The Passions of Chelsea Kane

by Barbara Delinsky

  Malcolm got the yacht, Michael the Packard, Elizabeth the two Thoroughbreds, Anne the Aspen condo. Still they waited while Graham read on.

  “‘As for the rubies . . .’”

  The rubies. Only then did it occur to Chelsea that that was what her aunts and uncles had been waiting for, not that any of them lacked for jewels—or yachts, or cars, or horses—but the rubies were special. Even Chelsea, who would never dream of wearing anything as showy, could appreciate their value. They had been in the Mahler family for six generations, traditionally passed from the oldest daughter to her oldest daughter.

  Abby had been the oldest daughter, and Chelsea was her only child. But Chelsea was adopted.

  “‘I have given more thought to this matter than to any other,’” Graham read, “‘and have decided to bequeath the rubies as follows—my sister Elizabeth is to receive the earrings, my sister Anne the bracelet, and my daughter, Chelsea, the ring.’”

  Elizabeth came out of her chair. “No, that’s wrong. If the oldest daughter doesn’t have a daughter, the entire set goes to the second oldest daughter. I’m the second oldest daughter.”

  Similarly appalled, Anne uncrossed her legs. “The pieces can’t be divided. They were meant to be kept together. Whatever did Abby have in mind?”

  “She must have been confused,” Malcolm decided by way of polite invalidation.

  “Or she was influenced by someone else,” Michael suggested by way of benign accusation.

  “A Mahler would never divide up that set,” Elizabeth insisted. “The whole thing should be coming to me.”

  Kevin stirred then, not much more than a shifting on his seat, but, given his prior immobility, enough to draw attention. In a voice that was gritty with grief but surprisingly firm, he said, “The whole set should have gone to Chelsea. She is the oldest daughter of the oldest daughter.”

  “She isn’t Abby’s daughter,” Elizabeth argued, “not in the real sense, not in the sense of having our genes and being able to pass them on. Besides, look at her. She’s a career woman. She won’t have a child. Even if she was of our blood . . .”

  Chelsea rose quietly and slipped out the door. She had no stomach for Elizabeth’s words. More than any of them, she was haunted by the fact that she had no Mahler blood. For years she’d been trying to find out whose she did have, but Kevin had refused to discuss it, and Abby had been too frail to be pestered. So the issue had floated. Abby had been her mother in every sense that mattered. With her death Chelsea felt a sense of loss, a sense of coming unhinged, of losing one’s anchor.

  Abby had loved her. Physical limitations notwithstanding, she had doted on her to the point of near suffocation. Many a time Chelsea had wanted to tell her to buzz off. But Abby was too kind for that, and Chelsea wouldn’t have hurt her for the world. She had fallen into a good thing when she’d been adopted. The Kane house was a haven. Love made it a secure, happy place.

  Nonetheless she had been curious. She had wanted to know why she had been adopted, why Abby couldn’t have babies of her own, how she had been picked. She wanted to know where she had been born, who her birth parents were, and why they had given her up.

  Abby had explained, with a gentle care that Chelsea remembered even so many years after the fact, that her paralysis had made having children impossible for her, but that she and Kevin had badly wanted a child at the same time that a baby girl badly needed a home. The adoption had been private and closed. Abby claimed to know nothing, and Kevin agreed. “You’re a Kane,” he insisted even when Chelsea was at her most outlandish. “It doesn’t matter where you come from, as long as you know who you are now.”

  Chelsea drew herself up before the gilt-edged mirror that hung over the console in the hall. She was as tall and slender as any of the Mahlers and as finely dressed, but that was where the similarities ended. She had green eyes to their blue, and her long hair was auburn, with the natural wave that the Mahler women envied only when waves were in style. Thanks to a motorcycle accident when she was seventeen that had resulted in a broken nose and subsequent surgery, Chelsea’s previously turned-up nose was small and straight. Likewise, thanks to a dental appliance that she had worn as a preteen, the chin that would have otherwise receded had been coaxed into perfect alignment with the rest of her features.

