by Diane Burke
Diane
2009–2010
Winning the Daphne du Maurier Award made a significant impact on my future writing career. One of the judges for the contest was an editor for Harlequin’s inspirational romance line, which at that time was called Steeple Hill.
When I received the contest score sheets, I was excited and hugely surprised to discover that the editor had not only given me a perfect score in every category, but she had written a paragraph on the last page telling me how wonderful she thought my writing was and she requested that I send her the completed manuscript for review.
Several months later I received the call that every aspiring writer dreams about. The senior editor, as well as the assistant editor who would be working with me, set up a conference call. They broke the news together that they wanted to publish my first book.
The title of my first manuscript, Whispers in the Dark, was changed by the senior editor to Midnight Caller. The editor sent me a letter with several revisions she wanted to see and also pointed out some areas she wanted me to expand.
I was now a published author. I had to deal with art fact sheets, back cover blurbs, synopses, revision letters, art suggestions for covers, Dear Reader letters, acknowledgment pages, professional biographies, and my end of marketing and publicity. Then I had to sit my butt in a chair and try to do it all over again.
Life was good. I trusted in the Lord and He continued to bless me.
In March 2010, my first novel hit the store shelves.
Steve
2010–2011
I believe roughly a year and a half had gone by since I had started my search for my mother. Every now and then, I’d check in with the social worker and ask her how it was going. I could tell I was just a file on her desk sometimes because she’d say things like, “Let me revisit your file, see where you’re at, and get back to you.”
I knew someone wasn’t constantly working on my case, and I was okay with that. I had waited thirty-nine or forty-some years by this time and I was trying to be as patient as possible. I didn’t want to be like the kid on Christmas. You know the one. The kid who knows the present is out there, but just can’t wait and has to shake the box and find out what’s in it. I was trying to keep my emotions and thoughts as controlled as I could.
The whole time this was going on, my step-daughter, Kristin, and my wife, Barb, continued to be very giddy and excited. They continued to watch the show The Locator, too. They wanted so much for me to get the answers I was wondering about. They really pushed me into it by constantly telling me, “Call the agency again. You need to find out.”
With my personality, I would always downplay it. I would tease them and I’d tell them that I’d heard stuff months ago when I didn’t just to get them riled up.
“Did you really?” they’d ask.
“No,” I’d say, and we would go on until the next time, sometimes as early as the next episode.
Finally, I called the social worker. Like I said, a full year and a half had gone into the search by that time, so I said, “Okay, so what’s the next step? Are you having any luck?”
“Well at this point,” Pat said, “I’ve given up on my end of it. I don’t fully believe that I can find your mother. I’ve exhausted every lead and avenue I have.”
I tried hard not to allow myself to feel the huge disappointment her words caused, but I wasn’t real successful at it. It’s never easy to have your hope taken away.
“But we can go to a private investigator that our agency uses occasionally,” she continued.
I felt like I was seeing shiny new bait on the hook, but I bit anyway.
“How does that work?” I asked.
“You send me another check. If he finds her, then you pay the money, but if he doesn’t find her, then you get your money back.”
I figured that was a pretty low risk opportunity. So I agreed and wrote a second check.
In the meantime, early on in the search process I had received a letter from the adoption agency. It told me very generic stuff about my mother’s family and what little they knew about my father.
They told me that my father was of Muslim religion, that he had immigrated to the United States from Jordan. That tidbit of information blew my mind. I’m American born and bred. I wave the flag in my eyes and my heart and my soul and now here I am finding out I have an attachment to a Middle Eastern country and a father who is Muslim. It was really a shock to me.
I looked in the mirror and wondered why I didn’t see any Middle Eastern physical characteristics staring back. I would have thought genetically that my father’s genes would have dominated. But my skin was milky white. I had medium brown hair, admittedly liberally peppered with gray, and I truly looked more like an Irish leprechaun than a Middle Easterner.
As I calmed down and read through the material again, I discovered that my father’s family was originally Russian. They must have immigrated to Jordan. So my dad was of Russian ancestry and Muslim religion and had been raised in a foreign country. That explained my physical appearance, but didn’t ease my shock about all the rest.
The whole thing blew my mind because the story I’d been told was that my parents had been two college kids. I had assumed two American college kids. Nobody ever said that one of my parents was from another country.
So that was the first piece of evidence the social worker had warned me about that really shook me to the bone. It was my first hint that this is going to be a wild ride. It didn’t look like it was going to be anything normal like I expected it would be. Two college kids. Yeah, right.
I had also received the paperwork on my mother. I found out that she was the oldest of seven children. I had six other aunts and uncles out there, probably a ton of cousins and brothers or sisters at some point along the line. So I knew very early on, probably within weeks of that original search process, that I belonged to a huge family.
I didn’t have any other information about my father or his family.
