by Karina Bliss
“Really, our breakup isn’t your fault,” stressed Rachel, misinterpreting his agitation.
Bracing against the bulkhead to counter the increasing swell as they hit open water, he searched for something to cheer her up. Zander said he’d give me a job when I want one. Nope, the guy wasn’t exactly top of Rachel’s hit parade. Someone at the party had even said she’d shoved him into the pool, but Mark figured that was another rumor, like Devin rejoining the-
He brightened. “Devin’s not leaving, you know. You could get back together.” But even as he offered the crumb, Mark wondered. There had been something ruthless about their parting, something final.
“It’s over.” Rachel’s flat tone confirmed his suspicions. She mustered another “dead woman walking” smile.
Mark pretended to buy the smile. “You’re still young…ish. What, twenty-nine, thirty?” Sheesh, that sounded old. Maybe he shouldn’t have mentioned age. But to his intense relief, Rachel smiled-a real one this time.
“Actually, Mark, I’m thirty-five in another month.”
He whistled. “Man, you don’t look anywhere near that,” he said honestly. “I mean, that’s old enough to be my mother.”
She was still smiling, but her expression seemed to freeze over.
Mark recoiled.
Staring down at her feet, she didn’t notice. “Listen,” she began awkwardly, “there’s something I need to tell you about me.”
He sucked in a great lungful of air. “You’re my birth mother.”
Rachel lifted her gaze to his. “Yes.”
Mark felt like he’d been shot. Soon it was going to hurt, but right now the shock protected him. Rachel…his mother?
Her cold hand covered his. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier.”
He looked down. Even her hands were young. Then what she’d said registered. “Wait a minute…you knew I was looking for you?”
“Only for a week.”
“A week…” Bewildered, he stared at her then jerked away, tucking his hands under his armpits. “And you didn’t tell me?” A week ago he’d gone to her house with…“Does Devin know it’s you?”
“Yes.” She added quickly, “But the decision not to tell you straightaway was mine. He argued against it.”
Trixie had called Rachel tonight, not to ask for advice but to warn her. Everyone had betrayed him. Everyone had taken her side.
Rachel was still talking. “You see, I wanted you to get to know me properly before I told you, so that you’d be more open to listening to-”
“Excuses!” Shooting up from the bench, he stumbled on the lurching deck.
“No excuses.” Her gaze held his, raw with regret. “I should have told you earlier.”
He hated her looking at him like she cared, when she couldn’t have-not and kept the secret. The engines slowed to a throb as the ferry edged against the Auckland pier. Mark regained his balance. “Can you even imagine what it’s like to discover everything you believed about yourself is a lie?” He spat the accusation at her. “Can you?”
“No, and I’m deeply sorry.” Her hands twisted together in her lap. “But please know that I had no choice but to give you up.”
“Why?” Maybe understanding would somehow help. “Wouldn’t your parents let you keep me?”
Momentarily, her gaze dropped. “It’s…complicated.”
Complicated. Trixie had used that word. “Screw you. I don’t want to listen to anything you have to say.” Picking up his bag, he stormed back inside, letting the wind slam the door behind him.
Another bang told him Rachel had followed, so he headed for the gangway, toward the people milling on the lower deck, waiting to disembark.
“Mark, please.” Rachel clattered down the stairs behind him. “Let me tell you the circumstances.” She became aware of the curious stares and dropped her voice. “Come back to my place.”
“It doesn’t matter.” He didn’t give a damn who was listening. Let everybody know what she was like. “You were my age when you gave me up. If it happened to me, if I got a girl pregnant, I’d stay in that kid’s life no matter what.”
“Steady, mate,” advised the purser, who was standing near the exit. “Calm down, eh?”
They both ignored him.
“At seventeen, you see your choices as black-and-white, right and wrong,” said Rachel. “I did, too. And I thought if you didn’t know you were adopted-if I broke all ties-it would be easier for both of us to get on with our lives. I was wrong, Mark.”
“You think?”
The gangplank rumbled down; in relief the dozen passengers debarked, heads down in embarrassment. A couple sent back curious glances.
