by Fox Brison
Adopted. Fuck.
The withered grass and skeletal trees proved the perfect backdrop to my less than tranquil mind. Here was a place I could hide in plain sight, somewhere to make sense of the waking nightmare that consumed me. Make sense? I snorted derisively. There was little or no sense to be made, not yet, not until I’d recovered from the shock. In fairness I had more hope of understanding the current social media fascination with the Kardashians and their appeal as a barometer to what was hot and what was not, than at comprehending…
Adopted. Fuck.
The sun was low in the sky, providing a bright outlook and a smidgen of warmth from the bitter cold wind, which in truth wasn’t the only thing numbing my body. The droning mantra in my head finally changed to one of angry accusation.
Why the hell didn’t they tell me?
***
The light started to fade, at which point I reluctantly returned to the flat I shared with my boyfriend of three years, Leo. He had put up with a lot over the last few months; long hours coupled with the stress of trying and failing to stop my father’s company from going belly up led to a general apathy on my part concerning all things, especially sex. Not that we were ever particularly rampant in the bedroom department before that.
Adopted. Fuck.
I couldn’t stop repeating those two words. The bombshell had dropped, exploded and left me bleeding from its shrapnel.
Adopted. Fuck.
The flat was in darkness when I entered. Leo wasn’t home from his five-a-side tournament, thank God for small mercies. Turning on the lamps I took the letter out of my hand bag and stared at it.
I’d never known such turmoil or pain.
My childhood was a happy one, and was I raised by parents who showered me with love, so why did it suddenly feel totally different? Was it the result of a stranger’s rejection, a person who despite giving me life had never, ever been a part of it? Could it be because I was now questioning everything about myself? Or perhaps it was down to the fact I no longer felt able to trust my parents, the two people I should have been able to trust, and the two people who up until this point I had trusted, with my life.
Lies by omission were still fucking lies.
Climbing into the shower I let the water wash over me until it ran cold. Naturally that didn’t help because when I got out there was no steam to hide my haunted reflection. I forced myself to look into the large full length mirror Leo insisted we buy.
I didn’t recognise the person staring back at me.
My body had lost some of its firmness since I’d been sedentary at work, but I was still lean. My long blonde hair hung in a tangle of rat’s tails and my grey eyes were thunderclouds of confusion and sorrow. I tilted my head and scrutinised my face, seeking the familiar.
There was very little there to remind me of my mum and dad.
Should I have seen this earlier? Exhibit A, milord. I touched the side of my nose with my index finger. The amount of nights I had gone to bed praying I would wake up with a cute button nose like my parents instead of the monstrous overhang I’d been born with was ridiculous. And let’s not forget exhibit B. When I won a place at the Royal Academy of Music and Noel and Bernie told anyone who would listen that they were tone deaf and didn’t know where I got my talent from.
Christ they were actually telling the truth!
I was living ‘Into the Woods’, where happy ever afters were words that began the real story of life.
I grabbed one of the soft white towels hanging slackly on a hook behind the door and frantically rubbed at my skin.
Adopted. Fuck.
***
Still drying my hair I made my way through to the kitchen and opened the fridge. Nothing caught my eyes until they lit upon a bottle of Chardonnay. One squeaky pop later I poured myself a generous glass, giving myself an ironic toast. Like father, like… shit. I huffed disparagingly. My father could be a tee-totaller for all I know!
Antsy, I perched on the edge of the sofa, my fight or flight instincts engaged in an epic battle. I glanced at the clock aware my alone time was coming to an end. As if conjured by magic I heard the front door open and Leo’s keys rattle into the bowl on the bureau.
“Hey, Darling, how’d it go with Mum and Dad?” he asked cheerfully. My parents adored Leo and insisted he call them Mum and Dad, but I never liked it. They weren’t his mum and dad they were mine...
At least they were up until three hours and seventeen minutes ago anyway.
