Jessica Lost

by Crumpacker/Picariello

  The next morning, a sunny April day, I walked through the park on my way to the doctor to confirm my suspicions. There were police cars on the park drive, clusters of cops, official vehicles off to the sides. I learned later it was the night of the infamous Central Park jogger attack—New York at its lowest and most vicious.

  But my New York was bright and happy. “It’s positive,” my doctor said. “You’re pregnant.”

  I almost wept with relief. We’d been trying so long, since Damien was three. Now he was six and would be nearly seven before his sibling arrived.

  “Let’s talk about stress,” the doctor continued. “You know, there’s a good chance the miscarriage was blood pressure–related. I don’t want you in any stressful situations, physically or emotionally. Are there any major stressors in your life right now?”

  Did crying nearly every day count as stress? Did being continuously criticized and demeaned count as stress? “Yes,” I said. “My job.”

  “How do you feel about going out on disability?”

  I looked at him like he was Santa Claus and the Lone Ranger wrapped up in one. “That would be great.”

  I spent the next seven months relaxing. Some mornings I took Damien to school, some mornings Lenny did. Usually I stopped on the way home to pick up something to make for dinner. Then I read, or watched television. Sometimes I knitted a little, or wrote. Occasionally a friend came over. Most days, I had an afternoon nap. Sometimes our nice babysitter picked Damien up to bring him home, or to an after-school program, or on a playdate; but sometimes I did. It was heaven.

  The spring passed, then the summer. In the fall, Damien started first grade. I was better at being a mother now, especially without the drag of work pulling me away, tiring me out. But I still wasn’t great. I felt like every other mom had gotten a neat little brochure, called something like “Mothering: What You Need to Know.” I was a stranger in a strange land, fumbling my way through.

  In December, Alex arrived. It was an easy labor after an easy pregnancy. He was a placid baby who smiled a lot and slept a lot and was content to sit in his infant chair and watch the world go by.

  It was so simple: I loved him, I took care of him; I was good at it.

  Why was this so much easier?

  Isn’t everything easier the second time around? Or lovelier, or whatever the song says? I was fairly confident. I was in a bigger, more comfortable home, not trapped in two small rooms in a walk-up apartment. I was no longer isolated. Lenny worked at home, and I’d met a lot of moms and kids at Damien’s school. More of my friends had children. In fact, I was almost never alone. I had a community, a village—something to do every day, people to do it with.

  When Damien was born, I had a job I loved, and my social life revolved around it. I missed work terribly and felt trapped by the baby. But Alex’s birth rescued me from a job I hated, and a boss who made me miserable. I was grateful.

  But the biggest difference was probably the passage of time. I was nearly seven years older, and calmer, and maybe a little smarter. I had prepared myself, joined a new mothers’ group, signed up for infant massage class, infant music class, infant exercise class. I knew I couldn’t be trapped in the house again, unshowered, in my pajamas all day.

  I loved my life, my family. I loved my children so much that sometimes I wondered how anyone could give a baby away. There was a strange disconnect: I had learned about my adoption as if the birth mother was no more than a womb, a vehicle. There was never a mention of her difficulty, her pain. She did the right thing, and she did it easily.

  The story of my birth parents was a shadow, like a house I lived in before I was old enough to remember it clearly: two young people, a precipitous marriage, a decision to separate, a baby that could not be cared for. But now I could not imagine doing it. And trying to imagine it led me to thinking about how someone had done that to me.

  Then I met Maureen, the mother of a child in Damien’s elementary school, a little older than me, a journalist, and a birth mother. After we became friends, she told me the story of how she’d gotten pregnant by her high school boyfriend, and was sent to a home for unwed mothers before anyone in their small town realized she was pregnant. She gave birth to her son in secret, and gave the baby up for adoption. Her son was now thirty, and for three decades she had mourned the loss, and felt that she was missing a piece of herself. She had searched for him for years.

  This was not the birth mother of my imagination, the clutching, grasping immigrant birth mother of Steve’s story, or the weepy teenage simps of the stories in the women’s magazines. Maureen was smart and funny. She lived on the Upper West Side and volunteered on the school board and loved books and theater. She was a lot like me.

  A tiny window opened inside of me. Maureen made me think: Maybe my birth mother would be okay. Maybe meeting her would be a good thing.

  “Your birth mother will welcome you,” Maureen said, over coffee at a sidewalk café on Columbus Avenue. “I know it. She’ll like you and you’ll like her.”

  “How can you be so positive?” I asked.

  “That’s how it is. That’s how it always is. I know it.”

  I never questioned how invested she was in my situation, how important it was to her that all adoptees want to meet their birth parents. But I was drawn to what she was saying, and the more I was drawn to her, the closer I got to actually doing something.

  In the fall of 1995, with Maureen’s encouragement, I decided to get some basic information about my adoption—just a few facts. I wrote a letter to the Louise Wise adoption agency, requesting information on my parentage: medical history, ethnic background, anything they might be able to tell me. I was humble and nervous. I felt like a bank robber asking permission to visit the vault. It didn’t occur to me that I had any right to information about my identity. I had been brainwashed well.

