St. Francis Society for Wayward Pets

by Annie England Noblin

  I pulled the phone away from my ear and stared at it. Surely I hadn’t heard that right. I hadn’t heard from my birth mother, well, ever, and I certainly hadn’t ever gotten a random phone call from someone claiming to know her.

  “Uh, yes?” I said, putting the phone back up to my ear. “How can I help you?”

  There was a pause, and then, “I’m sorry to call you like this. I, uh, I got your number from the website of the newspaper where you work . . .”

  “Used to work,” I said automatically.

  “I’m so sorry to tell you this, really I am, but Annabelle died two days ago,” the woman named Alice said, her words coming out in such a rush that I had to ask her to repeat herself.

  “I’m sorry,” I said finally, because I didn’t know what else to say. “How did she—I mean, she wasn’t very old.”

  “She drowned,” Alice replied, her voice cracking. “She was out on the lake in her little johnboat fishing, and she must’ve slipped and hit her head. She went overboard, and, well . . .”

  I hadn’t known Annabelle had a boat. Of course, I hadn’t known Annabelle. In fact, everything I knew about her could fit on one hand—she was my birth mother; she was from Timber Creek, Washington; and now I knew she had a friend named Alice and apparently a johnboat, whatever that was.

  “There will be a funeral, of course, here in Timber Creek,” Alice went on. “I thought you might want to know.”

  “Thanks,” I said, swallowing. That ranch dressing was really starting to stick in my throat. “I appreciate the call.”

  “The funeral is on Sunday,” she said. “At the Timber Creek Disciples of Christ. Two o’clock.”

  I peered around the entryway of the restaurant. I could see my mother sitting at the table, smiling up at the waiter as he refilled her glass of wine. Her blond hair was parted neatly down the middle and styled into a sleek bob. Her blue eyes, sparkling now, I knew would cloud over when I told her the news. She’d set her thin lips into a hard line, which caused them to nearly disappear. Sometimes I forgot, despite our obvious physical differences, that we were not related by blood. I forgot that she and my father had adopted me, a squalling, dark-eyed infant with a head full of even darker hair, at a few days old. I forgot there was another woman who’d given birth to me, a birth mother, she’d been called, living her life for the last thirty-six years like nothing ever happened—like I never happened.

  “Are you there?” Alice asked, when I failed to say anything else.

  I pressed the fingertips of my free hand into one of my eyelids. I just wanted this conversation to be over. “I’m sorry,” I said, already pulling the phone away from my ear. “But I don’t think I can make it.”

  Chapter 3

  I FOUND OUT I WAS ADOPTED WHEN I WAS SIX. ONE OF MY cousins, a scabby-kneed tomboy named Jamie, told me on the Fourth of July during our family barbecue. She asked me if I ever wondered why I was so tall and dark when my mom and dad were both short and light. I said no. Of course I hadn’t. I was six. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that I should look like my parents.

  “It’s cuz you’re adopted,” she said, confident in her ten-year-old superiority. “My mom said you have another mom somewhere else. That’s why you look different.”

  I didn’t believe her. She had a tendency to lie, especially when she was angry with me, like she had been at that moment. I wouldn’t let her play with my Polly Pocket. The last time I’d let her near any of my toys, she’d flushed them down the toilet and then blamed me for it. “I don’t believe you,” I said.

  “It’s true,” she replied.

  “Then why don’t I live with that mom?” I wanted to know.

  Jamie shrugged, already bored with the conversation. “She didn’t want you, I guess.”

  I wondered about this Other Mother.

  Who was she?

  Where was she?

  Why didn’t she want me?

  Most of all, I wondered if this Other Mother would show up at my house one day and want me back. Would my parents have to give me back to her? What would my life be like then?

  I got myself so worked up that my mother found me sobbing underneath my Strawberry Shortcake comforter.

  “What’s wrong, pumpkin?” she asked, pulling the comforter back so that she could see my face. “Why are you crying?”

