Blackbird: A Childhood Lost and Found

by Jennifer Lauck

  Did I ever believe?

  Before living with Jo, I’d say no.

  After seven years of being her mother and having access to her way of thinking and living, I’d call myself a full convert.

  But as I turn on the overhead light, setting the chandelier on dim, I forget all that Jo has taught me. I lose track of the power of fairies and dreams and magic. I am again, once again, governed by fear.

  One thing I finally possess, though, is certainty.

  I am certain I will not leave this office until I have made contact with Catherine.

  I UNPACK MY files, computer, and telephone. I unwind my power cords, get a wireless signal, and put my phone on the charger.

  As command central comes to life, an email beeps into my account. It is a message from my investigator. She has typed Catherine’s phone number in large, bold text. I’m sure you’re overwhelmed right now, she writes. I can’t wait to hear when you make contact.

  I SQUINT AT the numbers on the screen, pick up the phone, and dial.

  Catherine’s number rings several times and then a series of clicks send the call to her answering machine. A woman’s voice says, “No one is in to take your call. Leave a number and we’ll call you right back.”

  Is it her?

  The t’s and k’s are clipped and quick, in the same way I clip my own t’s and my k’s, and my tough-guy façade shifts—just a little—like a poncho sliding off my shoulders.

  Jesus—my voice.

  I’m a wicked mimic of other people but I have never heard my own voice coming back at me.

  I barely pull myself together to leave a message, which is short and odd—I think I leave a name and ask that she call me.

  After I hang up, I imagine Catherine listening to my message, screwing up her face with the question—What? Who the hell is this? I see her hit the erase button and continue on with her life.

  I hit re-dial on my phone and her machine picks up again. After the beep, I speak with more authority: “This is Jennifer Lauck, again. I need to leave a little more information ...”

  When I am done, I do not press the off button or close the phone. I exist in the silence of the open line as if she were standing right there, listening, and might just pick up.

  THE INVESTIGATOR SENDS one, two, three, and then five more emails. They come in a fast sequence and each holds more information, lists of telephone numbers for those related to Catherine—brothers, a sister, an ex-husband, friends, and her kids. This is when I discover my father’s full name too. William Wright.

  I tug out a high school yearbook from Reno High (sent by a member of the alumni association). I scan through the photos from 1961 and there they are. Catherine and Bill.

  Bill is a dark, moody-looking guy who tucks his chin in the photo as if he wants the photographer to go away. Dad?

  Catherine is—simply put—stunning. Model beautiful. Luminous skin. Shining blond hair and a delicate face and—my God—she looks just like Jo.

  Looking at her photo weakens me. My mother. She looks so fragile and beautiful and exactly as she should look.

  Catherine kills me without even being in the room.

  SOME MIGHT QUESTION why I didn’t wait awhile and let Catherine call me back. Some might say, “Geez, what’s the hurry? Give the woman a chance.”

  To really understand the intensity of my own desire is to go back to karma, cause and effect, and even Newton’s Law of Motion, which states: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

  I was now getting very close to someone who had never searched for me and had potentially locked me away—as a deep secret. To bury something as powerful as life, which includes identity and selfhood, is to beg for it to explode to the surface. I am motivated, very likely, by the very power of the polarized system in which I exist. I am reaching for the light of my truth. One more moment of being suppressed is unbearable to me.

  It isn’t me that creates the condition of urgency. It is actually Catherine, by her denial of me, who provides much of the momentum.

  I PLAY A little game of roulette. I spin the names sent by my investigator and make a random choice.

  I decide to call a guy named Darrell. He’s a cousin. I find his photo on the Internet. He sells real estate. He’s a broker. We part our hair to the side, in the exact same way. He has sad eyes and a nice smile. Darrell looks like a good man.

  A receptionist says Darrell is in a meeting and sends my call to voice messaging. His voice also has the familiar twang I recognized in Catherine. I leave a message that is, at best, cryptic.

  I go through the list again and pick another name. It is a thirtysix-year-old woman who shares a name with Catherine. A daughter?

  “Hello?” the woman says on the phone.

  I pause at the sound of an actual human being. I clear my throat and ask if she is related to Catherine.

  “I am,” she says. “She’s my mother. Who is this?”

  I want to put the phone down and lay on the floor, panting from the effort it has taken to get this far.

  “I think she’s my mother too,” I make myself say.

  “What?”

  “Go to your computer, if you have one—”

  “I have one,” she says. “I’m there.”

  It’s too fast, she moves too quickly, but her speed is also perfect. She has to be my sister.

  I ask for her email address and she gives it without hesitation. I send photos of myself, and after a second, hear the beep of an email arriving on her end.

  “Oh my God,” she finally says. “Is this you?”

  “Yes,” I say. “I hope I’m not freaking you out.”

  “You are totally freaking me out,” she says. “Wow!”

  Her voice pattern is like mine, not exactly the same, but so close and again, I am undone.

