Finding Ashley

by Danielle Steel

  * * *

  —

  Melissa slept fitfully the night before Hattie came to see her. She woke up several times during the night, and lay wide awake for a long time before she fell asleep again. She got up early in the morning, went downstairs, and made coffee. It was a hot, beautiful July day, but not as warm as it had been before the fire. A slight breeze rippled through the trees. She had gone to the grocery store the day before to buy some things she thought Hattie might like to eat. She didn’t even know what she liked anymore.

  Hattie had visited them a few times when Robbie was small, but Melissa had still been angry with her then. They didn’t let her leave the convent often in the first few years. They liked the younger nuns to stay within the community, and kept them busy with projects and chores. Melissa refused to visit her in the convent. She couldn’t bear the thought of it. So Hattie got permission to visit her, but it happened less and less frequently as they continued to drift apart. Her two years in Africa had created a real break in time, and Hattie seemed more certain than ever of her vocation when she got back. Melissa had seen more of her once Robbie got sick, and she came to sit with him to give Melissa and Carson a break. After he died, Melissa left New York, and cut all her ties with her previous life. Then Melissa was living in the Berkshires, she and Carson were divorced, and Melissa didn’t want to see anyone. The last time they had seen each other was at Robbie’s funeral, and Melissa had barely spoken to Hattie. She was in a daze. Melissa was afraid that seeing her would bring it all back.

  The station wagon she had borrowed from the convent came up the driveway at ten a.m. Melissa knew she must have left New York before six to get there by then. She squinted in the sunlight to see her sister and was surprised when she got out of the car in jeans, a white T-shirt, and sneakers. She looked like any other woman in her early forties, going to pick up or drop off her kids. The bright copper hair was cut short, and had faded somewhat to a duller red, but was still surprisingly bright. Her red hair had been the bane of Hattie’s existence when she was younger, but she had the personality to go with it. It lit her up like a neon sign the moment she entered a room, and every teacher she’d ever had remembered her for her mischief, her constant laughter, and her red hair. Melissa always had an easier time staying below the radar, and Hattie envied her for that.

  Melissa saw that she had put on a little weight, but she was still pretty, and had the same smiling face. Hattie looked cautious, but was smiling broadly as she approached and gave her older sister a hug.

  “You look terrific, Mellie,” she said admiringly. “How do you stay in such good shape?”

  “I work my ass off here.” Melissa smiled at her, as they sat down on the porch, and then Melissa went inside to get her something to eat. She had bought the cinnamon buns Hattie had loved as a child, and Hattie’s face lit up when she saw them.

  “I haven’t had a cinnamon bun in twenty years. We have oatmeal for breakfast, and potatoes with every meal. It’s way too easy to gain weight. This is a beautiful place,” she said, looking around. She noticed all the details and impeccable touches, and guessed that Melissa had added them herself. She knew her sister and how thorough and attentive to detail she was. Melissa’s apartment in New York had been elegantly done too, especially once her books were at the top of every bestseller list and she was raking in the money, but Carson did well too. Their combined incomes had provided them a very agreeable life. Melissa had invested enough of it to continue to live well now too. Hattie was happy to see it, and relieved for her. She had no idea how her sister had come out of the divorce, but the house was testimony to the fact that she had enough money to live well, even though she hadn’t worked in seven years. She had stopped writing when Robbie was sick. She never left Robbie’s side in the final year. “This place would make a very nice convent retreat,” Hattie said, as she helped herself to a cinnamon bun.

  “Not on your life,” Melissa responded immediately, and Hattie laughed, with the sticky sugar all over her mouth, just the way she’d looked as a kid, which made Melissa smile.

  “I just thought I’d mention it, in case you get lonely up here,” Hattie said innocently.

  “I don’t,” Melissa said firmly. “I like my own company. And I’ve worked on the house every day for four years.”

  “It looks it. You’ve done a fantastic job.”

  “Thank you.” She smiled at her younger sister. “It was a mess when I bought it, and needed a lot of work. It was just what I needed to keep busy. I have a great contractor who helped me do everything I wanted to.” She gave Hattie a tour of the house, and then they came back to the porch with a pitcher of lemonade. Melissa poured out two glasses, and observed her sister quietly. “You haven’t changed, Hattie.” She was as pretty and warm as ever.

  “I doubt that, but I love what I do. That helps. And I know you hated the idea, and it was sudden, but the convent was the right choice for me. I realized when I went in that I wasn’t cut out to fight the battles I’d have to as an actress. It wasn’t meant for me.”

  “You could have picked a different line of work,” Melissa said sadly.

  “I feel safe where I am. And I knew you couldn’t protect me forever. You needed your own life.” The fact that Melissa had married a year after Hattie had gone into the convent had confirmed that to her. She had felt that she’d been a burden to her sister for fourteen years and kept her from leading a normal life for a young woman her age. It didn’t seem fair.

  “It sounds crazy, but I feel like Mom sometimes. I’ve gotten so damn critical since I’ve been alone, and since Robbie died. Sometimes I hear myself, and I sound just like her,” Melissa admitted. “I hate that. She was so hard on everyone, or on me at least.”