On the many evenings I sat on my swing on my back porch and thought about the circumstances of my adoption, the pieces slowly began to fall into place. My mother was Irish Catholic. Having been raised as a Catholic, myself, I had a hunch that that probably was a big piece of my story. I figured my biological parents’ different religious beliefs probably led to a rift in their relationship, which I found out later was correct.
In the beginning, because this was the only information I had, I withheld my search from my sons. They knew early on that I’d been adopted, but I didn’t tell them about the search because I wanted to give them a complete story instead of teasing them like I was doing to Kristin and Barbara. So I waited. I had some information about my biological parents, but it still wasn’t enough for me. I still hadn’t gotten the answers I wanted.
If anything, my interest was piqued. Growing up as an only child on a dead end cul-de-sac with no kids around from the age of five to about the age of thirteen, my whole life was isolated. Now I knew I had this huge family out there and I found that pretty exciting.
The only exposure to a family I had had was Barbara’s family. Her parents had siblings. Barb had a brother and a sister who both had spouses and kids. So there were brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins all on her side.
Before the search, I had only had me.
So yeah, I was pretty excited … and hopeful … and patient. And I’m really glad I was because even though I agreed to hire the private investigator, I didn’t get answers right away.
Diane
2010
One of the little idiosyncrasies my husband, Bill, had was collecting discarded pennies. No matter where we went or what we were doing, if he saw a penny lying on the ground, he would pick it up. My father used to tease Bill. He used to say if it were dollar bills maybe he’d bend over for them, but not dirty pennies.
Once on a family trip to Tennessee, my father was walking ahead of us up an incline to Rock City. Bill and I followed a couple yards behi
nd. As we walked up the hill, I noticed my father was dropping pennies one by one like bread crumbs. It caught my attention because his shoulders were shaking from laughing since he knew Bill wouldn’t be able to resist picking them up.
Sure enough, Bill did.
“Bill, stop.” I pulled on his sleeve. “My father is doing that on purpose to embarrass you.”
Bill looked me right in the eye and said, “Darling, if your father is stupid enough to throw away money, then I am smart enough to pick it up.”
I never tried to stop Bill from picking up pennies again.
After Bill died, I began finding pennies. They weren’t just in parking lots. They were in unusual places like the floor of an elevator after I’d just worked with a particularly difficult patient. Or on the seat of my car, which was unusual because I rarely wear clothes with pockets so I don’t know how a penny would get there.
Pennies appeared with frequency and always, always at important times in my life, both good and bad—at my son, David’s, wedding or after I’d had a really difficult day. Bright shiny pennies would never be far away.
I used to laugh every time I saw one and I’d always pick it up. After all, I thought if Bill was still watching over me, the least I could do is let him know I appreciated it.
In March 2010, my first book, Midnight Caller, was released. I still remember what it felt like to walk into a store for the first time and actually see my book on the shelf. I felt giddy and excited and had to resist the urge to pick up the book and run around showing it to everyone in the place.
My very first book signing was held at a Barnes & Noble in Melbourne, Florida, about an hour and a half from my home. I was nervous as I took the trip. I imagined how embarrassing it would be if I found myself sitting at a table in the middle of the store while people walked past me without a second glance. I was equally as nervous as I thought about what I’d say and what I’d sign if someone really did approach me with a copy of my book.
As I was driving up to the store, my thoughts strayed to Bill. He would have been so proud of me.
“Thank you, God, for making this dream come true. I am so grateful for this blessing,” I prayed aloud. “Please, please let Bill know.”
When I pulled up in the parking lot, I stood on the sidewalk and just stared. In the window of the Barnes & Noble was a large picture of my book cover and right next to it was an equally large picture of me. I was speechless. You’d think I was somebody special. If they only knew …
When I entered the store, I found a table had been set up for me to the right of the entrance where everyone entering or exiting the store would see me. To my amazement, two people were already standing in line waiting for me. Balloons were attached to the edge of the table. My books were neatly stacked up in two piles. Right next to the books were a pen and a cold bottle of water.
I said hello to the people in line and hurried around the table. I froze for a good thirty seconds before I sat down. In the middle of the table, on that beautiful white tablecloth, was a bright, shiny penny.
Chapter
10
Steve
2011–2012
Even after the private investigator was on the case, multiple months went by and I still didn’t hear anything.
The more time that passed, both my wife and Kristin became almost silly and hostile. They were constantly asking me if I’d heard anything. My wife would bang around the kitchen saying, “I’m going to call that woman. She isn’t doing her job. You should have heard something by now.”
I’d respond, “Just calm down. I’m not going to rush this.”
They were very much in a this-has-to-be-done-yesterday mindset. I was not like that at all. I’d waited forty-some years. What was another couple of months? It really wasn’t going to make that much of a difference. In my mind, the search had begun and that was the most important thing.
