Relative Strangers

by Paula Garner

  “Want coffee?” she asked.

  “No thanks.” Her coffee tasted like weak tea compared to the coffee at Laroche’s, which could put hair on your chest.

  I poured some grapefruit juice and sat at the table, confused about her suddenly going to AA. “Is everything okay?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said carefully, as if unsure why I was asking.

  I mulled over how to approach her about what I’d found, desperate for answers but also nervous to confess about my snooping. I stared at the table and scratched at a jaundiced bit of Scotch tape that had been there forever. Our kitchen table was a relic from the 1950s — the owner had left it behind, and I didn’t blame him. White-and-gray Formica with a chrome lip, it came with four metal-and-vinyl chairs, two of which had splits in the vinyl patched with duct tape. I thought it was awful, the whole thing, but my mom thought it was a score — because it was vintage, she said, but I suspected it had more to do with its being free. I had some pretty fierce vintage sensibilities, but they were almost entirely prewar, not post-.

  “So what are you doing today?” she asked. As the coffee maker began to gurgle and hiss, she pulled a Chinese food container out of the fridge. She opened it, sniffed it, and then started eating out of it with a fork. Mu shu pork. Little did she know I had eaten all the black mushrooms out of it.

  I picked the bit of chipped tape off with my fingernail. “I have to work at four. I might go to Laroche’s first — say hi to Eli, maybe do some homework . . .”

  I was about to segue into the yearbook photo thing when a look of annoyance crossed her face. “How much money do you spend at that place?”

  “Not that much,” I said defensively. “I just usually have coffee, and the refills are free.” There were an awful lot of chocolate croissants omitted from that account, but since I didn’t pay for many of them, it made for some slippery math.

  “Are you going to be home tonight?” She tossed the rest of the mu shu in the garbage and poured coffee into her favorite mug. no soup for you, it read, with a picture of a mustached guy on it.

  She headed toward her studio with her coffee, so I followed. “I don’t know,” I said. “I work until eight. Not sure about after that.”

  “Okay, well . . . Let me know.” She set down her mug and picked up her palette. Translation: Get lost. She jabbed the brush into a blob of periwinkle. She was going to wreck the sky — there was no stopping her.

  “Mom?”

  “Yeah?”

  I stood in the doorway, chewing on my lip. “Is everything really okay? I mean . . . you don’t usually go to AA meetings. Right?”

  She hesitated. “No, not very often.”

  “You didn’t . . .”

  She turned to me and met my eyes. “No. I just thought it was a good time for a check-in.”

  That sounded reassuring, and yet . . . if she never went, why did she need a check-in now? “I don’t understand it, how it even helps you. Don’t you have to believe in a higher power and all that?”

  “That is sort of a flaw,” she said, giving me a wry smile. “I’m not a model AA-er. That’s one of the reasons I’m not great about going.”

  As much as I sometimes envied the Wassermans’ Jewish festivals and rituals (and had been flat-out awed by Gab’s bat mitzvah, where it was like she was speaking in tongues and owning the entire giant synagogue), and as much as the Hathaways’ decorations and traditions at Christmas tugged at my heart in a way I couldn’t quite explain, I kind of admired my mother’s unambivalent atheism. “Well,” I said. “I want to talk about the baby picture thing.”

  Her demeanor changed on a dime. “Okay, but not now.” She turned toward her painting.

  “Yes, now,” I said, turning her to face me. “I found the pictures.”

  She stared at me uncomprehendingly, and I lowered my eyes, crossing my arms in front of me. “The ones in your closet. I snooped, okay? I’m sorry.”

  “What?” Her voice was sharper than I expected.

  “I gave up on you,” I said, my tone more defensive than I intended. “The deadline has passed. I’m on the yearbook staff, Mom. I asked you over and over. So, yes. I went looking. And I found your box.”

  She seemed to pale. “What box?”

  “With the pictures. And the paperwork.”

  She lowered her eyes, and I waited tensely to see what she’d do. After what seemed like eons, she said, “Okay, then.” She took a deep breath, then pushed past me and headed down the hall.

