The Home for Wayward Parrots

by Wehm, Darusha;

  “Thanks,” I said and wished to hell that declaring a major was the worst of my worries. I gave Dad a weak smile and went out to the yard to light the barbecue.

  I STILL HADN’T HEARD FROM JACQUIE. I was too scared to call her, but I knew that I had to talk to her. I wasn’t ready for this, not by a long shot, but I was going to take responsibility. Whatever that meant.

  I had some money saved up from the A&W job; I figured I could probably pay for an abortion with it. I knew that it was up to her, though, so I looked into maybe getting some construction work instead of going to school. There were plenty of unskilled labour jobs available and they paid pretty well. I thought I could support a baby on those wages. I tried not to think about the other option. No one would expect me to marry her, would they? I mean, it was almost the twenty-first century. Right?

  At the back of my mind I knew there was more to fatherhood than financial support. But it was too big, too oppressive to really contemplate. I was only eighteen. I still felt like a kid myself. How could I be a father now? It was like a giant weight was sitting on my chest, invisibly crushing me.

  I walked over to the McKirks’ one afternoon when I figured that Mrs. McKirk would be at work and Blair would be at soccer practice. I didn’t know Jacquie’s schedule, but I assumed that in her delicate condition she wouldn’t stray far from home. I hoped their little sister Debbie would be at camp or something.

  I got to the big yellow door at about three in the afternoon and could hear the sound of talk-show television from the rec room. I couldn’t see in, but I hoped it was Jacquie. I rang the doorbell and waited. The TV noise continued, but I couldn’t hear anyone moving around. I rang again, waited some more, then walked around to the back door. I could see through the window that a couple of people were in the rec room. I could smell pot and after a minute I heard Jacquie’s loud laugh.

  I banged on the back door and heard a male voice curse. After a few minutes, Jacquie came to the door. Her shirt was on wrong and her jeans were undone. “Blair’s not here,” she said to me, her eyes bloodshot.

  “I’m not here for Blair,” I said softly.

  “Hurry up, baby,” I heard the guy call from inside the house.

  “Just a sec,” Jacquie hollered back. “So what do you want?” she said to me.

  “We need to talk,” I said.

  “We do?” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said, “about, you know, the baby?” I was starting to feel my heart rate increase and I had to fight with my legs just to keep standing there.

  Jacquie looked puzzled for a moment, then said, “Oh, shit, how do you know about that?”

  “I overheard you with your friend. At the A&W.”

  “Jesus, Brian, it was just a false alarm. I’m not pregnant, you idiot.”

  I must have looked like someone slapped me, because she burst out laughing. “Serves you right for eavesdropping.” She shut the screen door and I could hear her laugh fading as she walked into the house.

  I WALKED AWAY FROM THE MCKIRKS’ IN A DAZE. My feet moved on their own and took me into the woods where we’d played as kids and now we went to drink, smoke or screw. I wasn’t even looking where I was going; I was literally blind with rage. I always thought that was just a saying, but it turns out it’s real. I’ve probably never been as angry as I was that afternoon. It took hours before I even started to feel the relief that eventually poured over me like a breaking wave. And when it did finally come, I was glad I was on my own, in my favourite clearing in the woods, because I cried so hard that I thought I was going to throw up.

  I barely made it home in time for dinner. I caught Dad giving me funny looks all night, though by then I was just so happy that I wasn’t going to be anyone’s teenaged father, I didn’t care about anything else. I ate three helpings of scary vegetable surprise and even consented to play Scrabble with Mom and Dad, although it was cheap Tuesday at the movies.

  After I got a triple word score with reinstate, I remembered Dad’s little talk from earlier that summer. “I’m not worried about school,” I proclaimed to my parents without preamble. “Engineering’s a good course, I think I’m going to like it and there are lots of jobs for gearheads. I’m going to be okay.” I said the last sentence like it was some kind of prophetic pronouncement. Then I grinned at the two of them like an idiot and went back to my letter tiles. “Is there any potato salad left?” I asked as I shuffled the Q, Z and H I’d just drawn.

