What Was Mine

by Helen Klein Ross

  I longed to reach out to her, but wondered how she’d feel about hearing from me out of the blue. Did she even know I existed?

  I wanted to “friend” her, but at that time Facebook required categories and how would I categorize myself in the request? I wasn’t her classmate or colleague or acquaintance or coworker. Needless to say, there wasn’t an option for mother.

  I decided to send the request with a message. But what would I say? There are no ready words for a situation like this. I didn’t want to scare her or sound like some crazy stalker. I knew I couldn’t write what I really wanted to say: Whoever raised you weren’t your parents, they were your kidnappers! I sat there, drafting and deleting message after message.

  Darling Daughter, I am your mother who’s been searching for you for years. Too emotional. It might scare her.

  I am so happy I found you here. I have never stopped looking. Too stalkerish.

  I went to bed. Then woke up with a start, having finally been given the right words, in my sleep. I eased out of bed, careful not to wake Grant, and tiptoed out of the room, to the computer.

  I think I’m your mother, I typed. This is not a joke. It was honest. Direct. Unthreatening, I hoped.

  I stared at the message a long time before sending it. One thing I’ve learned, and something I’ve taught my kids, is not to do anything on a computer before you take a deep, cleansing breath. You can’t take back anything you sent into the Internet, which is as futile as trying to put a broken egg back in its shell.

  I inhaled deeply, as Pranayama breathing practice has taught me. But still I didn’t send the message. Instead I got up and made myself some valerian-root tea and returned with the mug warming my hands.

  I sipped while staring at the words I’d typed on the screen, wondering about the reaction it would provoke in my daughter. Surely the message would be confusing to her. Would she be curious? Dismissive? I was praying by this time that it was not wishful thinking, that it wasn’t another lead that proved to go nowhere.

  And what impact would my reaching out to her have on my family, our family, hers and mine? People she hadn’t met, who hadn’t met her, yet who were bound to her by blood, by bone. I worried about Connor, just turned sixteen. Could he accept an older sister into his life? And what about Thatch, two years younger and having a hard time adjusting to high school? Would this discovery make him feel even more unmoored? And how would Chloe, just ten, react to not being the only girl in the family anymore? What about Grant? How would he feel about bringing another child—not his child—into our fold?

  But all of these questions were moot, I realized. There was no way I’d resist reaching out to my daughter, no way I could put off the urgent need to see her. To hold her again in my arms.

  I waited until the tea was down to its dregs. I set down the mug. I took a deep, clarifying breath, in and out, deep, from my diaphragm, reached out a damp, shaking hand to the keyboard, and pressed return.

  46

  lucy

  Nothing happened, not right away. But what if Marilyn showed up again? What if she was following me, had alerted the authorities to make an arrest? I braced myself at the airport, flying home the next day, sweating when security lingered over my driver’s license, expecting, at any moment, to be whisked into a holding pen. But all proceeded as if nothing had changed.

  After I was back in New York for a few weeks, and still nothing happened, I convinced myself that my fears were unfounded, that my imagination had run rampant, that Marilyn just happened to be another Lance Orloff fan and that things would go on as they always had.

  And then, I came home and found the apartment ransacked.

  47

  mia

  Getting that message really made me freak. It was late at night; I was trying to finish a paper. Now I could hardly read. The words jumped on the screen. I’d heard about kids Facebook-searching their birth mothers, but I’d never heard of a mother looking for a kid this way. I’d thought about my birth mother, of course, and wondered about her, but never so much that I wanted to find her. I didn’t want to be rejected twice. Also, I figured that looking for my birth mother would be hurtful to my mom. I always thought I’d be the one to look for my birth mom someday when I was ready. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to connect with someone who thought it was okay to take that right away from me. Even if she turned out to be my actual birth mother. I didn’t friend her. But I didn’t delete her friend request either.

  Then came Thanksgiving at Aunt Cheryl’s and then came exams and then I was home for winter break and working on a paper again, and just to distract myself, I pulled up pending friend messages. There was Marilyn’s. For the first time, I clicked into her albums. They were mostly of her kids. Something about those kids looked eerily familiar. Without knowing why, I started to cry. Probably part of me must have guessed I was looking at pictures of people I was genetically related to for the first time.

  That night, I asked Lucy about my adoption. I didn’t want to ask her directly about Marilyn. If she was my birth mother, something told me to keep it from Lucy. Lucy was my mother. I didn’t want her to think that I wanted another one.

  We were in the kitchen, doing dishes. She was bringing up a pot from the dishwater, handing it to me to dry.

  Ayi had gone back to China by this time, so we didn’t have Chinese for dinner anymore. I’d made the spaghetti and Lucy was supposed to clean up, that was the deal: whoever cooked didn’t have to clean up. But sometimes I stuck around to help because really, I felt kind of sorry for her. She worked hard. She didn’t have any friends. She didn’t have time for anybody but me. I used to ask why she didn’t try to meet someone. She said she worked too many hours to have a relationship. Her only friends were work buddies and they had families of their own to be with on weekends or nights when they weren’t at the office working with her. I couldn’t imagine how it would feel not to have friends to hang out with. But Lucy seemed fine about it. She liked working, she said. I guess, after her marriage didn’t work out, her work was what she wanted to be married to.

