The English American

by Alison Larkin

  One of the only pieces the adoption agency let slip about my mother is that she works with artists. Painters, specifically. Or used to. Are you still painting? If not, why not?

  Hope to hear from you. Bye for now, love, Pippa Dunn

  Chapter Nine

  IN THE TWO MONTHSsince I made the first call to Judy, I’ve been in a daze, treading water, waiting. Needing to get away from London, one glorious Saturday morning in June, I drive down to Peaseminster to spend the weekend with my parents.

  Dad stopped smoking when we lived in Singapore. He now considers people who smoke to be unutterably weak and coughs dramatically whenever he thinks he can smell cigarette smoke. This is why he absolutely refuses to set foot in France. This is also why I have to lean two feet out of my bedroom window if I want to smoke a cigarette indoors.

  Dad is safely upwind at the bottom of the garden, so I can take a puff of my Silk Cut and inhale deeply before blowing the smoke far away from him. Unfortunately the wind changes. Seconds later, Dad’s standing at my bedroom door in his floppy gardening hat, sniffing like a furious beagle. I stub my cigarette out on the wall of the house and pretend to be closing the window.

  “Where are they?” Dad says, breathless from having run up the stairs at top speed. “Come on. Where are they?”

  He prowls around the room, searching for my cigarettes.

  He spies them out on the window ledge.

  “Got ’em!” he says. He crushes the packet in his hands. Then he holds them above his head, like he’s the Statue of Liberty or something, and says, “I’m going to throw these in the rubbish.”

  Then he storms out of my room.

  Later, I overhear him talking to Mum. They’re sitting on the porch. The skylight is open, to let in the sweet summer air. From the room above I can hear everything.

  “Ever since Pip decided to go on this ridiculous quest she’s fallen to pieces. Did you know she was smoking again?”

  “She certainly didn’t eat much lunch,” Mum says. “And she usually loves Scotch egg.”

  “It’s just an excuse, that’s what I think. For not getting on with things. She’s completely incomprehensible.”

  In truth, any understanding Dad ever had of what’s important to me ended the day I turned down his invitation to go on a family sailing holiday in Greece when I was eighteen. Mum, Dad, and Charlotte spent three weeks swimming in the sea, sailing from island to island, sunbathing and relaxing on a yacht. I chose to spend the summer playing a troll in a new opera at the Edinburgh Festival, which involved writhing around on the floor in a body suit for a month for no pay.

  “She should be building her career in advertising sales! Not airy-fairying about writing letters to America! And what if she doesn’t come back? Hmm?” A slight pause and then, “Goodness knows what she’ll find.”

  There’s an ominous silence.

  “More tea?” Mum says.

  More silence.

  “Why can’t she bloody well leave it alone?”

  “I think she would if she could.” Mum’s voice is calm. “But I don’t think she can.”

  “It’s typical bloody Pippa,” Dad says. “Drops a bomb and leaves us to deal with the debris.”

  I can hear Dad stand up and march back into the house.

  “Make sure you put the right crossword in the right envelope Alasdair,” Mum calls after him. “You don’t want to send theTimes crossword off to theIndependent !”

  My parents still laugh at the memory of Dad’s Great Crossword Sending Mistake six years earlier. He’s been sending theTimes crossword off to the weekly competition for fourteen years. So far he’s won a bottle of olive oil and two tickets toThe Pirates of Penzance . It made him very happy and I understand why perfectly. How I wish he could at least try to understand me.

  The hum of the swimming pool heater reaches me through the porch window.

  “And what if she doesn’t come back? Hmm?”

  The guilt is heavy and thick and instant. I want to run to Dad and reassure him that of course I’ll come back. Of course I will. I love him fiercely and always have done. I’ve just never known how to talk to him honestly about things that really matter.

  So it’s going to have to be Mum who reassures him. And she will. She’s good at that.

  As afternoon turns to evening, a light English rain starts to fall.

