“Can you please just slow down?” I asked, making a show of buckling my seat belt, as if fear of an accident was the reason I wanted the driver to do the opposite of what he thought his job was, what everybody in New York thinks their job is—to get somewhere fast.
We were crossing Central Park. The trees kept coming. The branches were snow-covered and stretched up to the moon. It was like that Disney film I saw as a kid where the trees in the forest turn into sad women begging. I was one of them now, wishing for something that the moon couldn’t give me, what no one could: make what had happened, un-happen. The cab stopped at a light and my stomach pitched forward. Then, right away, the cab started up, speeding through the park, and I watched the useless, beautiful moon appear and disappear behind branches until we got to the other side, to Fifth Avenue, where the buildings began again and the moon disappeared behind them for good.
How could she have done something so wrong? It wasn’t just that my mother was gone. My image of her as a good person had been taken away. What else had she lied about?
We stopped for a light right in front of my school. My old school. The Florence School is where I’d come every day for years, a big, limestone mansion, a long-ago gift to a Victorian bride from her father. We were stopped in front of its circular driveway, where horses used to drop off ladies in carriages, where Ayi used to wait for me at three o’clock with all the other sitters and mothers. Had Ayi known? Something rose in my stomach. I decided she hadn’t known. She must have believed, as I did, that I’d been adopted. Ayi had told me many stories about my birth mother, stories that comforted me, even though, after a certain age, I knew she was making the stories up. She’d describe the last moments before my birth mother had to give me away, how tightly she hugged me for the last time, her long kiss on my forehead before leaving me, which Ayi said she had to make herself do in order for me to grow up in a life she wanted for me. She told the stories as if they were true, with a sincerity she couldn’t have managed if she’d known I was stolen.
The bricks of the building were so white they glowed in the dark. Sometimes, when I was little and having a bad day, I’d put my hand up to one of the bricks and touching it would make me feel instantly better. I imagined jumping out of the cab right then, to run to the building and flatten my palm against it. But I didn’t, of course.
The cab turned down the side street, passing the school. Suddenly the cabbie spoke. “Don’t worry, he’ll call.” His eyes were kind in the rearview mirror and I realized I was crying. I felt in my pockets for a tissue, but didn’t have one. I wiped my face with the angora scarf my mom had given to me for Christmas. My mom. My mom wasn’t my mom. Was her name even Lucy?
Where could I go? I’d have to decide soon. I couldn’t let the driver dump me and my duffel bag outside in the snow, at some random address.
Ordinarily, when I had a problem this big, I’d call my mom.
“What’s with you girls talking to your moms every day,” my boyfriend’s mother had asked me. “When I was your age, I never called my mom.” I knew plenty of girls who didn’t talk to their moms every day. Now I’d be one of them.
I wished I could talk to Todd but he was still on J-Term in Guatemala, building water systems where they didn’t even have plumbing, let alone phone or Internet. Ashley, my best friend, a fellow Florence survivor (the word now felt loaded—going fifteen years to the same school was nothing compared to what else I’d survived, it turned out), was already back at New Haven and I considered telling the driver to keep driving east, onto the highway that would take me to Connecticut and I’d pay him double, not caring how much it took out of the gold card. But I thought of Ashley’s face when I’d tell her the news. She’d be shocked and sorry and would want to know all about it and telling her would be complicated and nothing she could say would change anything, and then I thought of Ms. Laniere.
Ms. Laniere was the coolest teacher at Florence. She was an English teacher and almost not like an adult because she treated you like an adult even when you were a kid in high school. I’d gone to her house a bunch of times. She’d helped with my essay to get into Midd. We were close for a while. With most parents, the parental relationship is based on petty economics. Like, how many beers did you have? Did you have a cigarette? But Ms. Laniere took the long view. She trusted you knew the deal. She trusted you wouldn’t wind up alcoholic after drinking one beer. She even let girls live with her sometimes, like when their parents were getting a divorce. “Call me anytime,” she’d said. She’d probably thought I’d forgotten about her. I decided to text.
My thumbs went into motion: Hey from Mia.
Mia! appeared. Is that you?
My thumbs kept going.
The cab was slowing as we got to York. Suddenly I leaned forward, which tightened the seat belt around me.
“Sorry!” I said. “I changed my mind. Park Slope!”
He turned around to see if I was serious, I guess, then started up the car again. He didn’t care. It would be a good fare.
As I was checking Ms. Laniere’s exact address on my phone, it rang. The word Mom flashed on-screen. Tears burned as I pressed ignore. I made a mental note to change the name in my contacts. I didn’t have a mom anymore.
54
christine laniere
When Mia turned up on my doorstep, I was afraid she was hurt. She was sobbing, but wouldn’t say what was the matter. She just wanted to sit with me, and once I saw she wasn’t bleeding or in physical pain, I let her. I made a fire to warm her and we sat talking about nothing, really. I asked if she wanted to talk about it. She said no. I assumed her turmoil had to do with a boy. I talked about other things to distract her—my classes this year, hers, her internship. That seemed to calm her. Once it got late, I told her she should stay, and gave her sheets for the sofa.