“Yeah, it was okay.” I didn’t mention the letter. Why? Saying it aloud would force me to face what I wanted to run from. Flight was clearly winning tonight.
“Brianna, Darling.” It didn’t immediately register when he bent down on one knee. It didn’t immediately register when he lifted my chin to look at him instead of the glass of Chardonnay held slackly in my hand. It did register, however, when he proceeded to take the glass and place it on the table. The mood I was in? Bad move. Exceptionally bad move. His smile strived for loving, but achieved smug and patronising. Why had I never noticed this about him before? Shock was driving me to re-evaluate not only the relationship with my parents, but all of my relationships.
And I wasn’t certain I liked the conclusion I was starting to reach.
“I know things have been rough, and I was going to wait until your birthday to do this, but I can’t wait until May,” he continued unabated. Oblivious.
Dear God, Leo, please don’t. Not now. I couldn’t get two words past the brain freeze which paralysed my face into a twisted grimace.
“Will you marry me?” He pulled a black box out of his pocket and opened the lid. Nestling inside was a huge and particularly ostentatious diamond engagement ring. It wasn’t me in the slightest, and it struck me that even after three years Leo still did not know me. Christ I don’t know why I was surprised, he continued to put sugar in my coffee when I only took it in tea.
“I can’t.” The refusal was much easier to deliver than I thought it would be, and that sucked for both of us.
Narcissism prompted an angry bark. “What?” He never in a million years considered I might actually say no.
“I can’t, Leo. You couldn’t have picked a worse time. I can’t think at the moment, never mind get married.” My tone was eerily calm and devoid of emotion.
“I get that you’re worried about your parents, but they’ll be fine. The wedding will be a boost for them too.”
He wasn’t listening. He rarely listened. “Leo,” I sighed. It would have been so much easier to say yes. Perhaps it would bring about an end to my insecurity, to my uncertainty.
But today had turned into a day of reckoning and I was done with taking the easy option.
Chapter 3
Brianna
So question: where do you go when you’ve lost a sense of who you are? Me? I went to the one person who knew me better than I knew myself, my best friend Sam. We met as eleven year olds in chemistry class at Brentwood High School, and when I turned up unannounced at her small flat after the debacle of the adoption discovery, and barely an hour after turning down Leo’s marriage proposal, she simply let me in. She didn’t ask what was going on because she knew that when I was ready to talk, talk I would.
Until then I gratefully wallowed.
I was entrenched in her flat, and a crow bar would have had a job prying my arse off her futon, which was also my temporary bed. What had started out as a few days was briskly heading towards a few weeks. I should have been applying for jobs, I should have been answering the phone to my mother and Leo, both of whom were calling every hour on the hour (and several times in between) but instead I watched the rain and moped. When something you’re one hundred percent sure of ends up being pure fabrication? It’s a mind fuck.
And even that was an understatement.
Sam arrived home from work and dropped her work bag at the door. Mocha skin covered in a sheen of dust, and a long ebony ponytail hanging in damp curls through the back of her bleached baseba
ll hat, screamed exhaustion, but her gorgeous brown eyes were beaming. Sparkies were in short supply in the capital, and after being laid off by McAteer Construction she had no trouble securing another job working on the new crossway railway line.
I handed her an icy beer. “Hungry?” I asked.
“Starved,” she replied, opening the can and taking a gulp of the amber nectar. “What’s cookin’ good lookin’?”
“I ordered an Indian when you phoned from the station, it should be-” the doorbell interrupted and we grinned at each other. “I’ll dish up while you take a quick shower.”
***
Sitting on the floor, our backs leaning against the futon, Sam grudgingly pushed her plate away and groaned whilst pulling at her pj elastic waistband. “I couldn’t eat another bite.” Detritus of the takeaway surrounded us, and a large glass of wine plus a couple of crumpled beer cans were decorating the coffee table. It was a familiar scene, one which we’d enacted many times since moving into our first shared flat twelve years previously. The only difference was the television wasn’t playing whatever crap we were into that month.
