What Was Mine

by Helen Klein Ross

  When Lucy gets mad, she looks like an alien—her eyes get small, her forehead crinkles, she pushes her tongue into her cheek and makes it bulge out, which is how she looked when I told her to go to Puerto Rico without me.

  Around eleven that night, I was on my way out. I’d just gotten home for winter break, I was going out to meet friends at a club. Lucy was in ratty pajamas and fluffy slippers and her hair was a mess. She was yelling at me for what I was wearing! She was saying my skirt was an invite to trouble on the subway, and as I watched her mouth move, I thought, This woman has no idea what she’s talking about. This woman who raised me is actually crazy.

  The next day, I was still mad at Lucy and went into Marilyn’s albums again. There were new pictures of kids opening presents under a tree. I got a jolt of recognition seeing that boy again, and now there was a girl who looked like me, too. Part of being adopted means you always want to “belong.” I used to watch families walking down sidewalks and think how like a club they were. These people looked like they were in the same club as me.

  I called the detective back. He told me where to get tested. It would be free and I didn’t even need to make an appointment. But it was weeks before I could make myself go there.

  February 1, 2012. The day that changed my life forever. I was sitting at my favorite place to work when I’m home—Starbucks on the corner. J-Term had just ended—Middlebury gives you January to take classes on campus or intern or volunteer somewhere. I’d spent it interning for a law firm downtown, something my prelaw adviser had arranged. I was working on the write-up, when suddenly the results of the DNA test came in. I’d forgotten I’d signed up to receive results by e-mail. The subject line was Personal and Confidential. I stared at it for a while. It was snowing out and I was sitting right by the door and cold gusts blew in on me each time it opened, but suddenly I was sweating. I kept staring at the Get Results icon, unable to click. My heart was pounding, even though I knew—or thought I knew—that the results would be negative. I closed my eyes and pressed. When I opened my eyes, I saw the word in big green letters: POSITIVE. Next to that word was “99.9%.” But the number I focused on was a number that wasn’t there. The number I saw in my mind was .1%. That was the chance that the test results were wrong. I wanted them to be wrong. I wanted the whole thing to be a mistake. It was important to think up an explanation for the existence of two things that couldn’t coexist:

  1. The results were correct and at the same time

  2. My mother wasn’t a liar and a kidnapper

  But I couldn’t think up an explanation right away. I gathered up my papers and went out into the cold. The flakes were sharp and cut into my eyes. I was glad for that, so that when the doorman opened the door for me, he didn’t realize that I was crying. It was around six, too early for Lucy to be home.

  All kinds of stories were going through my head, stories that would explain the unexplainable. If the Positive turned out to be true, how could I have come to Lucy without her having stolen me? That my mother had stolen me was, frankly, unimaginable. She was a good person. Stealing was something she was totally against.

  If I was the baby stolen from the Facebook lady, I decided that Lucy wasn’t the one who had stolen me. She probably hadn’t even known the baby she was adopting had been kidnapped. I’d seen a CSI episode about this. I knew I’d been adopted through a lawyer in Kansas. Was the lawyer still around? I could do a search. The lawyer’s name was probably on my birth certificate.

  I went to Lucy’s bedroom, to the walk-in closet where all our important papers are kept in a fireproof box, hidden in the back, under her hanging clothes. It was a beige metal box. I hadn’t opened the box in years, not since I was nine and playing Harriet the Spy with my friends. I flipped open the top and there were the same file folders I remembered, neatly arranged and labeled: Leases, Social Security, Insurance, Birth Certificate. I eased out the last file. It contained two pieces of paper, folded in thirds. The paper I unfolded first was pink, decorated with old-fashioned drawings of babies. Lucy Kane Wakefield born October 10, 1954 in Emmettsville, New York. Slowly, hands trembling, I unfolded the other. Of course I’d seen my birth certificate before. I’d needed it for camps, trips, college applications. But I’d never examined it closely.

  Certification of Birth. I felt glad seeing the word. That’s what I was looking for: Certification.

