Jessica Lost

by Crumpacker/Picariello

  It made her sad to hear that I didn’t have a very happy childhood, and that I didn’t get along well with my mother. Back in 1954, the agency said her baby was going to an engineer and his wife, liberal Democrats, educated people. None of this was true.

  Our talk bounced along easily, for two hours, then three, from movies to theater, cooking, books, travel, children, and husbands. We liked the same films, and the same Broadway musicals, and could quote the same show-tune lyrics.

  We both loved to cook (and eat); we both felt lost without a book. We both thought Kevin Kline was the most talented man in America. We talked about the authors we loved: Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, E. M. Forster, the Brontës. We’d both done a lot of volunteer work in our children’s schools, writing and producing newsletters and brochures. We had the same hazel eyes; the same strange, uncontrollable curl at the same widow’s peak in the middle of our same broad foreheads; the same small, wide feet; the same way of turning our heads and holding our cups and tapping our fingers when we were annoyed or bored. We even had the same strange habit of stroking the water tumbler sitting on the table; we both liked the feel of the damp, chilled glass. She was more like me than anyone I’ve ever met, which was the strangest thing I’d ever encountered.

  “I have something for you,” she said, opening her purse. It looked like a big carpetbag. We don’t have the same taste in purses, I thought.

  She handed me a box. Inside was a beautiful silver bracelet, delicate and antique-looking. “It was my mother’s—your grandmother’s.”

  The bracelet was lovely. I put it on.

  “And this was my wedding ring.” She handed me a small silver ring, chunky, with little connected boxes all round. “Jake and I had the same one. It was meant to signify the joining of two lives.”

  The ring had a ’70s look, like something I would have chosen if Lenny and I hadn’t gotten plain gold bands. I wasn’t sure why she was giving it to me—I had no connection to her and Jake as a couple. I barely had a connection to them as individuals. Was the ring supposed to mark the beginning of me? I said, “Thank you,” and slid it onto my finger.

  She showed me diary pages that she had written almost twenty years earlier, about me: “My first child, my daughter, is twenty-four years old, and I have never seen her. That is not exact. I have not seen her since she was four days old.” The papers talked of what she remembered—a tiny birthmark on my nose, feeding me a bottle. She wrote of the pain it had brought her: “Her absence is a part of my life.” And the fear it left her with for her own children: “When they leave me, I am always, in some way, terrified,” she wrote.

  I had often felt that way about my children. Sometimes Alex walked into the school building, or Damien went to visit a friend, and I was convinced I would never see them again. It was as if they were not real to me unless I could touch them. But I had felt that way about my husband, too: At any point he could walk into a store, a gas station restroom, a hotel lobby, and—poof!—vanish from my life. Not that he would die, but that it would be as if he had never been, a vanishing so complete that people would not believe he’d ever existed. It was more than a fear of abandonment; it was a fear that the people I love do not really exist at all—like the birth mother I never believed in.

  She told me the story again, of how she met Jake, how they married, how it all fell apart. The tale seemed so far away from me, not just in years, but from my life. I had to remind myself that it was my story, about how I came to be. I looked at her speaking and thought: I came from her; she bore me. I grew inside of her! It was completely impossible to believe. I might as well have come from a bottle, like a genie, or sprung from the cabbage patch.

  She said, as Jake had, too, “There are things I can’t tell you yet.” And for the same reason: “I want so badly for you to like me.”

  It bothered me that she was withholding information about me from me.

  Four days later she called and said she wanted to tell me the whole story.

  “Why did you change your mind so soon?” I asked.

  “I’m trying to learn how to be brave.”

  I suggested that we meet for lunch the next day.

  We went to Sarabeth’s again. The walk was easier this time, no collapsible knees or heart palpitations. But I was nervous about what she was planning to tell me. I’d tried and tried to imagine what it could be: Was I a twin? I wasn’t the only child she and Jake had given up for adoption? She and Jake were cousins?

  Like the walk, the lunch was easier, too; this time we actually ate something. She didn’t bring up her secret at first, and I didn’t want to push. We talked about her family’s health history—for the first time in my life I had a medical history!— about motherhood, about our own mothers. But it was clear we were both waiting for something. After she finished her omelet, she said she was going to the bathroom, and then would tell me the story.

  It began in Germany, after she had followed Jake to Stuttgart, after she already knew that their marriage was a mistake. There was a lot of ending and starting over, trying to make it work and then separating.

  “Jake had a friend, a guy named Quint,” she said, the wintry sun outside the window bathing our table in afternoon light. “He was from New York, a terrific fellow, smart, funny, and talented. The three of us were very close.”

  She told me about how Jake went into the hospital with a strange infection and ended up staying there for a month. She was sure he postponed his discharge from the hospital because he didn’t want to return home to her. She felt angry and abandoned. And during the last week Jake was in the hospital, she slept with Quint. Once or twice, she couldn’t remember exactly. Somehow Jake knew about her infidelity. By the time she found out she was pregnant, Quint had left Germany. She almost had an abortion before she and Jake decided to try, once again, to make their misbegotten marriage work. But he insisted that she give the baby up for adoption.