Oh, and also I was keeping a monumental secret from her.
That wasn’t our usual modus operandii and I decided there was no time like the present to rectify the situation. “Sam, will you read this?” I handed her the envelope that I’d found in my parent’s attic.
“Brianna, my darling daughter? What the hell is this?” she asked warily. When I remained quiet, she glanced back down and re-read the address a couple of times, wrinkles creasing her forehead before they were erased in a flash of understanding. Her eyes snapped back to me. “Bri?” she spoke softly, afraid she might scare me away with loud noises and probing questions.
“It’s a letter from my birth mother,” I explained. Explained? Detonated more like.
“Your…”
“My birth mother. I’m adopted.”
“Shut the fuck up.” Sam had a lovely way with words, and on this occasion her response was spot on.
“That was pretty much my reaction. So? Will you read it?” I asked again.
“Are you sure?”
“It’s about the only thing I am sure of,” I said wryly. I wanted her to read the note to confirm it was real, to confirm I wasn’t in some sort of parallel universe - or psychotic dream.
***
“…all my love, Maggie…” Sam whispered the final few words. Her cheeks puffed out as an enormous huff of air shredded the tense atmosphere. She glanced at me, her expression one of sadness and disbelief. Picking up her beer she drank it down in one long gulp, and stood to get another. In other news, my bum had joined the rest of me and was completely numb. I got up and began pacing, trying not to think about the boldly written words in the letter, yet was starkly aware they were the only things occupying my mind.
When she returned Sam stated the obvious first. “There’s not a lot to go on here, Bri.”
“Yeah, it’s a lot of rambling… St Patrick’s Mountains. Strong in body and faith. A rock,” I quoted sarcastically, my hands gesticulating as I wildly punctuated each inane sentence.
Sam re-read the letter a couple of times (for me there was no need because, damn, that poetic prose was seared into my brain) and topped up my glass so high I had to slurp an inch before I could pick it up without spilling it everywhere.
“I’m not quite sure…”
The rest of her sentence trailed into the vapour of lost words. You know the ones, the words that remained unspoken for fear of hurting a loved one, or the ones that stuck in the throat when grief became overpowering, or even the words that needed to be said when pain was endemic in your soul, yet timidity and dread locked them inside.
“Me neither,” I admitted.
“Your parents kept this a secret.” She shook her head again. “How on earth did Bernie manage that?”
“More importantly is why,” I whispered.
“Have you asked them?”
“I couldn’t they were so dazed. No…” I thought back to when I first found the envelope. Dazed wasn’t quite right. “Frightened. Shocked. Guilty.”
“Understandable,” Sam agreed. “So what are you going to do now?” ‘Heaven Must be Missing an Angel’ interrupted our conversation and I ignored it until she asked, “Is that your phone?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?” she repeated.
“Sam, I might not know where I come from, but I do know it wasn’t the seventies,” I stated forcibly.
“Well apparently the seventies aren’t so sure and are having a disco in your bag.”
I peered at my handbag which I’d dumped on the coffee table after paying for our dinner. She was right. Weird. I retrieved my phone which was still playing the same tune three minutes in.
“Huh.” I said.
“What is it?”
“An email notification.” I opened it out of a sense of rote – call it OCD, but I couldn’t leave a notification unopened, it bugged me. I was terrified I was going to miss something like, oh let me think… a disclosure form from an adoption agency! Besides, the song was becoming annoying and patently wasn’t going to stop until I opened the damned thing! I scanned through it quickly, gleaning the pertinent information in a matter of seconds.
It wasn’t hard because there were only two lines of text.
“Sam, have you heard of Heavenly Homes?” I asked. I certainly wasn’t familiar with it.
“Hmm?” A space had obviously opened up in her stomach because she was scoffing the last onion bhaji. “Heavenly Homes?” she munched, “Oh yeah, that’s the charity run by Rachel McTavers.”
