by Jodi Picoult
The last time my parents had been fighting—which was, like, yesterday—you and I were in our bedroom, and we could hear them loud and clear. Words slipped under the door, even though it was closed: wrongful birth . . . testimony . . . deposition. At one point I heard the mention of television: Don’t you think reporters would get wind of this? Is that what you really want? Dad said, and for a moment I thought how cool it would be to be on the news, until I remembered that being a poster child for dysfunctional family life wasn’t really how I wanted to spend my fifteen minutes of fame.
They’re mad at me, you said.
No. They’re mad at each other.
Then we both heard Dad say, Do you really think Willow wouldn’t figure this out?
You looked at me. Figure what out?
I hesitated, and instead of answering, I reached for the book you had in your lap and told you I’d read out loud.
Normally you didn’t like that—reading was just about the only thing you could do brilliantly, and you usually wanted to show it off, but you probably felt like I did at that moment: like there was a big Brillo pad in your stomach, and every time you moved, it grated your insides. I had friends whose parents had divorced. Wasn’t this the way it all started?
I opened to a random page of facts and began to read out loud to you about unlikely and gruesome deaths. There was a Brink’s car guard who was killed when fifty thousand dollars’ worth of quarters fell out of a truck and crushed him. A gust of wind pushed a man’s car into a river near Naples, Italy, so he broke the window and climbed out and swam to shore, only to be killed by a tree that blew over and crushed him. A man who went over Niagara Falls in a barrel in 1911 and broke nearly every bone in his body later on slipped on a banana peel in New Zealand and died from the fall.
You liked that last one best, and I’d gotten you to smile again, but inside, I was still miserable: how could anyone ever win when the world beat you down at every turn?
That was when Mom came into the room and sat down on the edge of your bed. “Do you and Daddy hate each other?” you asked.
“No, Wills,” she said, smiling, but in a way that made her skin look like it was stretched too tightly over the edges of her face. “Everything’s absolutely fine.”
I stood up, my hands on my hips. “When are you going to tell her?” I demanded.
My mother’s gaze could have cut me in half, I swear. “Amelia,” she said in a tone that brooked no argument, “there is nothing to tell.”
Now, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, I realized what a total liar my mother was. I wondered if that was what I was destined for, if you could inherit that tendency the same way she had passed me the ability to double-joint my elbows, to tie a cherry stem into a knot with my tongue.
I leaned over the toilet bowl, stuck my finger down my throat, and vomited, so that this time when I told myself I was empty and aching, I would finally be telling the truth.
Blind Baking: the process of baking a pie crust without the filling.
Sometimes, when you’re dealing with a fragile dough, it will collapse in spite of your best intentions. For this reason, some pie crusts and tart shells must be baked before the filling is added. The best method is to line the tart pan or pie plate with the rolled-out dough and place it in the fridge for at least 30 minutes. When you are ready to bake, prick the crust in several spots with a fork, line the pie plate or tart shell with foil or parchment paper, and fill it with rice or dried beans. Bake as directed, then carefully remove the foil and the beans—the shell will have retained its form because of them. I like seeing how a substance that weighs heavily can, in the end, be lifted; I like the feel of the beans, like trouble that slips through your fingers. Most of all, I like the proof in the pastry: it is the things we have to bear that shape us.
SWEET PASTRY DOUGH
11/3 cups all-purpose flour
Pinch of salt
1 tablespoon sugar
1/2 cup + 2 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
1 large egg yolk
1 tablespoon ice water
In a food processor, combine the flour, salt, sugar, and butter. Pulse until coarse. In a small bowl, whisk the egg yolk and ice water. With the processor running, add the yolk mixture to the flour and butter until a ball forms. Remove the dough, wrap it in plastic, flatten to a disk, and chill for 1 hour.
Roll the dough out on a lightly floured surface and place it in a tart pan with a removable bottom. Chill before baking.
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Remove the tart pan from the fridge, prick the crust all over with a fork, line the shell with foil, and fill with dried beans. Bake for 17 minutes, remove the foil and beans, and continue baking for another 6 minutes. Cool completely before filling.
APRICOT TART
Sweet Pastry Dough tart shell—blind baked
2–3 apricots
2 egg yolks
1 cup heavy cream
3/4 cup sugar
11/2 tablespoons flour
1/4 cup chopped hazelnuts
Peel the apricots, slice, and arrange in the bottom of a blind-baked tart shell.
Combine the egg yolks, cream, sugar, and flour. Pour over the apricots and sprinkle with the hazelnuts. Bake in a preheated 350 degree F oven for 35 minutes.
When you taste this one, you can still sense the heaviness left behind. It’s the shadow under the sweet, the question on the tip of your tongue.
Marin
June 2007
Facebook is supposed to be a social network, but the truth is, most people I know who use it—me included—spend so much time online tweaking our profiles and writing graffiti on other people’s walls or poking them that we never leave our computers to actually socially interact. Perhaps it was bad form to check one’s Facebook in the middle of the workday, but once, I’d walked in on Bob Ramirez tooling around with his MySpace page and I realized that there was very little he could say to me without being a hypocrite.