  “Bring the deck chair in from the garden before you go, darling!” Mum says.

  I listen to the sound of the raindrops splashing on the corrugated plastic roof of the swimming pool, and when I hear the sound of Dad’s car driving away from the house, I get out my secret supply of cigarettes from behind the bookcase and head into the rain.

  As I walk up the path to the top of the hill behind Little Tew, I turn my face to the sky. I’ve always loved the feel of rain on my face. This time it takes me back to my first real rainstorm.

  When I was eight years old, we lived a few miles outside Nairobi, Kenya, in a yellow house on loan to us from the embassy. We called it the upside-down house because the bedrooms were downstairs and the kitchen and dining room were upstairs. We had a cook, and an ayah, and a day guard, and a night guard. It was during the few years I spent with Mum and Dad before boarding school.

  One Saturday morning, when I was riding my bicycle to the local shop to spend my weekly pocket money on a giant bar of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut and aBunty , I met a little Kikuyu girl called Agnes. She was about my age and height, with a round, shiny face and hair braided in a hundred little braids. I thought she was beautiful. When she learned that we lived opposite each other, she invited me to come and visit her at any time, and I said I would. Agnes lived in a hut made out of leaves and sticks, in the banana plantation on the other side of the dirt road from our house.

  The drought was unusually long that year, and there wasn’t a green blade of grass or leaf in sight. All you could see along the murum roads was brown dirt and, occasionally, a dead or dying animal.

  Charlotte and Mum had taken to lying down in the heat of the day. On the day the rains finally hit they were asleep in their respective bedrooms, with the ceiling fans whirring above them.

  I didn’t ever want to lie down, in case I missed something. A dung beetle pushing dirt laboriously up the hill behind the kitchen door. A chameleon scuttling up the pawpaw tree, stopping suddenly on a leaf, and turning yellow. The cat on the wall, trying to catch lizards.

  That afternoon, I stood on the veranda, looking up at the darkening sky. The wind was strong, and black and blue clouds were blocking the sun. I was watching the skies the moment they broke for the first time in months, with a violent crash. Lightning and thunder tore through the air, and torrential rain came pouring down, suddenly, on the hard, dry ground.

  Rain like this is incredibly loud and hits the ground like long silver bullets. I just had to feel it against my skin, so I ran outside, held out my arms, and threw back my head. As the hard raindrops hit my skin, I marveled at how different they felt from English rain, which, to me, seemed insipid by comparison. Then I heard drums beating and music coming from the direction of the banana plantation, where Agnes lived.

  I ran down the long dirt drive to the bottom of our property, across the road and up the path that led to the banana plantation. Agnes had pointed her hut out to me many times. I knew it was the third tallest hut from the left. The music was coming from that direction, so I headed straight for it.

  As I ran toward the music, I saw Agnes and what must have been her entire family dancing together in the rain. They wore rows and rows of orange, blue, red, and yellow beads around their necks, and brightly colored cloths, and they were holding one another’s hands and dancing and shouting with joy. Agnes’s face was thrown back so she could drink the rain, just like I had, and she was laughing with the others.

  When she saw me standing completely drenched in my yellow sundress and flip-flops, she held out her hands. Before I knew it I was dancing with Agnes and the others—children, grown-ups
—about twenty people with open faces, who welcomed me with much laughter. And we all danced in the rain, in a big circle, Agnes, her family, and me.

  “It is called a rain dance!” Agnes said.

  The drum beat faster and faster and I whirled faster and faster. I had never felt so free or so alive.

  After about half an hour, we stopped dancing and sat under the eaves of one of the huts. Agnes had taken my wet clothes and wrapped me in a rough orange cloth, which smelled of must and dung. I know that might sound unpleasant, but it wasn’t. The combination of cloth and dung smelled sweet.

  Agnes sat me down and started braiding my hair in tiny little plaits, just like hers. Several children stood around touching my hair.

