Somebody Else's Daughter

by Elizabeth Brundage

  Her first appointment was with Mr. Gallagher, the writing instructor. Gallagher’s class was held in Walden House, a free-standing structure that had been built years before by some students as some sort of existential experiment, whatever that meant—she’d never understood that term and she still didn’t, even though she’d heard conversations about it at her own dining room table. Apparently, Walden House was a special place at Pioneer and Gallagher was a special sort of teacher. When she stepped into his classroom, she was struck with an uncanny sense of déjà vu. Something about his eyes seemed so familiar.

  “Come right in, Mrs. Golding,” Gallagher said.

  She sat down at the large round table. The school touted itself for teaching at tables, and not at desks, but sitting there so close to him made her nervous. At St. Theresa’s, they’d sat in chairs with one-armed desks, she’d been left-handed and they didn’t have any left-handed writing desks and the nuns made her use her right hand instead. Stop causing trouble, they’d admonish. Learn to write with your right hand like everyone else! One nun, a Sister Belinda, seemed to derive pleasure from watching her struggle, erasing so hard the paper inevitably tore and she’d have to start again.

  Unlike the nuns, Mr. Gallagher had on a blue work shirt and jeans, red suspenders, a skinny black tie, and his hair was longish, a bit too long for her taste—and that beard—he had the wild glare of a man who’d walked out of the woods. On his feet were heavy work boots. His hands were large and sprawling, a working man’s hands. His eyes flashed like a good storm.

  “Your daughter can write,” he told her. “She has an ear for language.”

  Candace beamed with pride, but then the pride turned bitter and she started to cry. Gallagher looked troubled and reached across the table and touched her hand. “What’s wrong? She’s doing fine, you don’t have to worry.”

  Candace shook her head, that wasn’t it. “Please, forgive me. I feel so silly.” He placed a tissue box before her and she took one and blew her nose. “I don’t know what hit me,” she apologized.

  “It’s the room. Everyone cries in this room. It’s okay to tell the truth here, that’s what I tell them. We say what we feel.”

  “That’s great. That’s really great.” She blew her nose again. She couldn’t seem to articulate what she was feeling. She didn’t tell him that her smiling little girl had vanished and someone else had taken her place. “I know it’s her favorite class,” she said finally. “She’s always writing in her journal.”

  “The journal helps them organize their thoughts,” Gallagher explained. “My hope is that the students find out something new about themselves, through writing. That’s the goal.”

  “It’s been a hard year,” she said. “She’s changed a lot. It may have something to do with the Sunrise Internship.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I think it’s been hard for her. Going there, I mean.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Well . . .” She thought about it a moment. “The women there, for one thing, with those sorts of problems. I think it’s alarming to her. Frightening.”

  Gallagher nodded. “It’s not easy, I agree.”

  “I think it has to do with the fact that she’s adopted.”

  “How so?”

  “I could be wrong, but I read somewhere that adopted children often make the assumption that they come from terrible circumstances. That their birth parents didn’t have the wherewithal to raise them. It’s not necessarily true, but in her case it was. The birth parents were indigent.”

  He frowned. “Indigent?” He spit out the word like something foul.

  “She may identify with these women somehow.”

  “You’re making the assumption that they come from terrible circumstances, socioeconomically speaking—as if money accounts for happiness. As if in families with money women don’t get battered, which we know isn’t true. But that’s a totally different conversation.”

  “Yes, I see your point,” she said, feeling slightly patronized. “I know. And you’re right, it’s not true. Money has very little to do with happiness.”

  “An easier claim to make, of course, when you have it. Money, I mean.”

  She looked at him. “Yes, that’s true too.”

  “You may be reading into it. How much does Willa know about her biological roots?” he fished.

  “Not very much,” Candace admitted. “We weren’t sure it was necessary for her to know. She’s always known she was adopted, she’s grown up knowing. We’ve always tried to give her the feeling that it’s a special thing, a wonderful thing.”

