What Was Mine

by Helen Klein Ross

  Chloe asked if I miss my other mom, and before I can answer, Marilyn says, “She is not her other mom! She’s her abductor!”

  Which makes me feel, for some reason, dirty. It’s like Lucy was some big ugly car splashing by in the rain, leaving us all splattered with mud.

  I got up and went to the edge of the woods and breathed deep for a while, like Marilyn has taught me to do.

  I’ve never tasted air this clean before. I feel like I’m bathing in its purity, that it is cleansing away the ugliness of what’s happened. But once a bad thing happens to you, it keeps happening in your mind, over and over.

  76

  lucy

  In this country, numbers are considered auspicious. Eight is the most auspicious of all, Ada says, informing me of my double good fortune in my draw of room number: 88. She was surprised that hotel management hadn’t given the room to a Chinese, who might have paid more for it. She says phone companies impose surcharges for numbers containing that numeral. Four, she says, is the opposite, a number to avoid because the word for four is the same as for death: si.

  I sit with my pot of chrysanthemum tea at a corner table in my favorite place for breakfast, the Glad Cock Restaurant, and brace myself for my fourteenth day in this country, a day containing the unlucky number.

  And then I walk to the Foreign Language Bookstore. At first, I think that nothing has changed. Steve Jobs and Henry Kissinger biographies are still in the window. But even before I make my way to the magazine section, I see what I’ve come for. The blood rushes out of me. There is Mia’s face on the cover of People magazine. The headline in screaming tall type reads: KIDNAPPED SURVIVOR BEGINS LIFE WITH LONG-LOST MOM! My daughter, a survivor! As if I had done her physical harm. My eyes burn as I approach the rack. There is my daughter, pictured with Marilyn. The physical resemblance between them is striking: the same blue eyes, the same fair coloring, the cheekbones and shoulder span of a runway model. I can almost feel Mia’s eyes raking over me. Is she glad to be with the beautiful mother, the good mother, the mother she should have had all along, instead of with me, the mother with the kind of looks no one notices?

  I look right and left before I reach for the magazine, not wanting to be seen with it, as if it is porn. When it’s in my hands, I rub my thumb over Mia’s glossy cheek, and feel a jolt as if I am touching her actual skin. I don’t dare open to the article in the store. What if my photo is in it? Shoppers are everywhere. Bookstores in America may be going out of business, but they seem to be thriving here. What if someone looking over my shoulder makes the connection? I take all three copies from the stand, then glance through a Newsweek. The story hasn’t hit that magazine yet. I take a Herald Tribune from the newspaper rack and fold it around the glossy issues of People to conceal them, and slink up the aisle to check out, and make the transaction with cash, not wanting to risk a credit card that might alert the cashier to my name featured on the pages of the magazine I am buying. Perhaps the cashier has already read it. Perhaps she has sounded out my name, practicing English, so that my name is on the tip of her tongue.

  I hurry out of the store and back to my hotel. It isn’t until I am safely behind the closed door of my room that I dare open the magazine. I barely see through tears to read of Mia’s joy in getting to know her “real mother.” “Abductor” they call me. “Baby Snatcher.” Nothing about how well I raised Mia, nothing about expensive schools and private tutors and bedtime stories and a full-time nanny and trips to beaches and Disney World. Nothing about how well she was loved.

  Marilyn looks hippie-ish in her flyaway hair and loose garb, her arm around Mia, gazing proprietarily at the poised young woman I carefully raised, as if she had fashioned her whole in the basement, like one of her homemade ceramics. The resemblance is unmistakable, says the caption. But that kind of resemblance is only skin-deep.

  The photo they used for me is an executive portrait used by the agency for pitches, in which I look stiff, my smile insincere. Suspected to be hiding somewhere in China . . .

  Then I read something that makes my heart thump. . . . where she’ll be safe from the law as long as she stays because China and the U.S. don’t observe extradition.

