Open Secret

by Janice Kay Johnson

  “Does it soften a sense of betrayal?” She made a small sound. “I really shouldn’t have called. I’m treating you like a therapist. I’m not even your client!”

  “But I’m the one who turned your life upside down. I owe you something for that.”

  “Why? You had no reason not to assume that I knew I was adopted.”

  “I wondered, then didn’t listen to my own instincts. But even if you had known, wouldn’t being approached by a member of your birth family have shaken you up?”

  “I don’t know.” She was quiet. “Maybe. Maybe I’d have already been looking for my sister, if I’d known I had one.”

  “Have you called her?”

  More silence. Finally, very softly, she said, “No.”

  “Are you going to?”

  “I don’t know!” she cried. She sniffed again, making him feel like a crud for upsetting her. “I’m being silly, aren’t I?”

  “No. This is complicated for you.” He hesitated, knowing he should keep this conversation long-distance—their relationship long-distance—but opened his damn mouth anyway. “Are you home? What if I come over? You need to talk, I’m a good listener.”

  “Really?” she said in a small voice. “You’d do that?”

  “I was just thinking how empty my house seemed tonight.”

  “If you mean it, I’d really like that.” She sounded teary again.

  “I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” he promised, and pushed End.

  He should mind giving up his peaceful evening, leaving his comfortable easy chair to get back in the car, but somehow he didn’t. Mind? Who was he kidding? Anticipation stirred in him, even a buzz of excitement he hadn’t felt in a long time.

  In other words, he really, really needed to start dating so he wouldn’t be quite so desperate.

  He took the Evergreen Point bridge across the dark lake, going south on 405 before taking the Northeast 8th exit. Five minutes later, he was knocking on her apartment door. “It’s Mark,” he called.

  She swung open the door so fast, she must have been waiting on the other side. Her dark hair was curlier than he remembered it, her eyes puffy, her mouth tremulous. “Thank you for coming.”

  “No problem.” He stepped inside, resisting the temptation to pull her into his arms. She might need to be held, but he wasn’t the one who should be doing the holding.

  “Can I get you a cup of tea?” she asked. “Coffee? A beer?”

  “Whatever you’re having.”

  “Tea.” She tried to laugh. “I’m already blubbering. Beer would have me sobbing and drumming my fists on the floor.”

  He smiled. “Tea it is.”

  He liked her apartment. She’d made it homey and a little quirky despite the blandness of the usual beige carpet and white walls. The overstuffed sofa was beet colored, the fat ottoman that served as coffee table was covered in a wild floral print, and her taste in artwork seemed to run from surreal to precious, but all inviting a laugh.

  Bright colors predominated even in the kitchen. The kettle was sunny-yellow, the mugs purple, the sugar bowl lime-green and a cookie jar that sat on the counter was in the shape of a fat, amiable green dragon. Mark leaned against the doorjamb and watched as she put water on to boil and tea bags into mugs.

  “Sugar? Honey? I don’t have cream, but I do have milk.”

  “Half a teaspoon of sugar.”

  “This is really nice of you.” She bit her lip. “I got home and tried to think who I wanted to talk to. I haven’t told any of my friends that I’m adopted. The idea of explaining all of it doesn’t seem very appealing. You seemed to understand what I felt, even when I didn’t.”

  “I’ve done quite a few adoption searches. It’s always emotional. I’ve also done some reading to give me an idea what I’m dealing with. I can recommend a couple of books, if you’d like.” Nicely done, he told himself. You may not be a therapist, but you can play one.

  “Please,” she said fervently. “Would you write down titles before you go?”

  “Sure.”

  The kettle whistled and she poured.

  “So, what do you do for a living?” he asked.

  “Right now, I’m a technical writer. I have a degree in nursing, and I work for a company that manufactures medical instruments. But I’ve been thinking of quitting.”

  “And doing what?”

  “I don’t know.” She ran both hands through her hair. “I must be nuts. I am nuts! I don’t have the slightest idea what I want to do, but I hate my job.”