  What I got was nothing: no phone call, no return letter.

  A couple of months later, I sent another letter, enclosing a copy of the earlier request—but no response.

  By the time the New Year rolled around, I had been waiting three months, and was getting annoyed. I still wasn’t completely positive that I wanted to know any of this—just the thought of it made my stomach clench. But now I was invested, and tired of being ignored. I got the name of the agency’s president and wrote him a letter personally, enclosing copies of the two prior letters.

  On January 25, 1996, I finally received a response. Ruth Hubbard, the agency’s supervisor of postadoption services, wrote to apologize for the delay and enclosed a brochure and application for the New York State Adoption Registry. She asked me to complete and notarize the form and return it to her, along with a check and a copy of my amended birth certificate—the only birth certificate I had—which every adoptee in New York State receives when he or she is legally adopted .

  I showed the brochure to Lenny once the kids were asleep. I felt as if I were showing him pornography. I was nervous, excited, scared—of what, I didn’t know.

  “It says there are two types of information,” I explained. “Nonidentifying and identifying: Nonidentifying is all they can give me if the birth parents haven’t signed up for the registry.”

  “Like what?” he asked.

  I read the list. “Like ethnic and religious background, education, age, occupations, hobbies, health history… even general appearance. And circumstances related to the adoption.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know, I guess why they were giving up the baby.”

  Lenny looked at the brochure. “So what’s the identifying information?”

  “Names and addresses. Their names and addresses. But that can only be released with the permission of both birth parents.” That seemed incredibly improbable to me, which I liked. It felt safer.

  I looked the form over. Check Box A, it said, if you are requesting nonidentifying information. Check Box B if you are requesting identifying information.

  I he
sitated. I thought about it. I hesitated some more.

  It seemed completely unreal. The fact of my birth parents’ existence felt nothing like fact to me. I knew they existed, but only theoretically. I had no sense of actually being born to someone.

  “How much do you want to know?” Lenny asked. This whole thing made him nervous, too, I knew. He expended a lot of effort keeping my relationship with my mother from boiling over, and I could see that he viewed this as potential trouble.

  It was a hard question to answer, like a riddle. Since I couldn’t believe that the information existed, I couldn’t imagine knowing it.

  “Just a little,” I said. “I want a medical history, ethnic background. I mean, I know they’re Jewish, but where they were from. Maybe that’s it.”

  But I was getting curious. If the information existed, how could I not know? If some government agency knew the identity of my birth parents, it only seemed right that I should know it, too. Didn’t it?

  I looked over the form again. “Do you know how unlikely it is that both of my birth parents would have signed up with the registry?” I asked. “I mean, they were splitting up when I was born. How likely is it that they would be in touch with each other, or even know how to find each other, much less agree to register.”

  Mentally hedging my bets, sure that (1) they didn’t exist and (2) if they did exist they would never have jointly signed the registry, I checked both boxes A and B, requesting identifying and nonidentifying information. I mailed the form off with my check for $20.

  Then I waited some more. Once every week or so, I would wonder if my form had gotten lost. I wasn’t sure if I wanted it to be lost or not.

  Finally, over the summer, I got a confidential letter from the Director of Vital Records at the State Department of Health. Your mother is not registered at this time, he wrote. What did he mean “your mother”? My mother was up in Westchester, where I grew up. When she registers—not “if she registers”; how could they be so sure?—we will request your consent to release your current name and address. She will be asked for a similar consent. When both consents are received, current names will be exchanged. Like bodily fluids, only way scarier. We are not allowed to search for your mother and do not know when she will register. No surprise.

  The letter went on to explain that since the program was confidential, they could only respond to questions in writing. What did one thing have to do with another? Were telephone calls too revealing? Could they only be discreet on paper? He pointed out, helpfully, that I might want to consider a private registry, such as Soundex, and provided the registry’s address and phone number.

  Was he kidding? I was so relieved that the information wasn’t there that I almost kissed the official State Department of Health stationery.

  The registry notified Louise Wise Services that I had signed up for both identifying and nonidentifying information, and had paid my fee, giving the agency permission to release the nonidentifying information to me.

  Was it strange to me that I had to sign forms to find out whether or not my grandmother had blue eyes? Was I angry that I didn’t know where my father was born, or whether or not there was a family history of diabetes? I am almost ashamed to say no. The fact that some agency knew more about me than I knew about myself made sense to me. Besides, those birth parents were all imaginary anyway. It was just a story. Not knowing the details about something that wasn’t real was fine with me, like not knowing the Tooth Fairy’s dress size or Santa Claus’s zip code.

  In early August, Ruth Hubbartt, the supervisor of postadoption services at Louise Wise, called. We made an appointment for the following week for me to come in and receive my nonidentifying information.

  Suddenly, it felt real: agencies, services, information.

  “I’m not sure I want to do it,” I said to Maureen that night on the phone.

  “Why? Why would you not want to do it?” her voice was strident. “You have the right to know. It’s your life.”

  “I know that, it’s just…” but I didn’t know what it was. It was both scary and unreal, like the monster in the closet you know isn’t there, but you’re scared of anyway.