  April 26, 1990

  Nortonville, Kansas

  Name: Mia Woodrich

  Mother’s Maiden Name: Kimberly Woodrich

  I tried to imagine the fifteen-year-old Kimberly. I pictured a pregnant, blond cheerleader. I was sad she was dead.

  Father’s Name: Unknown

  No lawyer’s name was listed. It was signed by the town registrar and sealed with elaborate stamps. I let out a huge breath I didn’t know I was holding. The Facebook lady was wrong. The DNA test was wrong, too. I really was who I thought I was. I had certification to prove it.

  I sat back, filling up with relief, realizing how ridiculous it had been to be taken in by somebody on Facebook who is probably crazy, though who could blame her for going crazy. Such an awful thing had happened to her.

  Then I saw something glint on the far wall of the closet. I wouldn’t have seen it, except for where I was sitting. I crawled toward it, on hands and knees, the hems of Lucy’s perfume-scented clothes brushing my face, reminding me of being little again.

  It was a key. The key was held to the wall with a piece of tape so old, it had melted to glue. I peeled the key off the wall. The key was old-fashioned, a brass metal ring with a long, toothy spine. The key hadn’t been there when I was a kid, or I would have seen it. The prying beams from our flashlights were thorough.

  What did it open? A door? A box? I felt around in the dark, but all that was there on the carpet was dusty shoes and boots she didn’t wear anymore.

  I crawled back out from under her clothes and stood up, looking around the closet. There was a built-in dresser, but the drawers didn’t lock. Maybe it was the key to her jewelry box? I stepped out of the closet, to the box she kept on top of a bureau. The box wasn’t locked; the lid lifted easily, and there was my grandmother’s jewelry. My mom had let me wear it for Halloween once, when I was Cruella. I looked under her bed, under her night table, behind doors of a cabinet for something that required a key. I went back to the closet and looked around. Then, I noticed locks on the luggage stored on the top shelf, three suitcases, stacked on top of each other, an old hard-box luggage set my mom had gotten before she went to college. When I was little, she’d promised the luggage to me when I went to college, but of course no one wanted that kind of luggage anymore.

  I got a stepladder from the kitchen and maneuvered it into the closet. I mounted its steps and pulled the first suitcase down from the dusty shelf. It was the smallest one. The suitcases graduated in size, like matryoshka dolls. I set the suitcase on the floor and pushed at brass tabs on either side of brown stripes. The tabs clicked as soon as I touched them and the suitcase sprang open. It was empty. The pink silk lining was faded and dusty. The dust made me sneeze. I got back on the ladder and pulled down the next suitcase. Its tabs opened right away under my thumbs. It, too, was empty. The last suitcase was bigger than the others, and much heavier, harder to work down from the shelf. When I got it to the floor, I positioned my hands over the brass tabs and pulled my thumbs in opposite directions. Nothing happened. I tried again. Nothing. I pushed the key into a brass opening by the leather handle and turned it, springing the tabs with a click so loud it made me jump. As I raised the lid, the smell of old paper, old clothes, gave me a sick feeling.

  By the time the lid lifted, I already knew.

  I peeled back tissue and neatly folded inside was an old baby outfit. The pink striped sunsuit Marilyn had described. Folded beneath, were newspapers, brown and stiff with age. BABY KIDNAPPED said a headline. INFANT ABDUCTED FROM SHOPPING CART said another. The dateline of each was the date Marilyn had told me, August 10, 1990, A
ugust 10, 1990, August 10, 1990.

  The closet walls seemed to close in and I felt as if I were about to be crushed. The floor shifted. It was like I was suddenly on that adventure-park ride where you’re strapped to the wall feeling the floor fall out from under you. I got out of that closet as fast as I could, out of that room, down the hallway, hurrying past everything in the house that now looked radically different. The house was suddenly a museum for the way things were. Framed photos of me on the walls weren’t of me, they captured the childhood of someone I didn’t know anymore. Notes stuck on the refrigerator, papier-mâché sculptures I’d made in school on a table—these were now artifacts from another time and place to which I could never, ever return.