  I pulled away from her and drew my knees up to my chest. “Jamie says I’m dadopted.”

  “She says you’re what?”

  “Dadopted!”

  That was when my mother picked me up and took me into the living room, well past my bedtime, and sat me down on my father’s lap. “I am your mommy, and Daddy is your daddy,” my mother said. She said it carefully, slowly, pronouncing every syllable. She wasn’t smiling.

  “So I’m not dadopted?” I asked.

  “It’s called adopted, sweetheart,” my father said. “And yes, Mommy and I adopted you.”

  “But all it means is that you came to us differently than Jamie came to her mommy. It doesn’t mean we love you less. It doesn’t mean we aren’t your parents,” my mother replied. “It just means that we got to pick you out, especially for us.”

  “Oh,” I said, chewing over this new information. “Do I have another mommy somewhere? Like Jamie said? Another mommy who doesn’t want me?”

  My father shifted me on his lap and stole a glance at my mother. “We want you,” he said. “You’re our best girl.”

  I grinned at him then, because it was always something he said to me, and I was forever telling him that I already knew I was his best girl. I was his only girl, after all. He let me ride on his back to the bedroom, and he pulled out the top drawer of his dresser, the one that held socks and silver dollars. He handed me a picture of a girl I’d never seen before. She looked young. She looked like she could be my sister.

  “This is your birth mother,” he said. “Her name is Annabelle.”

  I stared down at the picture. The girl wasn’t smiling, but she looked like maybe she wanted to. Her hair was dark and straight and parted down the middle. She had large green eyes and a wide mouth. Her nose was slightly turned up at the end. “She looks like me,” I said.

  My father nodded. “She does. She’s very pretty. This is an old picture, taken a year before you were born. She’s older now, but she probably still looks like you.”

  “Why did she give me to you?” I asked.

  My father sat down next to me on the bed and rested his hands on his knees the way he sometimes did when he was thinking about what he wanted to say. “Mommy and I couldn’t have a baby,” he said. “Annabelle loved you very much, but she couldn’t take care of you. She was very young, and she didn’t have a mommy or daddy of her own to help her. So she asked us to take care of you and to love you and to be your parents.”

  “Why didn’t you just adopt her?” I asked. “Then we both could have been yours.”

  “That isn’t the way it works, sweetheart,” my father said. “I wish it was, but it’s not.”

  My parents let me sleep with them in their bed that night, right in the middle between them, the way I liked it. Neither one of them complained when I accidentally kicked them or got up three times to go to the bathroom. I didn’t ask any more questions.

  The next morning, I heard my mother on the phone with her sister Brenda, Jamie’s mother, and she was crying. Jamie didn’t come to our house much after that, and my mother seemed more than a little pleased when, ten years later, Jamie got arrested for check forgery at the local CVS.

  The next year, my mother and father became foster parents through a Catholic charity in Seattle, and Eli came to live with us. At first I thought my parents becoming foster parents meant that we’d have a baby in the house. I’d already envisioned myself walking the new baby up and down the cul-de-sac in the stroller I’d gotten for my Baby Alive for my seventh birthday. I’d planned to dress the baby up and pretend to be her mother.

  Then one night after dinner, a nun showed up with Eli. He
didn’t have anything with him except a Catholic Charities logo coat and a trash bag. He was small, even for three years old, with sandy-blond hair and these bright blue eyes that looked entirely too big for his body. I hid behind my father when he answered the door.

  Eli’s mother had turned over temporary guardianship to the Sisters of the Sacred Cross. They ran what was, for all practical purposes, an orphanage. Most of the children, however, went to private foster homes. Eli, with his sweet disposition and desire to be loved, was a perfect fit for my parents, who were first-time foster parents, and despite my initial reservations, Eli and I grew close during the first six months he lived with us. He was smart and easygoing, despite the fact that I overheard one of the nuns telling my parents that he’d likely spent the majority of his time alone in an apartment taking care of his infant sister while his mother went to work all day. Sometimes he cried at night because he missed his mother and sister, and I’d sneak down the hallway to his bedroom, crawl into bed with him, and sing him silly songs my Nana and Pop taught me on vacation.

