by Lisa Wingate
I wondered if Angelo had ever stood in a courthouse waiting for some stranger to give him information about himself, or if his daddy told him everything he needed to know about Mama and me, or if he even knew I existed.
The phone rang, and Lana came out of the back room. She grabbed the receiver and answered, then said, “Could you hang on a minute?” Still cradling the phone on her shoulder, she stretched the cord as far as it would go and slid my driver’s license and orchestra ID card back to me. “These are both expired.” The words were punctuated with an irritated sneer.
“I’m sorry.” Turning the driver’s license around, I looked at the renewal date—my birthday, two months ago. I’d never even thought about it, since I had no car to drive in Ukraine. “I’ve been out of the country. It didn’t occur to me that my license might be out of date.”
Lana’s expression said, Yeah, sure. Go tell someone else your sad story. “I can’t take out-of-date IDs. Have a nice day.”
She turned her attention back to the phone. “Sorry about that. Yes, sir. I’ll be happy to get that file. I’ll walk it up there myself. You know I’d do just about anything for you, Mr. Riker, I just…”
She continued buttering up the caller, talking about how much she loved her new job and how hard she was working to get the office back in order. The words seemed to drift farther and farther away as all the expectation drained out of me, and a pulse pounded in the empty shell.
You should have come prepared. This isn’t something you do on the spur of the moment, part of me said. Take Shasta’s baby seat back to her and go home. This trip was a mistake.
Don’t just lie down and take it, another voice insisted . Tell her this is ridiculous. The driver’s license is obviously yours, even if it is expired.
I leaned over the counter as she finished her phone call. My hand caught her arm, seeming to have a will of its own. “I’m sorry the license is expired, but I need my birth information. I drove a long way to get here.”
Lana gaped at my hand, a tight, determined circle around her wrist, just above her turquoise-and-silver watch. Blinking slowly, she glared at me, her eyes cool and lifeless, as if they’d been put there by an artist who ran out of warm colors.
Overhead, the vent clicked on, puffing out mildewed air.
April halted what she was doing and glanced sideways, her pen frozen in midair. Even the little boy in the chair stopped moving.
The moment seemed to slow down, to freeze us there in a tiny diorama.
“Birth records are confidential,” Lana bit out each word individually. “We’re not the genealogy society here. We do not help people find lost loves, lost parents, lost siblings, lost ancestors, get CDIB cards or apply for benefits from the tribe, or whatever else it is you’re looking for. So why don’t you pick up your little issues and go back wherever it is you came from? I can’t give you anything without a valid ID. Period.” The phone rang again, and she yanked her arm away, grabbing the receiver. “County Courthouse…” She turned her shoulder and moved to the other side of the desk.
April leaned close to me. “You might try the library. They have a local-interest area with genealogy information and family histories in it. Or the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Muskogee, or the tribe building in Durant, or the Indian schools. I did research in all of those places when I was trying to get Micah a roll number.” She nodded toward her little boy.
I tried to imagine Micah being part Choctaw, with his blue eyes and blond hair.
“It’s easier if you start with yourself and work backward,” his mother added.
I can’t start with myself and work backward, I thought. The only copy of my birth certificate is somewhere back home, buried among James’s private papers in his safe-deposit box.
“Oh, hon, it’s okay.” April reached across the counter, snatched a tissue from the Kleenex box, and held it out to me, muttering, “Ignore Lana. She’s just hateful.”
Suddenly, all of it was too much—the sympathy, the moldy air, the fact that my birth records were a few feet away, yet I couldn’t have them.
I spun around and ran from the room, then dashed across the hall to the restroom. I turned on the faucet, and stood with my hands braced on the counter, watching water go down the drain.
This isn’t the end of the world, I told myself. Let it go for now. Go home. Be glad you have a family who loves you.
A grateful heart makes a happy life, Grandma Rose whispered in my head.