  I’M SURE THAT IF IT HADN’T BEEN for The Thing with Jacquie I might have been more concerned with starting university. I had done pretty well in high school, but I had heard that engineering was killer. The rumour was that they failed out something like thirty percent of the freshman class, and there were definitely brainier kids out there than me. But being preoccupied with The Thing with Jacquie, then with the sense of being suddenly pardoned off Death Row once there no longer was a Thing, I let university kind of creep up on me.

  The same feeling of being startled by something you’d watched approach for ten miles hit me when I heard myself say, “Lunch would be great. I know a good place downtown, quiet but very nice.”

  “I’m a vegetarian,” Kim said, a tone of apology in her voice.

  “No problem,” I said. “They do lots of veggie things there. And there’s parking,” I added, immediately cursing my banality.

  She thankfully ignored it and said, “Great. What’s the address?”

  “I’ll email you a map,” I said, and the phone fell from my sweaty hands and clattered to the bathroom linoleum.

  7

  YOU’VE GOT MAIL

  AFTER I GOT OFF THE TOILET, I didn’t know what to do. I wandered around the apartment in a daze and finally snapped back to reality when I found myself in the kitchen washing the already clean dishes. Feeling like an idiot, I drained the sink and dried off my hands. I fired up my laptop, got a Google map of the place I’d picked out for lunch and a dorky headshot of myself, and sent them off to kheinz@pawznclawz.ca. I managed to include what I thought was a more sane-sounding note than what I’d said on the phone, full of safe platitudes like how much I was looking forward to meeting her.

  After I sent the email, I picked up my phone and started to call Beth. We’d met at an adult adoptee support group, but I’d stopped going after we broke up. I figured she was there first, and my need for support was less than hers at this point. But I really wanted to talk to someone, someone who understood how fantastic and terrifying meeting my mother was. Beth would understand.

  “What do you want, Brian?” she said, her voice hard. We hadn’t spoken in weeks and the last time hadn’t exactly been pleasant.

  “I’m meeting Kim in a few days,” I said.

  “Well, isn’t that nice for you,” she said.

  “I just wanted your opinion,” I said, hoping we could get past meanness and just talk, like we used to. “You always had the best ideas, the best strategies. Come on, Beth, I’m just looking for help here.”

  “Yeah, I know,” she said, no trace of friendliness in her voice. “That’s all you ever wanted from me. Someone who understood how hard it is to be poor little Brian Guillemot. Well, I’m done with that now. You got what you wanted, you got your contact. You don’t need me anymore and I sure as hell don’t need you. I hope you and your mother have a lovely time and I never see you again.”

  She hung up.

  I was stunned. She was so bitter, so angry, even though it had been her idea to break up. I looked dumbly at the phone in my hand. I would never understand women. Never.

  I THOUGHT THINGS WOULD BE DIFFERENT WITH BETH. I always think things will be different. How else could I ever even go on a first date if I didn’t believe that? Beth was really promising, though. She understood about being careful. She really understood. I thought.

  When we met at the group, we hit it off right away. We’d had all the same questions throughout our childhood. Her adopted parents were a nice couple from the mainland who’d been unable to have k
ids of their own and adopted Beth when they were almost in their forties. Growing up with older parents had its own issues. According to Beth, they were more lenient than her peers’ folks were in some ways, but had some strangely outdated ideas in other ways. Beth grew up with no restrictions on where to play or with whom; her parents let her run around their suburban Vancouver neighbourhood unchecked. She got almost any toy or trinket she asked for, and they even let her eat ice cream for breakfast on weekends.