“Who now?”
“Rachel McTavers. You know, the one who inherited a gazillion quid last Christmas.”
“She did?” I was impressed. “How do you know these things?”
“Because I don’t live under a rock. She and her scrumptious missus were in the paper last week opening a new homeless shelter with Harry and Meghan.”
“Who?” Yes I lived under a rock, but it wasn’t on Mars. Who the hell were these people?
“Prince Harry and his fiancée the actress Meghan Markle from Suits. We watched the first series three months ago. Hello? Earth to Brianna.”
I ignored Sam’s teasing and passed her my phone. “What do you make of this?” It was brief, containing the time and date for an interview and nothing else.
“The twenty seventh? That’s tomorrow,” she pointed out helpfully and added, “I like the name.”
“Celeste D’Angelo? It’s frightfully cosmopolitan.” I said in a frightfully la-di-dah voice.
“Bri, do you believe in fate?” she asked in what was a complete non-sequitur to me, but to her it was a natural continuation.
And maybe the Fosters she had consumed were starting to take effect.
“Depends, what about you?”
“Surprisingly, I do,” she grinned. “I know I have a reputation for being pragmatic-”
“Dogmatic,” I interrupted, mirroring her smiling expression.
“That too, but I honestly believe in the law of coincidences. Rightio then, matey,” she began far too jovially, “let’s examine this logically. Coincidence number one. A letter from hell drops from the heavens. Coincidence number two, a couple of weeks later this serendipitous email arrives inviting you to interview for a job. Coincidence number three, all this happens when you and Leo have been experiencing problems,” she emphasised the last word with a raise of her eyebrows because she knew the type of problems Leo and I had been having – bedroom ones.
“I was drunk when I told you that.”
“Sometimes the only time you’re totally honest is when your head isn’t fully engaged,” she said knowledgeably. I silently contemplated her statement and grudgingly had to agree. “Fate is lending you hand,” she continued enthusiastically. “Embrace it. Grab it and don’t let go.”
“Or it could be a weather bomb,” I countered. “Storms of shit, followed by hailston
es from purgatory, and finished off with showers of what the fuck.”
She took my hands and squeezed them. “Bri, you’ve been stuck in this flat for several days, and after reading the letter I can understand why. I don’t want to be brutal, but you have to get out of your head and into a normal routine, otherwise you’ll end up driving yourself crazy. You need a job.”
“You make a good point,” I conceded. “The thing is I didn’t apply for this one.”
“Maybe it’s through the agency you signed up with?” she suggested.
“They wouldn’t send me on an interview without consulting me first.”
Sam glanced back at the phone, frowning. “And you’re positive you didn’t apply for it?” I shook my head. Slowly. Any quicker and I might regret that last glass of wine. “Someone could have recommended you.” It was the most plausible explanation we’d come up with so far. We both viewed each other with the glassy-eyed air of too much alcohol, and in my case, information overload.
“How much have we had to drink?” I groaned. I was skipping along the path of being nicely tipsy edging towards the cliff of totally rat arsed.
“Enough seeing as you have a job interview in the morning.” There was a moment’s silence. Actually, there were several moments of silence and I assumed Sam had drifted off. She did that quite frequently and I was convinced she suffered alcohol induced narcolepsy. I tapped her shoulder.
“I’m awake,” she whispered.
I snuggled under her arm and she pulled me close. “Sam.”
“Hmm?”
“Why didn’t you ever try it on with me?” I asked, swan diving off the rat arsed cliff.
“Bri, contrary to popular belief, being female isn’t the only criteria we lesbians look for in a partner!” she chuckled. “Honestly, you’re not my type and I’m definitely not your type. And well, eww. No offence but it would be like shagging my sister. My neurotic and needy sister.”
“I take offence at that!” I huffed.
“What the neurotic or the needy part?”
I laughed, “No, that I’m not your type.”
