I didn’t go to the conference, of course. I feared there’d be Western press and I didn’t want any of them around to recognize me if my story broke in the States. I stayed in my windowless, dimly lit room for days, until I couldn’t sit there alone any longer. But I found I couldn’t go anywhere by myself. All the street signs were in Chinese, which somehow I hadn’t expected.
68
lucy
The hotel receptionist gave me brochures advertising the services of several guides, all of whom had studied English tourism at university. (An example of Chinese practicality—this is now a university curriculum choice.)
I picked Ada, not only because her photo looked friendliest, but because I liked the copy in her brochure best. Ada promised to show visitors not only the glory but also the off-beaten paths in our city. I’m a writer for hire—I was a writer for hire. I know how hard it is to come up with copy. I couldn’t imagine having to do it using a language that is not your own. I liked the fact that Ada was willing to go out of her way to show someone sights beyond the ones that tourists could see on a bus tour.
Ada. Even in Shanghai, Chinese think up English names for themselves, partly out of kindness for speakers who find their names unpronounceable, partly because it’s fashionable. But their ears aren’t attuned to Western name fashions. So, though my guide is in her twenties, she has a name that makes her sound a hundred years old, a creaky moniker plucked from some Victorian novel. Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës—they’re all here, sold in “foreign bookstores,” printed in Mandarin on pages as sheer as toilet paper, with paperback covers featuring lurid drawings of couples in suggestive poses, bearing no relation to narrative content.
Ada thinks I am here on business, though she must notice that the only business I appear to do is to write in this journal. She is always “applying” to get a job in America by trying to impress me with her good work habits and dedication to improving her English. She shows up at least ten minutes early and goes out of her way to be helpful. Yesterday, she bargained the fruit seller half off a bag of litchi nuts, though I was willing to pay the few fen he was asking.
I knew the conference had ended when the man at the front desk informed me that so did the conference rate for the hotel. The rate would be going up astronomically. Ada helped situate me in another hotel, owned by a friend of her uncle. She got them to charge me the Chinese rate, not the foreigner rate, which she says is ten times higher, a common practice here which is apparently legal.
The hotel has an oxymoronic name: New Old House. It’s what’s called a “service apartment,” halfway between a hostel and a hotel. All the rooms have kitchenettes which consist of a hot plate and half-size refrigerator. No one here speaks English which is probably another reason why I’m getting a better rate.
This afternoon, I go to the Foreign Language Bookstore, bracing to see my face, my name. They sell a few periodicals in English: People, Newsweek, and the Herald Tribune. In the ten days I’d been going there, nothing of my story has turned up. Perhaps Mia’s reuniting with Marilyn won’t make the news. Marilyn got what she wanted. She has her daughter. How would it serve her interest, or Mia’s, to publicize this? Perhaps Mia has told her what a good mother I was and Marilyn—and Mia—mean to forgive me. Maybe the whole thing will go away, and I will go back to the States and we can share Mia between us, like joint custody.
In the meantime, I wait.
69
lucy
I feel sorry for Ada, so eager to seek fortune in the Motherland I’ve left, ignorant of the futility of her desire, at least with me as the conduit. She is a model corporate candidate, though—smart and eager and wishing to please. I mean to recommend her to former colleagues in the States, if I start up correspondence with any again.
Ada is only a few years older than Mia, and just as energetic. Though I wonder about Mia’s energy now. How is she feeling? Sad? Angry? Perhaps she has answered one of my e-mails I sent her before leaving the States. I wouldn’t know. I still can’t access my e-mail here. She doesn’t pick up my calls.
Ada meets me every day in the lobby. Yesterday, she showed me where I can swim. I haven’t exercised in weeks, not since my life began to unravel. I am fifty-seven years old. I’m afraid if I let things start to slide, they’ll just keep slipping and I’ll look like the old ladies women used to be at my age. I’m used to biking around Central Park, 6.2 miles every day, weather permitting. I used to do it before work. I had—I still have—the co-op apartment on Riverside Drive, which we moved into when Mia was just a baby. She’s graduating from college in three months. I can’t believe that I won’t be there to see it.
This morning I swam in the pool Ada showed me, near the hotel, a beautiful Olympic-size rectangle of clean, chlorinated water. It was only seven o’clock but bright light streamed from skylights dappling the water, which was still and inviting, as no one was in it.
I stood at the edge of the pool, contemplating big red Chinese characters on a wall, trying to puzzle them out, to determine whether or not diving was permitted, when a shout pierced the air. I turned to see a small, stern woman in uniform, hurrying toward me, pink flip-flops flapping, too big for her feet. She was waving something above her head—a bathing cap. She made me return to my locker for money to buy it, not an insignificant sum, given the fact that the latex was so thin and insubstantial it felt like pulling a condom over my head.
I had the pool to myself for a while. Being in the water worked like a tonic. I used to swim a lot before I moved to New York. The water made me feel calmer than I’ve felt since I got here. I did long, lazy backstrokes until I reached a wall, then breaststroked back to the other. I punctuated each lap with a turning flip by which you can tell any lap swimmer who’s been on a team, even if that team was as rinky-dink as mine was, a neighborhood swim club I swam for as a kid. I don’t turn flips very well anymore, and sometimes, when I come out of one, I find myself facing the wall by mistake. This happened, and when I brought my head out of the water and turned myself the right way around, I saw a Chinese man approaching the pool, glossy-skinned, having just showered, his hair contained in regulation condom.
