‘Thank you.’ What else could Grace say?
‘I’m sure you’re handling it, but you do know how important it is to that you make Cassie aware there is the issue of consent, don’t you?’ Gail paused. ‘Given there has been no contact post-adoption or, if I’ve got this right, any indication of any desire for such contact, Cassie may have to prepare herself for disappointment. We don’t want her building up her expectations.’
Grace forced herself to ask, ‘And the letters? Isn’t that a possible route?’
Gail sounded like she was double-checking on her computer again. ‘The file just confirms what you told me – that you’ve submitted them every year.’
Grace confirmed that she had. She was relieved Gail didn’t question such commitment in the face of such indifference; she wasn’t sure she’d have been able to give a truthful answer.
‘I’m obviously pursuing that, but this is where we get into permissions and mutual consent. You’ve never had a reply?’
Grace’s response was quiet. ‘No. We’ve never received anything back.’
‘Well, I’m sorry to say that’s not unusual. They move on with their lives. They want to forget, not remember. Or even if some of them do want to know, they often don’t want actual contact. I know it can feel very unsatisfactory, given your current circumstances, but it’s quite common with a closed adoption.’ Gail shifted into a brisker tone after this slightly mournful observation. ‘How is Cassie doing at the moment?’
Grace was taken aback by such a direct question from this virtual stranger. ‘Okay. I suppose. We’re keeping talking, making sure that she knows she can come to us, about anything, but it’s hard, given that we have nothing new to tell her.’
The implied rebuke was ignored. ‘Well, I’ll keep plugging away. I know it may be of little comfort to you, Grace, but you’d be amazed how often this flares up with adopted children; in their mid- to late teens. It’s natural curiosity. Quite often it runs its natural course, especially if the birth family aren’t interested, as seems to be the case here. But, as I said, I’ll keep going and see what we can uncover. I’ll be in touch.’ Grace didn’t get a chance to say ‘Goodbye’ before Gail put the phone down.
Grace sat for a while after the call ended, stalled yet again by events and emotions that she’d thought she’d processed and filed away, long ago. They’d been fools to think it was going to be so simple. She’d so wanted to believe Jane when she’d said that Cassie was untainted by her early experiences, that she was different from the other kids, that she was special. Grace had cherished their early morning conversation that first week of the match – in truth, she’d relied on it as a guarantee that everything would be fine.
The morning after the bedtime visit, Grace’s taxi had dropped her off at Jane’s house before dawn. The plan was for her to be there when Cassidie woke up and for her to learn the morning routine, having mastered the night-time one. The rest of the street was in darkness. She knocked gently, not wanting to disturb anyone.
Jane opened the door without switching on the hall light. ‘Tea?’ Her voice was croaky with sleep. In her dressing gown and slippers, bare-faced, at 6.30 a.m. on a cold winter’s morning, she looked much older – or maybe just her age. Her movements around the kitchen were slow, deliberate, the chirpiness of the preceding visits absent. They sat together at the kitchen table, listening out for sounds from upstairs. They both knew that when they heard anything, it would be Grace who would go up to Cassidie.
‘Thank you,’ Grace said.
Jane looked up from her brew.
‘I mean it. For helping us. It must be so hard letting them go.’
Jane pulled her robe a little tighter. ‘We’ve done it before. Thirty-six times, all told. No, I’m wrong, it’s thirty-seven.’
‘But still…’
Jane put her mug down. ‘I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t difficult. It is. You grow attached to them; there’s no way you can do the job and not – well, at least that’s the way it is with most of them. I’m going to miss her, of course I am. But I know that in a month or so, it’ll be okay. It always is. You adapt to life with them, then you adapt to life without them. And anyway, before you know it, they’ll have talked me and Doug into taking on another one. We keep saying we’re going to retire, but we never seem to manage it. There’s always just one more child that they’re struggling to place.’
‘Well, I want you to know how much Tom and I appreciate it. What you’ve done for her, and for us.’ It sounded patronising, even to Grace’s own ears.