  “Ngumba santi mtoto mari!”they said. “Her hair is made of red and gold.”

  I was sitting on a wooden stool eating a banana, Agnes’s swift hands working on the last of my braids, when I heard my mother’s voice.

  “Pippa! Pippa!” There was Mum, her blond hair tied neatly back in a black velvet scrunchy, completely dry, thanks to the large black umbrella a worried-looking Juma was holding over her.

  “Here Mummy!” I said, waving at her. “Come and meet everybody! I’m over here!”

  In perfect Swahili, Mum graciously thanked Agnes for looking after me. Then she grabbed me by the hand and pulled me away from my new friends.

  Later, much later, after I’d been given a hot bath, scrubbed down, lectured for hours about not going off on my own, and sent to bed, I heard my parents’ voices, hushed and low.

  “Charlotte would never go off like that and play with the Africans. Charlotte is perfectly happy indoors, playing Snap and drinking mango juice with the Morton-Pecks. You know how much I love Pip,” Mum was saying. “But sometimes—well, sometimes I just don’t understand her at all.”

  The crickets were high pitched and cricketing away at top volume. I heard a howl in the night. And more rain. Then my mother’s voice, clear and matter-of-fact, seemed to echo throughout the house.

  “You don’t know what you’re getting when you adopt a child.”

  Twenty years later, the English rain is still cold and light and it still spits. As I walk to the top of the hill behind Little Tew and look out over Peaseminster, with its dark gray cathedral and tidy little houses nestled in the valley below, my tears mingle with the rain.

  That night I get an e-mail from Nick.

  DATE: June 14

  TO: pippa-dunn@hotmail.com

  FROM: NickDevang@bankglobal.net

  Dear Pippa,

  So there you are. I’ve been wondering when you would resurface. I knew you would. Odd that it should happen now, at a time when I am clawing my way out of the very dark place I’ve been stuck in for the past year, cut off from the part of me that makes me feel alive, my ability to paint in shreds.

  I was lying on the floor, literally and metaphorically, when your e-mail arrived, written in the dead of your night, which I have just reread again in the dead of mine. And I find I am able to pull myself up from the floor and think, for the first time in weeks, of something other than the agony within me.

  Namely, you.

  At last. There is movement in the air.

  You remember correctly. I did indeed meet my father for the first time when I was an adult. It did, indeed, change everything.

  I hope your meeting with your parents casts you out of all safe places and into the great adventure that should be your life.

  I’m here whenever you need me.

  Love, Nick

  SUMMER

  Chapter Ten

  I’VE BECOME TWO PEOPLE.When I go to work or to the shops to buy food and cigarettes, I chat cheerfully to people as usual. I talk to my friends and family as if there’s nothing going on.

  The rest of the time, I sit in my room with the curtains drawn, waiting for the agency to call. When I sleep, I dream fitfully of a woman whose face I can only half see.

  And then, finally, three months after it all began, the phone rings.

  “I have spoken to your mother,” Judy says. “She is delighted.”

  “Really?” I say, my heart filling instantly with pure joy.

  “Yes.”

  She is delighted! The joy is coupled with an enormous sense of relief that the tortuous waiting period is finally over.

  “She said the news couldn’t have come at a better time. She’s in Georgia, to be with her father, who is dying of cancer. And it’s her greatest hope you will be able to come and meet him before he passes away.”

  Georgia? And—oh! Her father is dying. My poor mother.

  “Uh—should I call her, or should she call me?” My hand is shaking.

  There’s a pause on the other end of the line.

  Then: “Oh, I can’t give you her number.”

  “Can you give her mine?”

  “Oh no.”

  What cruelty is this?

  “Why not? I mean, you’ve just told me she wants to meet me before my grandfather dies, so…”

  “It’s the law.”

  “What law?”

  “Adoption law in the United States. It is against the law for me to give you identifying information. It is against the law for me to give you her name. If you want the information, you’ll have to petition the courts.”