  “You have to do it,” she said.

  Though I wasn’t sure if she was seeing me, or the son she’d given up so long ago, she was convincing.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

  19. BUNNY

  THE SECOND TIME

  Betrayal can only happen if you love.

  JOHN LE CARRÉ

  A PERFECT SPY

  I was still living on Second Avenue when I met my second husband several years later.

  By then, I had left Harper to become director of publicity at a small children’s book publishing house. After that, I took some time off because I wanted to write, and thought time was what I needed. Finally, discouraged, I started over at RCA Victor Records.

  At the office Christmas party, a few months after I’d begun working there, a slim, handsome man asked me who my favorite composers were. I said Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Verdi, and Wagner. It was Wagner that got him. If I’d said Bruckner, he’d have wanted to move in with me that very night. As it was, he waited from Christmas until the middle of June. The April after that, we were married, a year and a half later—not quite as fast as the first time around.

  We’ve been married a long time. We have two grown children.

  After a year or two, we moved from Second Avenue to an apartment in Brooklyn Heights, just a short walk from where I’d lived with Sally, eating sauerkraut night after night, in those empty, sad days so long ago. The past was gone; it happened when I was someone else.

  I never told my children about The Baby. When they were little, I thought they’d think I might give them away, too.

  But later there was never a right time, never a moment in which I could say that I’d given away my first child.

  I should have told them, and now I wish I had. I thought I would when they were old enough, but old enough was never the age they were. I paid a penalty for not telling them.

  I didn’t ever decide not to tell them; I never found the moment for talking about The Baby, and so I never did. And in a more important way, The Baby gradually ceased to exist. I imagine the process was like that of having a limb amputated: I remembered pain, and sometimes I felt pain, but in a place that was no longer there.

  I did count her years; I watched her birthdays go by. She’s ten now; she’s seventeen; she’s thirty. I might sit next to her at the movies, even talk to her at a meeting, or sit near her at a restaurant table. Would I know who she was? Would I recognize her? Would she know me? But none of that was real, because on another level, she stayed The Baby, the warm infant I carried from one place to another and then lost forever.

  It was a loss that I closed off. I couldn’t live with it for all those years in any other way. Even on the fourth day—the day she was four days old, the day I gave her away, lost her, began to be without that baby forever—the pain was so paralyzing that when I felt it, I couldn’t move from the street corner where I stood, immobile. After that, after she was gone, after I had allowed her to be gone, I stayed on the edge of numbness for such a long time: the long passive stillness was like a cloud I moved through. I put pain at a distance, because I was afraid that if I allowed myself to feel it, I would be unable to move at all.

  I didn’t do that deliberately, close off the place in my mind where The Baby was, but that’s what happened. Even after considerable therapy, those emotions stayed there, alone, seemingly safely hidden beneath the surface. But emotions don’t leave when your mind pretends they’re not there. If they can’t reach light in one direction, they turn, and in a photosynthesis of the soul, they try to find it in another. They don’t go away; instead, unacknowledged—in fact, even more so because of that—they affect the way life is lived.

  For me, those feelings burst open at moments when they were least expected. All of a sudden they were there, their power enormous
. That was the most surprising thing about the pain of missing The Baby—it never went away, but became an underground part of me, hiding there, to leap out suddenly and attack—always when I was alone, most often when I was driving in the car, perhaps because I could cry in the car without anyone seeing. I would be listening to music on the radio, daydreaming as I drove, and find myself suddenly in pain and in tears. And then it would slowly stop, and I would forget again.

  During all these years, The Baby’s birth, even on the conscious and deliberate level, became my great secret. I was ashamed, but I’m not sure why, because the adoption, I believed, was the best thing I could have done. But I was ashamed of having been pregnant, and no matter what was best, ashamed of the loss. Talking about it was difficult, much too intimate. At first, I needed to talk about it, because talking was a way to dilute the emotions I had been left with. Later, with the gift of therapy, it meant talking about another person, the one I had been, so that the connections could be well understood and then severed. Soon it was impossible, and I never talked about it at all. My husband was the last person I told.

  The birth of The Baby, and her loss, certainly affected the kind of mother I became: over-protective, full of the fear, without identifying it, that I would lose another child, that the baby would be taken from me.

  I couldn’t have loved my children more. I thought they were perfect. I didn’t look at them when they were infants, the way I’d gazed at The Baby, trying to memorize her face, to keep it unchanged, in my mind. When I looked at my daughter as an infant, I looked into her eyes to see who she was. When she looked back at me, I felt we recognized each other.

  I also thought I was a perfect mother. I learned how to breast-feed, in a perfect rocking chair: I loved being the mother of this beautiful child. I sang to her, rocked her, played with her, held her, and adored her. She was mine, no one else’s—just perhaps her father’s, too.

  She was almost three when my son was born. I prepared incredibly detailed instructions for her care while I was in the hospital (still a stay of four or five days then after a birth). Several pages long, the list included her favorite dessert, the music she liked to listen to at bedtime, in what order she liked to get dressed in the morning, as well as approximate times for naps.