Jane got up and rinsed her mug, allowing her to turn her back. ‘That’s what we’re here for.’ She put the mug on the rack, paused, then turned round abruptly. ‘Cassidie’s one of the best we’ve ever had, you know. She’s amazing – considering.’ Grace’s face must have given something away that Jane misinterpreted. ‘I mean it. We’ve seen enough of them over the years to know that she’s special.’
‘How?’ Grace prompted, wanting the reassurance.
Jane seemed to give it some real thought before answering. ‘She’s not got that hole in her that most of them have. Whatever you do, that gap, it doesn’t ever really heal up, not completely; too much damage has been done. When they’re not loved as babies, they never totally recover. I think it’s a trust thing, they learn that it’s not wise to trust anybody. A child needs to know that it’s loved, to grow up well. Well, that’s what I think.’ She shrugged her shoulders, deprecating her own experience, but Grace was convinced by every word. Jane went on, ‘Cassidie is different… She does trust people – once she feels safe with them. She knows that she’s lovable – that she’s worth loving. She’s not broken. You’re very lucky to get her.’
Grace said nothing. She didn’t want to have to think about the others; all she wanted to think about – all she could think about – was Cassidie, and how impatient she was to take her home and make her properly theirs.
As if on cue, there was a shout from upstairs. For a split second they both hesitated, then Jane said, ‘It’s okay. You go.’
Grace didn’t need to be asked twice.
Three short weeks later, Jane bent down, dropped a swift kiss on the top of Cassidie’s head and hurried out of Tom and Grace’s house. Cassidie didn’t even look up from the toy bus she was pushing along the carpet.
She played and ate a good tea, she splashed in the bath, her hair tucked away inside a bright-pink shower cap that she thought was hilarious, then Tom read her The Snail and the Whale and she rolled over and went to sleep.
And, just like that, the bedroom at the top of the stairs was no longer empty, and Cassidie was theirs for ever.
Or so they had thought.
Chapter 25
RYAN WASN’T happy about it. Not at all. ‘Why can’t I?’
Cassie watched the leaves ripple in the bright afternoon sunshine. ‘Because I don’t need you there. I’ll be fine on my own. I just need you to drop me off.’
He frowned and his lower lip actually drooped, like a toddler’s. ‘I think I should be there. She could be a complete nut-job.’
‘Cheers, thanks for that.’ She looked at him, marvelling at his capacity to be completely insensitive at exactly the same time as trying, in his own cack-handed way, to do something thoughtful, like drive her all the way over to Oldham – again.
‘You know what I mean.’ How often did he say that?
‘Yep. You meant…that my mum’s going to turn out to be some sort of Jeremy Kyle reject.’ Her fury was, in part, that Ryan could be right. The woman’s accent, her badly spelt text messages, the lack of even basic articulacy and politeness on the phone, it was all pointing to someone…well, rough.
‘I’m only trying to look out for you.’ He pulled his baseball cap off and slapped it against the palm of his hand in frustration.
She relented, slightly. ‘I know, but it’s something that I have to do on my own.’
He looked at her and half-nodded. ‘I get that.’ They both w
atched a young lad on a bike trying to do wheelies along the bottom path, in front of a group of girls who were sitting on the climbing frame picking at their nails. They didn’t seem overly impressed with his performance. ‘I could just hang around at the start. Check that you’re okay when you first meet her. Besides… I’ll need to stay around to bring you home.’
God, he was persistent. ‘It might scare her off.’ The tense phone conversation nagged at Cassie, making her fearful of two conflicting things. Firstly, that Ryan being there might very well scare the woman away, and secondly that not having him there might be quite scary as well. Why had she insisted that Cassie come on her own? And, more unnerving, how had she known Erin had been with her in Subway? The woman had given so little away on the phone. The only thing Cassie was certain of was that when, and if, they met, it was going to be truly uncomfortable. In truth, a growing part of her wished she’d never bothered trying to find her birth mother. All it had done so far was make her feel rattled.