I was annoyed to realize I’d have to share the pool. Ridiculous, I know. It is a public pool! But what really annoyed me is what came after that: he didn’t do laps, but swam around the pool’s perimeter, as if to claim the entire space for himself. What selfishness! I thought, resuming my laps, fuming whenever he interrupted them. Later that day, Ada told me that’s how Chinese swim and I realized how insensitive I had been to prevailing custom, and that he must have been fuming underwater, too, as perturbed by my actions as I was by his.
70
mia
Marilyn picked me up at the airport in San Francisco. It was a long drive to San Mateo and we mostly small-talked. I was too tired to get into anything heavy. When she turned the car into her driveway, I saw they’d decorated the house. There were yellow streamers and yellow balloons and a sign across the front door that said Welcome Home!
I saw it was a surprise for Marilyn, too. She stopped the car in the driveway, put her hand over her mouth, and cried.
I felt happy and sad at the same time. Happy to be wanted, but sad that it wasn’t really my home, that no place would feel like home anymore.
When I walked into the house, I burst into tears. When you grow up in a family that isn’t your birth family, sometimes you feel you’re not actually real. Because you don’t see yourself reflected in anyone else around you. Now, suddenly, I was among people who looked like they’d been made from the same clay. A little girl’s hair, a boy’s nose, the shape of his eyebrows were like silent confirmation of the way I am made. And then the immensity of the situation overwhelmed me and I leaned against a wall, trying to contain my emotion, until finally I was able to turn my sobs into laughs, and everyone, relieved, laughed along with me. Marilyn put an arm around my shoulder and told Connor to take my luggage upstairs.
She’d made up a bed for
me in Chloe’s room. Chloe led me to it. Being in her room brought back the comforts of being a ten-year-old girl—a turtle in a tank, a dollhouse, colorful throw pillows, floral quilts, stuffed animals sitting sentry on shelves. I said I hoped I’d be a good roommate. I’d never been one before, I told her. She said she hadn’t either; she only had brothers. But this made her blush and correct herself. “I mean I USED to have only brothers. We thought you were dead!” And now she flushed even deeper, sensing another error, and I reached over to hug her, telling her not to worry, everything was going to be okay, wishing I could believe it, hating Lucy for upending not only my life, but the lives of the good-hearted people I came from.
71
marilyn
I should have warned the kids and Grant not to decorate the house. It never occurred to me they would do it. And, of course, they didn’t know the meaning that yellow balloons would have for me.
A reporter was in the yard when we got out of the car. We hadn’t expected that. Detective Brown had agreed to hold off the media until Mia was settled. But someone in the police force had put something on Twitter. A reporter had seen it, put two and two together, and tracked us down.
A picture of me and Mia ran the next day in the San Francisco Chronicle. After that, we were deluged with media. We couldn’t keep reporters off the lawn. Grant tried to block the drive from the road with sawhorses, but they just moved the sawhorses. I didn’t dare let Connor and Thatch go to school. I worried about them being hounded to the point of physical danger, then being quoted on something they knew nothing about.
Detective Brown advised us to do a press conference with police. They promised to keep it low-key. Mia didn’t even have to be there. He then advised us to hire a lawyer to be a go-between with the media.
72
cheryl
The awful way I found out was on news radio, driving home from work.
A baby kidnapped in New Jersey twenty-one years ago has been reunited with her birth mother in California. Born Natalie Featherstone in Cranford, New Jersey . . .
I had just made the turn onto Lafayette Street when I heard words I’ll never forget:
. . . the girl was raised in Manhattan as Mia Wakefield.
My whole body began to shake.
But eight million people live down in New York City, surely one of them had the same name as my niece.
Ms. Wakefield, a senior at Middlebury College . . .
I had to pull off the road. I didn’t cut the engine, I gripped the steering wheel to steady myself as impossible words kept pouring out of the dashboard:
. . . raised by her abductor, a New York advertising executive . . .
I could barely control my trembling hands as I rifled through my purse for my cell phone and punched in my sister’s number at work. She’d still be there. It was only 5 p.m. I got her voice mail and left a message, then tried her at home. The machine didn’t pick up. I listened to the series of rings, imagined the echoes in the long, narrow hallways, the small, uncluttered rooms so much smaller than the rooms of the house we grew up in.
I thought there must be some mistake, something Lucy herself could clear up, if I could just talk to her. But I couldn’t get her on the phone. I switched to calling Mia’s number. But I couldn’t get her either.
I put the car in gear. It was February. The roads were icy. My hands trembling on the wheel, my heart in my throat, I pulled back into traffic, rejoining the stream of cars, imagining all of them blaring my sister’s name. I pulled up my coat collar, hoping that when I stopped at the light, no one I knew would be in the car next to me.