  I’d burned the sauce a little, and some of it was still stuck on the bottom of the pot. I handed it back to her.

  “What was the name of the adoption agency?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

  She took back the pot and examined my face.

  “I didn’t adopt you through an agency, don’t you remember?”

  “No,” I lied, though of course I remembered. She hadn’t told me the story in years. I wanted to hear the details again. I didn’t want to tell her about the lady who friended me. She didn’t get social media. She was all about privacy.

  “A girl in Kansas answered my ad in the paper. She was fifteen, too young to be raising a baby. She tried it for four months and didn’t want to give you up, but she knew you needed a better home than the one she could provide.”

  She’d never before mentioned that my birth mother was so young. That would make her thirty-six. In the Facebook photos, Marilyn looked older than that. So I guessed she wasn’t my birth mom, after all.

  Now Lucy was scrubbing the bottom of the pot with a copper cleaner, something she hardly ever bothered to do. I saw that the conversation was upsetting her, which made sense. She was my mom. She didn’t want to talk about me having another mother.

  “Did you meet her?”

  “Who?”

  “My birth mother!”

  “Yes, I met her just the once. I can’t believe you don’t remember this story. We met in a lawyer’s conference room, so the mother could interview me and see if I was the right mother for you. Lots of other people wanted you.”

  “Yeah, I was amazing right from the start.” I wanted her to go on with the story instead of switching subjects like she usually did when we talked about things she didn’t want to discuss. “So why’d she pick you?”

  “At first, I really worried she wouldn’t. I was the only single mother she was considering, but she was okay with that. She’d been raised by
a single mother and was a single mother herself. I told her that not having a husband would mean I’d have much more time to devote to a baby. I so wanted a baby, Mia. You can’t imagine how much.”

  “What about my dad?” I’d always imagined my teenage birth parents, beautiful and in love, like Romeo and Juliet. I’d never asked directly about them. It was like some sort of unspoken agreement between us.

  “He was a boy in another school who didn’t even know he got a girl pregnant. He was very handsome, the girl said. And smart.” She wiped her hands on the back of the mom jeans she always changed into as soon as she came home from work.

  “What was the girl’s name?” Marilyn’s last name was Mornay. Maybe she was my birth mother’s mother.

  “Kimberly something. She died a few years later, the lawyer told me. In a car accident.”

  “What?!” This was new information. She’d never told me my birth mother was dead. In fact, through the years, I’d always thought of my birth mother on my birthday and wondered if she thought of me every April 26, too.

  “I hadn’t wanted to tell you when you were younger. I thought it would make you too sad. But now you’re old enough to know.”

  The phone rang and she searched for a handset like we always had to do when the phone rang. The ringing phone didn’t interest me. None of my friends ever called on a landline.

  I stood, leaning against the wet counter, holding the dirty, wet towel, waiting for the earthquake inside me to be over so I could put one foot after the other and walk out of the room.

  Something about the story didn’t feel right.

  That night, I confirmed Marilyn’s friend request.

  48

  marilyn

  Mia didn’t accept me on Facebook at first. But one day, I saw she’d become my friend. The first thing I looked for on her page was her birth date. The day was wrong, but the month and year were correct. Someone could have changed it, for obvious reasons.

  After that, I began to post a lot more. Shots of the kids, our house, Grant, my ceramics. I became very aware of what I was posting because I knew I was introducing my daughter to her real family. But I didn’t message her. I knew I should wait for her to feel ready to make that first move.

  I spent hours absorbing her virtual presence—picking up details of her life from her funny photos, her wry posts, her musings, her frettings about tests, her love for animals. It was like I was trying to soak up my daughter, as if I could pour her from the screen. I knew she was still in college from her profile. I got her cell number from a comment she left for someone. My hands shook as I wrote down the numbers. These were the numbers that would let me hear my daughter’s voice. But I knew not to call her. Not yet.

  I clicked voraciously, searching each photo for likenesses, scrutinizing every feature. There were Tom’s dimples, my blue eyes and disobedient hair. A picture of her at the beach revealed my complexion, always in need of sunscreen. It felt strange to stare at photos of my own daughter, feeling how deeply we are connected, yet realize that I didn’t know her at all. In one photo, the set of her chin (Tom’s chin) made her look like a strong person. I was glad. She’d need to be strong.

  A photo of her as a little girl sent a bolt through my heart. There she was, about five, a little straw-blond girl in a white nightgown, at night, running on a sidewalk, holding a lit sparkler. Who had taken the picture? Who had been watching her with a lighted firework in her hand?

  In another photo, she looked to be about seven. I recognized my sweet, lost child. I was glad to see she was smiling, happy. She was holding someone’s hand, the hand of someone who wasn’t in the frame, the hand of someone who wasn’t me and I got a strong burning in the center of my chest as I stared at her face, imagining all the milestones I’d missed, the birthdays, the firsts, the time she said “Mother,” and I mourned the loss of our years together, grateful that the Oneness was finally guiding her home. Of course, I’d been given the gift of other children, other childhoods to witness. But none could make up for the one I had lost.