  When I got to my room, I took my big duffel bag out from under my bed and stuffed it with clothes and things I’d need for a while. I didn’t know where I was going. All I knew was, I had to get out. I felt as if bugs were crawling all over me.

  I bent down to say good-bye to the cat. I was sorry for Pumpkin. Lucy might forget to feed him. I went to the kitchen and refilled his bowl and as I squeezed food from the pouch, I worried about what would happen to him.

  Once out in the hallway, I couldn’t get my key in the door. The metal glittered maliciously as I aimed and failed again and again at the keyhole. I’d locked this door thousands of times since I wore my first house key on a ribbon around my neck. Now the door seemed to be saying You don’t live here anymore.

  52

  lucy

  In some respects, a co-op with a doorman is like a small town: eyes are everywhere, which gives residents the illusion that you and your belongings are always guarded and safe. It’s not always an illusion. We lived in our apartment for twenty-one years, ever since Mia was six months old, and we’d never been robbed.

  So that night when I got home and found the door unlocked, walked in, and saw the hall mirror askew, the basket of mail upturned on the bench, the brass bowl of change spilled on the foyer rug, I knew what was inevitable had finally come to pass—we’d had a break-in—and yet it came as a shock to me.

  My first worry was for Mia. Was she okay? One of her blue gloves without fingertips lay on the rug.

  My instinct was to turn back and enlist the doorman. But I didn’t want him to call the police. As quietly as I could, I dropped my bag, slipped off my boots, and walked noiselessly on the balls of my feet toward her bedroom.

  Our apartment was full of hallways and the one I was in felt darker and longer as I made my way down it to Mia’s room. The apartment was silent. The only sounds were coming from the lobby: the buzz of a house phone, the yap of a dog.

  My hand shook as I felt for the switch on the wall and flicked on the light. Mia is a neatnik, her room is always orderly, things boxed or hung or separated into marked bins, but now it was a mess, closet doors awry, clothes still on hangers but fallen to the floor, drawers protruding from the chest, jeans and shirts and sweats spilling over the sides. I was relieved that her keys were gone from the finger hook by the door. Mia is safe. She hadn’t been home. How upset she’ll be, I thought, when she sees the mess a robber has made of her room.

  I went back down the hall to the living room and kitchen—not too much damage. Still, I felt violated. Mia’s old school artwork pieces had been smashed to the floor. Why did they have to be vindictive?

  I continued to my bedroom, still walking carefully, but by this time, I wasn’t scared. I felt certain that no one else was in the apartment. There was a perceptible lack of charge in the air.

  I flicked on the light in my bedroom and the first thing I looked to see was still there—my old silk jewelry box, which contained nothing intrinsically valuable, but was of great value to me: costume pieces from my mother and grandmother, which I hoped to pass on to Mia someday. The box was open, and I was relieved to see that the jewelry was still in it. But the door to my closet was ajar. The light was on. I approached warily. I thought again of alerting the doorman—but I didn’t want him to report the robbery yet.

  I proceeded into the closet. My mouth went dry. There, on the floor, was the sunsuit I hadn’t looked at in years, the outfit Mia had been wearing the first time I saw her. It looked so tiny. I got down on my knees and lifted it from the carpet. It was hard to believe that Mia could ever have been small enough to wear it. The faded seersucker was stiff. It smelled of talcum. Beneath the sunsuit, her little starched white bib, yellowed. The thought of a stranger’s hands on them brought tears to my eyes.

  Below that, newspaper clippings, browned and brittle.

  My first thought was that the intruders weren’t robbers, they were police with a warrant. But wouldn’t they have taken this evidence away?

  The suitcase hadn’t been jimmied. It had been opened with the key. The key was still in the lock. Someone had found it. Then I saw that the documents file had been opened. I thought of the plumber’s assistant who’d worked in our apartment recently. He’d spoken no English and his eyes had darted furtively into rooms he passed on the way to the kitchen. Perhaps he’d come back, looking for money or papers with which to forge identity. But I didn’t keep cash lying around. And the papers were still there.