  “At the time I was sure the baby was Quint’s,” she said. But that belief had nothing to do with timing, cycles, or sex. It was based on her feeling that Jake could not be the father because he was not emotionally capable of being a father.

  Jake never believed he was the father of the baby, either, maybe because he agreed with her assessment of his emotional maturity, or maybe because he was so angry at her for sleeping with his friend. But even though he never believed the baby was his, he stayed with her through the pregnancy, went through the counseling sessions at the adoption agency, was there when she gave birth, and for a few more months after I was born. She was even more certain that the baby was Quint’s when I was born with a large freckle on my nose, just like one Quint had—a freckle that has disappeared somewhere over the last forty-two years.

  “Why?” I asked her. “Why would Jake stay with you if he knew you cheated on him, and was sure you were having someone else’s baby?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I think he wanted to be the good guy. He had done some pretty rotten things in the time we were married, and this gave him a chance to redeem himself, I guess, to make himself the hero instead of the heel.”

  “Did you ever see Quint again?” I asked.

  “About a year after you were born, I ran into him at a party. I told him I’d had a baby, and that I thought it was his. He was pretty shocked, understandably.”

  She glanced at me, her eyes shining. “He was a good friend to me at a difficult time in my life. I never blamed him for anything.”

  “And you still think he’s my father?” I asked. I was trying to take it all in, but I no longer believed we were talking about me. This was someone else’s crazy life.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t.”

  I wasn’t surprised. She only slept with Quint once or twice; she lived with Jake. The odds were in his favor. And now that she’d seen me… “You look like Jake’s mother,” she said. “You have her chin, and smile.”

  “But why does Jake want to meet me so badly?” I asked. He was already planning t
o come to New York, and wanted me to clear my schedule so we could spend lots of time together. “Why is he now so convinced that I’m his daughter?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “I think it might be that he can’t bear the idea of being left out of this story. He’s a romantic, and this is a very romantic tale. He wants you to be his baby.”

  We examined the odds. I had Quint’s freckle. But the freckle was gone. I had Jake’s mother’s smile. At least Faith thought I did; I couldn’t see it. I started wearing glasses when I was six. Jake and Faith had perfect vision; Quint wore glasses. I had green eyes and blond hair. Jake was dark, Quint was light. But Faith’s eyes were light; I had her eyes. Jake was creative, a photographer who had done some writing. I loved photography, and I was a writer.

  “What does Quint do for a living?” I asked her. “Do you know?”

  She looked carefully at me, and drew a breath. “Yes. He’s Quint Phillips.”

  I was too stunned to speak. Finally, I sputtered: “The writer? Quint is Quint Phillips?” I thought about the books and movies he’d written, the television shows he’d appeared on, the Oscar nomination.

  She was looking at me anxiously, as if waiting for tears.

  I burst out laughing. “Quint Phillips? That’s ridiculous. I can’t believe it.”

  “It’s true,” she said, confused at my laughter, which was quickly becoming inappropriate. Two weeks ago I had two parents, the same ones I’d had for forty-two years. Then I had three, then four, now five! They were going to love me at the card shop on Mother’s and Father’s Day.

  “Does he have any children?” I asked, still chuckling.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “I’m not in touch with him anymore. I haven’t seen him since that party forty-one years ago.”

  The laughter started to die down.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “I guess so,” I said, wiping my eyes. I liked Jake; our talks on the phone had been wonderful, long and emotional and intense, and I was looking forward to meeting him. I wanted him to be my birth father. And now maybe he wasn’t. I wasn’t angry at her or disappointed in her, but I was disappointed to hear that there was another character in the story—and that maybe Jake wasn’t mine at all.

  That night, I told Lenny the new piece of the puzzle.

  “I’m not sure I want to know the truth,” I said. “Jake wants me to be his; he believes I am his, so maybe I should just leave it at that.”

  “Do you really think you’ll be able to put that out of your mind?” Lenny asked.

  I thought about it. Would I be able to respond to Jake the way I wanted to if that question remained? And what was this whole thing about? My parents were my parents, the people who raised me, for better or worse. Faith and Jake/Quint were something else—I wasn’t sure what. The people who made me? If what they are to me was important, then I needed to know the truth. If the point was to find my birth parents, then I needed to find my birth parents, not the man who was married to my birth mother when she conceived me.

  Faith told me Jake’s wife wanted us to have a DNA test immediately, before we got to the point where we might be too disappointed with the results. If his was the sperm, then fine, journey over. But if it wasn’t, I had to do this again, with another stranger—and a famous one at that. Would I try to contact a man who once or twice slept with a woman he probably doesn’t remember forty-two years ago? There was only so much courage I could summon.

  “I can’t believe it,” I told Maureen the next morning over coffee. I had kept her informed of every step in my search , even though I sensed that she was less and less interested. While she had cheered me on at the beginning (“Your birth mother will welcome you—I know it!”), she seemed uninterested, almost irritated, by what had happened since then. “I can’t believe Jake might not be my birth father.”