  I followed her into her bedroom, where she went straight for the closet and pulled out the box. She set it down on her neatly made bed and then sat beside it, glancing up at me. “I don’t know how to tell you this.”

  I sat down gingerly, suddenly feeling shaky.

  She stared into her lap. “There are some things I’ve never told you. Because they were hard for me. And because for a long time, I didn’t think it mattered.”

  A chill ran through me. She’d never said anything like that to me, ever.

  “You know I haven’t had a drink in a long time,” she said, glancing up at me over the box.

  I nodded. “Since before I was born.”

  She looked away. “Not exactly. I went through a rough patch after you were born. It was the hardest time of my life, Jules. I relapsed.”

  My heart hammered inside me. “What happened?”

  Her eyes stayed trained to a spot on the floor. “I just . . . I needed help for a while. And I needed help taking care of you.”

  “What . . . what kind of help?” I clutched my arms to myself, suddenly cold. “Who took care of me? Was it the boy in the pictures?”

  She turned to me suddenly. “What?”

  “The boy who was there when I was born. Who was he?”

  She turned away. “He was a friend. He was . . . my best friend.”

  “Well, is he the one who took care of me?”

  After a pause, she said, “No.”

  “So who did?”

  “A family,” she said without looking up.

  A family? It was such a simple phrase, but I couldn’t wrap my mind around what she was saying. “Who?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know their name. It was . . . it was foster care.”

  I sat, stunned. Foster care? I was in actual foster care? I recalled the DCF paperwork and the gap in photos. What in the world had happened? “How long?” I finally asked.

  There was a pause before she spoke, her voice so soft it was almost a whisper. “Nineteen months.”

  “Nineteen months?” I stared at her. That whole gap. Yes. The whole time.

  She pulled the flaps back on the box and pulled out the photo album. “Here are the pictures I have of you. But . . .” She slid the envelope out and set it aside. “I also have a handful of photos from the agency. From the foster family.”

  The words “foster family” echoed in my head as she rummaged through the box and pulled out a small, weathered envelope from the bottom. She glanced nervously at me, then held it out. I accepted it with trembling hands.

  Baby pictures. Ones I’d never seen before. They were labeled in a neat slanted penmanship. Jules at four months. Jules at five months. One for each month. By six months I was smiling. And each month thereafter. When I lifted away the eleven-month photo to see the next one, something tightened in my chest. Jules’s 1st birthday!!!!!

  “You weren’t there for my first birthday?” I asked. I didn’t mean to sound accusatory; I was trying to process.

  “No.” She got up to get a tissue from her bedside table. She blew her nose, then took another tissue and wiped her eyes. She was crying? That was a phenomenon I had rarely seen. “I missed it,” she said. “Just that one. I had you back before you were two. And I was okay after that. I’ve been sober all these years. I just . . . I had a hard time for a while. It happens.”

  I turned back to the photos, watching myself grow from a baby into a toddler. Me, standing on my own two feet at thirteen months. Me at f
ourteen months, on a piano bench, in the lap of a little boy. . . . Who? He was skinny and wore rocket ship pajamas. But his face was blocked out in the photo.

  “Who is this?” I asked her.

  She sank down next to me on the bed. “They had a son. They can’t include images of the foster family for legal reasons, so . . .”

  My mind reeled. “You mean, I had a brother?”

  Her brow furrowed. “Well, not really. I mean, sort of, temporarily. I guess.”

  I flipped the last picture to the back and looked at the four-month picture again.

  Mom turned away. “I can’t —” Her voice broke. “I can’t look at that one.”

  I could see why. I looked scared to death, my lower lip curved into a pout that suggested I might cry. And I almost cried now, looking at it, except it was surreal. Trying to bridge the gap in my head between the baby in the picture and myself. . . . That was me, feeling that way — feeling whatever that baby was feeling. How traumatic must that have been? Being taken away from my mother and handed over to strangers?

