Sunlight on My Shadow

by Judy Liautaud

  It was mid-September 1986. Fall comes early to the northwoods of Wisconsin. All the families were settled back in Chicago, their cabins closed after Labor Day. It was an unusual circumstance, because Dad had not made his end-of-season plans to have his car driven to Florida nor to purchase his airline ticket. He had worked with my brother Jeff extensively, getting his affairs in order several years earlier. Dad seemed quiet and reflective when I talked to him on the phone a few days earlier.

  My dad’s youngest brother, Uncle Phil, drove the 450-mile trip from Chicago to visit Dad that lonely day in September. The leaves were starting to change and fall off the trees. Most of the lake people had their piers out of the water in preparation for the winter freeze that would soon cover the lake with several feet of ice. Deer-hunting season was right around the corner.

  On September 14, 1986, I got a call from my brother Jeff saying that Dad had died in his sleep. He was eighty-three.

  As far as Dad was concerned, the secret of our black heritage was buried with him. When his body failed him with weakness and incontinence, I don’t think he could tolerate this loss of control over his own body. As he lived, so he died. It was just like Dad to decide for himself when he was done with it.

  When Mom died, I had plenty of warning and knew that her death finally brought her peace from her suffering. I felt like she had led a full life and was ready to go. But when Dad died, I felt ripped off. I wasn’t ready. I was left with a lonely sadness of incompletion. Since his death, I have found ways to commune with him, writing him a letter, doing a role-playing session imagining him talking to me. These days I have peace about his life and death; as an adult, I also have a clearer understanding of his life choices. I love him dearly and Mom, too, and believe they are with me in spirit, guiding me and still loving me as I do them.

  CHAPTER 45

  THE JOY LUCK CLUB

  In November of 1993, Dave and I went to see a movie that propelled me into further action. It was called The Joy Luck Club, based on a book written by Amy Tan. The story opens with a woman carrying twins across the countryside in China. She becomes deathly ill and reasons that it will be bad luck for her twin girls to be found next to a dead mother. So she sets them next to a tree, believing they will be found and cared for and continues on her trek, barely able to walk. She ends up living through it all and moving to San Francisco and birthing another child, June. After the mother dies, June receives a letter from the grown twins in China searching for their mother. June goes overseas to meet them and to tell her half-sisters of their mother’s death. Their faces fall with sadness and grief as the twins realize they will never be able to meet their mother and wish they had written the letter just a few months sooner. It was a tale of longing and sadness. My throat tightened and I sobbed silently as I thought of how happy this mother would have been to meet her thriving, adult children and to know that they had survived.

  The movie brought on a sense of urgency. What if something happened to my child before I was ever able to meet her? I left the theater with a resolve to do whatever it took to move ahead in finding Baby Helen. I was forty-three, and Baby Helen was now twenty-six.

  I found the phone number of a professional search artist through an ad in Mothering Magazine.

  I was nervous as I punched the numbers on the desk phone. It was a late autumn day; dried leaves were blowing against the windows and the wind whistled through the cracks. I took a breath. I looked at the phone number and dialed.

  I hired Mary Sue that day to find my Baby Helen, who was now a woman; she told me it would take four to six months. Mary Sue’s fee was $600: I would pay half up front and the rest when Helen was found. I asked how she would go about finding her.

  Mary Sue told me that they know her down at the county courthouse, because she does a lot of research. She said that once she had the date, place, and exact time of birth, she goes through all the birth certificates of babies born on that day until she finds the time that matches. This is the identifying clue. Then the baby’s given name is available on the certificate.

  “Do you have the date and time of birth?” she asked. I was thankful I had the information from my medical records and relayed this to Mary Sue.

  I hung up the phone and looked out a nearby window. Light flecks of snow were spinning around the outside corner of the house. Wind whistled through the weather stripping on the glass door. I knew in my gut that I was on the way to finding my child.

  Mary Sue had told me that she was only allowed one visit to the courthouse per month and that she was working on several cases. So each month after I hired her, I expected some news. But the waiting trailed on for many months.

  CHAPTER 46

  BLAST FROM THE PAST

  It had been twenty-five years since I spoke to Mick; it was uncanny that he would be calling now, just before I would be making contact with our birth daughter.

  My heart thumped as I sat down on the bed with phone in hand and leaned against the pillows. Every shred of attraction and excitement from years ago came down on me. I could hardly think. I didn’t know I still cared about him.

  He had been thinking of me, he said, was now living in California, happily married with three boys, had his own golf course out back, and his own business as an electrical engineer.

  “Geez, it’s good to hear your voice,” Mick said. Was he throwing me a bone? This time I might sniff, but I wouldn’t chomp.

  I told Mick that I had just started looking for the child he fathered.

  “I always wondered what happened to the baby,” he said. “I kind of thought maybe your sister raised it or something.”

  Mick told me that he wanted to help out, to ease his guilt.

  “Why do you feel guilty?” I asked Mick.

  “I guess because of how it went down … not cool, on my part. I told my kids about this and they think I’m a real jerk,” he said.

  I told Mick that if he wanted to, he could pay half of the searching fee. My brother Jim had offered to pay for the other half.