  “What did you expect?” she said dismissively.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, stung by her tone.

  “I never believed that story—a nice married couple, even if they’re having problems, don’t just give away their baby. An educated, middle-class, married couple, just handing their baby to a stranger? It doesn’t happen. I always knew there had to be something else.”

  She was right, I suddenly realized. And I thought of a story Faith told me the first or second time we talked, of riding down in the hospital elevator with Jake, holding me in her arms, to go to the agency and give me away. She begged him, pleaded with him to stay with her and keep the baby. He said no. I should have wondered then: Who does that? What man gives away his child, the baby he has made with his wife? I should have wondered, but I just accepted the story I was told—then and now—and didn’t wonder at all. That, in itself, seems strange. Maureen questioned it; I never did. So what else was there that I hadn’t questioned?

  That night Jake called and I told him Faith had spilled the Quint Phillips beans. He was angry.

  “I didn’t want you to know that until I met you,” he said. “I wanted to be the one to tell you. I wanted you to know me a little first.”

  “I do know you,” I said. “I don’t have to meet you to know you.”

  “I know, I know… but… I wanted to feel the connection.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Why is it so important to you?” Was it because, as Faith suspected, he wanted to be part of this drama, this juicy story?

  “I’ve thought a lot about that,” he said. “I think it’s because I behaved so damn badly back then. I want to take responsibility. I want to be the grown-up I couldn’t be then.”

  It made sense to me, all of it: the drama, the responsibility, the stupidity of these young people who made a baby and messed up their lives and didn’t even know who did it. I understood what they did, and even why they did it. In my head it made sense, but in my stomach it was an ache, a pain. They messed up their lives and messed up my life and really, deep down, I didn’t understand it at all.

  I got off the phone and lay down on the bed. All my life, I’d wondered about my identity, wondered why I had so little sense of self, why I felt so unknown, so invisible, even to myself. But now that it seemed I had answers to some of those questions, I felt like I knew even less.

  I started to cry for the first time since the day Jake called after getting my letter. I cried and cried and cried, without thinking at all, flooded with feelings I didn’t even have names for, purging the emotion of the last two weeks, the strangest two weeks of my life.

  25. BUNNY

  GETTING TO

  KNOW JIL

  We know the truth,

  not only by the reason, but also by the heart.

  BLAISE PASCAL

  THOUGHTS

  The almost immediate connection between Jil and me seemed like more than two people liking each other: It was quite mystical, like the immediate connection two strangers sometimes feel, as if they recognize each other from a previous life. It was more than seeing a genetic echo of me in Jil, although that was part of it; and it was more than the healing of a wound, though that was important, too. Far beyond those things, there was the sense of recognition of someone I’d always known, but had lost. “I once was lost and now am found,” a hymn of grace.

  That didn’t change as we began to know each other better; what did change was the feeling of unreality. More and more, knowing Jil felt real.

  But now I needed to tell Jil about Quint. I was frightened that I’d be judged, which seemed inevitable. I wasn’t just a confused young girl whose husband wasn’t ready to have a baby. This story was different: I had done something wrong when I slept with Quint, no matter how many reasons I had for doing it. I had cheated on my husband, and gotten pregnant. I could change the setting of my personal kaleidoscope, but the facts remained.

  “Oh, please God,” I wrote in my journal, “I was a child!

  “Is that an excuse? Do I need an excuse for then, if I do what’s right now? The right thing is to tell her as quickly as
possible, and let her search continue a little longer. I know she thinks Jake is wonderful, and he thinks the same about her. They want to be related. And she believes they are. This is going to be difficult for her.”

  And then: “What will she think about me? What do I think about me? It was such a long time ago. I barely recognize myself—that thin, dark, lost young woman. Is it really fair to be held accountable for something that happened so long ago? Is it really fair not to be held accountable?”

  Before we met, Jil told me she had freckles—like Quint, not Jake.

  Jil gave me a book someone she knew had written about a birth mother and her lost child. I read it eagerly, and recognized my feelings, told in someone else’s voice. The adoption was the loneliest thing I’d ever gone through. Finding out that others had the same feelings of terror and loss was a revelation. Why had it never occurred to me before?

  A baby is never quite a reality while you’re carrying it, but for this woman— and for me—even the pregnancy was hardly real. We both watched it happen to someone else. The difference between us was that she remembered everything that had happened to her; it was painful, and she wanted to forget. I still hoped to remember.

  The imperative now was to tell Jil about Quint, which I knew would be painful for her. She seemed delighted to think Jake was her birth father; now he might not be. In a way, she had only half a story, and half of a complete set of parents. She had to begin all over again, and I hoped the story I told wouldn’t be too difficult, too hurtful. And I wondered what she would think of me, knowing the whole story of my marriage and pregnancy. From another point of view, geographically, Jake was relatively far away, while we were here, in the midst of a storm of personal history. He was safe and dry and untouched. She was out in the weather, and, less so, I was, too.