  I have a vague sense of what extradition is, but now I’m desperate to know its exact definition. I go to the computer in the lobby. I can’t get Google, but I can get Merriam-Webster online.

  Ex-tra-di-tion—the surrender of an alleged criminal.

  So, if I stay in China, I can’t be arrested? I type in “extradition of US criminals in China” (criminals! Typing the word brings tears to my eyes).

  There is a blog post titled The best countries for U.S. citizens to go to become invisible. To my surprise, China is at the top of this list. According to the article (which was written by a lawyer), as long as I stayed in China (not Hong Kong), I’d elude the reach of the U.S. law. Unwittingly, I’d managed to escape to a place where I can hide in plain sight.

  But I hadn’t left home thinking that I was leaving forever. I’d thought coming to China was only an interlude during which I’d gain needed distance to gather my wits and figure out how best to face down my future.

  But could I stay? Could I do it? Did I have the mettle to abandon my career, my future, my family—any chance of reuniting with Mia?

  And who would I be, stripped of everything that made my life recognizable where I knew no one but Wendy—but how could I explain my troubles to her?

  What would I do, in a country where I didn’t have friends, couldn’t get work, couldn’t speak a word of the inscrutable language? I was fifty-seven years old. According to research I’d read for an insurance pitch, chances were good, I’d live thirty-six more years. I didn’t want to spend them all over here. But what was my alternative? Go home and rot for the rest of my life in a jail?

  If convicted, she faces a maximum sentence of life in prison and a minimum sentence of twenty years.

  I returned to my room and turned on the TV and spent the rest of the day staring at Qing Dynasty soap operas, alone on a narrow bed, in a fetal position, in a dark room that is numbered for luck.

  77

  mia

  I wish we could have stayed in the mountains forever. But we had to come back and talk to lawyers, each of whom had a thousand questions.

  They gave us a pile of letters from people we don’t know. Some addressed to me, some to Marilyn. Total strangers saying they’re sorry for us. Most of them share their own sad stories. As if they knew us. Some send money enclosed in the envelope, which Marilyn puts in a special account that we’ll give away to charity or something. We don’t want that money. The letters are heartbreaking. Awful things happened to some of those kids. The lawyers won’t let us answer them, which makes us feel guilty.

  I’m taking an anger management workshop with Marilyn. My homework is to write in a notebook and throw rocks into the ocean, getting rid of the feelings I have for the woman who stole me. Today, I drove out to Devil’s Slide with Marilyn and we stood on a cliff and let rocks fly from our fingers, saying Lucy’s name, letting the hate out, driving it out of us so it doesn’t seep in and poison our bones.

  It’s been over a month and Lucy still calls sometimes, but I never pick up. What the fuck does she want me to say? That it doesn’t matter she stole me? That she was still my mother, no matter what heinous, horrible crime she committed? I don’t want to speak to her, ever again.

  In psych, we studied signs of a sociopath and Lucy has them all: charm, cunning, pathological lying.

  What arrogance to think she was entitled to me. How dare she treat me like hers for the taking, a toy to dress up to send to expensive schools and camps so she could show off what a good mother she was. I thought she was a good mother. She was a good thief!

  Now that I see Marilyn in action, I understand what a good mother is: selfless and caring and always there for her kids, who she builds her whole life around, keeping them happy and safe. I was never Lucy’s priority; her work was. Ayi was always the
re doing drudgery while Lucy was getting ahead at her glamorous job. Ayi is the one who actually took care of me, made my favorite dishes, listened to me, held my hair back when I threw up, sat on my bed telling me stories to distract me from picking scabs off my chicken pox so I wouldn’t get scarred. Lucy cared more about her computer than me!

  On the drive home, I open the window to let in the smell of salt water and stretch out my arm and let my hair fly in the wind.

  78

  marilyn

  I thought I’d come to the place of forgiveness.

  I’ve worked hard to heal the hole in my heart. I learned to live with my walking away from my child, which would turn out to mean walking away from her for twenty-one years.