  “Nursing…”

  She grimaced. “I hated that, too. So why, you may ask, did I go into it?”

  He knew. “Daddy’s a doctor.”

  “And Mommy was a nurse.” She saw his expression. “Yep. Surgical nurse. Guess how she and Daddy met?”

  “Their eyes met while he held someone else’s heart in his hand?”

  She giggled, a lovely, spritely crescendo. “Something like that.”

  “And so you assumed you should follow in their footsteps.”

  “Isn’t that funny,” she said, not sounding as if it was funny at all. “If I’d known I was adopted, I doubt I’d have assumed in the same way that I was meant for medicine.”

  “Did you like science in school?”

  “It was okay.” She laughed again at his expression, but sadly. “All right, I was an idiot. I admit it. Sure, biology was fine. What I really liked was English. I love to write.”

  “Thus the technical writing.”

  “‘Insert the mouth of the tube into the opening’ does not satisfy my creative side.” She squeezed a tea bag and dropped it into the trash, then did the same with the other and handed him his mug. “Shall we go sit down?”

  They returned to the living room, sitting on opposite ends of the couch from each other. She immediately kicked off her shoes and curled her feet under her, like a cat getting comfortable.

  “Why did you say this is complicated for me?” she asked.

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Yes!” She let out a huff of frustration. “But I don’t know why. I know I feel betrayed because my parents lied to me all my life. But I’m not really any different than I was last week. I’ve had the same experiences, the same friends. I’m good at the same things, bad at the same ones. I’m the same Carrie I was yesterday, and a month ago, and ten years ago.” She gazed beseechingly at him. “So why did I drive home tonight thinking, I have no idea who I am?”

  “Because,” he said, “you’re also Linette.”

  “But she’s a stranger. I don’t know her!”

  “Yeah, you do. You’ve just never let yourself recognize her before. Give yourself a chance.”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “No.” Thanks to him. “You don’t.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  OF COURSE, she couldn’t actually afford to quit her job, Carrie realized, not without going to her parents to ask for help.

  Her adoptive parents.

  Who had left a dozen messages on her phone that week, none of which she’d returned.

  Not being able to turn to them made her realize how spoiled she’d been. And why not? she thought, with bitterness that was foreign to the person she’d been. After all, they’d bought themselves a daughter. You took good care of a prized possession, didn’t you?

  She knew she wasn’t being fair, and didn’t care. She was entitled to be angry. They’d lied. They’d let her spend her entire life wondering why her skin wasn’t the same tone as theirs, why she hadn’t inherited a musical ear, why she was more emotional than they were, why, no matter how hard she studied, she didn’t have what it took to make it to medical school? Why, why, why?

  Hadn’t they ever ached to say, Carrie, dear, there’s a reason? Or had they genuinely convinced themselves that biological children were often a puzzle to their parents, too, that all her differences had nothing to do with unrelated genes, with the mother who’d carried her and loved her for the first six months of her
life?

  She felt a funny little shock, a spasm of…grief. How odd. This was the first time she’d actually thought of her birth mother as a person. Someone whose face she’d gazed up at, whose voice she’d known from conception, whose laugh had made her laugh. A real person, not an abstraction.

  What had she looked like, this mother? Carrie knew she could find out, and didn’t understand why she hadn’t yet called this sister who wanted to know her. She felt as if she was on a ship, far out at sea, one landfall far behind her, the other not yet a reality. She belonged in neither place.

  Carrie got together one night that week with Ilene Feldman. She and Ilene had been friends since fourth grade and she’d chosen Ilene as the first person to tell.

  Ilene had a really nice condo in Belltown. Her parents had bought it for her when she graduated from the U.W. with a degree in statistics. Ilene had since passed all the exams required to become an actuary, which sounded unbelievably dull to Carrie. But Ilene had always loved numbers. The two of them had been good for each other: Carrie social, adventurous, sometimes too impulsive; Ilene introverted, cautious, practical. Physically they were a good foil for each other, too, since Ilene was a blue-eyed blonde with milk-pale skin.