  She was an attractive woman. To deny it would have been an exercise in false modesty, and Chelsea was too forthright for that. She had come a long way from the unruly waist-length hair, kohl-lined eyes, and ragtag flower child look she had espoused as a teenager. Abby had been proud of the woman she’d become.

  Now Abby was gone, and her family was in the library bickering over a set of jewels. Chelsea was sickened. Had it not been for Kevin, she would have walked out of the house. But she didn’t want to leave him alone. He was crushed. After anticipating Abby’s death for so many years, he was finding the actuality of it hard to accept. Chelsea could fault him for thickheadedness on the matter of her adoption, but not for his absolute and unqualified love for Abby.

  The library door opened to Elizabeth and Anne. “We’ll fight, you know,” Elizabeth warned Chelsea as she strode past.

  Anne pulled their furs from the closet. “The ring should remain in the family.”

  Without another word—not the slightest gesture of consolation, encouragement, or farewell—they left.

  The front door had barely shut when Malcolm and Michael emerged from the library.

  Chelsea handed them their coats.

  Silently they put them on. Malcolm was fitting his hat to his head when he said, “You made out quite well, Chelsea.”

  She stood away with her hands by her sides. “I’m afraid I wasn’t paying attention to the details.” They didn’t interest her now any more than they had then.

  “You should have. Abigail has made you a wealthy woman.”

  “I was a wealthy woman before she died.”

  “Thanks to the Mahlers.” This came from Michael, who pursed his lips at the black driving gloves he was pushing on finger by finger. “Elizabeth and Anne are upset, and frankly I don’t blame them. They have a point. That ring is worth a lot of money. You don’t need the money, and you don’t need the ring. It can’t have anywhere near the sentimental value for you that it has for us.” He raised his Mahler-blue eyes to hers. “If you’re half the woman Abby always claimed you were, you’ll give us the ring. It’s the right thing to do.”

  Chelsea was thrown back in time to the parties her mother had given that the Mahlers had attended. Chelsea’s friends had been impressed. They saw the Mahlers as jet-setters who hobnobbed with princes and dukes in the glitter capitals of the world and who spoke the Queen’s English with flair. But Chelsea had never been charmed, then or now, by civilized speech expressing uncivilized thoughts.

  She wanted to feel resentment or defiance but didn’t have the strength. As with her inheritance, she had little taste for adversity in the shadow of Abby’s death. “I can’t think about this, I really can’t,” she said.

  “If it’s a matter of having the ring appraised,” Malcolm suggested, “that’s already been done. Graham has the papers.”

  “It’s a matter of mourning. I need time.”

  “Don’t take too much. The girls will likely go to court if you don’t give up the ring on your own.”

  With an upraised hand, Chelsea murmured, “Not now,” and took off for the kitchen. She was leaning against the center island beneath a tiara of copper pans when Graham burst through the door.

  “Ahh, Chelsea,” he breathed, “I was worried you’d left.”

  Chelsea liked Graham. A contemporary of her parents, he had taken over as Abby’s attorney after his father died. Over the years he had been a quiet constant in her life.

  Tucking her hands under her arms, she sent him a pleading look. “Don’t you start in on me, too, Graham. It was bad enough reading the will while Mother’s still warm in her grave, but to bicker over it is disgusting. They wanted it read, now it’s been
read, but I have no intention of looking at it, thinking about it, or acting on it until I’ve had time to mourn her.” She tossed a hand toward the front of the house. “They’re off to jet home and return to their lives as though nothing has changed, and maybe for them it hasn’t, but it has for me, and it has nothing to do with inheriting whatever I inherited and being worth such-and-such more than I was before. I refuse to define my mother’s life in terms of dollars and cents, so if that’s what you’re here to do, forget it.”

  “It’s not,” Graham said, and drew an envelope from the inner pocket of his suit jacket. “This is for you.”

  Warily she stared at the envelope. It was old and worn. “If that’s an ancient stock certificate, I don’t want it,” she said, though the envelope didn’t look official by any measure. It was small in size, nondescript, and even from where she stood Chelsea could see that there was no return address.

  “Go on,” Graham coaxed, nudging it closer. “Abby wanted you to have it.”