The lad on the bike misjudged one of his wheelie attempts and his front wheel skewed awkwardly. He tipped forward and for a second it looked like he was going to fly, head first, over his handlebars. Ryan laughed. ‘What a doughnut!’ But Cassie felt a moment of panic – for the boy, and for herself. After another five minutes of arguing, she accepted what she knew, in her heart, she’d wanted all along: namely, that Ryan would take her to Oldham and would wait and watch to make sure she was okay. Only when she gave him the signal would he take himself off and leave her alone to talk to the woman, whoever she was.
‘It’ll be like summat in a film.’ Ryan grinned and stretched, making his shadow grow taller and wider against the scorched grass.
‘Yeah,’ Cassie said, though she didn’t for a second think that it would be.
And it wasn’t.
For starters, Ryan was late.
Cassie sat on the wall at the T-junction, on her own this time – as instructed – and waited, the pressure building inside her like gas in a can of Coke. Twenty-five long, tedious minutes she waited. The argument kicked off the minute she clicked her seatbelt into place.
‘Where the hell have you been? I’ve been calling you.’
Ryan grunted something unintelligible in response and proceeded to stall the car as he pulled away from the kerb. The snort of disgust that Cassie let out was the perfect opening salvo to the tense and bad-tempered start of their journey.
Ryan stared ahead, concentrating on where he was going, as she bitched and moaned. He had half a mind to simply pull over and tell her to shift her lovely arse out of his car and do one – but he didn’t. At last they made it to the motorway. Ryan accelerated down the sliproad and straight across two lanes of traffic. She wanted fast, she could have fast. He’d said he’d get her there on time and he would, but still she didn’t let up. As they sped along, he heard Cassie nagging, but tuned out the words. It wasn’t just the turning up late that she seemed mad about; it had morphed into something else, something about his ‘not quite good enoughness’ in general. This was not how he wanted to be spending his first Saturday off work in weeks.
He didn’t understand how he’d gone from simply fancying the pants off Cassie to being snared by her. She bossed him around like a f---ing teacher. And she was so pig-headed. He wondered, not for the first time – while flashing his headlights at an old bloke who was pottering along at sixty-five in the middle lane – if she was worth it. His other girlfriends had been so much easier. They’d seemed grateful for any attention. With them he’d been the one in charge, the one deciding the when, the where, the what, even ‘if he could be arsed’. Not with Cassie. She had him by the balls.
He pulled into the outside lane and glanced at her, silent at last, looking away from him out of the window. Even when she was pissed off he still fancied her, wanted to get to her, touch her, squeeze her. Just having her sitting so close to him in the car was screwing with him. He looked back at the road and had to brake suddenly as the traffic slowed. He put his hand out and stroked her thigh through her skinny jeans. His reward – not even a glance. And so it went on; foot on the accelerator for five miles, foot on the brake for the next ten. The M62 was a ball-ache – much like Cassie herself.
Cassie wasn’t thinking about Ryan. She was thinking about what she was going to say to the woman. It seemed too big a conversation to have, using normal words. She couldn’t imagine how it would play out. She wasn’t even sure she knew what she wanted from the meeting. Clarity as to who the woman was, that would be good for starters, but after that, what? She wasn’t sure. That’s what made it all so scary. Until this point in her life Cassie had always known what she wanted; she hadn’t always got it – that was not Tom and Grace’s style of parenting – but at least she’d known. It was the way she was. She’d inherited her single-mindedness from Grace, or so everyone said. But that was just it, wasn’t it? Who knew why she was the way she was? Until she found out more about her biological mum, she’d never really know what was inherited from her family and what was in her DNA; and until she knew that, how could she go on and become whatever she was supposed to be?
Ryan touched her leg with his free hand, but Cassie was so wrapped up in the swirl of her own conflicting emotions that she didn’t even feel it.
They parked in a side street and Ryan set off for the bus station, as agreed. He kissed her on the mouth before he left, as much to leave his mark on her as anything. She waited, leaning against the car for support. She counted down the minutes by studying the litter in the gutters and avoiding eye contact. After the agreed five-minute delay, she set off, her pulse beating as fast as if she’d been running. She willed herself to calm down. When she arrived at the bus terminus she spotted Ryan straight away. He was sitting, with his earbuds in, phone in hand, his cap pulled low over his face. He was probably loving every minute of it, the drama making a nice change from peeling spuds and frying chips. As she walked past him, he glanced up and swiftly down again, faking disinterest.