Mark went to follow, but Rachel barred his way. “Your parents tried to talk me out of it-until I made it a condition of the adoption. I’m just sorry that they kept their word, though it shouldn’t surprise me. They’re good people.”
“Better than you,” he said, wanting to hurt her. But she only nodded.
“That’s why I chose them.”
She wasn’t even going to fight.
He shoved all the contempt he could into his next words. “I don’t want you in my life.”
Rachel seemed to shrink. “That’s your choice.” Even her voice was small as she stepped aside to let him pass.
“Yes,” Mark said savagely. “It is.” Buoyed by righteous anger, he marched down the gangway, then turned. “How does it feel being the one rejected for a change?”
IT FELT LIKE HELL.
Except Mark was wrong. Rachel had plenty of practice at being rejected.
All the color leached out of her life. For the first time in her life she was rudderless and bereft of the capable, cheerful identity she’d built block by painful block from the age of seventeen.
Worried that Mark would quit university if she remained on campus, Rachel rang her boss first thing Sunday morning. She told him everything so he’d accept an immediate resignation. He refused to accept it and insisted she take a week’s leave to think things over. Rachel didn’t have the energy to argue, but knew she’d never go back. It was too hard.
And thinking things over-every scathing, scalding denouncement-was killing her.
Even hating her, Devin hadn’t told Mark. How could she ever have doubted him? She’d worried that love blinded her to his faults. Instead she should have worried about how love triggered her own deep-seated insecurities.
The truth was, she’d launched into a blind attack the first excuse she got. Because she’d wanted to shut Devin down before she got hurt. It was ironic that the one time he’d tried to deceive her-stripping for the spa with Dimity-Rachel had seen right through him. He was a good man, struggling to make a new life for himself, and she’d used his imperfect past against him.
Hurt him. And hurt her son.
For the first time in five years, Rachel canceled her Sunday lunch for students. Bowed by a grief so bone-deep she couldn’t cry, she spent the day hunched up in an armchair, or lying in bed staring at the ceiling.
When she’d been a scared teenager living in an Auckland youth hostel, ostracized by her parents and community, the conviction that she’d done the right thing-no matter the personal cost-had saved her. More than that, it had fueled her drive to sit up half the night studying for her library degree while working two dead-end jobs.
With that belief shaken, Rachel felt as if someone had let the air out of her.
The phone rang incessantly with voice messages from Trixie, but she didn’t pick up. She had no expectation of hearing from Mark or Devin. Not only had her past lost its meaning, her future had become meaningless, too.
On Sunday night a stormy sou’wester rattled the windows and hammered on the corrugated iron roof of her cottage. Rain stripped the petals off the roses and littered the path with twigs and leaves. The world became the damp, gray chill of her childhood and adolescence, reduced to the clock ticking, light and dark, snatches of restless sleep. Blankness finally settled over her,
and even that small inner voice shut up.
When she first heard the banging on the front door at six o’clock Monday night she thought the wind had shaken something loose. It persisted. Despite everything, hope propelled her out of her armchair and into the hall. But when Rachel opened the door it was Trixie standing outside, like a bedraggled black cat. “About bloody time!”
Though her immediate impulse was to shut the door, the maternal part of Rachel wouldn’t let her. “How can you go anywhere in this weather without an umbrella? Come in. I’ll get you a towel.” She headed toward the bathroom.
Squeezing water from her long black hair, Trixie followed. “Why haven’t you answered my calls?” Her abrasive tone grated Rachel’s nerves. “I’ve been worried sick about you, particularly after Mark’s rant.”
She’d forgotten that Trixie knew. In the midst of handing over a towel, Rachel paused. “Is he okay?”
“If foaming at the mouth is okay.” Trixie dried her face, her voice muffled through the towel. “He was furious with me for not telling him as soon as I found out you were his mother.”
“I’m sorry.” The fallout of this just went on and on, and her feeble apologies felt as useful as a Band-Aid on a severed jugular. “You two were good friends.”
