If Only

by Jennifer Gilmore

  I wait until after dinner to check the site. And when I do, there is a response waiting for me. I see the red dot, the unreadness of this message, and I don’t know what to do. I have lied. What will this person be saying to me? I go get the rock, my talisman now, and I gather up what is left of my shredded heart and I take deep breaths and then I do it: I click on the link to the message.

  We have received your message. Thank you for using Adoption Registry, the official adoption finding site. We hope you have some communication soon!

  Just another case of getting myself all worked up for nothing. So much so when I check the next morning and the red dot appears again, I think nothing of clicking on it, that it will be an update of the non-search that is happening in some database somewhere in the belly of my planet. And so I don’t think and I don’t work myself up or psyche myself up or chant anything or grab her rock and I don’t really prepare for anything and of course that is the time that when I click on there is the message.

  From her.

  Here it is.

  She is out there. She is looking. She is so close and still so far away.

  Ivy

  2017

  Patrick honks three times from inside his mother’s teal-green Subaru Outback and I am out the door.

  Mom and Mo wave to me from the front steps. I know if this were any other road trip, one made up of fun and fun only, say, there would be no way in hell I’d be allowed to go. But rules are strange things when it comes to this stuff, right? Like, how can they tell me no? Now. After stealing my mail, which is, by the way, a federal offense? They can’t tell me no.

  In part, because I lied. I hated to do it. I have never lied. Fibbed, maybe. Said I brushed my teeth when I hadn’t. That I hadn’t eaten all the Tate’s in the cookie bin. But this?

  I showed them the email response from her, well, part of the response: It’s so nice to hear from you. I’m in school at NYU. Finally, school. And I’m in the classroom three days a week now. Teaching! I’m going to be a teacher. Hopefully. It would be great to see you!

  Mo’s hand shook as she read the printout and Mom wiped away tears. But what they said, eventually, after a good deal of my pleading, was: you have two days there. “Two. Back on Saturday.” Mo had held up her hands, all but her index finger wrapped with silver rings.

  “And you go to Gram’s first and you leave the car there,” Mom had said.

  “Patrick can drive!” I had said.

  “Not in Manhattan, he cannot,” Mom had said. “No way, no how.”

  Mom couldn’t help but smile, though. New York City. I wonder how much she misses it, really, because she says she misses not one thing. I don’t really get the whole city thing. I don’t get its big strange hazards or its massive appeal. It’s just another place, another way.

  “Okay,” I had said. “God.”

  “And you go back there by nine pm. To Gram’s. All right? Ivy, I am serious. This is not a joke. It’s not safe. I will give you money for taxis and that is what you are to do. Are you sure you don’t want me to come? I will be totally quiet! I will not speak for two days.”

  “Nine!” I had said. “What the hell, Mom?”

  “What the hell to you, Ivy,” she’d said. “Aren’t you going downtown to see her school? And find her that way? What do you think you will need to be doing at night there? I’m really unclear on this.”

  “Okay.”

  “No, really. And I don’t see why Mo and I can’t try to get in touch with her before. Or why you can’t. This all makes me very nervous. Very. To just catch someone unawares this way.”

  I got quiet. “I’m not trying to catch her,” I had said.

  Mom softened. “Of course not, darling. That’s the wrong word. I just want to protect you. I want her to be ready to meet you! I want her to be her best self for you.”

  “I don’t want her to run away again,” I had said. “This will be okay, I just know it. I just want to see her. That’s it.”

  Mom had hugged me then and then sort of pushed me away to look at me and then hugged me again, all cinema-style mom stuff.

  “I just hope she wants to see you,” Mo had said, also hugging me tight.

  “Thanks a lot,” I had said.

  “Ivy,” Mom had said. “You have to understand something. We just don’t know her anymore.”

  “Hey, B,” I say now to Patrick, shrugging it off, still. The memory and the worry. The past the present and the future, really, which is what we’re kind of moving toward here. All at once. All at the same time. Just shrug it off, throw my bag in the trunk, keep my purse with all the stuff that we will need. Before I get in I lean into the window. “You brought snacks, right?”