  “You two had a bad run for her last two years,” Hattie said, and Melissa nodded, thinking about it.

  “I never forgave her for what she did, and then she was gone. I don’t think she forgave me either. They made a terrible mistake sending me away.” Melissa’s voice was raw as she said it. It felt as though it had happened yesterday.

  Hattie hadn’t expected to get into the subject, but she waded into the deep waters with her. “She didn’t know what else to do. At least that’s what I thought later on. At the time I was just a kid, and didn’t understand all the ramifications of their decision. I didn’t get any of it until you explained it to me later.”

  “It wasn’t ‘their’ decision, it was hers,” Melissa corrected her, still angry at the memory. It had changed her life forever. “Dad never spoke up for me. I think he was just relieved to have Mom make the decision for him. We never talked about it before he died. The subject was taboo. But the price I paid was real.”

  “I know,” Hattie said sadly, looking at her sympathetically. “I understand that now. But there was no other option in their minds. She was too Catholic to let you have an abortion. And people didn’t keep babies born out of wedlock then. It was 1987. You were sixteen years old, and couldn’t have taken care of a child yourself, and they would have been too ashamed to let you keep it.” In a way it was a relief to both sisters to talk about it. Melissa hadn’t intended to, but seeing Hattie brought it all back again, just as she had feared.

  “So they sent me to that dungeon in Ireland, and forced me to give the baby up. Mom said I couldn’t come home again unless I did. What else could I do at sixteen?”

  “It would have ruined your life if you’d kept the baby. And you couldn’t have stayed in a Catholic school in New York with a child born out of wedlock.” They had gone to private Catholic schools all their lives.

  “Instead it ruined my life giving her up. I’ve never been the same. And two years later, I was taking care of you. And I didn’t mind it. You were my baby from the moment you were born. I was six then.” Melissa smiled at Hattie. But there was always an underlying anger and bitterness just under the surface, which colored everything
, when she thought about the baby her mother forced her to give up, especially now, when she had nothing else. It was why her books had been so dark, as she tried to exorcise the demons that tormented her, and never could. Her mother banishing her and making her give up the baby had traumatized her for life.

  “Did Carson know?” Hattie asked her, curious. She had always wondered and never dared ask. Their mother hadn’t told Hattie at the time that Melissa left home for seven months because she was pregnant, but Melissa had told her herself when Hattie was sixteen. Melissa had warned her sternly not to let the same thing happen to her. Hattie still remembered how shocked she had been when Melissa told her the whole story when she was old enough to understand.

  “Of course he knew,” Melissa answered her. “I told Carson after he proposed. I would never have married him with a secret like that. And I guess I only had two good eggs in me. We tried but I never got pregnant again after Robbie. Carson was very nice about it when I told him. She would have been sixteen when Carson and I got married, and he asked me if I wanted to try to contact her. He said she’d be welcome to visit. I tried, I called Saint Blaise’s, and spoke to the mother superior, and she said there was no way to find her. All the records had been destroyed in a fire a few years after I’d been there. She said she had no idea where the baby went, or the name of the people who adopted her. I’ve heard that from other women since, and I even read a book about it. It was an exposé of those convents and mother and baby homes in Ireland and England, written by a reporter who was a fallen Catholic. There were many convents like it in Ireland then. They were baby mills. It had been going on since the late forties. Mine was probably among the last of them. Nice Catholic girls from respectable families who got in trouble, and the Church offered a perfect solution. We went to Ireland for the pregnancy, disappeared from our schools at home, and left the babies with them, which made everything nice and simple for our parents, and the nuns had the babies adopted by wealthy American couples, and even a number of movie stars. The adoptive parents gave very large donations to the Church, and everyone was happy, except the girls who gave up their babies when they were too young to know better or have a voice in it. The adoptive parents got what people call today ‘designer babies,’ no drugs or girls from bad homes, all white middle and upper class Catholic girls. The pregnant girls’ parents who could afford to paid a hefty sum to the convent for keeping us, and then the adoptive parents paid a fortune for healthy white babies from decent families.

  “The youngest girl when I was there was thirteen. She told me she’d been raped by her uncle, her mother’s brother. Her parents said she was in boarding school for a year, which was what Mom told her friends too. She told them my grades were slipping because I was boy crazy, so they sent me to a good school in Ireland for a year, and I was an angel when I came home. There was only ever one boy. I loved him. And I only had sex with him once. We were too scared to do it again, and I got pregnant the first time. His parents sent him to military school in Mississippi, and Annapolis for college. I never heard from him again. I never had sex again until I was a junior in college at Columbia five years later. I was too traumatized to even date. The baby’s father and I were just children. He was even more afraid of his parents than I was of ours. They sent him away two days after he told them. He snuck out to tell me. The school he was going to sounded like a military prison. His father was a retired naval officer. They treated us like criminals. We thought we were in love, but who knows what that means at sixteen? Mom and Dad shipped me off pretty fast too.”