  “Sure, I’d love to do that,” Mick said. “I’m doing well financially, so it’ll be no trouble.”

  He was doing well financially? My heart sank. I remembered the days when Dave and I lived in the cabin and had to collect coins in a jar to buy milk, the single-wide trailer in Utah, scraping together money for rent when the snow flew and we couldn’t teach hang-gliding lessons.

  His voice still had that dry wit about it and he still had that contagious laugh. But then I stuffed the fireworks in my gut. It felt disloyal to my husband to linger, even though by now Dave and I were on shaky marital ground.

  “I better hang up now, Mick. Do keep in touch. I’ll let you know if I hear anything about the search,” I said.

  I set the phone in its cradle, still pumped with adrenaline. I was shy about showing the silly grin that was plastered to my face.

  Dave was in the basement watching TV, so I lit down the stairs to tell him the news.

  “That was Mick Romano,” I said.

  “I know,” Dave said as he clicked the remote.

  “Are you jealous?”

  “No. I don’t get jealous.”

  “Even if I talk to an old boyfriend?” I said.

  “No, it doesn’t bother me.”

  Dave was nonchalant and uninterested in the conversation, still staring at the TV.

  “He just called me out of the clear blue sky,” I said. “I couldn’t believe it.”

  “Why’d he call?” Dave asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “He just said he’d been thinking about me. It’s so weird that I just started looking for my birth daughter and he called. He said he’d help pay for it.”

  “That’s nice,” Dave said and flipped the channel.

  I skipped back upstairs to go to bed. Dave had been sleeping in the downstairs bedroom for several years, since he tossed and turned all night and neither of us got much sleep. I fell asleep alon
e, with sugarplums of Mick dancing in my head.

  CHAPTER 47

  INTUITION

  Why did Mick call me now, after twenty-five years, and right after I started searching for Helen? It was a bit eerie.

  I remembered when I was in my first year of college at SIU. I was living in a high-rise dorm when an earthquake rumbled through. As I watched the pictures on the wall rattle and heard the clatter of perfume bottles dancing on my dresser, a shot of panic went through me. But within minutes, the tremors settled down and the phone rang.

  “Hi, Judy. Is everything okay? I just had a feeling I should call.”

  It was my mom. How did she know? Mom’s caring love and concern could travel like light.

  Mom came to me in spirit during another incident when I needed her. In 1977, Dave was out hang gliding at the Widow Maker Ridge in Utah when he tumbled end over end in the rotor behind the ridge, breaking his back. I was at home when this happened: at that same moment I had an intense feeling that my mother was present. I felt her love wash over me.

  About a half hour later, I got the news of Dave’s accident. He mended well and suffered no permanent damage except for lingering aches and pains. This incident caused me to suspect that we live on in spirit after our body has been covered in dirt.

  So I took Mick’s call as another omen that the time was right to find my child. Remembering the story of The Joy Luck Club, I had a renewed sense of urgency, and hoped something happened before it was too late. I wondered if this anxious feeling was some kind of motherly instinct like my mom had when she called me after the earthquake.

  Four months had passed since I hired Mary Sue. I waited day by day for news. Finally, along about February, we came home from a ski trip in Colorado and the answering machine was blinking. Mary Sue said that she was getting close to wrapping up the investigation, but first—did I want to be on a TV show and have the reunion filmed live in Chicago?

  Wrapping it up? Did that mean she had found Helen? I assumed that meant I would hear something soon, but another month passed with no news. I had agreed to appear on the TV show, but since then I had heard nothing. I had the sick feeling that I would be waiting until the talk-show host had an opening or until all the logistics were worked out, so I told Mary Sue that I didn’t want to do the show after all. I just wanted to get my information as soon as possible. More weeks passed.

  At long last, I received a call from Mary Sue with news.

  “I have the contact information for your birth child,” she said. “I’ll give you the name when I receive the balance owed.”

  “Do you know anything about her that you can tell me now?” I said.

  “She has green eyes, brown hair, and is five feet, five inches tall,” said Mary Sue. “I still have to contact the Department of Motor Vehicles to get a current address.”

  I wired the money to her. Days crept by one after the other while I waited for the final call.

  One night that week I had this dream:

  I am lying in a blow-up raft and floating at sea. The waves are lapping at the sides. I bounce up and down, afraid to be drifting so far from land. An offshore wind pushes me out in the dark, until the shoreline is gone. Then I hear a baby softly crying in the blackness, somewhere to the right of my raft. I know it was my baby. My lost baby. Then the whimper gets louder, and I reach out to grab her. It seems like I can almost touch the baby, the sound is so close, but I can’t see in the blackness. The wind is soft but chilly. I needed to get the baby so I could keep her warm. Then the crying stops.

  I hear it again, to my left. The cries are softer and sound like they are farther away. I paddle with my hands to move the raft toward the cries. Then I look up and see someone in a lighthouse. I call out, “Please shine the light. Over here, over here.” The lighthouse man walks up a spiral staircase. I think he hears me and is going upstairs to turn on the searchlight. I can still hear the whimpering, faint in the distance. I paddle great dips of water with my bare arms, moving my raft in the direction of the cry. “Please turn on the light,” I yell again. Then the man descends the stairs. The wind starts to pick up and the sound of the child vanishes. I hear the waves lapping against my raft.