These days I used Facebook to join groups—Birth Mothers and Adoptees Searching, Adoption Search Registry. Some members actually found the people they were looking for. Even if that hadn’t happened to me, there was a nice comfort to logging on and reading the posts that proved I wasn’t the only one frustrated by this whole process.
I logged in and checked my mini-feed. I’d been poked by a girl from high school who’d asked me to be her friend a week ago but whom I hadn’t seen in fifteen years. I had been dared to take a quiz on Flixster by my cousin in Santa Barbara. I’d been voted by my other friends as the person you’d most prefer to be stuck in handcuffs with.
I glanced at the information just above this, my profile.
NAME: Marin Gates
NETWORKS: Portsmouth, NH / UNH Alumni / NH Bar Association
SEX: Female
INTERESTED IN: Men
RELATIONSHIP STATUS: Single
Single?
I reloaded the page. For the past four months on my Facebook page that line had read: In a relationship with Joe McIntyre. I clicked on the home page and scrolled through the news feed. There it was: a picture of his face and a status update: Joe McIntyre and Marin Gates have ended their relationship.
My jaw dropped open; I felt like I’d been sucker-punched.
I grabbed my coat and stormed into the reception area. “Wait!” Briony said. “Where are you going? You’ve got a conference call at—”
“Reschedule it,” I snapped. “My boyfriend just dumped me via Facebook.”
It was not like Joe McIntyre was the One. I’d met him at a Bruins game with clients; he passed me in the aisle and spilled his beer down the front of my shirt. Not an auspicious beginning, but he had indigo eyes and a smile that contributed to global warming, and before I knew it, I’d not only promised that he could pay my dry-cleaning bill but also given him my phone number. On our first date, we found out that we worked less than a block away from each other—he was an environmental lawyer—and that we’d both
graduated from UNH. On our second date, we went back to my place and didn’t get out of bed for two straight days.
Joe was six years younger than me, which meant that at twenty-eight he was still playing the field and that at thirty-four I had traded in my wristwatch for a biological clock. I expected this fling to be a little fun: someone to go to a movie with on a Saturday night and get flowers from on Valentine’s Day. I wasn’t banking on forever; I fully figured that I would tell him sometime in the next few months that we were looking for different things in our lives right now.
But I sure as hell wouldn’t have broken the news to him on Facebook.
I strode around the corner and walked into the reception area of the law firm where he worked. It was much less grandiose than Bob’s, but then again, we were a plaintiff’s attorney, we weren’t trying to save the world. The receptionist smiled. “Can I help you?”
“Joe’s expecting me,” I said, and I headed down the hall.
When I opened the door to his office, he was dictating into a digital recorder. “Furthermore, we believe it’s in the best interests of Cochran and Sons to— Marin? What are you doing here?”
“You broke up with me on Facebook?”
“I was going to send a text, but I thought that would be worse,” Joe said, jumping up to close the door as a colleague wandered by. “C’mon, Marin. You know I’m not good at the touchy-feely stuff.” Then he grinned. “Well, the metaphorical touchy-feely stuff . . .”
“You are such an insensitive troll,” I said.
“This was a lot more civilized, if you ask me. What was the alternative? Some big argument where you tell me to fuck off and die?”
“Yes!” I said, and then I took a deep breath. “Is there someone else?”
“There’s something else,” Joe said soberly. “For God’s sake, Marin. You’ve blown me off the past three times I’ve tried to get together. What did you expect me to do? Just sit around waiting for you to have time for me?”
“That’s not fair,” I said. “I was reading marriage license applications—”
“Exactly,” Joe replied. “You don’t want to go out with me. You want to go out with your birth mother. Look, at first, I thought it was kind of hot—you know, you were so passionate when you talked about finding her. Except it turns out you’re not passionate about anything but that, Marin.” He slid his hands into his pockets. “You’re so busy living in the past, you’ve got nothing to give right now.”
I could feel my neck heating up beneath the collar of my suit. “Do you remember those two amazing days—and nights—at my house?” I said, leaning toward him until we were a breath away. I watched his pupils dilate.
“Oh yeah,” he murmured.
“I faked it. Every time,” I said, and I walked out of Joe’s office with my head high.
• • •
My birthday is January 3, 1973. I’ve known this, obviously, my whole life. The adoption decree I’d gotten from Hillsborough County was dated in late July, because of the six-month waiting period to finalize an adoption and the time it takes to schedule the hearing. There’s a lot of debate about that six-month period, in the adoptive community. Some people feel it should be longer, to give the birth mom time to change her mind; some people feel it should be shorter, to give the adoptive parents peace of mind that their newborn won’t be taken away. Where you fall on the spectrum, of course, depends on whether you have a baby to give away or one to receive.
I was a few days late. My father used to say that he was counting on me being his little tax deduction, but then I foiled that by arriving in the new year. On the slip of paper that came home from the hospital with me, saved in my baby book, was a bassinet card with my name torn off—but I could still make out a loop in the middle of the last name that hadn’t been ripped away: a cursive y or g or j or q. I knew this about my former self, and I knew that my birth parents had lived in Hillsborough County, and that my mother had been seventeen. In the seventies, there was still a good chance that a seventeen-year-old would marry the father of her baby, and that had led me to the records room.