Closing my eyes, I pictured her there with me. I could feel her stroking my hair, patting my back, protecting me the way she had after she moved from this world into the next. I was never afraid, because I always knew she was there watching over me. She wanted me to be happy. She wanted me to be whole. Why couldn’t I be? Why couldn’t I find the place where I felt okay, where I felt normal?
Listening as the water ran down the drain, I pleaded silently, Take away this empty space. Make me stronger. Take away this need.
Please…
Grandma Rose’s hand was warm on my shoulder, rubbing a slow circle. I opened my eyes, and, in the mirror, Jamie was standing beside me. I hadn’t heard her come in.
“Here.” Handing me a manila envelope, she pressed a finger to her lips, winked, and added, “Ssshhh. You never saw me here. Tell Shasta she owes me.” Then she turned and disappeared out the door.
I wiped my face on my sleeve, tore open the envelope, and slipped my fingers inside with a mixture of fear and anticipation. My hand trembled as I pulled out a printed copy of my birth certificate. Stapled to the back was another piece of paper—a form my mother had filled out when I was born. There at the bottom, I saw for the first time my father’s signature.
Thomas Clay. I traced the letters with my finger, and suddenly he became real to me. A man who was there the day I came into the world. He’d signed this paper. I tried to picture the scene, tried to feel him through the reproduced ink, to sense who he was through the curvature of the writing, the shapes of the letters, the forward slant of the words.
The handwriting on the space marked INFANT’S NAME was his. Dell Jordan Clay. Was he the one who had chosen my name? Was he the one who’d decided to include my mother’s last name as my middle name? All my life, I’d been Dell Jordan. Sometime before enrolling me in school, Mama and Granny had dropped Clay. I’d never even known the name was on my birth certificate until social services got involved with my adoption.
Now, here it was in my father’s handwriting. Dell Jordan Clay.
My father had beautiful handwriting, the letters large and curved, as if he’d written the name carefully, so it would be beautiful in the future.
Did he think I was beautiful? Was he looking at me when he wrote those words? Was I lying nearby, cuddled in a fuzzy pink blanket, blinking against the bright hospital lights, taking my first glimpses of the world, trying to understand, to bring things into focus? Was Mama leaning over me like a Mary on a Christmas card, her eyes filled with rapture, with love and amazement?
In spite of everything, I wanted to know. I needed to know. I wanted some proof that, even for just a few moments at my birth, there had existed the scene I’d dreamed of all my life, the one every child’s heart yearns for—my mother, my father, and me, nestled in a moment of tender embrace.
Tracing the writing with my fingertip, his writing, I could almost make the dream become concrete—a moment that existed briefly, then flew away. A memory from a time I was too young to remember.
CHAPTER 16
I stood for a long while reading the form, imagining the day it was created, the day I was born. On the top corner of the printout, Jamie had written in red ink, Thomas Clay, born 9-17-61, son of Nora and Audie Clay, town of residence Antlers, OK. The words were in a careful, blocky print, with circles over the i’s. A period with a little smiley face punctuated the end of the sentence.
I wanted to run across the hall, grab Jamie and give her a hug, but instead I peeked carefully out the door before leaving th
e restroom. Across the hall, Jamie was at the counter, enjoying whatever was in the foam take-out container. She waved covertly as I exited the restroom. I waved back, mouthing Thank you, then hurried to the door like a thief committing grand larceny. Bursting onto the front sidewalk, I caught a breath of fresh air, finally free of the courthouse smells and the memories attached to them.
The garden club ladies had abandoned their flower bed in progress, probably in favor of having lunch at the café. Micah and his mother were squatted down next to one of the remaining flats of pansies, examining a caterpillar. She was explaining that it would spin a cocoon and stay inside for a long time, becoming a butterfly. I asked her how to get to the library, and she directed me a few blocks down the road.
“Good luck,” she said as I headed to my car.
