Mom. Jack is married. I’m twenty-two years old and hiding in my parents’ house. I’m pregnant and alone. At this moment, I’m not doing a damn thing I want to do. I can now only do what is best.…”
“I’m sorry, baby. I’m sorry.…”
“Mom, I’m begging you to stop and see what I see. To know what I know.… I’m not giving up, and I’m not giving her away. You can’t ever say that again. It’s a choice, mom. I’m choosing not to focus on everything in me that is screaming, ‘keep her,’ so that I can focus on what I want to give my child. I’m choosing. I’m offering. It’s a gift to another family, to my child.”
“So you could give her to a stranger but not to us?”
The conversations ended this way every time, and often in weakness Katie agreed to allow her parents to raise her child, her and Jack’s child, until her strength returned. Always underneath the tension and arguments and deathly silent days and nights while her child grew within her, Katie’s decision remained the same: she would offer her child the gift of a beautiful, hand-chosen family.
Katie began to show, her belly forcing its way past the buttons and zippers of her clothing. She had to make a decision. At the very least, she had to buy herself some time. Kate knew that if she brought the knowledge of this child into her hometown, she’d need to bring the child itself. And she wasn’t prepared for the questions or the well-meaning advice that was bound to come her way. That’s why, when she asked her dad to rent a small cottage on the lake an hour away, Katie felt she was protecting her child and herself, not hiding her pregnancy. Norah and Katie’s family were the only visitors, and they often spent the night, watching movies and reading books.
Katie walked through the paths and hiking trails around the small lake, and she continued to collect feathers. Wherever she went or walked or sat, there seemed to be a feather floating beneath her feet or at her side. She placed them in a bowl. She mixed the wilderness feathers with the new ones until the individual was indistinguishable region from region.
She found feathers so blue they shimmered, the red ones and brown, the soft down and the coarse bristly ones. Her favorite was all white, so white it seemed bleached and yet had a single dot: a freckle. Bluebird, raven, hawk, chickadee, cardinal—and then she found some that she couldn’t identify, ones she hadn’t yet found a name for. She became obsessed with the nameless ones. She checked Audubon books out of the library and they were piled on the dining room table. Engrossed in discovering what bird had lost a piece of self, she tied tiny labels to the quills. She didn’t have any plans for the feathers, and maybe that was the best part—they existed for beauty only.
She brought something wild to the tame and rational. She brought heart into a place where she must soon give away her heart.
Jack shut down, or that was the best way Katie knew to describe what happened to the man she once knew. He disappeared and another man, a married man who wanted to get on with his life, took his place. She felt it wasn’t true, that deep down Jack still existed, but the facts proved otherwise. He left her alone to go through family profiles until she decided on a closed and confidential adoption.
Through terrible phone calls and months of agony, Katie chose a mother and father who had been trying for nine years to have a child and were unable: a couple with a large extended family and a seemingly solid (as solid as one could look on paper) background.
Still and yet, through all this agony, Jack never told his wife, Maggie.
seven
BLUFFTON, SC
1997
The cramps weren’t bad. Really, they were little more than a stomachache or muscle spasm. Katie still had another week and anyway, the agony she’d heard about—head-spinning pain that tore women in half—would be much more severe than this. She wouldn’t panic over muscle aches. It wasn’t time yet.
Katie sat back against the tub and let the warm water soothe her. Twilight was turning into night, and the bathroom was dusky and serene as the first knife-searing stab thrust itself through the middle of her body. She bent over with its force and lost her breath into the darkness.
“Mom…” she called, tentatively at first, then louder, then loudest of all. “MOM!”
Nicole ran into the bathroom where Katie stood in the middle of a puddle, naked and round, doubled over and dripping water onto the tile floor. “Are you okay?” Her mom placed her hand on Katie’s bare back.
Katie looked up. “I think … it’s time.”
“Get dressed. I’ll get the bag and start the car.”
Another knife ripped through Katie’s body, a searing heat that she’d never felt before. “Oh…”
Her mom uttered the same soothing sounds she’d used when Katie was sick as a child, the sounds a mother uses with any child in any world, rubbing her hand up and down Katie’s spine until the pain dissipated.
Nicole rushed into the bedroom and grabbed the prepacked bag as Katie wobbled, wet and bent, into the room to pull on sweatpants and a T-shirt. Within two minutes, they were on their way to the hospital.