  Without snacks there is no road trip.

  Patrick nods from inside the car and I open the door and pitch myself inside, set my bag down next to me: clothes for a few days, the rock, the letters. My evidence that I was once a person who was looked for.

  I leave the locket at home, trapped with the spinning ballerina.

  I watch my moms, still waving, try not to look at their sad, worried faces. I hook my head out and flash a big smile. “Bye!” I say, smiling more.

  Then I duck back into the car, peer into the bag at my feet: gummy snakes, worms, bears, fish. I shake away that video everyone had posted about all the bones and muscles of teeny tiny helpless animals that go into our gummies. Just gross. Also: BBQ potato chips, tortilla chips. A tray of blondies.

  “Where are the bagels?” I say.

  “Dude,” Patrick says. “Seriously? I made you blondies, dude.”

  I bump my head back. “Okay,” I say. “Anyway, Claire will bring good stuff.”

  “Oh, really,” he says, backing out of the driveway.

  My moms. Still waving. The flash of Mo’s silver rings.

  “And what did you bring, princess?”

  I smile and open my bag. “I have a bag of cheese sticks, an open bag of goldfish, and two yogurts.”

  “This? This is your offering? Your road trip fare?”

  “I know,” I say. “It was all I could do to get out of there. I had big plans for muffins but they were foiled.”

  I don’t watch my parents watch me as they fade into the distance but I do wonder when they turn to go inside. And then Patrick has turned off our dirt road and onto asphalt, toward the highway.

  I hit him on the shoulder. “Claire!” I say.

  He rolls his eyes. “Must we?” He makes a big production of putting the car in reverse and turning the car around. Stick shift. I think the most romantic thing Patrick has done is teach me how to drive it. I am surprised the gears still work actually, as I am sure, night after night in the high school lot I had to have stripped them down. I’m still not great on it. But, I don’t know, I think it’s nice to know how. I think it’s cool.

  We head over to Bridge Street to pick up our girl.

  Claire sits on the front stoop: overalls, high-tops, hair down, all wavy-perfect.

  “Ready?” I scream out.

  “Ready,” she says, standing.

  I get out of the front seat and open the door for her faux gallantly.

  “No way, you sit in front,” she says, and then we faux fight.

  “Hey, Claire,” Patrick says when I push her in.

  “Patrick.” She nods, looking straight ahead.

  I sit in the back, which is where I want to be, my head pressed up between them. “Hey, Mom, Hey, Dad!” I say. I feel like that. “When are we gonna get there?” I say, bobbing my head between them, pretending to be, like, four. I can do faux everything right now. But not sure how to do real.

  They both turn and look at me.

  “Ivy,” they both say. “Where exactly are we going?”

  A tray of blondies, a bag of gummy bears, a tub of Swedish fish, and two packages of lunch meat later, there are signs to the Palisades, and to bridges. I don’t tell them about the registry site or the fact that I know where she might be. I don’t tell them abo
ut the letter to the future I have in my bag, too, the only one I haven’t read yet.

  Boy Band again, just to make me insane I think. Signs to bridges always means Manhattan is close, which I know from visiting Gram. Mom hates to go back to New York. Too much shit, she says. Outside or inside, I never ask. Like memories or just stuff to run into. Is it the past, her past, or does she mean the place, her place, or something I don’t know yet? But there are bridges that lead us there. There is water to cross.

  I sigh. Maybe it’s the traffic Mom was referring to on every trip. Because no matter what bridge we have taken, I have never come into this city and not had to wait in a line to the moon to get in.

  George Washington Bridge, says Boy Band. Traffic ahead, Boy Band says. In nine miles, take the FDRrrr . . .

  This is where we turn off for Gram’s. Riiiight, Boy Band says, and I ignore the voice, Claire’s giggles, think of Gram with her pastel-colored macarons in waxy paper bags. Her soft leather flats on the pavement as we walked to the Met to see the Rembrandts, thick and sloppy with paint. Now this is a portrait, she’d said. Her long gloves. Her glasses on a golden chain.