  Her name is Jessica but she says she goes by Jessie. She has a young voice with a familiar cadence. It’s not like Catherine’s voice on the answering machine, but I feel the nuances that make her voice and diction like my own.

  “You really look like us,” Jessie says, as she looks at the photos online. It’s almost as if she has been waiting for something like this. She is that fast to process and to speak.

  “My mom did marry a guy named Bill, just after high school. They had my brother Daniel but then they got divorced and she married my father and oh my God, your dad, Bill, he died a couple years ago, I think. I heard he died anyway. Oh my God, I’m so sorry to tell you that but I guess you should know.”

  I am so into her inflections and tones that I’m not fully hearing what she says. Her words glance off me, unable to penetrate. Did she say my mother married my father? That I have a brother—a onehundred-percent brother? Did she say my father is dead?

  “I’m your sister,” Jessie says.

  We both laugh, in the same way, at the same tempo.

  “Do you know where she is?” I ask. My voice is small and hopeful.

  “At work, I just talked to her like an hour ago,” she says. “I talk to her every day, sometimes three times a day.”

  A sting enters my body and catches my breath. She talks to her mother every day, three times a day?

  “We tell each other everything,” Jessie says. “I thought I knew everything about her ...”

  Her voice trails away.

  Both of us are lost now. Both of our realities are changing. Both of us must manage our own sense of betrayal.

  “I’m truly sorry,” I say. “I hope I haven’t upset you.”

  “No, it’s okay. I’m just so surprised,” she says.

  “I get it, and you know what—I just want to find my mother.”

  “Of course you do,” she says. Her immediate understanding catches me by surprise. I expected resistance and even doubt but not this. If I had been looking for a sister, I might slow down a little and let myself linger on what we have stumbled upon, but I am a heat-sinking missile of focus again—I just want the person who has denied me all these y
ears. I want my mother.

  “Can you do me a favor and call your mother? Can you break the news in a gentle way? Can you let her know I’m here and want to talk to her, tonight, as soon as possible? Can you tell her I don’t want to make any trouble? I just want to talk, that’s all.”

  “Our mother,” Jessie interrupts.

  “What?”

  “She’s our mother,” she insists. “You are just going to have to get used to saying that.”

  WHEN JESSIE CALLS again, she says Catherine is frantic.

  “She had to leave work. She was sobbing and hysterical. She’s upset and confused. I’m sure you understand,” Jessie says.

  “Of course,” I say.

  “She says she knew about you. She saw that email that you sent to the Reno High alumni, like a couple months back?” she asks. “Is that right? ”

  “I did,” I say. “I sent a photo too. She saw it? ”

  “She thought your message was a hoax and she deleted it.”

  “She deleted me?”

  Jessie says nothing. How terrible it must be for her to tell me—the first born—such a shocking thing. You were deleted.

  Jessie finally says she’s sorry about all this, as if she wants to make up for what is going down. But I know she is innocent. This mess is not her doing or her job to clean up.

  I’m not mad at Jessie, not in the least.

  I clear my throat and refocus. “Can she call me?”

  “I told her to,” Jessie says, “but she is really torn up about this. She didn’t want anyone to know and now she’s going home to call my brother, my father, her own brothers and sister and several friends. She says she needs to let everyone know her secret before they find out. That’s the way she is. She worries they will all hate her. You understand all this, right? ”

  “Of course,” I manage to say but the fact that my mother is not calling me first makes me ache. I feel pain in my head, at the base of my neck, and the core of my body goes ice cold. The world feels surreal. It’s like a bad dream.

  “I’ll do my best to have her call,” Jessie says, “I promise.”

  When she hangs up, I pull a blanket off the sofa. I wrap myself tight. I chant Tara, I pray to Mary, I ask God—whatever that force of energy is, to give me strength. I rock forward and back—alone.

  AN HOUR PASSES and finally the telephone rings again.

  I drop the blanket and snap the phone open.

  “Jennifer?” comes a delicate voice.

  “Yes,” I manage to say.

  “This is your mother,” my mother’s voice is weak and broken, a frail warbling. “I want you to know not a day has gone by that I haven’t thought about you.”

  Like an old dog, tired to the marrow, I cannot respond to what she says. I can only lie down on the floor of my office, pull my knees close to my chest, fetal, and close my eyes.

  Catherine goes on to tell her story. It spills from her almost like a prepared script.

  She says she was just seventeen years old, crazy in love with Bill, a boy her mother did not approve of. “I remember saying, ‘But mom, we’re in love. I love him.’ My mother told me to knock it off.”

  Catherine sounds like she is crying.

  “My mother, your grandmother, she had a good heart. She meant well,” she says. “She died a couple years ago. Today is actually the anniversary of her death. I just realized that.”

  “I’m sorry,” I manage to say. I’m sorry? Is that true?

  “Thank you,” Catherine says. “I really miss her. Every day I feel like crying. She was my whole life.”