But time kept passing.
Money gets tight every now and then for most people. I’m no exception. The money I had sent to the private investigator was tied up and not producing any results. Finally, I said to Barb, “You know, I’m gonna give it two more weeks. If I don’t hear anything, I’m going to tell Pat to return my check and we’ll use the money for expenses around the house.”
I never planned on dropping the search for my mother completely. I fully intended to gear back up down the road and find a private investigator on my own, who, I might add, would have had to give me the information on my mother even if my mother didn’t want to be contacted.
I wouldn’t have pushed contacting her, though. I’d already promised myself that I would not disrupt anyone’s life. But I would probably still be able to track down pictures of her on the Internet and do research on my own without making contact. Whether she wanted to know about me, I still wanted to see who she was. I wanted to know what she looked like. I wanted to know where she lived. I wanted to try to find answers for all those questions that have rattled around inside my mind for years.
If that’s all it ever was, I could have lived with that.
But we didn’t get to that point because within days of making that statement to my wife, I received a phone call at work from the social worker. Pat was almost crying on the phone. “He found her. He found your mother.”
I was surprisingly very stoic, very non-emotional. Through this entire process, I did not allow myself to give in to my emotions. I controlled myself, probably because I didn’t want to get hurt. Nobody had made contact with my mother yet, so we still didn’t know how she’d react or if she would want anything to do with me. Rejection was only a telephone call away. So I held my emotions very close to the vest.
“We are 100 percent sure it’s her,” Pat assured me.
“How can you be so sure? Can I ask that?” I was hoping she’d give me one more clue to my mother’s identity just in case my mother closed the door on her end.
“We found her through public records. The private investigator found the names of your mother’s siblings in the record and it matched everything we had in our files on your family background perfectly.”
I couldn’t get any other information from her. The agency was very secretive since it had been a closed adoption and my mother hadn’t signed any of the release papers yet.
“Okay, what happens now?” I asked.
Now that they had an address, they were going to send out three letters. The first letter was going to be a generic letter stating there was an important family matter to discuss and we’d like her to contact us. If she didn’t respond to the first letter, then they would send a second letter that would have a little more teaser information in it.
If still no response, then the third letter would be sent certified. If the first two letters had been thrown away—maybe by an angry husband, maybe by my mother herself because she didn’t know what it was, or even maybe because my mother did know and wasn’t ready to deal with it—at least I’d know without doubt that she’d have to sign for this one so she’d definitely received it.
And that’s what happened.
Diane
April 10, 2012
Confused, upset, I gripped the phone and waited for Pat Fowler to tell me what this was all about.
In a soft, gentle voice, Ms. Fowler asked, “Mrs. Burke, did you give up a child for adoption in 1971?”
Those words played over and over in my mind. Oh my God, I can’t believe it. This couldn’t be happening. Not after all these years.
“Yes,” I whispered, my voice laced with tears.
“Mrs. Burke, I am not trying to upset you. I simply want to know if you’d be willing to answer some medical questions for me for the file.”
Medical questions? Of course, what else had I expected? They just needed to update their files in case my son ever needs it.
“Of course,” I said.
I tried to hide my disappointment. I’d thought … maybe … just maybe …
We spent the next few minutes discussing th
e necessary health backgrounds of myself, my parents, and my siblings. The whole time I was relating the information in as calm a voice as I could muster, my heart hammered in my chest so hard it almost hurt. My mind raced with a hundred questions and a thousand memories.
Don’t get excited. It’s just the agency updating their files. It’s not like your son is asking about you.
“That about does it, Mrs. Burke. Thank you for your time and information.”
“You’re welcome.”
So that’s that. See? Clerical information. That’s all anybody wanted. Now let it go, Diane.
“Mrs. Burke, can I have just one more moment of your time?” Her voice sounded tentative but determined.
When I agreed, she continued, “I’ve come to know your son and he is a very nice young man.”
Tears welled up again and my vision blurred so much I couldn’t see.
“He’s been searching for you for over three years,” she said.
Oh my God!
“When we were unable to locate you,” Pat said, “We used a private investigator that often works with our agency in a last attempt to turn something up.”
A private investigator?
The first smile of the day teased my lips. My son must have really wanted to find me.
“When the investigator found you, we sent out a letter to you immediately.”
“What letter? I never received a letter.”
“We sent it, Mrs. Burke. In the letter we asked you to contact us.”
“That can’t be. I never got any letter.” What was happening? I’d never received a letter. I wouldn’t have forgotten getting a bombshell letter like that one would have been.
Pat’s voice remained soft and gentle, although this time I could hear a slight tinge of scolding. “We sent it, Mrs. Burke. A few months later we sent a second letter as well.”
Two letters?
“I don’t understand. I never got any letters.” My mind raced. “I would have called you immediately if I had gotten a letter.”