  “Was this listed in her will?”

  “No. It was a private matter, something between her and me, and now you.”

  Curious, Chelsea took the envelope and immediately noted its weight. There was something inside. She shifted it in her hand, then studied the address.

  The ink had smeared what was an awkward scrawl to begin with, yet she made out her mother’s name. She had more trouble deciphering the name beneath that.

  Graham helped out. “It was sent care of my father. That’s his office address. He was the lawyer who represented your parents in the adoption.”

  Chelsea had known that, but Graham’s mentioning it out of the blue was startling. Her heart skipped a beat, then made up for it by starting to race. Her eyes flew to the postmark. It too had faded with age, but its print was more legible than the scrawl beneath it. The date was November 8, 1959, the place “Norwich Notch, New Hampshire?” she read.

  “Nor’ich,” Graham corrected.

  “I was born there?”

  “Yes.”

  She was stunned. Wondering where she’d been born was as much a part of her as celebrating her birthday each March. To have an end suddenly put to the wondering—to ask a question and receive a yes—was overwhelming. Norwich Notch. She held the envelope in her hand as though it were something fragile, afraid to move it, lift it, open it.

  From across the room came Kevin Kane’s somber voice. “What’s that, Graham?”

  Graham’s eyes went from Chelsea’s face to the envelope in silent urging. She swallowed, then turned it over, lifted the flap, and drew out a piece of tissue paper that was as worn as the envelope itself. It looked to have been unfolded and refolded many times. Setting it carefully on the counter, she unfolded it but again. Inside, attached to a threadbare ribbon that had once been red but had long since lost its sheen, was a heavily tarnished silver key. At least, she thought it was a key. Its bow was a miniature French horn with coils ripe for the gripping, but its blade was unserrated, nothing more than a thin tube half the length of her thumb.

  An image flashed through her mind of the metronome that stood on the grand piano in her parents’ living room. That metronome had been her nemesis through years of laborious piano lessons. It was wound by a key with a similarly smooth blade.

  Bewildered, she raised her eyes to Graham’s. “Who sent it?”

  He shrugged and shook his head.

  “Is it a key?”

  “Abby thought so, but she never knew for sure. It arrived when you were five.” For Kevin’s benefit, he added an apologetic, “Since it was addressed to Abby, my father had no choice but to pass it on.”

  Chelsea followed his gaze. “There was no reason why he shouldn’t have,” she said to her father. His frame filled the doorway, stately in spite of his tired eyes and the weight that lay heavy on his shoulders.

  “Oh, yes, there was,” Kevin contended. His feelings on the subject hadn’t changed over the years, not with Chelsea’s reaching adulthood, not now with Abby’s death. “You were ours from the time you were eight hours old. We raised you and loved you. Your mother didn’t want to know where you’d come from. She didn’t have to know it. That information was irrelevant. It still is. Everything that you are today came from us.”

  Chelsea knew that wasn’t true. She had neither the purebred Mahler look nor Kevin Kane’s grooved chin, thin lips, and ruddy complexion, and whereas both the Mahlers and the Kanes were musically inclined, she was tone-deaf.

  But she wasn’t about to argue with Kevin on that score. In the best of times he was threatened by the thought of her going after her birth parents, and these were far from the best of times. He was in pain. So was she, and his distance didn’t help. She couldn’t bear the thought of driving him farther away.

  Nor, though, could she ignore the key. Laying it in the palm of her hand, she ran her thumb over it front and back. “Who sent it?” she asked again.

  “Abby never knew,” Graham said. “She received it exactly as you have it now.”

  Setting down the key, Chelsea flattened out the tissue paper and studied one side, then the other. Likewise she turned the envelope over and back. There was no writing other than what was on the front, no sign of a message. “There had to have been a note.”

  “She said there wasn’t.”

  “She also said she didn’t know where I was born,” Chelsea blurted out, because the realization that Abby had lied to her stung. Even worse was the thought that Kevin knew more. Her eyes found his. “Did you know she had this?”