  “Which it is,” he said. “Her birth parents—what do you mean by indigent?”

  “Well . . .” She didn’t really want to get into it and regretted bringing it up. It wasn’t the sort of information she should be sharing. “They were poor. The father was into drugs, heroin. They both were. The mother had AIDS.”

  Nate Gallagher shifted in his chair. He couldn’t seem to look at her. Perhaps he was distracted. Perhaps she was taking too much of his time. “Go on,” he said.

  “He didn’t have a steady job. They had very little. They were living in a tenement in San Francisco.”

  Gallagher looked down at his hands. He didn’t say anything for several minutes, which she thought was somewhat odd. “I’m not a psychiatrist, Mrs. Golding, but I don’t think it matters all that much,” he said, finally. “People make mistakes. They get into stuff that they shouldn’t. Things happen.” He looked at her very carefully, his eyes tinted with his own brand of wisdom. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “You’re right. I know.”

  “As corny as it sounds,” Gallagher said, “life is very long. You’re supposed to mess up when you’re young and other people sometimes benefit from your mistakes—as you did in this case. But things rarely stay the same. People grow up and change. They move on. The truth is that you probably know close to nothing about those people who gave birth to your daughter. We’re told certain things, information that pushes us into tidy little categories, but they’re just words. We’re rarely told the whole story and the story is always changing.”

  She looked at him and held his gaze. For several seconds they were perfectly still, staring at each other. Something seemed to be knocking at her brain, she didn’t know what, an old scrap of memory that she couldn’t quite grasp. She felt like he was almost angry with her. You’re too stupid for him, Sister Belinda mocked. But then he smiled, warmly. He’d been intent on communicating something to her, some essential information that might help her with Willa, and she appreciated his effort. She could understand why the students liked him so much. He made the world make sense.

  “Maybe you should ask her,” he suggested. “Ask her if she wants to know.”

  “I will,” Candace said. “She’s old enough now. She has the right to know.”

  “It’s been my experience, Mrs. Golding, that teenagers seem to yearn for the truth in the same way that adults yearn to ignore it,” he said. “If nothing else, it’s always liberating. But you should remind her too that people change. Her birth parents, I mean. The fact that they were indigent. It’s not a reflection of her. It’s who they were at the time, not who she is now.”

  There was a knock at the door; his next appointment was there. “I’ll get going,” she said, but she didn’t move. Gallagher took her hand and looked at her intently.

  “Your daughter’s a fine girl. You’ve obviously done an excellent job with her.”

  She felt herself blushing. “Thank you for saying so.”

  “Enjoy this beautiful afternoon, Mrs. Golding.”

  And she thought to herself: I will.

  35

  Nate went home that afternoon feeling drained. He was badly in need of a drink. In his apartment, he fixed himself some bourbon and lay on the couch, listening to Beethoven on his stereo. He considered packing his things, leaving—being here had become unbearable in its own way. Surprisingly, s
eeing Willa, getting to know her, had been harder on him than he’d predicted. Not because he wished he could take her away, nothing like that. Not because he even thought of himself as her father, because he knew he was not. Their only connection was their blood, which, when you came right down to it, didn’t mean all that much. The genetics did, perhaps—he could see traits in Willa that he saw in himself—good things, mostly, but the bad things were probably there too.

  What he’d said to Candace Golding had been an idealized version of the truth—suggesting that people really did move on and change. But what if it wasn’t true? What if he were still the same person he’d been back then? A man who couldn’t get it together to finish anything he started. Someone who couldn’t commit.