  Just when I was beginning to believe that Eli would be with us forever, the Sisters of the Sacred Cross came to get him one afternoon while I was at school. When I got home, his room was empty. My parents explained to me that Eli’s mom had taken him back.

  I’d been mad at Eli, because it hurt my feelings that he didn’t want to stay with us. Later, I was jealous because Eli had a birth mother who loved him and wanted him back. I wondered what made Eli so special that his birth mother couldn’t live without him. I figured it was probably because he never snuck sticky fruit into his bed at bedtime and never argued when it was time to wash his hair.

  Two months later, Eli came back. All my parents would tell me was that something “bad” had happened while Eli was living with his mother, and that this time they hoped he would get to stay forever. I knew I should feel bad that something happened, but I was so excited to have him back. But he was different when he came back with the nun this time. His eyes were hollow. He didn’t smile. He didn’t even talk. When I tried to play with him, he’d sit on the floor and stare off into space. My parents never left him alone, and he went to see a special doctor three times a week in the city. My mother took a leave of absence from the high school where she worked so she could stay home with him.

  Eli’s mother never asked for him back again after that, and my parents adopted him the next year. I found out later that his mother and sister had been murdered and that he’d likely seen it happen. I was never jealous of Eli after that. I never got angry when he got better grades than me in school or finished first in a track meet. I never felt slighted when my parents bragged about him for being a dentist and living in an exclusive neighborhood. Everything he had was hard earned, and for many years, until the summer I was sixteen, I happily kept my own mother tucked away in my father’s sock drawer.

  Now, however, my own birth mother was dead, and I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to be feeling or even what I should say about it. I’d managed to come up with a story about an interview for a job, so that I didn’t have to tell anyone at the lunch table what was really going on, but my mother saw it written all over my face and demanded that I tell her on the way home.

  The minute we walked through the door, she started cooking dinner, nearly three hours too early. She couldn’t help it. It’s what my mother did when she was stressed—she cooked, usually something smothered in gravy. This time it was pork chops.

  “Do you think I should go to the funeral?” I asked her. All I really wanted to do was go down to my room and call Holly, but I couldn’t leave my mother alone like this. If I didn’t watch her, she’d go to the grocery store for more food we didn’t need.

  My mother didn’t answer, busying herself with the pork chops.

  “Mom?”

  “I can’t tell you what to do,” she said finally.

  I rolled my eyes. “You’ve been telling me what to do for my whole life. You’re suddenly stopping now?”

  My mother flipped a butterflied pork chop onto its back and looked over at me. “I don’t have any experience in this department,” she said. “I didn’t even go to my own parents’ funerals, you know that.”

  “I’d go to your funeral,” I said. “You’re my mother.”

  She smiled at that. “I am your mother,” she replied. “I will always be your mother, but I didn’t give you life.” My mother paused, and then pointed her spatula at me. “However, I do give myself credit for keeping you alive for the last thirty-six years. That’s no small feat.”

  “That’s true,” I agreed. “It’s been a constant battle, pretty much since I tried to eat those mushrooms in the backyard when I was four.”

  “Don’t remind me,” my mother groaned. “I’m fairly certain poison control knew me by name that summer.”

  We both looked up when the door opened, and my father came rushing through, still wearing his golfing glove and his visor askew on top of his bald head. Now that he was retired, he spent most of his free time on the golf course. My brother and I joked that golfing was the one thing he loved more than the two of us. Well, golf and his grandchildren, Eli’s two kids—Rowan and Theo.

  I knew that my mother must have called him when we got home during that five minutes I was in the bathroom. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have come in before five o’clock, and he certainly wouldn’t have come home still wearing his golfing gear. My mother allowed nothing golf related at our house, and all golf talk and golf wear was relegated to the clubhouse at the club.