  Tonight they made pizzas with pita bread and sat in the dining nook off Ilene’s kitchen drinking wine and catching up. Ilene had changed from her charcoal suit into sweatpants, putting her fine, straight hair up with a wooden pronged thing that kept it in place even if it did look precarious. Usually they didn’t have more than a glass of wine apiece. Tonight it seemed they both drank more recklessly.

  “Your turn,” Ilene said, after telling about her father’s new wife—his second new wife since he’d left her mother.

  Carrie took a deep breath. “I found out I was adopted.”

  Ilene gaped. “What?”

  Carrie told her about the P.I. and then her parents’ admission. “I haven’t talked to them since.”

  “Honestly…” Ilene hesitated. “That doesn’t surprise me as much as it should.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t look like your parents.”

  “Erica didn’t look like her parents, either.” Carrie had always taken comfort in knowing one other girl whose parents came as a complete surprise when they walked into school open houses.

  Ilene squirmed. “Yeah, but she kind of did. I mean, she had her dad’s eyes. You know? And her mom’s boobs.”

  Carrie couldn’t argue with the boobs part; Erica had been the first girl they knew to develop, and keep developing. She must have ended up in a D cup, just like her mother. The eyes… Carrie pursed her lips, trying to picture Erica’s dad.

  “Maybe,” she admitted.

  “I never consciously wondered, but… You being adopted…it fits.” Ilene shrugged. “You’re going to get over being mad at your parents, aren’t you?”

  “Mad?” she echoed. “‘Mad’ is… Well, I was mad at them about Jed.”

  Ilene nodded. When she was a freshman in high school, Carrie had been insanely in love with a guy who was a senior. She’d thrown a major tantrum when her parents wouldn’t let her go out with a boy four years older.

  “This…this is different. Bigger. They lied to me.”

  “Well, I know that. It’s just…” Ilene tipped back her wineglass and swallowed while she thought. “In the grand scheme of things, does it really matter that you were adopted? Your parents love you.”

  “I know they do. And, yeah, it does matter.” Ilene was her best friend. Couldn’t she see how this shook Carrie’s very sense of self? “I have a sister and a brother,” she tried to explain. “And I didn’t even know about them.”

  “Have you called your sister?”

  “No-o. I will,” she added hastily. “I’m just…not ready.”

  “What’s to be ready for?” Ilene gestured, sloshing wine on the table. Dabbing at it with a napkin, she said, “Maybe once you meet her, this will all be settled one way or the other.”

  Surprised and a little wary, Carrie asked, “What do you mean?”

  “Chances are, she’ll just be this stranger, and you’ll look at her and feel no connection at all. And you’ll realize you have a family.”

  Carrie gaped at her. “Why are you sticking up for them?”

  “Them?”

  “My parents. My adoptive parents.”

  “Because they’re nice.” Suddenly Ilene’s cheeks were flushed and her eyes sparkling. “Because they didn’t run out on you. Instead their big screwup was wanting you to be theirs so much, they never admitted you weren’t! Forgive me if I’m not as sympathetic as you want me to be!”

  Wow. Taken aback, Carrie studied her friend’s militant face. “I didn’t know you were that angry at your dad.”

  “I’m not! I mean, I know he left Mom, not me.” Her chin wobbled. “Yes, I am! Okay? Your house always felt more like home than mine did. I was jealous.”

  Carrie bit her lip. “I should have known. I’m sorry.”

  “How could you have?” Her friend drew a ragged breath. “This is dumb. I’m a big girl now. I don’t know why it still upsets me so much.”

  “Because we’re little kids inside?”

  Ilene blew her nose on the napkin, then wadded it up. She gave a twisted smile. “And you’re a little kid who just found out her mommy isn’t really her mommy. I get it.”

