by Jo Watson
I went to bed that night mulling over these conflicting feelings, trying to focus on the good things that had come from my journey, but my thoughts kept returning to Dimitri and kept me awake. Although perhaps it was better if I stayed awake with the thoughts of Dimitri than if I fell asleep with them…
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
I’d been home a week before I finally called my friends over to read the note to them.
“It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard,” Lilly said, wiping away a small tear that was rolling down her cheek.
Val looked at me and nodded. Tears were also running down her face.
I turned my attention to Stormy. She was sitting in total silence and I suddenly felt terrible for reading it to her. She really had been unwanted by her mother. Her story reads like the plot of a science-fiction film but is completely true. Her parents were both strange traveling hippies of sorts, and when she was born, her mother ran away to join a cult. True story.
“It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.” Stormy looked up at me and smiled. I’m sure it took a lot for her to smile through the pain I could see reflected in her eyes.
“So what should I do about the other letter?” I asked them. The letter for Phoebe had been sitting on my bedside table, where I had spent countless moments staring at it, resisting the urge to rip it open and read.
“You have to take it to her,” Stormy said.
Val nodded. “You have to. It’s your duty.”
“You have to,” Lilly echoed.
I glanced down at the letter. I knew I had to. But that was easier said than done. Meeting her and showing her the letter would be among the hardest things I’d ever have to do—and she didn’t want to see me, so I would have to convince her, too. Maybe she didn’t even want the letter?
After a few more minutes of catching up, the girls left and made me promise that I would get the note to Phoebe. So that left me no choice, but I wasn’t feeling very positive. The last time I’d tried to reach out to Phoebe, she hadn’t been very forthcoming. Still, I had to try.
And the first step would be to call the adoption agency and ask them to pass on the message once again. I picked up my phone and saw that I had three text messages from Dimitri. I immediately tossed the phone on my bed and moved away from it, as if it were a coiled snake about to strike.
I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to read them, but I didn’t. I wanted to love him, but I couldn’t.
Oh, who am I kidding? I grabbed the phone and went to my messages.
First one:
Jane. I’m sorry. I love you.
The next one must have come only a few seconds later:
Actually, I’m not sorry because I got to watch you change and become this amazing, strong, beautiful woman that I knew you were from the moment I met you.
He must have been typing them one after the other:
But I am very sorry that I hurt you. I hope one day you’ll be able to forgive me. I love you.
I put the phone back down on the bed and pondered. He was right: I had changed. Pre-Greece Jane wouldn’t have been that harsh and unforgiving with Dimitri. She would have reacted in some self-deprecating way and blamed herself and forgiven him on the outside, but quietly hated him inside, letting yet another destructive and negative emotion eat her from within.
But I wasn’t that Jane anymore—and I wasn’t the Jane that would take no for an answer, either. Phoebe was going to meet with me whether she liked it or not. And so I picked up the phone and dialed the adoption agency. This time I would entice her: I would tell them to pass on the message that I had an urgent letter for her.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
I sat in my car staring at the coffee shop. I couldn’t see inside, so she might not even be here yet. I think I had forgotten to breathe a long time ago. My body had certainly forgotten how to work: It was frozen to the car seat.
I was clutching the letter in my hands. I had been holding it so tightly and for so long that I had crumpled it, and it was damp with the sweat coming from my clammy hands. I laid it on my lap, ran my hands over it in an attempt to straighten it, and then slipped it back into my bag. I looked at myself in the mirror, fixed my hair, cleaned the lipstick from the corners of my dry mouth, and opened the car door.
My heart pounded as I walked across the parking lot toward the coffee shop. I was assaulted by nerves so overwhelming, I had to stop walking for a second and take a deep breath. I had been so confident over the phone. I had been firm. But right now all of that was gone.
I reached the door and paused. I didn’t want to do this. Every single cell in my body screamed that I didn’t want to be here doing this. If I had learned anything in my life so far, it was that things didn’t always go according to your own carefully laid-out plans. Instead, life was filled with painful lessons. It was full of dashed hopes and expectations that had crashed in a head-on collision with that thing we call reality. But I had also learned that once you survived the collisions intact, armed with the lessons you acquired, reality could also be beautiful. Life could be beautiful.
Finally, having mustered as much positivity as I could, I pushed the door open and walked in. Each step felt like I was wading through thick mud. I scanned the restaurant and…
I saw her.
She had her back to me, but I knew it was her. Don’t ask me how I knew, I just did. For a few seconds I simply stood there and studied her, trying to get a sense of what she was feeling and thinking. But the only thing that offered me any insight was the frantic tapping of her foot on the ground. Clearly she was as nervous as I was.
I approached her slowly, like someone approaches a dangerous wild animal that has been let out of a cage. But the closer I got, the more the sick, strange, panicky nerves gripped me. The heat of the coffee shop ovens and the soaring temperatures outside coalesced into a suffocating blanket that made it difficult to catch my breath.