She stayed a few days, and several times I was tempted to call her mother. I didn’t, though. I respect kids’ privacy. That’s why they come to me. And Mia wasn’t a kid anymore. She was twenty-one years old, an adult.
Mia has always had a good head on her shoulders. I had her for two years in English, she was one of my best students. She was a real enthusiast for texts she liked, such as Faulkner. In fact, one Halloween she and a few girls came to school dressed as characters from As I Lay Dying.
She wrote a beautiful essay about how learning Chinese makes you see the world differently. The essay was nuanced and original and helped her gain early acceptance to college. I still have it:
I may be blue-eyed, but the fact is, my brain is actually half Chinese. I was raised by a Chinese nanny I called “Ayi” and grew up being a Chinese child during the day and an American one at night. I learned Chinese and English simultaneously and could dream in both. I believed monkeys ate peaches, not bananas. I wasn’t allowed to sleep with my belly button showing, because this let cold air in. When I was sick, I ate xi fan, which is rice in water, and listened to my Ayi sing me Chinese lullabies. All my Barbies had Chinese names.
I can’t believe her mother—or, Ms. Wakefield—did what she did. We had no idea at Florence, of course. She was a single mother and one of the few who worked outside the home, as the saying goes, but she’d help out when she could. I remember she made us a beautiful banner for our art show, which we still use, year after year. She didn’t seem like the kind of person who would kidnap anybody. But I’ve worked with private school parents for decades. Nothing they do surprises me anymore.
55
lucy
I walked back to the apartment from the lobby and finally took off my coat but didn’t hang it up, just left it in a heap on the front bench. I didn’t bother to pick up the pieces of mail or change scattered on the floor. They didn’t matter. The only thing worth picking up was the glove. I bent down to retrieve it and squeezed it with both hands, caressing the soft wool, as if I was holding the hand of my daughter.
I walked the length of the hall, past the kitchen to the dining room, which looked out to the street.
I opened the shutters and watched the parade of people lit by streetlamps. Scarves and hat strings flew out from silhouettes moving headlong into falling snow. Standing at the window, with her glove to my face, I half expected to see Mia walking home, having changed her mind. I leaned toward the window and my breath fogged the glass. I rubbed a hole in the fog with the glove. But I didn’t see her.
How often I’d anticipated this moment. Before Mia knew. After she did. Sometimes, sitting across the table from her, eating a dinner that Ayi had cooked, she’d be telling me about her day at Florence, chopsticks going, happy, and I’d imagine the knowledge I was keeping from her, somehow leaching into her bones. I’d never see her trusting expression again.
The night before, she’d stayed home and we’d watched an old Woody Allen film on television. Manhattan had come out when I was still new to New York. I told her how much the movie had meant to me, I was so happy to be in Manhattan. Growing up in Emmettsville, I’d always wanted to live there.
“Now a canonical film like that would be called Bushwick,” Mia had said, reaching blue manicured nails into a Pyrex bowl of popcorn we were having for dinner, our eating habits having deteriorated since Wendy left.
I wouldn’t have movie nights with her anymore. My life as a mother—which was the life that most mattered to me—was over.
I had to sit down. I slid into a chair at the marble table, and pushed my palms against the stone trying to steady myself. I tried to think, but it felt as if fireworks were going off in my head.
How long had she known? An hour? Two? Where had I been when she discovered the truth? I’d been oblivious to the significance of the moment, stepping blithely out of a conference room or into an elevator, going down, down, down, not knowing the doors were opening on a life entirely different.
What had led her to open that suitcase? It had something to do with Marilyn, I was sure. Marilyn had somehow made the connection to me, had tracked down my daughter. I felt an urgent need to explain things to Mia, to help her see my side of the story.
Come home, I texted. I can explain.
But how would I explain?
Even if I could think of a way to explain to Mia, how could I explain to the police?
The police. Fear started in my belly, crawled up my spine. I’d done the research a long time ago. Even if Marilyn didn’t press charges, the feds would come after me. I had crossed state lines. Kidnapping was a felony, first degree. There was no statute of limitations. I’d get twenty years to life. Life! I could already hear the clink of the door to my cell, where I’d be on display, night and day, a bug in a jar. The cold steel bars. The constant confinement. Unrelenting fluorescent. It would never get dark. How would I survive? How does anyone?
I had to get rid of the evidence. I got up from the table and went into the kitchen and pulled a plastic trash bag from a box under the sink.
I went back to my closet and took down the suitcase again from the shelf.
I put in the key and snapped open the lid and took out the contents, one by one, and making myself look the other way so I could go through with it, pushed the sunsuit and bib and papers into the plastic bag. Dust clouded the air. I twist-tied the bag shut. Fighting tears, I walked out the front door and out to the lobby and up the stairs to the compactor chute and opened the narrow door. I pulled back the metal handle and set the bag into the rounded receptacle. I had a fleeting thought of grabbing the bag back, returning it to the apartment, finding another place to hide it, a spot so well hidden that no one would ever discover it—but I made myself push the handle, flinging the bag to the basement, where I knew from watching a long-ago Sesame Street episode with Mia it would be crushed the next morning, smashed flat along with hundreds of other bags, making unrecognizable what I’d kept all those years, buried relics of the day I became a mother.