Fluid gushed from Katie’s body, drenching the towel that had been placed on th
e passenger seat. She knew from her classes that her water had broken, meaning that the baby would come quickly now. “Mom.” Katie uttered the name, feeling its shape change with each contraction. She would be a mother soon. And then she would relinquish the right to be called by that same name.
Nicole gunned the car, placing her hand on Katie’s leg. “You are going to be okay. This will be fine.”
“I’m scared.”
“Of course you are.” Tears dripped off Nicole’s chin and Katie turned away.
“We forgot to call Jack. I promised…” Katie’s words were stopped short by a quick contraction, her body disobeying her commands to be still. Her body’s unrelenting defiance left her breathless.
“I’ll call him as soon as I get there. Shhh … be still. Focus on your breathing.”
Tears blurred Katie’s eyesight and as they drove, the Spanish moss hanging off the live oak trees blurred into winged birds.
“Katie, I will take care of everything. Focus only on your body. On the birth. Let go of everything else.”
And she did. Closing her eyes, Katie went inside her body, talking to the baby she had named Luna, moving with the pain and the stirrings and the shifting of her bones. When they arrived at the hospital, the nurse told Katie that she was five centimeters dilated and moving fast.
In her last birthing class, Katie had decided she would not have a single medication, and she stuck with that choice. Using every technique she’d ever learned, she took control of her body, allowing the reckless spasms to move through her, crying when needed and screaming when something begged to be released.
There was, she found, a tunnel of darkness that she willingly entered as she pushed Luna from her body and into the world. Only the two of them existed—the crush of body cooperating outside time and space, allowing life to endure. The doctor, the nurse, and her mom were all in the room, yet they seemed somehow outside the world, another dimension.
Bearing down one final time, Katie was silent and resolute as Luna was born. For the briefest moment, the baby was simultaneously attached to Katie and in the world. The doctor cut the umbilical cord, releasing Luna from Katie’s body. It would be Katie who would have to release Luna from her life.
The nurse walked around the bed and placed a wide-eyed Luna into Katie’s arms. Katie looked down into her daughter’s face. “Oh, she’s the most perfect. Most perfect.” Luna’s hair was dark and thick, poking out in wet clumps after her journey. Her eyes were green, clear: Jack’s eyes. If grief had a sound, it was the silence of that birthing room.
Nicole walked over and took Luna from Katie’s arms, and the room filled with the deepest and most awful knowing: They would hold Luna this once and then she would be gone. Somewhere in the same hospital, a family waited to hold their new daughter.
Nicole held Luna and stroked her face, staring into her eyes. “We love you, baby Luna. We will, from this day forward, pray for you every day.” Nicole handed Luna to Katie. Pictures were taken as if it was a normal birth—a day of celebration even—and then it was time to say good-bye.
“How do I do this?” Katie looked to her mom.
“I don’t know.”
Katie held her daughter, her heart yielded to the good-bye she hadn’t yet spoken. “I can’t go through this pain if there isn’t peace at the end. I can’t. Please promise me there is peace at the end of this.”
Nicole placed her hand on Katie’s forehead, but didn’t promise anything at all. The nurse entered the room with her own tears. The social worker stood at her side with papers and a sad smile. “Are you ready?”
Katie pulled back the blanket, memorizing every bend and curve and sinew of Luna’s body. Touching her. Kissing her.
Jack was there, at the hospital, waiting in a separate room to both meet and then say good-bye to his daughter. If a last living piece of Katie’s heart existed (which she wasn’t sure about) seeing Jack would have killed it.
“You, Luna, are beautiful and special and you are going to have a wonderful mother and dad. I want you to grow up to know your God, and be surrounded in and by love. Be a good girl. I love you with every piece of me.” Katie kissed her daughter’s forehead as a tear dropped on Luna’s wild hair.
In a motion she would have thought impossible, Katie handed her child to the social worker and then reached into her bag. “I have something I want to send with her,” Katie said in a voice suffused with sorrow. She handed the social worker a small feather.
“It will be up to the parents whether they will take this,” the social worker said softly.
“I found it the first day I thought I might be pregnant. It’s my only gift.”
Nicole laid her head on the pillow next to her daughter. “Life is your gift, Katie.”
“Kate,” Katie said to her mom. “Now, from now on, call me Kate.”