This was a bad idea. This was the worst idea ever. But I felt duty bound. I had never been able to do anything for my father while he was alive; this was the only father-daughter act I could complete, and because he wanted this to happen, I would do it. But only for him.
I reached the table and was just about to walk around it when she turned and looked at me. We locked eyes and it was as if we stared straight past the physical and into each other’s souls with an intensity that froze my gut. It reminded me of what Stormy had told me once, the true meaning of the word namaste—my soul recognizes your soul. That was exactly what it was.
This was the first time we’d seen each other in twenty-five years. We were essentially strangers, yet we were a part of each other. We’d shared the most intimate bond any two humans can share. She’d carried me inside her body—connected to her, feeding off her, entirely dependent on her. She had created me, together with that magical bond that was meant to be unbreakable, and yet it had been broken. She had broken it. We shared the same DNA, yet we knew nothing about each other.
How could two people be so similar and yet so far apart at the same time?
Neither one of us said a word as I walked around the table, pulled out a chair, and sat down.
You might have imagined this playing out a few ways. Maybe in your fantasy, in mine even, my biological mother would see me and throw her arms around me. She would hold me to her bosom and she would weep from the sheer joy of being reunited with her child. I had long since given up on this expectation, though. If she were the kind of woman who would have done that, she would have been the kind of woman who wanted to meet me years ago. I knew now that this was less about me and more about her, and not being able to deal with her own pain.
So I wasn’t expecting anything from her today. I wanted to give her the note and then leave. I no longer needed anything from her; my father had told me all I had wanted to know. And the rest of it I had found out for myself—inside myself. The waiter came up to our table and broke the awkward staring silence.
“Ca
n I get you anything?” he asked me.
“Water, please.” My words came out stilted, mirroring the strange way my thoughts were playing out in my head. The waiter turned and looked at my mother—mother, what a strange thing. She shook her head.
“No thanks,” she said in a voice that I had heard every day of my life. She sounded exactly like me. The waiter left and we went back to looking at each other. One of us needed to end this, and since I had been the one to call this meeting, and hadn’t taken no for an answer, I would have to be the one to do it.
“Like I said… I just came back from Greece a week ago,” I said slowly. I was still trying to order my thoughts. “I went looking for Dimitri, my father, and…” I was coming to the part where I needed to say it out loud. That I hadn’t found him, that he was dead. But I couldn’t. So instead, I pulled the letter out of my handbag and pushed it slowly across the table. “This is for you. He wanted me to give it to you.”
I looked up at her and saw the color drain from her face as if she had just seen a ghost. Her hand came out to take the note; it was shaking so badly that I didn’t think she was going to be able to hold it. She clutched the note as if it was the most precious thing she owned. Her eyes teared up and a small smile started to tug on her lips.
“How is he?” she asked. Her question knocked me in the stomach like a mallet. I can’t even begin to explain how offended I was. She hadn’t asked me anything about myself, she hadn’t spoken a word to me yet, and this was all she could say?
A feeling of anger—no, rage—rose up in me again. I thought I had put the anger away, but I think some wounds are so old and deep, they take more than a letter and a week to heal.
“He’s dead.” The words came out flatly and coldly and I stared at her, waiting and watching to see what her reaction was going to be.
“He’s…?” Her eyes pleaded with me. She was willing me to say something different. She looked hurt; devastated even. But it was the fucking truth and I’d had to deal with it. In that moment, all my rage and anger and hatred toward her flooded me. How dare she get this upset over him when I was here in front of her? I was her daughter and I was sitting across the table from her and she had barely acknowledged my presence. I wanted to hurt her now as much as she had hurt me, and I had the power to do so for the first time in my life. I leaned in across the table and met her eyes.
“He’s dead,” I whispered with venom. “Dead.”
She took in a sharp breath. A loud one. And then another, and another, and soon she had clasped her hands to her chest and it looked like she was struggling to breathe. Her elbow knocked over a glass and a few people turned to look as her breathing got worse and more erratic. It deteriorated quickly, until she looked like a fish that had been pulled out of the water opening and closing its mouth frantically.
“Mom…” I said instinctually. I reached out across the table. Was she having a heart attack? “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to… Mom?” The waiter rushed over and someone else came forward claiming to be a doctor.
“It’s the heat,” he said loudly. “Bring me some cool towels and a paper bag.” He moved my mother to the floor and laid her out on her back. He started trying to calm her and coach her into a better breathing rhythm. And then everything became chaotic.
An ambulance arrived, and she was rushed off to the hospital, and I was ushered along for the ride. I found myself in the back of the ambulance, sitting next to her while an oxygen mask was placed over her face and she was given something to calm her.
“It might help her calm down if you hold her hand.” The medic looked at me expectantly and I froze. This was all happening too fast. A moment ago I was angry and I hadn’t quite recovered from it yet.
My mother turned her head slightly and looked at me.