  “I probably should have told you.” She sighed and wiped her nose again. “I just never knew when to do it. Or how.”

  I stared at the photo in my hands, thinking I should feel something, but too struck dumb to know what it was. Anger? I had a feeling that might be coming, but I was sort of stuck spinning in place. “Why is my scarf in there?” I asked. “You never keep anything.”

  She lifted it out and held it both hands. “It was from them. They wanted you to have it.”

  I stared at it. “It was from them? I wore that scarf for years! You never told me?”

  She looked at me like the question was unreasonable. “How could I?”

  I snatched it away from her. “What else have you been keeping from me?”

  She looked as though I’d slapped her, but then she gestured at the box. “This is everything.”

  I stuck the photos, the envelope, the album, and the scarf inside the box and stormed out, slamming her door behind me.

  Morty and I worked at opposite ends of the stainless steel prep table, lost in our own tasks and thoughts, not that we could talk over the racket of the meat slicer. Today’s special was the Gobbler, which meant Morty would be slicing pounds upon pounds of turkey, and I would be opening cans of cranberry jelly and washing more than the usual amount of iceberg lettuce. Despite the lavish schmear of Miracle Whip (which lacked anything even remotely resembling a miracle), I found the sandwich to be a total snore. But somehow it sold like crazy. My idea of a turkey sandwich worth eating would involve some runny, stinky cheese, or maybe a spicy sauce. Buffalo-style turkey sandwich, maybe — with blue cheese and chopped celery and a buttery hot sauce. Something. But I had learned long ago that my suggestions were of little interest to Morty. And maybe that was reasonable — twenty years of an unchanging menu, and business was as good as ever.

  The relative solitude of our routines did at least give me space to think. Trying to comprehend having had a foster family (for more than five hundred days!) was, it turned out, a slow and consuming exercise. The last twenty-four hours had seemed like a year, so what would five hundred of those be like? Five hundred days of knowing people, of trusting them, of being fed and held. Five hundred days during which I’d cut my first teeth, learned to walk, probably uttered my first words. I was overcome with a need not just to know who they were, but to say thank you. Thank you for caring for me, thank you for making it possible for me to survive when I was completely helpless, thank you for saving my life. Wasn’t that just good manners?

  And what the hell had happened to cost my mom her sobriety? With a baby depending on her!

  The phone jangled. I wiped my hands off and walked over to the tiny front room and picked up the wall phone — old school, complete with spiral cord, straight out of nineteen-whatever. “Kold Kutz, can I help you?”

  I took the order — four Gobblers and one Horsey Moo (roast beef with horseradish sauce and sharp cheddar). I went back and called the order to Morty, who nodded without comment. The man used words as if they were priced by the unit.

  I put on plastic gloves, applied the condiments to the rolls, and slid them over to him for the meats and cheese.

  Before things got busy, Morty asked me the usual question: “What can I get you?”

  “Um, could I have the Mount Etna?” I don’t know why I always answered in a question. A meal was part of my meager compensation package, but I still felt like I was asking a favor, especially when I asked for a combination not on the menu (possibly insulting) or a hot sandwich (extra work). I wondered how having been tossed around by the currents of an unstable early life might have affected me. Subconsciously, did I feel like an imposition, unentitled to what others took for granted?

  He nodded wordlessly and set to work. I would have been happy to make it myself — preferred it, even — but sometimes he had to slice something, and I wouldn’t touch that horror movie meat slicer with a ten-foot pole. I’d probably lose a limb. Anyway, it was established from the start that Morty made my sandwich, and, like everything else at Kold Kutz, it didn’t seem subject to negotiation. Fortunately, the Mount Etna, the most flavorful thing on the menu, was pretty good as is: salty cured Italian meats, pizza sauce, melted provolone, and spicy giardiniera.

  The rush started not long after I finished eating my sandwich. I barely had time to think about my mother, about my days as a foster child, about anything, really, until close to eight, when things slowed down and we could clean up for closing. I vacuumed up the front room with the archaic carpet sweeper that picked up exactly nothing, but it was part of the job description, so I went through the motions.