  “It’s not just that. It’s… I’ve started wondering where all my traits came from. What I would have been like if my real parents hadn’t died. Even what I would have been like if Mom and Dad had told me I was adopted. I might have felt freer to explore the parts of me that weren’t like them, instead of repressing them.”

  Ilene tilted her head to one side. “Did you do that?”

  “You were my lab partner in bio. Weren’t you a little surprised when I went into nursing?”

  Her friend wrinkled her nose. “Okay. Yeah, I was. And you did that to please your parents?”

  “I knew they wouldn’t mind if I majored in something else. It wasn’t that. It was more that I was trying to be like them. Now I’m wondering if I didn’t always know. I don’t remember anything from before they brought me home, but I wasn’t a newborn. I was nine months old. Or maybe ten months.” She waved that off. “I guess I was in a foster home for a month or two in between. So they were my third set of parents. Maybe I was afraid they’d go away, too. All I know is, I grew up trying really, really hard to be…” She gusted a breath. “I don’t know.”

  “The daughter they would have had, if they could have?”

  Hearing it said so baldly gave her a stab of pain. But after a minute, she nodded. “Just like that.”

  They were both silent for a long time. Ilene was the one to speak, finally.

  “You know what? Sometimes I think my job is boring, too. But statistics, I can depend on them. So you’re right. I’m a little kid inside, too. I didn’t choose a career because I’m passionate about it. I chose it because it makes me feel secure, like the world’s a predictable place.” She shook her head, dislodging the wooden fork that held up her hair. Impatiently she poked it back in. “And I still think you should call your sister. She could answer a lot of your questions, anyway. Show you pictures of your mother and father. You’ve got to be curious.”

  “I’m curious.”

  “Well, then? What are you waiting for?”

  What was she waiting for? Days later, Carrie was still asking herself. Why did she feel this wave of anxiety every time she thought about the phone number she carried in her wallet, pictured herself dialing, then waiting for a woman to answer? Was she afraid her sister would be cheap and loud and uncultured, so she’d be ashamed of her heritage? But Mark had said she was nice. Carrie trusted him.

  So, okay, maybe that wasn’t the problem. Maybe she was worried her sister wouldn’t like her. That somehow she’d be a disappointment.

  Or maybe…maybe what really scared her was the possibility, like Ilene had suggeste
d, that she wouldn’t feel any connection at all to this sister. Maybe she’d look at photographs of her birth parents and not see herself in them, either. And then she’d realize that there was no niche anywhere that she was designed to fit. She’d be like a puzzle piece that ended up in the wrong box and was left over when the picture was complete.

  Carrie moaned. How pathetic could she get?

  She was prowling her apartment, unable to settle down on the couch with a book or to watch a TV show. For Pete’s sake! She was starting to despise herself! She’d turned into this self-absorbed creature who spent every waking hour, when she wasn’t actually having to work, agonizing about what she thought, felt, dreamed, feared.

  Maybe she should spend ridiculous amounts of money so she could lie on a couch and tell a psychoanalyst what she thought, felt, dreamed and feared.

  “Maybe,” she said to her empty apartment, “I should actually call my sister.”

  What she really wanted, Carrie was embarrassed to realize, was to call Mark Kincaid. He’d stayed for a couple of hours Saturday night and listened to her without showing any sign of impatience. He seemed able to fill in the blanks when she hesitated, to know what she felt. He didn’t seem to think she was being silly, or was self-absorbed. A couple of times he’d said, “You have a lot to deal with.”

  Monday night he’d phoned to ask how she was. They’d ended up talking for over an hour. About her, of course. She’d wanted to ask questions about him, but that would have made it seem as if she thought they were becoming friends or were two people exploring the possibility of a relationship, which of course they weren’t. Finding her had been his job. Maybe that job wasn’t done until she’d actually agreed to meet with his client, her sister. Maybe he was giving regular reports, telling Suzanne Chauvin that Carrie was coming around.

  She hated the idea of him repeating what she’d told him to anyone. Would he do that?