  “I remember,” Hattie said with tears in her eyes for her sister.

  “Saint Blaise’s was a nightmare, worse than I feared. And the nuns had the adoption all set up before I gave birth. They wouldn’t tell me anything about the family, just that they were ‘lovely people,’ and they were going to name her Ashley. They were at the convent, waiting, when I had her. The moment the midwife delivered her, they rushed her out of the room to them. They said it would be a sin to let me hold her and rejoice in what I’d done. I never got to hold her and I only got a glimpse of her wrapped in a blanket as one of the nuns took her away.” Melissa had had dreams of it for years. “I was never allowed to meet the adoptive parents, and they took her away to the States when she was a week old. They stayed with her at a hotel in Dublin, until she was old enough to fly back to the States with them. I never even knew what city they lived in. I knew nothing about them, except that they were American.

  “There were seventy or eighty girls at the school, from all over the United States, and one girl from Paris who cried all the time. They had two nuns who were midwives right on the premises, so we never left the convent, even to give birth, unless a girl was having twins, or something went seriously wrong during the delivery, and then they’d take them to a hospital. They treated us like criminals, bad girls who needed to be punished, and worked us like slaves. There was no counseling, no therapy. We just stayed for the duration of the pregnancy, went to classes in the morning so we could go back to our schools when we went home, and worked for the rest of the day. After the baby was born, they shipped us home again two weeks later, our hearts broken forever.

  “I read somewhere that the Church started getting nervous about it. Forty or fifty years of high-priced adoptions, which must have brought in a fortune, given the donations they accepted in exchange for healthy newborns to be adopted. The nuns covered their tracks by burning all the records, so no one could find the babies that were adopted later on. All trace of them was erased, including the names of the wealthy people who adopted them.

  “Saint Blaise’s still exists, I checked. It’s a home for elderly, retired nuns now. They don’t do adoptions anymore. No one in the Church likes to talk about it, but you hear about it from time to time. Most of the girls who went there were too ashamed to talk about it, even now, years later. And probably the men they married later didn’t know.”

  Melissa looked devastated while she told Hattie the details she hadn’t told her before. Hattie was deeply moved by what she said. It was an awful story if what she said was true. And Hattie thought that it was. It made her feel almost guilty for being a nun herself, but things happened sometimes even in the Church that were hard to explain, or justify. And she believed what Melissa said, that they had covered it up. She’d heard about some of those convents and mother and baby homes herself. They had served a purpose at one time, but no longer made sense in today’s more liberal world.

  “I never forgave Mom for it, I don’t think I ever would have, even if she were alive today,” Melissa said in a broken voice. Talking about it tore her heart out all over again.

  “The nuns probably meant well, and it met a need in the early days. What seems wrong is their making money from it, even if it all went to the Church. And destroying the records. But in those days, people weren’t looking for the babies they’d given up, or their birth parents. That’s new, even in adoptions by the state. Those records used to be sealed, and no one could get that information, until the laws were changed,” Hattie said quietly.

  “Burning the records was a very efficient way to seal the records forever,” Melissa said bitterly. “I’ve hated even the sight of nuns ever since. I stopped believing in God, and never went to church again when I came home. Mom didn’t dare press that point. Dad acted like he knew nothing, and Mom got sick a few months after I got back, so we never talked about it. You and Carson are the only ones who know.”

  “Do you think it would make a difference if you went to Ireland yourself? Some old nun might remember something. It’s a long shot, but it might be worth it,” Hattie suggested.

  “When I called them, the mother superior said there were none of the old nuns left. It was thirty-three years ago, and they’re all dead, retired, or had been reassigned years ago. There have been four mother superiors since. And no one wants to talk about it or remember. They sounded sympathetic, but were
very skittish when I called. I don’t think going back there now would make a difference. I’ve tried to make my peace with it for thirty-three years. I almost have, but not quite. I still haven’t forgiven Mom, but what good does that do? With Robbie gone, it would be nice to know where my daughter is, just to meet her and make sure she is having a good life. I’m no use to her as a mother now, she’s an adult, and she probably hasn’t forgiven me either for giving her up, but I’ve lost two children. Robbie, who I loved so much, and a little girl called Ashley I never knew. I’m sorry, and it probably doesn’t make sense to you, but I just couldn’t stomach it when you became a nun. All I could think of every time I saw you were the nuns at Saint Blaise’s. It made you one of them. It’s nice not seeing you in your habit now. You look like you again. I could never understand why you’d want to be part of all that. I still feel traumatized when I see a nun. Fortunately, I don’t see them much anymore.”

  “Most orders don’t wear the habit now. I’m sorry you went through all that, and I made it worse for you.” Hattie said it with deep feeling.

  “Why did you do it?” Melissa looked baffled. “You were such a happy kid. Why would you want that life? We were never that religious, except for Mom.”

  “Things happened that made it seem like the right choice, the only choice, at the time. It’s hard to explain.”

  “You were a good little actress. You had talent. One minute you were starting to get good breaks, and the next minute you were gone.”