Emerging from the towel, Trixie said gruffly, “Why didn’t you tell him as soon as you knew?’
“Because I’m an idiot… Did Mark mention whether he got my message?” She didn’t tell Trixie what it was. If she knew Rachel had resigned her job she’d be here arguing all night. And already Rachel was restless to be alone again.
“He didn’t say,” said Trixie. “He feels like you really did a number on him.” There was accusation in her tone.
Rachel said nothing.
“I still can’t get my head around the fact that Mark’s your son or that you had a baby when you were seventeen and adopted it out. I mean, you love kids so much, I don’t understand how you could have brought yourself to do it.”
Again she waited for an explanation; again Rachel remained silent.
“Now if it was me, I’d understand it,” Trixie continued blithely, “because I’m the hard-nosed one.”
Something inside Rachel snapped. “You’re a child playing at dress up. If you ever came up against real hardship you’d fold like a pack of-” She stopped, controlled her breathing. What was the use? Leading the way to the front door, she opened it. “Please go. I don’t want to hurt you, too.”
But Trixie stood her ground. “I’m sorry, I had no idea… I speak without engaging my brain sometimes.”
“Was Mark at university today?”
“No. Yesterday he talked about going home for a few days to spend time with his par…” Her voice trailed off.
“I’m glad,” said Rachel. There was a chill to the wind blowing through the open door. She hugged herself. “At times like this, you need your family.”
“What about you? Your family?”
“I’m not important. Mark is.”
“Oh, Rach.” Trixie stepped forward and wrapped her arms around her.
“I’m okay.” Out of courtesy, Rachel waited a few seconds before she tried to free herself. Trixie only tightened her hold.
“He said you and Devin broke up, too.”
“I’m okay,” she insisted again, but they both knew that was a lie.
Trixie started to cry. “You’re giving up, I can tell.”
“No, I’m not.” Giving up implied you had something to give up. And both Mark and Devin had made it clear she had nothing left to fight for.
RACHEL’S MOTHER LIVED in an affluent part of Hamilton, a midsize city bisected by the Waikato River. Her house reminded Mark of his grandparents’ home-his adoptive grandparents’ home-in Cambridge.
At least fifty years old, it was brick and tile, with immaculate paintwork and ornate flowerbeds full of old people’s plants-purple hydrangeas; pink and white roses, standard or climbing over freestanding arbors. Even the trees had to be flowering varieties-magnolias and camellias.
Okay, he was procrastinating again. Mark didn’t give a damn about the garden. Slowly, he walked up the path to the front door and paused with his finger hovering over the bell. He’d thought telling Rachel to go to hell would be the end of it. But he still had a burning need for answers.
It’s complicated, she’d said. What did that mean? Mark wished he’d hung around to find out, except how could he trust anything Rachel said, anyway? Last night-Sunday night, after he’d blasted Trixie-he’d got on the Internet and sourced everything he could about his birth mother. Which wasn’t much. Most online references were about Rachel’s dad, who’d been some big shot in Hamilton City Council before he died.
Steeling his resolve, Mark pushed the doorbell. A chime rang in the house and set his heart pounding. The idea of approaching Rachel’s mother had come to him in the middle of a sleepless night. At seven this morning he’d rung her before he could chicken out. Maureen Robinson had cried when he told her who he was. Yes, she’d tell him everything he wanted to know.
So Mark had caught the afternoon bus to Hamilton, an hour and a half south, with the idea of taking another one the extra forty minutes home to Cambridge after he’d talked to Maureen. At least now he knew his parents weren’t the bad guys in this.
The door opened; a plump elderly woman in a mauve housedress stared at him. She lifted her hand to her mouth.
“Hi,” he said awkwardly. “I’m Mark.”
“Oh, my dear.” Dark eyes glistening with tears, she flung her arms around his waist. Tentatively, Mark returned her hug. She was way older then he expected, and her granny perm barely came up to his armpit.
“I wasn’t going to do that…embarrass you.” She released him, but brushed a hand quickly across his cheek. “Come in, Mark, come in. I have sausage rolls in the oven-I knew you’d be hungry. And a plate of queen cakes…” She bustled ahead of him. Mark had to lengthen his stride to keep up.