Using a due date calculator on a pregnancy website, I figured out that I must have been conceived sometime around April tenth in order to be due on New Year’s Eve. (April tenth. A high school spring formal dance, I imagined. A midnight car ride to the shore. The waves on the sand, the sun breaking like a yolk over the ocean at dawn, he and she, sleeping in each other’s arms.) At any rate, if she found out she was pregnant a month later, that meant getting married in the early summer of 1972.
In 1972, Nixon went to China. Eleven Israeli athletes were killed at the Munich Olympic games. A stamp cost eight cents. The Oakland A’s won the World Series, and M*A*S*H premiered on CBS.
On January 22, 1973, nineteen days after I was born and living with the Gates family, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade.
Did my mother hear about that and curse her bad timing?
A few weeks ago I had started scouring the records of Hillsborough County for marriage certificates from the summer of 1972. If my mother was seventeen, there must have been a parental consent form attached, too. Surely that would limit the numbers I had to wade through.
I had blown Joe off for two consecutive weekends while I waded through over three thousand marriage certificate applications, and learned incredibly creepy things about my home state (like that a girl between thirteen and seventeen, and a boy between fourteen and seventeen, could marry with parental consent), and yet, I didn’t find an application that looked like it might belong to my birth parents.
The truth is, even before Joe dumped me, I had resigned myself to giving up my search.
I went back to work after I left his office, and somehow phoned in a performance the rest of the day. That night, I came back to my house, opened a bottle of wine and a tub of Ben & Jerry’s Coffee Heath Bar Crunch, and faced the truth: I had to decide if I really wanted to find my birth mother. Presumably, she had gone through significant moral contortions deciding whether or not to give me up; surely I owed her the same self-assessment in deciding whether or not to find her. Curiosity wasn’t good enough; neither was a medical scare that had left me wondering about my origins. Once I had a name: then what? Knowing where I came from did not necessarily mean I was brave enough to hear why I had been given away. If I was going to do this, I was going to be opening the door for a relationship that would change both of our lives.
I reached for the phone and dialed my mother. “What are you doing?” I asked.
“Trying to figure out how to TiVo The Colbert Report,” she said. “What are you doing?”
I glanced down at the melting ice cream, the half-empty bottle of wine. “Embarking on a liquid diet,” I said. “And you have to push the red button to get the right menu on the screen.”
“Oh, there it is. Good. Your father gets cranky when I watch the show and he falls asleep.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Am I passionate?”
She laughed. “Things must be really bad if you’re asking me that.”
“I don’t mean romantically. I mean, you know, about life. Did I have hobbies when I was little? Did I collect Garbage Pail Kids cards or beg to be on a swim team?”
“Honey, you were terrified of the water till you were twelve.”
“Okay, maybe that wasn’t the best example.” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Did I stick with things, even when they were hard? Or did I just give up?”
“Why? Did something happen at work?”
“No, not at work.” I hesitated. “If you were me, would you look for your birth parents?”
There was a bubble of silence. “Wow. That’s a pretty loaded question. And I thought we’d already had this discussion. I said that I’d support you—”
“I know what you said. But doesn’t it hurt you?” I asked bluntly.
“I’m not going to lie, Marin. When you first started asking questi
ons, it did. I guess a part of me felt like, if you loved me enough, you wouldn’t need to find any other answers. But then you had the whole scare at the gynecologist’s, and I realized this wasn’t about me. It was about you.”
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I’m old and tough.”
That made me smile. “You’re not old, and you’re a softy.” I drew in my breath. “I just keep thinking, you know, this is a really big deal. You dig up the box, and maybe you find buried treasure, but maybe you find something rotting.”
“Maybe the person you’re afraid of hurting is yourself.”
Leave it to my mother to hit the nail on the head. What if, for example, I turned out to be related to Jeffrey Dahmer or Jesse Helms? Wouldn’t that be information I’d be better off not knowing?
“She got rid of me over thirty years ago. What if I barge into her life and she doesn’t want to see me?”
There was a soft sigh on the other end of the phone. It was, I realized, the sound I associated most with growing up. I’d heard it running into my mother’s arms when a kid had pushed me off the swing at the playground. I’d heard it during an embrace before my newly minted prom date and I drove off to the dance; I’d heard it when she stood at the threshold of my college dorm, trying not to cry as she left me on my own for the first time. In that sound was my whole childhood.
“Marin,” my mother said simply, “who wouldn’t want you?”
• • •
Honestly, I am not the kind of person who believes in ghosts and karma and reincarnation. And yet, the very next day I found myself calling in sick to work so that I could drive to Falmouth, Massachusetts, to talk to a psychic about my birth mother. I took another swig of my Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and imagined what the meeting would be like; whether I would come out of it with information that would send me in the right direction for my adoption search, like the woman who’d recommended Meshinda Dows and her prophecies in the first place.