  The man gazes out over the open sea. Wind and spray batter my raft and my body. I hear no further cries. I sob for the loss of the child who was within my grasp. She slipped away. I lay my head down on the raft and let the waves take me farther into the blackness. I am broken with hopeless despair.

  Finally the call came with the treasured information.

  “Now, Judy,” Mary Sue said. “I have your information, but you have to be very careful about contacting her. You can’t just barge into her life. She doesn’t know you. She might not even want to hear from you.”

  I swallowed her words like a fish bone. I knew all this. She named my vulnerability. I wasn’t a dummy.

  “You can’t just call her up. One lady who I helped did that; her approach was all wrong and the kid hung up on her and would never talk to her again. She has her life, you know, and she might not want you in it.”

  “I understand that,” I said. “I will put a lot of thought into how I contact her.”

  “So, do you have my birth daughter’s name and information?” I pushed. I’d had enough of the lecturing, enough of the waiting. Finally, the words spilled out of her mouth. I repeated the spelling and wrote it all down.

  I hung up the phone and sat in stunned silence until my heartbeat returned to a normal clip. A sense of calm came over me. I was elated to be done with Mary Sue, the phone calls, and the waiting. I looked down at the paper. There it was in black and white: the information I needed to make contact. Her name was Karen. I ran my hand over the precious words. A shot of electricity pulsed in my veins. I finally had it. Twenty-six years after her birth, I could turn the corner. Perhaps all my questions would be answered very soon.

  CHAPTER 48

  A CALL TO KAREN

  It was one of the wettest Aprils on record in Salt Lake City. Thunderstorms built daily and dumped buckets of rain. After the rivers were full to the brim, the temperature rose to an unseasonably warm 90 degrees. The snow on the high peaks melted all at once and ran from the mountains to the valleys, gaining speed and force.

  When the water hit the Salt Lake Valley, the rivers couldn’t bear the burden and overflowed into basements and roads. State Street turned into a river. Million-dollar homes that sat on the East Bench, overlooking the city, had their yards destroyed by mudslides. Some of them had damaged foundations, and a few slid down the bluff.

  Our house, snuggled near the Wasatch Mountain Range, was on the flats and unaffected by the flood. The surrounding ground was crinkled, like a pulled-apart pleated skirt with dips and rises fanning out from the mountain range. Right near our house, where I rode my mountain bike, was a small stream that ran through the gully in the springtime and then dried up by midsummer. This year, as the rain and snow melt came down in torrents, the little gully overflowed with silt, sand, and mud and turned the twenty acres into a lake. At one point, the water was running so fast that you couldn’t walk across the gulley—the force would knock you down. When it was all over, the weedy sand fields were just a sea of mud.

  Several years later, after the flood was long forgotten, some fancy developer built high-priced luxury homes in that gully. When I walked through the new neighborhood, I noticed that the areas that were once rivers and gooey mud were now lush green lawns with little footbridges nestled among flower gardens and tomato patches. I remembered the destruction and chaos that once ravaged the area. I wondered if the people who bought those homes knew that they were built on a gully that was once a mud river.

  Perhaps it was just a freak of nature, the perfect combination that year of early warm temperatures and heavy thunderstorms in April. Perhaps it would never happen again. But then again, perhaps it would. It reminds me of all the things we try to control, even though the forces of nature are beyond our
control. We go on living after a hurricane, tornado, mudslide, or fire, trying to find a sense of safety by forgetting that it ever happened: but deep down we know it could happen again. Our capacity to weather the unimaginable astounds us.

  Nature follows its course, regardless of how we try to control it. The best we can do when disaster strikes is go with the flow, forget about wishing it wasn’t so, and take note of the blessings brought by wind, rain, fire, or death. Even though I prayed hundreds of rosaries, there was no way to change the course of nature. I asked God to give me a break, make it untrue, make the unwanted pregnancy go away when I was just sixteen. But, of course, once the baby was conceived, the outcome was inevitable and nature took over.

  Now, after forty-five years, once in a while I wake and have the awful feeling that disaster is looming, but I take inventory and realize that all is well and I sigh back into peace. But the nagging feeling persists, and perhaps it is the reason I am writing this story. The unease has lessened at an accelerated pace in the past years. I suppose that is because of the writing and listening to the feelings that are asking to be heard and felt. I never will forget the chaos and fright that colored the nine months of my junior year of high school, yet facing those memories directly as an adult has reduced the threat that these strong emotions will knock me flat.

  Now that I had Karen’s name and address and was done with the search, I could turn the corner—but how to approach her?

  “Uh, hi, I’m your mother. No, not your mother, but I gave birth to you. Wanna meet me?” Oh, geez. How could I? What would I say? I decided to find someone to help me with this, a consultant. I found an ad posted by Charlene in the publication for MANA: Midwives Alliance of North America.

  The rain of that wet spring kept coming until it gave way to the white daffodils and yellow hyacinths in our back yard. I called Charlene.