“Thanks.” I could feel her watching me as I drove away. Checking the car clock, I realized it was later than I’d thought, already almost eleven. I’d have to hurry to be back in Tuskahoma in time to meet Jace. Unfortunately, I didn’t know where to begin, or what exactly to look for at the library. When I walked in, the room was empty, and the librarian was busy eating a baked potato at her desk. “Sorry,” she mumbled, shielding her mouth with her hand as she finished a bite. “Let me know if I can help you with anything.”
“I’m doing some genealogy research.” I held up the envelope from the courthouse, then realized that it might not be wise to show her the unofficial copies of the birth records with Jamie’s handwriting on them. “Could you point me in the right direction?”
“Sure.” She dabbed her lips with a napkin and took a drink of her tea, then motioned toward the corner of the room. “Our genealogy section is over there. Our materials go way back into the eighteen hundreds. We even have the Dawes Commission Index to the Final Rolls on CD.” Her brows lifted. “You from the Indian school? I get a lot of kids from the Indian schools, doing senior research papers.”
“No, ma’am.” I shook my head, reminded again that in this part of the world my looks put me in a certain category. Member of the tribe. “What if you’re looking for more recent people?”
She paused to consider the question, a new interest dawning in her face. “Let me help you, and we’ll see what we can turn up.” She pushed lunch aside and grabbed a pad and pen. “Who all are you trying to find and when were they born?”
“Thomas Clay.”
She jotted it on her notepad. “Middle name?”
“None, I guess.”
“And when was he born?”
Peeking into the envelope, I read aloud the birth date from the corner of the form. The librarian leaned over to see, and I closed the envelope again. “His parents were Nora and Audie Clay.” My grandparents. It seemed strange to be sharing information so personal, so new and fragile. “I’d like to find them, too, if it’s possible.” The librarian gave me a perceptive look, and I quickly added, “To find out about them, I mean. I’d like to find out about them.”
She nodded slowly, as if she were putting together the puzzle pieces in her mind. “Let’s see if they’re in the phone book.” Pulling a local directory from under her desk, she licked her fingers and thumbed through the pages. “Hmmm. There’s nothing listed. Those names don’t ring a bell, but I’ve only lived here five years. I came to take care of my sister, Sarah, and I stayed after she died. If Sarah were here, she could have told you right off if those people ever lived in Antlers. She taught Sunday school at the Methodist church and kindergarten at Antlers Elementary, and her husband owned the feed store, so anybody who ever came through this town, she knew.” After glancing at her notes, she slipped from behind the desk and walked to the corner of the room, motioning for me to follow. “Let’s see…take the birth date and add eighteen years, you get high school graduation, more or less.” Leading me to a dusty archival area filled with shelves of newspaper catalogs, she stopped and ran her finger along the spines of an enormous collection of high school yearbooks. “Seventy-eight, seventy-nine, eighty maybe.” She pulled several books off the shelf and set them on the table, sending a fine coating of dust drifting into the window light. “Look through these. See if you can find anything. Sometimes they put address lists in the back, so if he’s in there, you might even find out where he lived. That could be helpful. A lot of these old Choctaw families don’t move much. Many of them still own the land that was given to them in allotments back in the eighteen hundreds when they came here. There’s some rigmarole involved in selling Indian-owned parcels, so oftentimes it stays in the families.”
I sat down at a table with the yearbooks and began leafing through the pages, surveying pictures of football players, FFA kids with show animals, student council members smiling for the camera, kids showing off at school dances and parties. I wondered if one of them could be my father, his image frozen in time.
“Try the indexes in the back,” the librarian suggested. “It’ll be faster.”
She didn’t know that I was stalling, looking at each face, thinking, Could this be my father? Could this be my father? I imagined each possibility—my father, football captain. My father, FFA president. My father, a boy dressed up as Pocahontas’s dad for the school play. My father, funny kid sticking his tongue out at the camera….
The librarian glanced over her shoulder, and I flipped to the index. It was faster, but also more quickly devastating. After several indexes, it was clear that Thomas Clay had not graduated from high school in Antlers, which probably meant that my grandparents had moved away at some point.