  My mother shot him a look when she saw him, and my father immediately pulled off his visor and glove. “I’m sorry,” he said, focusing his eyes on me. “I forgot.”

  “Really, Dad,” I said, standing up to give him a hug. “You didn’t have to come all the way home. I’m fine. It’s fine. Really, it is.”

  He held me out at arm’s length and eyed me suspiciously. “I came right home when your mother called,” he said.

  I sighed and sat back down. “I don’t know why you’re making such a big fuss over it,” I continued. “I’m fine. It’s not like I ever knew her anyway.”

  My father and I had always shared a special bond. It wasn’t more important than my relationship with my mother, but it was true that I got along better with my father than I did with my mother. I chalked it up to personality, but I also knew it had at least a little bit to do with not knowing who my birth father was.

  I’d wondered about my birth father, sure. I’d wanted to know who he was and where he’d come from and what he looked like. But my parents couldn’t tell me any of those things, and so his existence was merely an abstract thought—a passing curiosity I had once in a while when my mind wandered—unlike the reality of knowing not only who my birth mother was, but also that she didn’t want me.

  “It’s okay if you’re not fine,” my father said, forcing me out of my thoughts.

  I realized that staring off into the distance at the slightly dingy spot on the wallpaper above my father’s head probably didn’t do much to convince them that I was all right.

  “I swear, I’m fine,” I said again. “Really. I just need some time to digest the information, that’s all.”

  My parents shared a look with each other. They knew, just as well as I did, that I’d once tried to make contact with Annabelle. The summer I was sixteen, I’d sent her a series of letters in secret, only to be found out when every single letter came back to our house, unopened, “return to sender” scrawled in black ink across each one. I’d admitted to them, my face flushed and tearstained, that I’d found Annabelle’s address on some adoption paperwork in their bedroom. I don’t know what I’d expected, really. I guess at the core of it all, I’d hoped for some kind of affirmation. I’d had fantasies of keeping up a correspondence until I was eighteen, when she’d want to meet, and I would finally, at long last, stare into the face of someone who looked like me—who was part of me.

  Instead what I got was dismissal. My birth
mother couldn’t even be bothered to read my letters. They weren’t very long, and I’d been so nice in them, never once writing that I was angry or hurt about being adopted. I’d used the prettiest Sanrio stationery with scented envelopes. But in the end it hadn’t mattered. I burned the letters in our backyard fire pit. I begged my parents not to mention it again, even after they suggested the address they’d had was old and that my birth mother might not even live there anymore. I knew they were just saying that to be nice—to keep me from the heartbreak that had already happened.

  And I hadn’t for nearly two decades.

  Now I was folded into a kitchen chair and my parents were exchanging worried looks and I felt sixteen all over again and all I wanted to do was pretend like none of this was happening.

  My father glanced at the stove, where the pork chops were starting to burn. “The, uh . . .” He motioned to my mother. “The, uh, pork chops.”

  My mother’s eyes widened and she sprinted to the stove. Flames licked the edges of the pan, and instinctively my mother reached in to grab the handle.

  “June, no!” my father yelled, but it was too late. My mother’s arm up to her elbow was engulfed in flames, and my father covered her up with a wet dishrag just as the pan of pork chops came crashing down onto the kitchen floor.

  We all three stood there for a few seconds, letting the shock wash over us. My mother’s arm was still outstretched, the dishrag hanging limply over what we all knew was scorched skin underneath.

  After what felt like forever, I found my voice and managed to croak out, “Are you okay?”

  My mother’s eyes were wide, but she made no attempt to move until my father pulled away the dishrag, and we all gasped.

  “I think we need to go to the ER,” he said.

  “I’m fine,” my mother insisted, but even she didn’t sound convinced. “I’ll just run it under some cold water.”

  My father was already putting on his jacket. “I’ll pull the car around out front. Mae, wait with your mother.”