  When she got into high school, though, Mr. and Mrs. Soderberg changed. They wouldn’t let her hang out with her friends unless there was a specific activity planned. “In my day,” her mom would say, “we didn’t just walk the streets. Is that what you want? To be a streetwalker?” Beth thought her mom was only kind of kidding, as if hanging out with a bunch of other teenagers at the mall would inexorably lead to a life of drug addiction and prostitution. “Penury is probably what she would have called it,” Beth once said. “I kind of think they believed that bad behaviour could be passed along genetically. Like they were just waiting for me to get knocked up myself.”

  She wasn’t forbidden to date, exactly, but her parents wouldn’t let her go anywhere without an itinerary and a plan of how she would get there and back and exactly when. It made dating tough and just hanging out impossible.

  Otherwise, though, Beth loved her parents, just like I love mine. But she was always haunted by the question of who her birth parents were.

  WHEN I STARTED GOING TO MEETINGS of the Adult Adoptee Support Network, I was feeling as disillusioned with the parent search as I ever got. It had been five years since I had paid my two hundred and fifty bucks to the Adoption Reunion Registry for a search, and all I’d ever gotten was a single name: Wilhelmina Heinz. You’d think there wouldn’t be that many Wilhelmina Heinzes to go through before I tracked down the one who was my birth mother. And you’d be right, there weren’t many. It’s just that none of them were her.

  I’d spent hours searching Canada411.com and PeopleFinder.com, looking for W. Heinzes. Most of them were Williams and none of them were Wilhelminas. The people at the government agency looked, too, using whatever secret government spy tools they had. They got nowhere either. I received a nice letter informing me that “all search procedures have been exhausted” and that my file “would be placed in inactive status.” The letter promised that “should additional information become available, the file would be reviewed.” It read like every other Please Fuck Off letter I’ve ever gotten.

  I was out of ideas. I’d known about the Support Network for a couple of years, but I’d never been desperate enough to hang out with a bunch of other sad cases looking for mommy and daddy. After my file was “placed in inactive status,” I became exactly that desperate.

  THE MEETINGS WEREN’T AS PATHETIC as I’d imagined they might be. Mostly, we talked about search techniques and occasionally one of the members would strike gold. Then we’d talk endlessly about reunions, the need to be sensitive to others’ discomfort, how to pick neutral ground ... everything we’d all secretly fantasized about for as long as we’d known we were adopted.

  I asked Beth out on a date after the fifth meeting I attended.

  We went to a very nice Italian restaurant downtown, where they take no reservations but give you free cheap red wine in coffee cups while you wait in line. We spent a very enjoyable evening getting quietly sloshed on wine and talking about everything other than being adopted. We already knew about that part of each other’s lives, so it seemed pointless to rehash it.

  Beth worked in a bank as some kind of manager. I never really understood it and she never really explained. It was the same with my job. We left work at work, and when we were together we talked about other things. Soon enough, the adoption issue no longer was off limits and we spent a lot of time comparing search strategies.

  Focussing on a single name was Beth’s idea and I have to give her all the credit. I’d had no luck with Wilhelmina Heinz, so Beth suggested I try each of the names separately. It wasn’t a strategy that would ever have worked for her: her birth mother’s name was Susan Jones. But my mother’s names were unusual enough that it might have worked.

  I knew that I had been born in Victoria, and there was only one hospital with open records for this sort of thing. I sent an official request for information on women admitted to the maternity ward in April 1981 with the first name of Wilhelmina. Six weeks later, I got a nice answer telling me that there were no Wilhelminas admitted at that time.

  My hopes dropped. I’d managed to convince myself that this was it, this was the way I could finally track her down. When I got the letter, Beth talked me out of what certainly would have become a month-long funk. “Try Heinz,” she said. “There really aren’t that many of them. It’s worth a shot.” So I did.

  And there she was. W. Kimberly Heinz. My mom.

  IT WASN’T AS SIMPLE AFTER THAT AS I’D HOPED it might be, but once I gave up on all the Wilhelminas it was just a matter of time. I wrote a nice letter to N. Frantzman, the name at the bottom of the PFO from the province, and provided N. with the new information needed to reopen my case. Miraculously, the department really did reactivate my file and in late July 2010, I got the letter I’d been waiting my whole life to get.