“Here, I have a few books for Rattan and Soper and Hugo, plus some of the Indian schools.” The librarian set another stack in front of me. “Try these.”
She continued at the shelf, while I checked the yearbooks, one by one. As Shasta had told me, there were plenty of Clays, but no Thomas Clay.
Thirty minutes later, the librarian was out of ideas, and I needed to leave.
“I’m sorry,” she said as we returned to the desk. “You could come back and look through old newspapers. Sometimes a kid’s name will be mentioned in a parade photo, because they got an award in Cub Scouts, or something like that.” Drumming her fingernails on the desk, she took a drink of tea, then set the glass next to her now-cold potato. “Are you sure he lived around here?”
“He was born in Antlers.” If this area wasn’t his home, why would he have brought my mother here?
“Huh…,” the librarian muttered, slipping into her chair and stirring up the potato.
“Sorry your lunch got cold.”
“Oh, no problem.” She smiled at me. “I love a good mystery. I just wish we could have found some answers for you.”
“It’s all right,” I said glumly, but it wasn’t all right.
My hopes plummeted as I left town and headed toward Tuskahoma. The scenery no longer seemed interesting. My mind had stopped painting pictures of my father’s childhood.
I didn’t see the police car in my rearview mirror until the siren blared.
My pulse fluttered and I glanced down at the speedometer. Seventy-six. Way over the speed limit. I pulled over and I rolled down the window, then let my head fall into my hand, waiting for the officer to come to my car. By the time he finally did, tears were prickling in the bridge of my nose, and I was squeezing it hard, like the Dutch boy trying to hold up the dam.
Now, on top of having a secret trip to explain away, I was going to have a secret speeding ticket to pay. The lies just kept getting bigger and bigger, and it was all for nothing. I wanted to forget this place existed, to form a reality in which I was born the day James and Karen adopted me. Dell Sommerfield. Period. End of story.
“License and proof of insurance, please.”
My face reflected in the officer’s sunglasses as I handed him my license. He was young, red-haired and freckle-faced, his mouth set in a stern line. He didn’t look much older than me.
Just as the license was leaving my hand, I remembered that it was expired.
Please don
’t let him notice. Please, please, please.
“Kansas,” he observed, jotting information on his ticket pad. “On vacation?”
“Sort of,” I replied, afraid to move. Please, oh please, don’t let him notice the date.
“Here for the Choctaw festival?” The attempt at chitchat made me feel better, despite the fact that he was writing me a ticket.
“Yes.”
“Staying somewhere nearby?”
Maybe if I kept him talking, he wouldn’t notice the date on the license. “Out at the lake…with family. Family reunion. The Reids.” Maybe he knew the Reids and would take pity on me.
“Don’t know them. I haven’t lived here too long.”
“Oh.” I gripped and ungripped the steering wheel, my hands sweating and a trail of perspiration dripping, hot and itchy, down the small of my back. I wanted to wipe it away, but I was afraid to move.
“You know you were doing seventy-six in a sixty-five?”
Now we were getting down to business. No point denying the fact that I was speeding. Best to be contrite and cooperative. James got stopped for speeding all the time, and usually, because he was such a nice guy, he only got a warning. It didn’t hurt, either, that he was a pilot. For some reason that seemed a passable excuse for speeding. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a good excuse. “No. I’m sorry. I just…my mind was on other things. I wasn’t paying attention. I’m really sorry.”
“Ma’am, this license is way out of date.”
My stomach crashed through the floorboard. What if I ended up with a ticket that would necessitate coming back here to court? What if I ended up in jail, in Oklahoma, where I wasn’t supposed to be?
“I’m sorry. I…I’ve been out of the country for two years, and I just got back last weekend…. I…I didn’t…think about…I just came here to…” Tears sprang into my eyes. The events of the past few days welled up inside me and flowed forth like blood from a mortal wound. The next thing I knew, I was sobbing uncontrollably, blurting out my whole story to a police officer on the side of the road.