  There are two Jennifers now. One of us dissolves back to the beginning of herself and she is a baby again. The details Catherine speaks of don’t matter, my mother is here and the sound of the voice matches a pattern I’ve been waiting for since the day I was born. All is well. But there is also “survivor Jennifer,” who wants to tell Catherine that she knows full well what it is to miss a mother. Survivor Jennifer wants to pick a fight. Who does this woman think she is? Who does she think she is talking to?

  Catherine, oblivious to these divided portions of Self, goes on to say she wanted to be with my father more than anything in the world but since she was so young—the whole thing was out of her hands.

  She says she can’t really remember her pregnancy at all. “Isn’t that funny?” she asks.

  I want to say, “No, that is not funny, it is tragic.”

  I say nothing.

  “And I don’t remember having you either,” she continues. “I just remember going into the hospital, being drugged, having a doctor come in, take you out, and then you were gone.”

  I weep now, tears falling on the rug.

  “I never even got to hold you,” Catherine says, “but my mother did get to see you. She told me you were beautiful with a bunch of dark hair. And that was it. Whenever I thought about you or even about looking for you, my mother would tell me, ‘Forget it, she has her own life. She’s happy. You’re just going to mess things up.’”

  Finally, Catherine goes silent. The wind blows outside and the branch of a rhododendron bush scrapes against the window.

  I realize I have been here, in my office, for six hours.

  It feels like a moment.

  It feels like forever.

  I push myself off the floor, wipe the tears from my face, and move to the sofa where I ease into a nest of velvet pillows.

  I know this is my chance to say something and I search for words. I want to speak the truest truth but what is the truth?

  It’s Catherine who speaks once again. “So,” she says, as casual as if meeting me on the street. “How have you been? ”

  This is such a funny question and we both laugh in the same way, at the same tempo.

  The release of seriousness is a relief and within, I feel a rise of love so pure and so utterly familiar. It is the same feeling I have for my children, which began sprouting the moment I knew I was pregnant with them. When each child was placed in my arms, I was a goner. I know I have been waiting—for my true mother, for Catherine—in order to finally release this universal love in the other direction. Love has always been in my heart, waiting for the right person to trip the code.

  I ONCE HEARD the Dalai Lama say, and I am paraphrasing, that after birth, our first experience is a mother’s affection. A child may not have the idea “This is my mother,” but there will be a connection because of the biological system. On the mother’s side there is also that sort of tremendous feeling of care. He said this was not due to religious faith, but because of the biological factor. According to the great master, human bonding is the key that brings the deepest satisfaction to the world, it is the basis of our life breath and how our life started.

  But what of the adopted child deprived of her mother? What of the birth mother deprived of her child?

  Of course, I already knew the answer to these questions from my own experience. I also knew that love had been trying to find a way through me as I loved my own children and they loved me in return. Love was a force greater than political, cultural, and religious interventions. Love was bigger than this institution we called adoption. And love had more work to do in me. It had driven me to be on the phone, right now. I didn’t have to defend or protect myself anymore. With my mother on the line, my good heart knew what to do.

  I cleared my throat and spoke that truth.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you for my life.”

  Catherine exploded like a heavy sky, tears raining, and her voice comes ragged.

  “That is the most amazing thing you could have ever said to me,” she managed. “I was just so sure you have hated me for what I did to you.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  CATHERINE

  CATHERINE IS ON the earliest flight from Reno.

  She will land in Portland by 8:00 AM.

  I am going to pick her up at the airport.

  We get a day together—just this day. She has a sick cat, a job that needs her, an
d appointments in her datebook she cannot possibly reschedule.

  I STAND IN my closet and evaluate my wardrobe—jeans, tops, sweaters, skirts. What to wear? What to wear? Should I choose a fancy combination that makes me look pretty or perhaps something professional that makes me appear credible? Perhaps I can pick an ensemble that says, “Love me. Take me home with you. Don’t leave me again.”

  CATHERINE AND I have talked, several times, on the phone. We’ve exchanged emails with photos from her life—Christmas holidays, anniversaries, birthdays, and graduations. In her pictures, I’ve seen aunts, uncles, a grandmother, and a brother and sister. My people. They all have the shape of my smile, the curve of my eyes, the size of my chin, and the span of my forehead.

  As I look at the life my mother has gone on to have without me, I tell myself this story: She had a decent life with family who loved her. That’s good. I’m happy for her.

  Deep in me, though, pushed low and flat, another story rises. I finally feel what Catherine worried I would feel—a seething rage that turns the contents of my stomach to toxic waste. She made a life without me. She made a life as if I didn’t exist. She kept me a secret for forty-four years. She has even told me she would have never searched. Never!

  To cope with the pain I have been feeling for most of my life and have been denying and redirecting, I drink way too much wine late at night. Or, I get my bike out of the garage, pedal hard, and sweat myself blind as if in training for the Iron Man competition. Or, I press Spencer and Jo to my sides and read silly books like Captain Underpants and Bad Kitty. The latter is the only way to actually still the fury. Warm bodies, sweet breath, steady hearts, and the familiar sound of their laughter. They are whole and loved and kept children. Their proximity makes me whole and loved too—for a while.