73
mia
I hated having what happened to me in the news. I had to shut down my Facebook because so many friends were tagging me with news stories and putting them on Tumblr and Instagram and I didn’t want to know about any of it. It felt like my friends weren’t my friends anymore. The person who they had become friends with no longer existed.
It turns out that getting off Facebook is annoyingly hard to do. It keeps wanting you to deactivate it instead, warning you that deleting your account is irreversible, asking if you’re sure again and again. One of the captchas I had to type twice was “over.” By the last time I pressed enter, it felt like I was launching myself into outer space, a million miles away from the person I was.
74
marilyn
The lawyer said we had to pick a magazine to give an exclusive to. If we didn’t do that, the story would run without us and reporters would tell it any way they want. We decided to go with People. It was the most money—we couldn’t believe how much. Enough to help Mia with law school, if she still wanted that. Enough to help with college for the kids.
The photographer brought a stylist who insisted on making up Mia and me, saying we’d look like washed-out ghosts if she didn’t. She brought a huge bag of cosmetics with her, but I insisted she use the toxin-free ones I already had. They posed Mia and me together in the living room, under the hanging crystals, then in the kitchen in front of the wall of affirmations. She asked if she could take a portrait of the whole family, but I didn’t want my other children’s pictures in the press. So she posed the six of us on the rebounder, the trampoline in the backyard, our backs to the camera, midjump, none of us recognizable. Now Marilyn won’t let her children out of her sight, says a caption. A lie. The boys go out of my sight, to school. We didn’t get to see the pictures or captions before they went in the magazine. They put Mia and me on the cover. The photo was so retouched, we looked almost like sisters. The article called me a healer, which I’m not, and I’ve never claimed to be.
After that, we were glad to work with an IKEA public relations person who reached out to us. He offered us his expertise for free. We realized what his motivation was, that IKEA was just as eager to keep out of the news as we were. But, still, we were grateful. To help us avoid any more press, he suggested we sneak away for a few days. We went to Mount Shasta.
In the mountains, the six of us began to learn how to be a family.
75
mia
The first day I was there, Marilyn kept asking if I was glad to be home, and I kept saying I was. But it didn’t feel like home. Everything was different from the place I grew up in. The light was different. The smell was different. The furniture was different. There was wall-to-wall carpeting instead of bare floors. There was color everywhere, and decorations that Lucy would think of as clutter: candles and little flowerpots and embroidered pillows and crystals and little mirrors dangling from ceilings, making rainbows on walls. There were framed family photos on shelves and walls and side tables—baptisms, weddings, graduations. Seeing them made me feel sad at having been excluded.
It felt good to escape to the mountains. Trees, stars, mountains, moon—those things look the same wherever you are. So I did feel at home during those days we camped out, even though I hadn’t been camping before. I’d been to camp, but that wasn’t camping. At sleep-away camp, I slept on a bunk bed in a cabin with a bathroom inside it and trails paved with cedar chips so you’d never get lost and a camp chef to make any omelet you wanted.
This was real camping, in actual tents. I was impressed that Grant and the boys knew how to put up the tents, without even having to look at instructions. They put up a tent for them, and one for us girls. We slept in sleeping bags on special mats so the wet from the ground wouldn’t seep through. We zipped up the tent at night, against mosquitoes and bears. The thought of bears didn’t seem to bother them, but it terrified me and I made sure not to drink anything at night so I wouldn’t have to get up to go to the bathroom. There was no bathroom, of course. You went in the woods, and I didn’t want to risk it because I couldn’t imagine being able to do what Grant told me to do if a bear charged: make myself stand there, waving my arms to look bigger. I knew I’d just run, which is the worst thing to do.
Grant’s shoulder hurt from putting the tents up, and Marilyn rubbed peppermint oil on it, making the air smell
like Christmas. I watched her, thinking this is what a normal family looks like. For the first time, I was part of one.
I loved waking to birdsong and the crackle of fire and to a mother toasting slices of bread on a stick, pouring tea from a tin pot heated over the flames, and it’s like we are living in Little House on the Prairie, a book I was obsessed with when I was a kid.
Even here in the woods they say grace. We hold hands around the fire, bowing our heads, saying thanks for the food. They take turns saying the prayer and I bow my head to respect that.
“How come you don’t ever say it,” Thatch wanted to know, and I told him I didn’t know any prayers. I grew up in a house where we didn’t say them. “But you can be a good person without praying,” I said as I was spooning apple quinoa from the pot into my bowl, and when I looked up, everyone had stopped eating. They were staring at me and I realized they were thinking my mom wasn’t the greatest example of that.
“What do you believe in?” Chloe wanted to know.
“Herself,” said Thatch under his breath, and I realized I’d have to be careful with him.
“Believing in yourself is a good thing,” Marilyn said. “I’m glad Mia was taught that.”
She looked over at me and our eyes met. I was grateful to her for coming to my rescue. But I kept eating, just wanting the subject to change.
I’m sorry for the kids. Their life is turned upside down, too. Connor wants to know why I want to keep my kidnapped name and I tell him it’s hard to change a name you’ve had for twenty-one years. To me, Natalie is like a twin who died at birth, someone I never met.
What Was Mine Page 17