  When Morty gave me my paycheck, I thanked him profusely as I always did, as if he were doing me some extravagant favor by paying me for my labor. I pulled my coat on and wrapped myself in my reclaimed blue scarf, still stunned to think it came from my foster family. My foster family. The term seemed ludicrous, something made-up. Where were they now? Did they ever think of me? Was I just one in a long stream of foster children? And what about the boy? He looked a lot older than I was. If he was even a few years older — about five or six years old at the time I left — he might remember me.

  The thought nearly laid me flat. What if he still thought of me?

  The fresh night air was a welcome reprieve from the meaty smells of Morty’s. A fine silvery mist swirled in the columns of streetlamp light. I pulled my coat tighter around me as I headed past Laroche’s, which was now closed, past the familiar landscape of Maplebrook, the only place in my life I could remember. It boggled my mind that I’d once lived somewhere else — in a whole other town, with a whole other family. I racked my brain for memories of those early months, which of course was ridiculous. All I came up with were a few rogue snippets of the apartment we had lived in before this house — an old building in Chicago with high ceilings and peeling paint. I remembered the radiators, dangerously hot to the touch in winter, and the odd southwestern cactus and cowboy tiles on the kitchen backsplash. I remembered a neighbor — an old Polish lady named Mrs. Borski — who sometimes brought over tiny nut cookies or soft little parcels of meat-and rice-stuffed cabbage in a sweet and tart tomato sauce.

  I wondered what memories were swimming in the soup of my head from just a couple years before that, and if they were, at this point, too far lost ever to recover.

  As I walked, I played with the tassels of my scarf, fine silver threads sparkling among the blue in the light of the streetlamps. Above the knots of the tassels, the name of the designer, Luke Margolis, was neatly stitched. I was so happy to have the scarf back — and amazed my mother hadn’t gotten rid of it. It occurred to me to wonder why she’d stashed it in her box of secrets. Why not let me keep wearing it, or throw it away if she’d gotten sick of seeing it? But I’d never had much luck making sense of her secrets and motivations, and this was no different.

  At home, I zoomed past her studio without pausing. Nothing said “
Do Not Disturb” like Stravinsky blaring from behind her closed door, and at the moment that suited me fine. I shut myself in my room, pulled off my clothes, which were spattered with mustard and oil, and put on sweats.

  I settled on my bed with my precious box in front of me. I wished I had someone to talk to, now that I felt ready to confront my past head-on. But Gab and Leila were in the city at a Bulls game, and Eli would probably cringe and eye the exit doors if I reached out to him in my time of emotional need.

  How strange to think that none of them knew I had been a foster child yet. What would Leila think of that? Leila, who spent her first three years in an orphanage? For about half the time she was cared for by strangers, so was I. She and I shared something that Gab was not in on. The thought was a guilty tantalization. I treasured my friendship with Gab and Leila more than anything, but I was not above sometimes wishing they knew what it was like to be the one looking in from the outside. Especially Gab, whose brash self-assurance I sometimes resented.

  But my friendship with both of them was more important than that. I needed their support. I needed Leila’s compassion and Gab’s knowledge and lack of judgment. I was at once desperate to tell them and also feeling a need to sit and process. And it didn’t feel like the kind of news I wanted to text — especially when they were in the racket and pandemonium of United Center during a Bulls-Cavs game.

  I pulled out the photos that documented my lost nineteen months, wondering if the family had taken more, if somewhere in the world there were dozens more photos of me that a family had held on to. I couldn’t let go of the idea, the hope, that they still thought of me. I remembered my mother’s words, her reasoning for not telling me — I didn’t think it mattered — and something twisted inside me.

  I turned to a photo of me sitting on a bed with a blue comforter. I was holding a toy car in my chubby fingers, and there was someone else there, too — a knee and elbow were visible in the shot. Was it the little boy? I squinted at the photo, wishing I could see more, find some clue about the family’s identity. There were some things on a display shelf behind us, but I couldn’t make them out. They were too small.