  Why had I kept them, those things that could incriminate me? Why hadn’t I buried them long ago in a bag of garbage and tossed them away? Because these were the only remnants I had of the day Mia came to me. I couldn’t part with them. For years, I’d secreted them away in a safety-deposit box at a bank. Then thousands of records and heirlooms disappeared on September 11, in the pulverized vaults of the Trade Center banks. I was glad my things weren’t among them, but realized that no safety-deposit box was perfectly safe. I stopped paying the monthly fee and brought the things home, finding a place to conceal them until the day I’d tell Mia. I meant to tell Mia someday.

  I lifted one of the newspaper pages and part of it crumbled onto the carpet. This was the piece that ran in the Post, the one I’d meant to show Mia first: BABY SNATCHED AS MAMA YAKS. Only the Post had told the truth, that Marilyn’s baby had been taken because she’d walked away from her.

  Carefully, tenderly, I put the things back in the suitcase, the suitcase back in its place. How disappointed the thief must have been by its contents.

  I put the ladder away and arranged the papers back in their files and dropped the key in the file box, too. I’d tell the police that nothing had been taken from the bedroom, which was true.

  I realized I was shivering, though I was still wearing my coat. I reached into its pocket and brought out my phone. I needed to call Mia, to warn her that we’d been robbed so she wouldn’t get a shock when she walked through the door.

  I put in her number, but the call went to voice mail. Like many kids, Mia often doesn’t answer the phone. You have to text first.

  Call me b4 u come home. I didn’t want to say we’d been robbed in a text.

  When she didn’t reply, I followed with okay?

  Maybe she was in the subway, out of cell range. She said she’d be working on her paper. Maybe she was still at Starbucks. I’d run around the corner to check.

  Francisco knew something was wrong as soon as he saw my face.

  “You miss her, right?”

  “What?”

  “Mia went back to school, right? Half hour ago, I put her and her big bag in a cab.”

  And only then did I realize what must have happened. Something turned to ice under my breastbone.

  “Where was the cab going?”

  But he didn’t know.

  53

  mia

  Francisco helped me put my duffel into the trunk of a cab. Francisco was my favorite doorman. I’d known him since I was six months old. We used to take a picture of me and him every year by the fountain, which Ayi helped me put in an album. I’d take it to the lobby and show him sometimes. Once, he borrowed it to show his family. He’d welcomed guests for my birthday parties when I was a kid, and for parties on the roof that my mom didn’t know about when I was in high school. N
ow I wasn’t even giving him a real good-bye.

  When I thanked him for helping me with my bag, he saw I was crying.

  He gave me a thumbs-up, like he always does. “Soon you graduate and come back to New York.” I realized he thought I was going back to Vermont. Tears stung as I watched him turn his back to the cab and become a silhouette under the lit canopy.

  Being inside the warm cab was like being inside a cocoon. Soft and dark, its warmth a refuge from the cold.

  “Where to?” asked the cabbie.

  Really, I didn’t want to go anywhere. I just wanted to drive around for a while, to think.

  “Sixty-Sixth and York.” I told him an address that would take me all the way across town, as far to the east as I was now on the west. Getting there would give me time I needed to figure out where I was going, what I was going to do.

  I didn’t often spend money on cabs, and when I did, I was usually conscious of clicks of the meter, leaning forward to keep watch on the fare, worrying about how high the numbers are going. But this time, I sat back and just looked out the window. I didn’t care how much the ride ended up costing. I would use the gold credit card she’d given me for emergencies. And then I’d throw it in the East River.

  I thought I had a mom who didn’t lie. She’d been honest about things other mothers lied about. She told me the truth about Santa as soon as I really wanted to know, warning me not to tell other kids. She told me the facts of life in fourth grade so I didn’t freak out in Growth & Development, like a lot of my friends whose moms didn’t have the guts to tell them things yet. It’s like she took every picture I had of my childhood and spray painted over it.

  The cab was hurtling across the park. This always happens. When you want to get someplace fast in New York, the cab crawls, but when you want to give yourself time to get warm, or talk something out, or figure out where you want to go next, there’s no traffic and you get a driver like I had, trying to get you there in record time.