Kate handed Luna to the nurse, and something felt torn away, a hollow feeling like her insides had been scooped out. A great wind could blow through her without hitting resistance.
Kate’s words echoed across the empty hospital room. “What will fill the place where you were?” The question was meant for her daughter, who was now someone else’s child.
eight
BRONXVILLE, NY
2010
Science was Emily’s favorite class. She sat at the long black table with a plastic DNA helix at each place. The model was constructed of colored plastic bubbles attached by thick straws in a winding helix. Emily thought it beautiful. She was awed that every body had miles and miles of these microscopic and twisted ropes inside. Human bodies were so much more interesting than trying to decipher words.
Words made her crazy really—the way the letters moved around and changed their sounds just by being next to each other. The teachers and testers called the moving letters “dyslexia” but Emily called it obnoxious. Now she needed to have one more tutor and one more hour of school and one more sheet of homework.
Emily raised her hand.
“Yes?” Mrs. Graceland, the teacher, asked.
“Is dyslexia on DNA?” Emily held up the plastic molecule.
“Wow. That is a great question, Emily. But sadly, I don’t know. I will look that up and tell you as soon as I find out. But usually attributes like that are on DNA; they don’t know where yet.” She touched the helix as if trying to find the exact spot where dyslexia would dwell.
Mrs. Graceland turned back to the board, holding chalk like a cigarette above her head before drawing a chart that would explain how DNA bestowed someone eye color or hair color or height. “Every attribute in or on your body is coded into this strand.”
Two seats over from Emily, Chaz Ross laughed in that confident way that only athletic, good-looking boys could laugh, the way that meant they didn’t care what anyone thought because only what they thought mattered. Emily looked at him and he smiled at her. “Guess that means that nice butt was coded before I was born.”
“Gross,” Emily said. “You’re disgusting.” But of course that was the last thing she thought he was. She turned back to her DNA strand and ran her finger across the plastic and then down to the base.
Sailor Kessler, Emily’s best friend, whispered. “I got my dad’s brown eyes and Mother’s curly hair. What parts did you get?”
Emily stared at Sailor, who was so confident where every part of her had come from and why. “I don’t know,” Emily said, lowering her eyes to the desk.
“Don’t know? I mean, are your pretty green eyes from your Mom or dad?”
“I don’t know because I don’t know.” Emily looked up at her friend. “I’m adopted.”
“Really?” Sailor paused as if swallowing a long sip of lemonade and waiting to decide how it tasted. Then she smiled. “Wow. How cool. How come you never told me?”
“I don’t think about it much,” Emily lied.
Sailor, whose parents not only gave her good looks, but all the money a thirteen-year-old girl could possibly need, hugged Emily with one arm, almost ti
pping over their metal chairs. “Just think, you have four parents. I mean that’s something I can’t have, right?”
“But not really. The other two—well one really—gave birth. Birth parents are what they are. So whatever.”
“Not whatever. It’s like a mystery. Like that book we loved when we were little.”
“Harriet the Spy?”
“Yeah, like that. We could go try and find them. We’d be good at that.”
“I don’t want to find them.” A half truth, which Emily continually convinced herself was a full truth.
Sailor looked up to the ceiling and sighed. “Oh, you are so lucky. I have my two boring parents and you have mystery parents.”
Mrs. Graceland stopped her lecture on the X and Y chromosomes with her funny chart. “Sailor, please stop moving your lips and making noise come out.”
The class laughed and Sailor apologized with her batting eyelashes. Class resumed, but Emily’s thoughts were in the land they often were: Far-Away-Emily-World, her parents called it.
Mystery Parents. Emily had never thought of it that way—she’d only believed someone “gave her away.” Now her adoption took on a mystique it hadn’t before.
After school, Sailor and Emily sat on the back steps of the junior high.
Sailor pulled out a pad of paper. “Here, we are going to make a list. I mean, we have to find out, Emily. What if you finally kiss Chaz and then find out he’s your brother or something gross like that? Maybe you were saved from a horrible situation or war, like all those kids Angelina Jolie adopted.”
“You’re wack-a-doodle,” Emily said, smiling through her favorite word.
“Yes, I am, and that’s why you’re my best friend.”
The two girls put their heads together and made a list of all the mysterious reasons her birth parents couldn’t keep her.
• They were spies on the lam.
• The dad was the President of the United States and needed to hide her.
And Then I Found You Page 7