  I thought all the work I did with Sonya and others freed me from corrosive anger, resentment.

  But every time I look at my daughter, I am overcome by new sorrow, realizing all that was taken from me. Today I saw a scar on her knee. Just a tiny scar, nothing disfiguring. Mia said she’d fallen, learning how to ride a bike. When she said this, my eyes went hot with tears. I should have been there, to steady her. If I had been there, I wouldn’t have let her fall. I should have been by her side to see her first steps, her first word, her first day of school. I burn thinking of the woman who stole her from me. A woman with the mind-set that would allow her to steal an innocent child.

  Detective Brown tells me they’re on the case. An international arrest warrant has been issued for her. I ask why they can’t just go get her in China, but he says they’re not allowed to do that. They’ve frozen her passport. They’ve alerted Interpol. She can’t stay in China forever, he tells me. The second she enters U.S. airspace, they’ll arrest her. I don’t want to hate people. There’s already enough negative force in the world. But taking a child is taking a life. Someone who does that isn’t deserving of grace or mercy.

  79

  cheryl

  When I turned the corner that day, after hearing the news, I saw TV trucks on our road. So I knew it was true, that Lucy was who they were talking about.

  As soon as my tires crunched onto our driveway, truck doors opened and reporters spilled out. They rushed my van, which terrified me. Hands and cameras were everywhere suddenly and I was glad it was winter and my windows were up. I gunned the engine up the hill. I used the remote to open the garage, and how relieved I was when it went down behind me. Doug was already home. He’d had to pass through the same gauntlet. We called the boys. Both of them live in towns nearby. They were still at their jobs—Sam sells insurance and Jake teaches at a high school. They hadn’t heard the news and no one had come to bother them yet.

  Doug and I thought if we stayed inside, behind closed doors and blinds, the reporters would get discouraged and go away. But they didn’t. They stayed and stayed. Finally, that night, we opened our front door, and gave in to a few questions, thinking that would get rid of them. But the next day, we realized our mistake. The newspapers twisted our words in the statement, making it sound like I knew all along.

  Lucy didn’t call us until she was already in China.

  “Is it true?” I asked her, and she said that it was. “How could you?” I shouted, and she said it was “complicated.” That is so like her. Making what’s straightforward appear to be complicated. Taking black and white and pretending it’s gray.

  What Lucy didn’t think about is how doing what she did doesn’t just affect her and Mia. It affects all of us. The paper isn’t the Emmettsville Echo anymore. It merged with the county journal that now goes to every town in the district. We don’t have a friend at the paper anymore, so Lucy’s story was headline news.

  Doug is on the school board and said no one mentioned a thing at the meeting, but also, no one wanted to sit next to him. Now Jake says his fiancée’s parents are worried about her marrying into a family with criminal genes; he says the wedding is still on, but I wonder. I know the influence mothers have on their daughters. My own mother worried that Doug came from the wrong parish. We go late to church now so we don’t have to talk to anyone.

  I’ve spent my life trying to do the right thing: to be there for family, to be a good citizen. I never wanted a big life like Lucy did. I never wanted to stick out. And now she’s made me famous all over town: a kidnapper’s sister.

  I know people assume I covered for her. Old friends from school knew I used to do that. Her teenage antics were harmless by today’s standards, but I kept them secret from our mother, my stomach always clenched worrying she’d get hurt or do irreversible harm. But I didn’t tell on her because we were sisters and sisters stuck together. That’s how we were then.

  Maybe I should have suspected something. But I only saw Lucy for holidays. Thanksgiving, Christmas. Those were busy days, my getting the house, the meals ready. There wasn’t time for long, sisterly chats when I might have sensed something was wrong, or she might have divulged her secret to me.

  I am grateful she didn’t tell me her secret. If I’d known, I would have been sick with having to keep it inside. I wouldn’t have told, but I wouldn’t have been able to live with it either. It’s one thing to protect a relative who’s done, say, a murder. Your telling won’t bring the dead person back. But here, she had someone else’s baby. The baby’s poor parents waking up day after day, never knowing what happened to her. How could I have remained a silent party to that?