  “Here,” I say. I point to her building. She’s all the way east and we pull up in front and pause and we can all see across the river. There are a ton more buildings over there than there used to be.

  The doorman knocks a knuckle on the window. I can see his double row of golden buttons sparkling, the metallic threads entwined in the ribbon shot through with light at the brow of his wool cap.

  Patrick rolls down the window. “We’re here—”

  “To see Mrs. Cohen?” He smiles. He’s always so sweet to me. “Hello, Miss Ivy!” he says, smiling.

  “Milton,” I say, suddenly shy. “Hello.” It’s been a few years but one time we stayed here when I was a little girl, maybe eight, and Gram was having some kind of surgery. I played here in the lobby with Milton all afternoon long. He brought me checkers and Christmas crackers and all kinds of hard candies. I heard Mo ask if my grandmother was paying him and Mom got pissed off about it but they were both so uptight that visit—it was Mo who had made us come. After that, Mom said, she can visit us upstate if she wants to see us. I just can’t, Mom said.

  And she does, Gram, she comes and stays, makes a big fuss with her packages all tied up with fancy ribbons and strings, her spun-sugar desserts, her elaborate pillboxes and perfumes. It’s like she’s bringing the very essence of this place to us.

  So Milton—he’s been here forever. He has one of those faces that seems to spread out more over the years. His hair has always been white but now it’s like a brighter white, escaping beneath that cap.

  “Out, kids,” Milton says. “Gimme those keys, my boy,” he says to Patrick.

  Patrick goes all splotched red. He hands the keys over in a way that makes me realize Patrick has never given the keys to anyone before. Like, he’s never gone to dinner and had his car parked. It’s weird that I have. That’s all the stuff from my mom’s past—the stuff she chose to leave behind. Was it a choice? I mean, did she have to in a way? Didn’t she?

  Milton takes our keys and who knows what he’s doing with Patrick’s car but he guides me by the shoulder to the elevator. Here’s the thing about New York City apartment buildings. They have these lobbies. Correction: the ones near Gram. Her friends. These ladies uptown. Golden and glass, fake flowers, brass. They are these old grand things and then step into the elevator and when you step out there is this brown carpet and old faded wallpaper and all darkness, no windows, a frightening hotel. Today it doesn’t have the smell of old people food—cabbage and eggs and beets—but more of maybe dried roses. That’s what Gram smells like, too, her rosewater, when she answers the door on the corner apartment, number 759.

  Gram.

  Gram!

  Gram.

  “Hi, Gram,” I say. We all bow our heads and go inside.

  “Gram, this is Patrick,” I say.

  He sticks out his hand and awkwardly says hello. I watch his hand come out of his jean jacket and it looks so weird, like it’s not part of him, and then there’s all this random, I don’t know, guy hair, sprouting from his wrist. I don’t love it.

  “And you know Claire, right?” I say. “Remember her?” Claire has been around for years. We’ve been in school together since kindergarten.

  She places her hand on the side of Claire’s blond curls and says, “Darling, of course I remember her,” right in her face.

  “Come, darlings,” she says, her pink lipsticked lips moving. “Sit down here.”

  Claire throws down her tote bag and her books spill out. The huge photo books. Some vintage fashion photography magazines. And that little paperback of New York orphans she got on road trip number one.

  Gram ignores the spill of books and motions us grandly to a light blue couch—it’s like silk or something—in front of the windows, heavy with curtains. I don’t know why but I keep hearing the word “brocade” in my head when I look at them. There are big-paned windows and I pull my leg up beneath me and turn to the side so I can see out to the river, far below.

  Tea sandwiches are laid out on a silver platter, I kid you not. I pick one up: cream cheese and cucumber and some kind of salad green, watercress, I think, as I pop it in my mouth. Then another, this one with some sort of brown spread. Pop that in, oh God, not into it at all.

  Gram must see my face because she says, “Liverwurst, my dear, you need to learn to love it as I do, as I have.”

  Claire downs one. “Tastes like Spam,” she says.

  “Spam?” Gram puts a hand over her heart, alarmed. “My lord no.”