There was a conference I’d been invited to, in Shanghai. A global convention of paper manufacturers. I’d received countless such invites to conferences over the years. I never went to any of them. Nobody I knew in creative departments did. We only traveled for shoots or awards shows. We had too many deadlines to care about trade shows, no matter how interesting or exotic the location. But there was only one deadline I cared about now. How much time I had until they’d come to arrest me. How long would it be before the police figured out who I was? Had Marilyn already tipped them off? But what evidence did she have? That I’d written a book about kidnapping? By that line of logic, most thriller authors would be writing from behind bars.
I did a search for the e-mail invitation to Tissue World Asia 2012.
I knew that wherever Mia went, it wasn’t to the police. She’d be mad, she’d be upset, but she’d never betray me. I knew her that well. She was my daughter. My heart went out to her. Was she okay? Of course she wasn’t.
I downloaded the conference registration form.
I can explain, I texted. Please let me explain.
But I got no reply. The phone in my hand lay silent as a dead fish.
56
marilyn
The phone rang while I was working on my pottery in the basement. I was in the middle of glazing a vase, which I’ve left unfinished. I keep it to remind myself of the joy of that day. It’s always on a table with silk flowers in it.
It took me a moment to dry off my hands and pull the phone out of the pocket of my apron, but when I pressed the button to answer, no one was there. The call was from a 917 number, which I knew was Mia’s. I’d given her my number in a Facebook message and told her to call anytime. I knew enough to leave the calling up to her. She’d need to feel strong enough to do it, but I knew she’d get there eventually. Mia was born in the Year of the Horse, she’s good at leaping over obstacles.
I was tempted to redial the number to reestablish connection, but resisted the urge. If my daughter was having a failure of courage, I wanted to give her the chance to recover. I sat down on a stool in front of the kiln, just sat there, staring at the phone on my lap, willing it to light up again. When the kiln isn’t on, it stays cool in the basement, but sweat trickled from the backs of my knees. I sat there focusing my energy on it, willing the ringtone to sound again, a ringtone I realized was eerily appropriate, a song Chloe had loaded, and now I was waiting to hear “The Girl Who Fell from a Star.” I watched the second hand of a big industrial clock on the wall go around once, then twice. Again. I could hardly breathe from the pressure I felt in my stomach. Just when I thought I couldn’t resist the urge to press redial, I heard the music I was waiting to hear.
“Hi, this is Mia.” It was a full-grown woman’s voice, not the little girl’s voice I’d heard in my head all those years. My heart flooded. I held back tears.
“Hi, baby,” I managed, as if I’d just spoken to her, which I had—every day for more than two decades. And then we were crying, three thousand miles apart but finally together again.
57
lucy
I stayed up all night, filling out PDF forms for the conference. Instructions were mainly in Chinese but there was some English. The whole time I was figuring out how to fill in the blanks, I was thinking it was crazy to take off like this. Bolting out of the country. What was I doing? But what choice did I have? I needed to get away, to achieve distance so I could think straight, figure out my options and how to deal with them.
Mostly, of course, I worried about Mia.
For the first time in her life, I had no idea where she was.
Well, that isn’t true. She was twenty-one years old, a senior in college. There were plenty of times I didn’t know where she was. But I always knew she was safe because we had a code word. I made it up when she was fifteen and going to her first sweet sixteen party. The party was across town, on the East Side. She looked so vulnerable: her smile shiny with braces, teetering out the door on platform heels she didn’t know how to walk in yet. Even without them, she was taller than me. And beautiful. So beautiful. I half regretted the looks she’d inherited, half wished she’d look
ed as ordinary as I did when I was her age. It was terrifying having to send such a gorgeous creature out into New York, having to trust her well-being to the care of a teenager.
“You can call me anytime if you ever feel unsafe or uncomfortable,” I told her. “Just say a code word, so your friends don’t have to know, and I’ll come pick you up anytime, no questions asked. Katcheratchma.” I made it up on the spot. I have no idea where it came from. It just popped into my head, and for some reason, both of us remembered it. Mia did use it a few times over the years—once I went to get her way out in Brooklyn when she was supposed to be at a party on the Upper East Side—
But now there was no communication.
I assumed she was staying with a friend that night. Or had gotten a ride back to school, though it was still a week before the start of spring classes. I suddenly wished college was like it was in the old days when you could call a pay phone in the dorm and someone would answer and you could check up on someone else who lived there. Mia didn’t have a landline, of course. Her only landline number was mine.
She didn’t answer my text until the next morning, just before I got into the subway downtown.
Explain what? Kidnapping me?
I heard a train coming into the station, but I stayed where I was on the platform steps, concentrating on controlling my shaking thumbs so they’d hit the right keys.
Call! I can explain.
NO. u CAN’T!!!!
Where are you?
Then—nothing.
I continued my walk downstairs and reached the platform just as the train was pulling out of the station. I wasn’t going to work. I’d called in sick. I was going to the Chinese embassy on Forty-Second Street. I needed a visa.
What Was Mine Page 14