  “Well, how long will that take?”

  “It could take years.”

  Years? I can’t wait years!

  “Well, if I write to her, will you send on a letter? Please?”

  “Yes, but we will need to remove any identifying information.”

  I want to shout in frustration, but I dare not. Judy holds all the power.

  “What can I call her?”

  Judy’s voice softens.

  “You can call her by her nickname. You can call her Billie.”

  I can’t move. I lie on my bed, shaking. I can call her by her nickname. I can call her Billie. Billie, Billie, Billie.

  My hand is shaking. I start to write.

  July 5

  Dear Billie,

  Thank you so much for your letter you wrote just before I was born.

  Unfortunately it took longer than you would expect to be delivered—twenty-eight years actually—but you can’t rely on the postal service these days…

  I can’t say that.

  July 5

  Dear Billie,

  This is letter number twenty-eight. I know it will be read for “identifying” information. Because of this I shall try to keep it as brief and as factual as possible. I’m longing to speak with you on the telephone, to let you know where I am and to meet with you as soon as possible either in London or Georgia. I’m sorry to hear your father has cancer…

  I can’t say that.

  July 5

  Dear Billie,

  Judy promised to send on a letter from me to you. I have started thirty-one letters so far and am failing miserably. There is so very much I want to say to you—so very much I need to say to you.

  Most of all that I feel an enormous love for you and wish to tell you that I am safe and well and happy.

  Above all, I want to thank you for having had the strength to give me to Mum and Dad twenty-eight years ago. I send you so much love. To my grandfather too.

  This need I have to speak to you is such that I can’t think of anything else.

  Billie, this is impossible. The feelings are running so deep. I’m so embarrassed that this letter has to be read for identifying information, by people neither of us know.

  Is wanting to meet you so terribly wrong? I feel like a criminal…

  I have to get to my mother. If Judy won’t help me, I shall find her another way.

  I google “adoption search, US” and find a number for a man named Pete Franklin, who runs a volunteer organization out of Nevada. Five minutes later a friendly American voice is telling me that if I can persuade the adoption agency to ask my mother to fax him the date I was born—and the name of the hospital—and if I can send h
im a fax with my time and place of birth, and the details match, then he is one of the few people in America who is legally able to give us each other’s phone numbers.

  I can tell he understands what the last three months have been like for me. I’m so relieved not to have to pretend with someone that, for a moment, I can’t speak.

  The Abbey looks majestic on the other side of our garden, in the early evening light. People say it’s a holy place. Perhaps it is. But it’s the voice at the end of the telephone, belonging to a man I’ve never met, in the middle of the American desert, that brings me peace for the first time in months.

  “You okay?” he says.

  “I am now,” I say.

  There’s a crackle on the line.

  “I’m sorry you’ve had to go through this,” Pete says. “It’s a messed-up system.”

  “I still don’t understand why Judy won’t give us each other’s phone numbers. We’re grown women who want to be in touch with each other.”

  “The adoption agencies say they’re helping the kids. Really they’re helping the parents. And until adoption law is changed in the United States, the people the law is supposed to protect are going to be hurt in this way again and again and again,” Pete says.

  As we talk, I feel like a kid. I’ve had to be at my most compliant, charming, and persuasive in order to get the invisible Judy to bend the rules and send the non-identifying information about me to Billie. Thank God for my English accent and years of learning how to conceal my anger about unreasonable rules.

  Pete’s voice sounds warm and familiar across the telephone lines.

  “Some of the adoptive parents are waking up,” he’s saying. “Like any parents, the good ones do what’s best for the kids, and they’re trying to get the records opened. The ones who are fighting to keep the records closed are scared.”

  “Of what?”

  “Losing their kids to the birth parents.”

  “But I’m—they’re—not looking for a replacement mother! They just need to know who they came from! I mean in my case—well, nothing can take away the fact that Mum and Dad are my parents.”