  36

  Her son seemed beleaguered by something beyond his control. Distracted. He seemed aloof, uncertain. Claire tried to talk to him, but he’d shrug, disinterested, and change the subject. That morning, after he got on the bus, she went up to have a look in his room. There was nothing so revealing as a teenager’s room, she thought, breathing in the woody reek of stale pot. The room was its usual mess, piles of dirty clothes on the floor, the unmade bed. Pinned to the back of his door was a photograph of Maggie Heath, presently employed as a dartboard. With festive penmanship he’d colored in all her teeth. He’d crudely drawn snot coming out of her nose and little cockroaches coming out of her ears. In his wastebasket, she pulled out several papers he’d written for Mrs. Heath’s Language Arts class, each one with a glaring red D on its front. Where’s your topic sentence? one declared. Sophomoric, read another. Poorly organized. See me!

  With a sinking heart, Claire read over the papers and found herself agreeing with the teacher to some degree. He’d used little or no punctuation and many of the words were misspelled. He still confused certain letters, writing B where it should have been D, or P where it should have been F, and vice versa. He’d been doing this ever since first grade; they’d told her at the time that he’d grow out of it and eventually catch up—he obviously hadn’t. His handwriting was sloppy. Instead of using an eraser, he had simply written over the wrong letter, seemingly satisfied that a messy jumble of pencil marks would suffice, as though he were too busy to take the time to redo it. In truth, she couldn’t blame Mrs. Heath for her criticism, but the teacher’s method obviously wasn’t working and Teddy showed no signs of improving. Like most kids, he would retract like a snail if you embarrassed him, and Mrs. Heath had clearly done a good job of that.

  “We’re putting him on academic probation,” Mrs. Heath told her that afternoon during their parent/teacher conference. “It’s for his own good.”

  They were up in her classroom and she was showing her Teddy’s grades, offering them as proof. “We’d like to see more effort on his part,” she said, frowning. “That’s the sort of thing we expect here at Pioneer.”

  But later, Nate Gallagher took a different tact. He told her outright that Teddy was dyslexic. “I’m surprised nobody ever suggested having him tested,” he said.

  When she thought back over all the years in L.A., switching from one overcrowded, understaffed school to another depending on where they lived—plus the fact that she wasn’t the type of mother who had the time to sit around doing homework with him—if he was even home to do it—he was on his own at fourteen, basically, with her always working—but still, it seemed amazing to her that he’d been pushed through year after year without so much as a phone call from somebody. Teddy would tell her he was bored, he couldn’t concentrate—and his report cards remarked that he wasn’t working up to his true potential. Which was basically what Mrs. Heath was saying, accusing him of being lazy and indifferent, which was not entirely untrue, but—and it was an important exception—after so many years of being labeled a loser, she couldn’t really blame him. And when you compared his work to the other students in his class, it probably was unacceptable, but what if he couldn’t help it? It was clear to her now that the apathy her son so dazzlingly displayed came from a dark place inside of him, a place that, until now, he’d dealt with completely on his own.

  “We moved around a lot,” she said morosely. “He always seemed smart; he had an attitude. They thought it was behavioral.” It’s all my fault, she thought. I’m the worst sort of mother. She shut her eyes to keep from crying and sighed.

  “Hey.” Nate hugged her. “It’s okay. He’s a really smart kid. It’s not too late to get him what he needs.”

  “Which is what?”

  “Testing, for one thing. One of the many things you’ll discover is just how smart he is. He’s relied on that intelligence to get him this far, without any help. I’ll find out who’s good around here and we can set it up.

  “In the meantime,” he reached behind him and pulled a stack of photocopies off the shelf, “I want you to have these,” he said, handing them to her. “These are some of the stories I’ve published in journals. Just so you know he’s not a lost cause.”

  She held the stories in her hands, impressed, honored. “You’re dyslexic?”

  He nodded. “Once I finally figured out how to write a decent sentence, which took me about twenty-five years, I couldn’t seem to stop. As it turned out, I had an awful lot to say.”

  She looked over one of the stories. “Thank you for these.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  She wanted to say more, to tell him what she was feeling and how moved she was by his honesty, but the next parent had come to the door.

  “I’ll see you,” she said.

  “Soon.”