  Claire just shrugs.

  I grab a napkin from the fan of blue napkins next to the tray and bring it to my lips, spit out the brown sandwich, watch Patrick trying not to laugh.

  “Now, Ivy, dear.” Gram takes a swill off her drink. “Tell me what on earth you’re doing with this idea you’re having.”

  I snap to because this is only something I’ve heard about, from Mom. Like, I can’t believe Gram is going to not just be nutjob leather and dessert-bearing Gram. But I am not into it. “What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask.

  Claire clears her throat and Patrick scoots a little closer to me on this couch that is surely 112 years old.

  “This notion that you want to find this ‘other’ mother of yours.” She uses her fingers to make quotation marks. “Why bother?” Now she sort of waves her hand in the air. “What of it? Why do it is all. We all know Andrea is your mummy, and she has raised you after all, hasn’t she, and why cause anyone more pain?” She nods her head. “I’m sorry I just don’t understand the point in it.”

  This is the part where I can’t believe this person is sitting across from me and I have never known this part about her, that she thinks finding the woman who gave birth to me is, like, a throwaway thing, that Gram, Gram!, doesn’t understand, well, anything. Also? Mo is my mother, too. I was raised to respect my grandmother, all old people, really—Mo’s mom is in Atlanta and she is awesome—but I can’t really wrap my head around what is going down.

  Claire slides in. “Well, it’s important to Ivy, you know. There are so many unanswered questions after all.”

  Patrick nods. “I mean, I don’t have those kinds of questions, and I imagine you don’t. But Ivy wants very much just to see her.”

  My friends. I love them love them I do I do.

  “Oh, sure, sure, I have many questions, believe you me, about all sorts of things. I mean, my mother was about as pure as the driven snow if you must know, I’ve got some questions there, and I’ve had my own life, too, if you must know, but why is my point, dear. Why. Let it be. Isn’t your life good now, Ivy, darling? It seems rather charmed to me. Other than living in the sticks like a farmer as you do, by choice, well, it seems rightly charmed.”

  “Oh, does it?” I say. Is my life charmed? What does that even mean, really?

  “When I think of what your mother went through to get you
, well, I just can’t bear it to be honest. What she did to have you.”

  “Gram. She didn’t have me. I mean, she took me.”

  “Took? Hardly. And I’ll tell you I have the bills to prove it.”

  I feel like I’ve been hit in the stomach with a two-by-four. I think Patrick’s eyes are going to bulge out of his head. His parents don’t comb their hair. They make a lot of stuff from hemp. They cook mostly ancient grains. I don’t think he has ever witnessed about 1,001 things that are happening right now. I swallow, hard.

  “So she bought me, then. Or you did.”

  Gram smiles. “No. My goodness no. I didn’t mean that, Ivy.” She shakes her head, cool as a cucumber. “Lovely shirt, by the way,” she says, fingering my striped button-down. That and my wide-leg jeans feel about as cool as I get.

  “So what did you mean then?” I ask.

  Gram’s blue eyes are blurry. She places her hand on my knee and I feel my body tighten. She is suddenly different to me. I don’t want her to touch me.

  “I want to protect you,” she says. “I want things to stay as they are. With our family. My only grandchild. You. I want things to be just like this.” She holds her arms out to the sky behind her. “I don’t want it to change.”

  I am starting to doubt that I am the one everyone wants to protect here.

  “It’s not going to change. If I get an answer or see a face or meet a person. It’s not going to change. I might change but I’m entitled.”

  Gram puts on a pouty face. “You might love me less. Maybe you won’t want your old gram anymore. Maybe there will be another grandmother out there with all kinds of presents and kisses waiting for you. What will I do then, darling? You’re my only.”

  “Only?”

  “I’m counting on it!”

  I roll my eyes. Now I am going to have to reassure my eighty-year-old grandmother, who is as mature as a ten-year-old. Tops. “I’ll always love you, Gram,” I say dutifully, though now I start to doubt it. Just at the edges. I go to hug her and I can see Claire on the other side of her. I roll my eyes her way now as I pat Gram’s back.