“Um, thanks for seeing me. It must be a shock.”
She paused and looked over her shoulder. “I prayed for this day… Now, what would you like to drink? Tea, coffee…juice?” With one hand she opened a cupboard door, revealing cups and glasses; with the other she opened the oven. She reminded Mark of the quails at home, small and pear-shaped. Like her, they flurried.
“Juice, please. You didn’t need to go to so much trouble.”
Maureen reached for a glass. “You’re my grandson.” Pulling a tissue from a box on the bench, she dabbed at her eyes. “Ignore me, I’m…” Without finishing the sentence she waved the tissue helplessly.
“Yeah,” he said, a lump in his throat.
Mark waited until she’d finished serving the food-enough for a small army-before he spoke again. “I guess I’m here to find out a couple of things, but the main one is how I came to be adopted.”
“And Rachel wouldn’t tell you.” It was a statement, not a question. Maureen poured the juice and set it in front of him.
“She said it was complicated.”
Compressing her lips, Maureen pulled out a chair and sat. “No, Mark, it was very simple. We wanted her to keep the baby, but she wouldn’t consider it.” His grandmother seemed to become aware of who she was talking to, and dropped her gaze in confusion. “I should have softened that-I’m sorry. This is taking awhile to sink in.”
Mark managed a smile. “It’s okay.” Please know that I had no choice but to give you up. So Rachel had lied to him. Only now did he realize he’d had hope that this could still turn out all right. His cell rang, a welcome distraction. “Excuse me.” Taking it out of his jacket, Mark frowned as he saw the caller ID.
Devin again. Switching it off, he put the phone back in his pocket. “No one important.” That betrayal hurt the most. Devin had been his friend, the only one who guessed how much finding his birth mother had meant to him. And he’d chosen Rachel.
Mark looked back at the woman who was his grandmother. After the enthusiasm of her phon
e call, he’d expected to feel some kind of connection, warmth. Instead he felt more alone than ever. “You were talking about Rachel.”
“She was always so compliant as a child, so good.” A fleeting smile lifted the downturned corners of Maureen’s mouth. “And then in her teens…well…you hear how kids change overnight, but until it happened to us…We didn’t even know she’d been sneaking out at night, so her pregnancy came as a shock. It hit my husband, Gerard, particularly hard. Your grandfather was a man of some standing in the community.” Her voice grew stronger. “But we never wavered, not once, in our decision to support Rachel even though the circumstances…”
Her gaze darted to Mark and shied away. She began to fidget with her wedding ring, deeply embedded in one fleshy finger. “But Rachel was determined to give you up right from the start. She was almost hysterical about it…I begged her to reconsider, and her father absolutely forbade the adoption, but she told such lies to the social worker…such lies.”
Maureen’s hand crept to the gold crucifix around her neck. “I still struggle to forgive her for that. You’re sweating, Mark-it’s probably too hot in here with the oven.” She bustled to the window above the sink and opened it. Mark felt the breeze but it did nothing to cool him down.
“Anyway, you’re here now. And that’s all that matters. Eat up.” Returning to the table, Maureen pushed the towering plates of sausage rolls and dainty cakes toward him. “I only wish your grandfather were alive to meet you. He was a wonderful man, Mark. Let me show you some pictures.”
She left the room, and Mark stared at the food. A fly buzzed over the cakes, but they were still too hot to land on. The thought of eating anything made him nauseous, but he didn’t want to hurt Maureen’s feelings, so he hid a few in his rucksack.
His grandmother came back, hugging half a dozen photo albums to her ample bosom. “Here we are.” Mechanically, he flicked through the ones featuring his grandfather, pretending to be impressed by the faded articles Maureen had clipped from the paper over the years. His mind buzzed as fruitlessly as the fly while he tried to process what he’d heard into something other than rejection by his birth mother. With every word out of Maureen’s mouth he’d felt himself diminish. Until he felt transparent. It was the strangest sensation.