  Slowly he shook his head. The measuredness of the gesture expressed his anger. “I’d have prevented it if I could have. She had enough to worry about without agonizing over a key.”

  Feeling an overwhelming sadness, Chelsea said, “There wouldn’t have been any agonizing if she’d simply given it to me.”

  “If she’d done that, you’d have run off.”

  “Because of a key? I don’t even know what it’s supposed to unlock!”

  “You’d have found out,” he said gruffly. “That’s your way. When you’re curious about something, you follow it through.” His tone mellowed. “It was one of the things your mother most admired in you. You had the courage that she didn’t.”

  Chelsea was astonished. “She had more courage than any one of us.”

  Kevin remained mellow in memory’s grip. “She didn’t see it that way. She was bound by her family nearly as much as she was by her leg braces, while you broke free. You did the things she might have liked to have done. You looked for challenges and met every one. She loved the flower child you were, just as much as she loved the club swimming champ.” His mouth went flat, his tone hard. “Anyway, that’s why she must have agonized over that key. She knew that you’d have taken that curiosity of yours and run off in search of elusive parents who didn’t want you in the first place.”

  “Unfair,” Chelsea whispered, feeling a knot in her throat. She ached for Kevin, who was afraid that two others would usurp his and Abby’s places in her heart. But she ached for herself, too, because the last thing she wanted to believe was that she was alive simply because abortion had been illegal at the time of her conception.

  Turning the key in her hand, she said softly, “I wouldn’t have run anywhere. I certainly wouldn’t have hurt you and Mom. You’re my parents. That’ll never change.” She so wanted him to understand. “It’s just that I’ve always wanted to know about the other.” It was a deeply emotional subject for her. She doubted anyone but another adoptee would understand the sense of rejection that came with having been given away at birth, the isolation she felt at family gatherings, the incompletion that nagged and nagged.

  But this wasn’t the time to piggyback one emotional subject on another. With care, she set the key in the middle of the tissue and folded the paper as Abby had apparently done so many times. She returned the small package to its envelope and slipped the envelope into the pocket of her silk dress.

  Raising her head, she said to Ke
vin, “You’re right. It’s not important now.” As though to show him that Abby did indeed live on through her, she turned to Graham with much the same poise that her mother would have shown in equally trying times and said, “Cook makes an incredible potted chicken. You’ll join us for dinner, won’t you?”

  KEVIN KNEW CHELSEA WELL. SHE WAS INDEED A DOER. WHEN her college grade point-average had been lacking, she’d won acceptance as a graduate student at Princeton by literally planting herself and an impressive portfolio in the offices of the Department of Architecture. When she’d decided that she wanted her first apartment to be something loftlike in ways that nothing in Baltimore was at that time, she had presented a schematic design to one of the city’s hot real estate developers, with promise of free working drawings to follow if he would buy the building she had in mind and take on the project. When she’d found herself with two partners in a brand-new architectural firm, she’d designed a striking logo and sent handwritten letters to every prospective client she could find in her personal address book. Given that she’d grown up with frequent exposure to her mother’s family contacts and her father’s professional ones, that address book was expansive.

  Her challenge now was the tarnished silver key. She tried to ignore it at first. It was a wedge between Kevin and her at a time when she could least afford one. But the key wouldn’t be ignored, seeming to blare its silent presence from wherever she chose to hide it.

  Likewise, the name Norwich Notch came to have a familiar ring. She wondered whether some mystical force inside her was connecting with her birthplace or whether she had simply said the name so many times now that it rolled easily through her thoughts. An atlas at the library told her that the town was in the southwestern corner of New Hampshire and had a population of eleven hundred. But she found no mention of it in other books through which she browsed.

  She did find reference to it in the phone book for the Keene-Peterborough area. Among other listings were the Norwich Notch Town Clerk, the Norwich Notch Congregational Church, and the Norwich Notch Community Hospital, any of which might have information on her birth. So her reading told her, and she had read almost every major article on adoption published in recent years. She knew about searches. They were done all the time in the enlightened nineties. Social workers leaned increasingly toward shared information between birth parents and adoptees. Open adoptions were in vogue.