  The only thing I even saw when I opened it was a strange line with an improbable number of instances of the letter Z: kheinz@pawznclawz.ca

  HOW DO YOU SEND AN EMAIL to the mother you’ve never met? Is there some modern etiquette book for situations like this? What would it be called? Emily Post and the Etiquette of Twenty-First-Century Family Dynamics? So, You’ve Got Two Mommies, So What? I think there’s a market here. Someone could do well with this book.

  As much as I wanted to make contact as soon as possible, it took me nearly a week to finally send my mother an email. I must have gone through twenty drafts.

  Dear Ms. Heinz,

  I got your email address from the Ministry of Children and Family Services, as part of an adoptee parents search. I believe that it is possible that you and I may be related.

  To W. Kimberly Heinz:

  I have been searching for you for a long time. Please reply to this email.

  Are you the Wilhelmina Kimberly Heinz who gave birth to a baby boy at the Victoria General Hospital on April 16, 1981? If so, please reply.

  Hi.

  You don’t know me, but I think I’m your son.

  BETH HELPED A LOT. She practically wrote the final version that got sent and when I got an answer she cried. “I’m so happy for you, Gumbo,” she said, though I thought she didn’t sound exactly happy. “This is wonderful.”

  Ms. Heinz — Kim, as she asked me to call her — replied quickly, I’ll give her that. I don’t know what I was expecting: shock, fear, wonder, an outpouring of emotion. But I wasn’t expecting to get the response I got. I’m not complaining, but it was kind of overwhelming in its totally normal tone.

  hi brian

  its good to hear from you. ive been wondering whatever happened to you and im glad you turned out okay.

  im kinda busy with the store and the new birds i took home but we should get together sometime. give me your phone number and ill call. dont freak out if you dont hear from me for a few months, im a big flake but ill get there eventually! ha ha.

  cheers

  kim

  THE DAY I GOT THE EMAIL, Beth wanted to take me out to dinner to celebrate. We went to the same restaurant we’d gone to on our first date; it was where we always went for special occasions. Things were great over the appetizers, but by the time half my plate of seafood pasta was gone, Beth was drunk and crying softly into her eggplant parmigiana. We skipped dessert and I took her home.

  I got her into her apartment and into bed. She was a wreck and I wasn’t sure why. I waited while she fell asleep, then went back to my apartment. It wasn’t much of a celebration after all.

  I should have seen it coming that night, but I was so sure Beth would be different. Over the next th
ree weeks we couldn’t seem to stop arguing.

  We had The Fight about a month later.

  8

  PAWZ N CLAWZ

  SO, THANKS TO BETH, I was on my own. No problem. I’d only spent most of my online life reading forums, blogs and personal pages about adoptees meeting their birth parents. I could probably write a dissertation on the subject. Somehow, all that research didn’t seem to be helping. My stomach was roiling around like a drunken octopus, and my heart would have formed a perfectly usable drum background to any punk rock song. Be careful what you wish for.

  For probably the billionth time since I got the letter from Children and Family Services with Kim’s email address, I surfed to pawznclawz.ca. It was the website for a pretty eclectic pet store up island, where her email address indicated that Kim worked. They had the usual puppies and guppies, but they seemed to specialize in exotic birds. Their site was pretty rudimentary — I wondered if they’d updated it since 1999, the year they opened.

  Obviously, I’d been hoping for a staff photo gallery. Lots of small business websites have them: people like to see pictures of people. It’s a proven marketing technique. Pawz N Clawz didn’t seem to know about it, though. Their site had a few photos of the store, badly lit and poorly composed shots that seemed to show off the cages much better than the animals they contained. On the other hand, they also had some great pictures of some of the individual animals. There was a particularly adorable chocolate brown puppy I could easily have taken home with me if I weren’t allergic.