Cassie picked a seat on the end of the row, settled in it and looked at the departures board. Ten minutes to go. Ryan had been as good as his word and had got her there in time. She tried to swallow, but her mouth was dry. A series of buses arrived and deposited a ragbag of people onto the concourse, a steady flow of humanity. There were a lot of women. The old ones huffed and puffed and clutched their shopping bags to their bodies, as if expecting to be mugged at any minute, while the young ones juggled buggies, small kids and packets of crisps, talking non-stop into their phones. Cassie didn’t know where to look, at the passengers or at the passers-by. She had no idea where this LW person was coming from. Every woman under fifty was a candidate, but most walked past Cassie without so much as registering her existence.
The minutes edged by. Her eyes kept returning to Ryan. If he was getting impatient, she couldn’t tell; he looked like he always did – just Ryan, just another lad in a cap and expensive jeans. He blended in fine. They were separated by only a few metres of concrete, but she felt much further away from him than that. Two more buses arrived and departed, but there was still no sign of her. The cruelty of being stood up twice was too much for Cassie to contemplate and yet, with every minute that crawled by, it seemed that was exactly what was happening.
Cassie checked her phone. Nothing. As she was looking at it she became aware of a presence, someone standing to the left of her, not moving. Her pulse thumped. But no, it was a woman in her twenties. Thin, wearing jeans, cheap trainers, a hoodie, dyed hair – the type of hard-faced girl Cassie would normally have avoided. The woman/girl just stood there. Waiting for someone? Cassie ignored her. LW obviously wasn’t coming. She felt so strung out she could have cried.
The hard-faced young woman came and sat down, one seat away from Cassie. Ryan leant forward. Cassie shook her head at him. Another five minutes, that was all she would give her and that would be it; she wasn’t going to be taken for a mug twice.
‘Are you Cassidie?’ The voice Cassie had he
ard on the phone was coming from the woman. Cassidie was too shocked to say anything. ‘I said – are you Cassidie?’
Cassie saw Ryan get to his feet, but she shook her head again, more clearly. He sat back down, but on the edge of his seat.
‘Don’t then.’ The woman stood up.
‘No. Sorry. Yes. I’m Cassie.’
‘Cassidie,’ she insisted. Three flat, assertive syllables.
‘Okay. Yes. I’m Cassidie. Who are you?’
‘Not here.’ She stood up and started walking away. Cassie was forced to follow her, dodging in between the shuffling bus passengers, her heart rate rocketing. The woman didn’t look back, and so didn’t see Ryan get to his feet and join their bizarre little procession across the road and along the high street. Cassie stayed a few paces behind the woman, who didn’t glance behind her once, but walked quickly with her head down and her hands rammed into the pockets of her top. It felt ridiculous, and not very bright, to be following a complete stranger down unfamiliar streets, but she’d known Cassie’s name or, more tellingly, she’d known her birth name, so she had to take a chance.
Their trek didn’t last long because, without warning, the woman suddenly veered left into a pub. Cassie checked that Ryan had seen, then stepped through the doors after her.
The sudden shift from bright sunlight to interior gloom was disorientating, the smell of beer strong. Cassie looked around. The woman was at the bar, ordering. She turned and indicated a table in an alcove. As Cassie moved towards it, Ryan came in. They passed so close that Cassie could have reached out and touched him, but she didn’t. He continued to play his part well. He strolled up to the bar, where he waited. Cassie was impressed that he was controlled enough to glance at her only briefly.
The woman paid for two Cokes and brought them over to Cassie.
‘Thanks.’ She accepted the offered glass. The woman put her drink down on the table. She stared at it. Cassie sat, feeling uncomfortable and very, very out of place. For the want of anything better to do, she concentrated on the woman’s hands. Painted stubby nails, neon-blue varnish, chipped at the edges. A lot of rings, a band of fake gold running across her fingers. Dry, flaky skin. A scatter of small white scars across the back of her left hand.
The Forgotten Sister Page 14