  For years, I had lived with constant worry about my daughter’s well-being. Now here she was, grown, entirely different from my memory of her as a baby. I was glad beyond words, but it also hurt. With each piece of information, I was slapped in the face with the realization that I had not been part of her life for over two decades.

  I clicked on another photo. She had a boyfriend! They were kissing and a sparkling sea was behind them. Were they still together? They must be, I thought, or she would have taken down the picture. Was he good to her? From what I could see of him, he looked like a nice boy, intelligent. But was he kind? Loving? Another photo was a close-up. He was pushing a strand of hair from her face. How serious were they? According to her profile, she was still at Middlebury, she hadn’t graduated from college yet. My heart filled with desire to hold her, to impart to her wisdom and love and maternal cautions.

  Once I had seen all the photos, I cycled through them again and again, savoring them slowly, reclaiming my daughter bit by bit, but not reaching out to scare her away, until the joyous day when I received an answering message from her.

  Who are you, really?

  I didn’t want to scare her. I didn’t want to give her a reason to unfriend me. I didn’t want to sound crazy, telling her she’d been kidnapped. But that is what I had to say.

  49

  mia

  The first night I friended Marilyn, I looked at her page. She did kind of look like me. Her eyes were the same. I could see that one of her front teeth was crooked, which is the reason I had braces for years.

  She lived far away, in California. Her About said she was from New Jersey, there was no mention of Kansas. She seemed like a nice lady, but I didn’t know that many mothers on Facebook to compare her page to. Lucy wasn’t on Facebook. She was old school. She got pressured at work to set up a page and asked me to help her the few times she updated it. “Why do I need this again?” she’d ask, and I’d shrug. Honestly, I didn’t want a mother on Facebook. I didn’t need to share stuff with her that I do with my friends. My boyfriend’s mom was on Facebook. That was bad enough.

  Marilyn’s profile said she did ceramics in the basement and homeschooled her kids. Her kids were who I was most interested in. I zoomed into pics to see faces better, and something pricked the backs of my arms. There were people around a birthday cake and one of the boys looked almost exactly like me. It was weird to see my face on a boy. I began to wonder if Marilyn’s message was right. Could this be the woman who had given me up as a baby? But she couldn’t have been fifteen when she did it—so, also, that part of the story didn’t make sense.

  Then, one day, I messaged her and almost instantly, a reply message came back. The message was so long it took up almost the entire screen. She said her baby was kidnapped in 1990 and she was convinced that I was the baby kidnapped from her. She sent me links to newspaper reports about it. But I didn’t look like the kidnapped baby in the pictures.

  She told me my real name was Natalie. I tried to imagine being a baby named Natalie. I couldn’t.

  The only evidence she was going on was that my mom had written a book about kidnapping. I replied that my mother wrote books about murder and bank robbery, too, I said, but that doesn’t mean she’s a murderer or a robber.

  I began to think she was crazy, which was kind of a relief. I liked my life. I didn’t want it to change. And having a birth mother would definitely change it.

  50

  detective brown

  It was days before my retirement party when the call came in. I didn’t know who Mrs. Mornay was at first. Then she said she used to be Mrs. Featherstone, and of course, I remembered. Her case haunted me for decades. She said she’d kept my card in her wallet all these years. She said she’d found her daughter on Facebook and asked if I could help.

  I told her not to get her hopes up. Chances were, this girl on Facebook wasn’t her missing daughter. It’s rare that victims of non-family abductions sh
ow up after this many years. If a child isn’t found in the first twenty-four hours, the chance of recovery goes into low percentages. If the child is still missing after four months, the chance of recovery is down to almost nothing.

  So when she wanted me to push for a DNA test, I was reluctant. But I decided not to hand in my papers just yet.

  51

  mia

  A detective called me on my cell. He said he was calling on behalf of a Marilyn Mornay who had contacted him because she had a daughter who’d been abducted in 1990 and thought I might be her. Now she was sending the cops after me? That made me freak.

  At first, I refused to take the test. The detective told me the chances were slim that I was the baby. He just wanted to rule me out. He said I could take my time about deciding whether or not to take it, I didn’t need to give him an answer right away. But I told him he shouldn’t wait around for a yes.

  What made me decide to take the test was getting into a fight with Lucy.

  She wanted to go to a beach for New Year’s, but I wanted to go out with my friends and my boyfriend. It was nice of her to offer a trip to Puerto Rico and all, but New Year’s was important to me! It would be the last one I had while I was in college. Who knows if I’d even be able to celebrate next year. I was applying to law schools, and if I got into a good one, I wouldn’t have any time to party. Also, this would be the last New Year’s with my friends before we all graduated and started real lives. We had a thing for New Year’s. My best friend and I always wore gold outfits. I loved my mom but I really didn’t want to spend New Year’s with her.