I looked down at her hand and then reached out. The second I touched it she grabbed it so hard that my fingers crushed together. She pulled it all the way up to her chest and laid it on top of her. She looked down at my hand with something that resembled awe and I wondered if she had held my tiny hand in hers after I was born and looked at it like that. And then she closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
As soon as we got to the hospital it was even more chaotic. I was ushered to the side as they guided my mother’s gurney down the hall. I stood and waited until one of the nurses came and took me into the waiting area. I spent the next few minutes pacing up and down the corridor, barely able to process what had just happened. I didn’t know what to do. I had to talk to someone, to make this all less surreal and to get a better grip. So I took out my phone and called my mother.
She came rushing over and the two of us sat together in the waiting room. It was a lot like the moment in the airport. We didn’t speak. I didn’t need to explain to her what had happened. I didn’t have to explain how I felt. She just had to be there. I looked up at her face—and that’s when I realized I had never seen my mother looking so nervous in my entire life.
“If I can, I want to meet her,” my mother said to me. “I want to thank her.”
At some stage Phoebe’s family, her real family, arrived. I’d remembered her saying that they didn’t know about me and I didn’t want to overstep my boundaries, so I continued to sit in the waiting room wondering if I should even be there at all. I’d given her the note, I was free to leave. My duty to my father had been done. But just as I was ready to leave, she asked for me.
I walked into her room apprehensively. She was seated in a chair looking out the window, and she was holding the open letter in her hands. She turned and gave me the faintest smile.
“They said it was a panic attack brought on by stress, and also the heat made it worse. I haven’t eaten or slept in two days… I’ve been nervous for this,” she said in a small voice.
I nodded and sat on the edge of the bed awkwardly. “I’ve been nervous, too.”
And then she burst into tears. “I was so scared you were going to hate me,” she said. “Hate me for giving you away and then hate me even more for not agreeing to meet you all those years ago, too.” She looked down at her hands and played with the note.
“I did hate you,” I said faintly.
She looked up at me briefly and gave a small nod of acknowledgment. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“I don’t need your apologies. That’s not why I came. I came to give you that note.”
She looked back down at the note, and her hands started shaking again. “He was the love of my life, you know.” She smiled in a way that made her look many years younger. “I have never loved anyone like that again…” She paused. “Not even my husband.” There was a silence in the room, and all I could hear was the faint ticking of the clock.
“We had this plan, we were going to get married and have children and live this life full of love and laughter and… but I was only eighteen, I was still at school, and my parents, well… I’ve never really forgiven them for that.”
There was another silence, but this time it was so full I could almost hear her thoughts and feel her feelings.
“You have his eyes, you know.” She finally looked up at me again. “I’m sorry I didn’t meet you earlier, it was just too painful.”
“It’s fine. It was meant to happen this way.” If I had met her all those years ago, I never would have gone on my journey. I never would have found those parts of me or my father, or his words that had spoken to me from beyond the grave. And I never would have met and loved Dimitri, even if it was only for a few moments. Loving him had changed me in many ways. It had made me realize that I was not the unlovable person I once thought I was and that I did, I did, deserve to be loved by someone amazing one day. Even if that wasn’t going to be Dimitri.
“I’ve never been a mother to you. But can I give you one word of motherly advice? If this is the only thing I ever give you that means anything… Never let go of true love. Fight for it. No matter what the odds are and no matter how hard it is. Never, eve
r give up on that kind of love. If you do, you will regret it every single day for the rest of your life.”
She stood, walked over to me, and wrapped her arms around me. “I’m really sorry I never got to be your mother. But I can see your parents have done a very good job, and for that, I don’t regret giving you the life you deserved. I would never have been able to give you that.”
And with that, she let go of me and walked out of the room. I glanced after her and watched as my mother, my real mother, the woman that had loved and cared for me, walked over to her. The two women looked at each other for the longest time, and then Phoebe joined her family and left. She walked out of the hospital and out of my life for the second time. But this time, I was happy to see her go. I didn’t belong to her. I wasn’t hers, and she was not mine.
I was Jane. I was loved and I had a family and friends that I wouldn’t trade for anything. I was right where I was meant to be. I was who I was meant to be, and it had taken me twenty-five years to figure that all out.
My mom took me back to my parents’ place and made me a cup of sweet tea.
“Honey, I’ve got a roast that I could pop into the oven. Do you feel up to a family dinner? I know your sisters are dying to see you.”
And strangely, despite the long day, a family dinner sounded like exactly what I wanted. I smiled at my mom and nodded.
That night at dinner I was struck by how different it all felt. I was so much more relaxed. For once I allowed myself to take part in the conversation. Not to sit as a bystander and vaguely hear my sisters talking about some new interest of theirs. And I could see how happy they were to see me. They tossed one of their usual invitations out to me, for me to come to this new amazing place that served “vodka sushi” (whatever the hell that meant).