  He was on her mind. In the barn, when she did her work; when she stood at the counter peeling apples. She wanted to cook; she wanted to bake pies. Her body was firm; her breasts ached. She wanted to be in love.

  She read his work. She sat in the old wingchair full of horsehairs. Sometimes she would read a paragraph and wait, thinking, looking out at the field. His words came into her head like a good cold wind. She would make a fire and sit before it in the chilly house that was too big for her and imagine what it would be like to have him there.

  One afternoon, he called. He asked if she wanted to go for a drive in her father’s old truck. She had learned to drive in that truck. The shift was up on the column, and you had to roll the windows down. When you played the radio, it always crackled, no matter how clear the reception. It had that old truck smell, of gasoline and vinyl, a smell she had known well as a child. It was a moody Sunday and Teddy was sleeping in. Nate came and picked her up and they slipped out of the house, silently, not wanting to wake him. They stopped at the café and bought a picnic lunch and drove into New York, into Chatham, under the low heavy clouds. There were great farms out there, with cows and sheep and pigs. You could park and walk for miles. It was cold and the sky was dark. They walked through somebody’s sheep field to the shores of a wide creek. They sat on the large flat rocks and ate their lunch and shared a bottle of wine while the sky played its gloomy étude. “I read your stories,” she told him. “They’re wonderful. I read every word of them.”

  He thanked her, shy with pride.

  “This is going to sound weird, but—” She suddenly stopped herself.

  “What? What’s weird?”

  She looked at him. “I kind of have a crush on you.”

  “Really?”

  “Do you mind?”

  “Do I mind?” He grinned at her.

  “It’s kind of serious. I’m totally smitten.”

  “Smitten?”

  “As in besotted, obsessed, head-over-heels.” She spoke dramatically.

  He stroked his beard like a mad scientist. “A rather old-fashioned condition, wouldn’t you say?”

  She nodded.

  “I think it’s quite serious.” He put his hand on her forehead. “You’re burning up. It wouldn’t happen to be contagious, would it?”

  “Very. It’s a highly communicable disease, I’m told.”

  He shook his head. “That explains it.”

&nbs
p; “Really? You too?”

  “Oh, yes. The symptoms are intense. I’ve really been suffering. I can’t eat. Can’t sleep. I have this pressure right here, in my heart.”

  “Me too.” She looked up at him and he pulled her close and kissed her. “I’m totally terrified,” she whispered.

  “That makes two of us.”

  The clouds pressed down and the light turned sharp and it thundered. She felt something let loose inside of her. She could smell his clean smell. He had on a worn flannel shirt, old jeans, a duck-hunting coat with millions of pockets. His hands were large, his fingers long. He was like a man from an earlier century. He could plow a field; he could make a fire; he could build his own house. It started to rain. She wanted to climb inside him. He kissed her again and they stood there in the rain kissing, the rain running into their mouths.

  They had to walk back to the truck. The sky turned yellow as the rain fell, the road was empty. Suddenly, there was hail. He held her hand as they ran through it. They were like the last people on Earth, she thought.

  Later, shivering in his apartment, she let him undress her. It was as if their bodies were whispering to each other and neither of them could bring themselves to speak, and she was aware of the sound of his breath as it came close to her face and the distant prickling of sleet on the windows. “God, you’re beautiful.”

  “I’m not,” she said. And she wasn’t, not really, not anymore. She had a crooked, intelligent face and a body battered by work, by late nights with no sleep, by a certain variety of neglect, but somehow right now, here in this place, his touch made her so. Then he took off his clothes and laid all the wet things, his and hers, on the clanking pipes of the radiator and the room filled with the smell of wet wool, the smell of childhood afternoons of ice skating and sledding and wool mittens left to dry. My poor little kittens have lost their mittens, she thought, and he kissed her. They climbed up on the old bed with its cranky springs, sliding under the cold sheets, and she wrapped her body around his and held on, as the saying goes, for dear life.