  Of course, the one who’s hurt most in all this is Mia. Poor Mia. I’ve tried to call her, but she doesn’t answer her phone. Sam says she’s taken down her Facebook page. Who can blame that poor girl.

  I wrote her a real letter, addressing it to where her family lives in San Mateo. (Her family!) I told her how sorry I was to find out what happened. I wanted to let her know that we haven’t abandoned her. We’re still her aunt Cheryl and uncle Doug. Our door is always open to her.

  80

  mia

  We spent this weekend, just Marilyn and me, on a Forgiveness Retreat. It’s a place where you go to get rid of your anger so it doesn’t eat into you and cause cancer.

  I hope that the person I hate most of all in the world stays in China forever. I cannot believe Marilyn can forgive her for what she did, but Marilyn says she’s had decades of experience learning how to do it. She doesn’t expect me to learn in one weekend.

  The retreat was weird but actually helpful. It took place deep in beautiful woods. There were about twenty of us. I wasn’t the youngest. There were a few teenagers, girls and boys, and I wondered what terrible thing had happened to them.

  The first thing we did was pick out our drums. There were lots to choose from: big ones, little ones, leather-topped, plastic. The retreat leader, Meribelle, made Marilyn and me sit across from each other, twenty-one feet apart, the number of years we were separated. With wooden sticks, we hit the drums hard, pounding out messages to Lucy, all the things she deserved to hear. We didn’t speak words, but the drums said it for us, as we hit at the skin of them, over and over.

  Liar! Thief! You. Never. Were. My. Fucking. Mother. You were my captor! You ruined my life!

  After that, we sat in a circle and Meribelle passed around pen and paper and told us to write down blessings for our object person. Lucy is my object person. I couldn’t write anything. I walked into the woods and threw up instead. It was like I was emptying myself of the bad secret of those years, getting Lucy out of my life. Marilyn got up and came to me and held my hair back. She gave me a little packet of tissues. The tissues smelled like roses.

  When we came back to the circle, Meribelle said all experiences must be treated as valuable. She asked me to say a good thing that had come from my bad experience. I couldn’t think of one. Obviously, the retreat wasn’t working for me.

  But Marilyn hugged me and said she had one to offer. She told the group that if I hadn’t been taken, I wouldn’t be who I was and she loved me just the way I am. That made me cry. I guessed that’s how a true mother feels. Lucy was never satisfied with the way I was, she was always trying
to improve me. Dancing lessons, riding lessons, tutors, piano. I was never good enough for her, she was always concentrating on my outward manifestations. Lucy was all about outward manifestations.

  81

  marilyn

  A reunification specialist helped me see that just as I once accompanied Mia through the natural process of birth, now my job is to midwife her spirit, assisting at the birth of the new person she is becoming. I spent twenty-one years trying to find my daughter. Now I need to help my daughter find herself.

  Mia’s anger is fresh, like a fresh wound. The sooner it is attended to, the sooner it will heal. I don’t want her to have to deal with anger years old, like mine. We are practicing Unmasking Yoga together—a healer comes to the house and helps us process our anger, helps us turn the heat into light.

  We keep anger journals—all of us, the whole family. I want to include the other children in this process. I worry that my intense work with Mia might make them feel neglected. But if one of your children is on fire, you run to that child to put out the flames.

  82

  thatch

  Our family was fine until she came along. Now we’re all so pissed off, we have to keep journals about it. I don’t think Mom knows who I am anymore, even though she still sometimes brushes my back to help me process things better, saying, “I love you, I love you.” Last night she was sitting on my bed, doing the brushing thing and I looked up and saw Mia in the doorway, eating out of a bag of Goldfish, which Mom never allowed in the house until she showed up. She’s like an exchange student, allowed to do anything. I knew Mom would get up right away and go to her, and she did. Mia doesn’t ever come into our room. She told Chloe it smells.