“Bye cutie. Have fun with your dad.” Her smile made me a little hot under the collar. She grabbed her bag, kissed my cheek, and made a beeline over my legs and down the aisle toward the front, stepping over anyone in her path. I felt pleased with myself for no apparent reason. Although uncomfortable, meeting Brandy had been a welcome distraction.
I got my little carry-on suitcase and stood in line, waiting for everyone to move, one by one, toward the exit. Very slowly. Every second became agony. The thought that another family was waiting for me, just a few feet away, was making my skin feel like fire. I wished I could teleport. I would just snap my fingers and be at the head of the line and forget everyone on here. Finally, after what seemed like a few lifetimes, the line started slowly moving. Then I got nervous and didn’t want to move.
I got to the long terminal, and could hear people greeting each other with shrieks of delight from women and pattering of little running feet and the grunts of hugs. As I walked out of the security tunnel I saw a man with black hair, big shoulders, and muddy green eyes standing about ten feet in front of me. They were my eyes.
Next to him stood a beautiful woman with brown curly hair who started jumping up and down when she saw me. There was a little boy spinning in circles with hair exactly like mine. I wasn’t even thinking anymore, my feet walked me toward that family without any effort on my part. That was my birth father. He looked just like my grandma had described him. As I got closer, I saw his eyes were red from potential tears and his lips were quivering.
“Hey.” I stopped right in front of them. My dad’s wife put her hands up to her mouth.
“Tony, he looks just like Lindsey.” She whispered to her husband as her eyes got as big as one of those cartoon characters who gets scared by something.
“David.” My dad choked, holding his arms out and gathering me up into them. I dropped my carry-on and went for it.
Anthony Pfalmer, my birth dad, held me tight against his chest. With all of my strength I wrapped my arms around him and buried my face into his neck like a child would do to a loving parent after they got hurt. I was a few inches shorter than him, so he had to bend down a little, but we had the exact same build. Big shoulders, small waist and hips, and he was probably hiding replicas of my chicken legs under his jeans. I felt a tugging on my pants and looked down at a little boy with big brown eyes and chubby cheeks.
“Are you David?” His voice hinted at one of those little-kid lisps.
“I am.” I wiped my eyes, glad I’d decided against mascara. When I bent down the little boy crawled onto my knee.
“You’re my brudder.” He kicked his legs back and forth, almost knocking me on my butt. I put my hand down on the ground to steady us and took a long look at his face. He was seriously cute. He looked a lot like Anthony, a round nose with high cheek bones and black hair. It curled, though, like his mother’s amazing head of curls.
“Are you a girl?” He’d also been taking a long look at me, and he was puzzled.
“What?” I started laughing. I’d heard this from little kids before.
“Your hair is weawwy wong.” He started brushing it with his little hands. “What happened to your eye?” He touched my scar, something no one except Lucy had ever done.
“I fell when I was little.” I stood up but kept hold of his hand. This was a cute kid and I liked him, if for no other reason than that he was my brother, my real brother. I put my hand out to Marty to try to shake it, but she leaped into my arms.
“David, we talk about you so much. I am so honored to meet you.” She smelled amazing, like apple juice and roses. A warmth shot through me. “That’s Dillon and I’m Marty.” My heart expanded. I felt like I should have always been here and that, and in a strange way, I had. They had known about me and been thinking of me, which was an amazing thing to discover. We walked quietly, little Dillon in my arms talking in a high voice about my earrings and how I really was a girl. He talked all the way back to the house. He talked as we walked in, as they showed me around. He talked as I commented on the extreme neatness of the house. Marty got a kick out of that; apparently my need for cleanliness was inherited from my birth father. Dillon stopped talking to show me his room. Like the rest of the house, it was filled with high-quality things – not showy, but still fancy.
“You like it?” Anthony asked my opinion of the house as Dillon and I made our way into the kitchen.
“Yeah, it’s great. Amazing, actually.”
“I designed it, Marty decorated it. We’ve had a business going for the last few years.”
“So are you a contractor?” I walked around the open downstairs again, marveling at the multi-tiered ceiling and the way that the kitchen connected seamlessly with the dining room and living room. Everything about the house seemed simple, yet elegant. Every chair and lamp and picture fit perfectly. Nothing was too much, and there were no empty spaces. And it all seemed inviting. The few really nice houses I had been in before had a lot of zones or rooms that seemed kind of off-limits, like the Peterson’s dining room, or Isaiah’s entire house. But every room in this place invited me to come in. It felt like a home.
“Kind of,” my birth father replied, “I did draw this house up, but it looked like chicken scratch.” He laughed a carefree laugh and shrugged. “We had to get an architect to do real plans. I did build most of it, though.” He was looking around with accomplishment, then his eyes landed on my face. A million smile lines exploded around his cheeks and eyes. Even with those, his face was joyful and young. The lines were more from a lot of smiling and less from old skin.
I guessed he was in his early thirties. We looked a lot alike. People might mistake us for brothers if we walked around together. Our body build and hair was identical. Our faces, however, were very different. Only our eyes, the exact same shade of hazel, matched.
“Marty said I look like my mom.” I tried not to look or sound sad. I was still kind of bummed that she wasn’t here. It would have been about five million times cooler, in this already amazing day, to have met both my birth parents together. For as much as I had wondered about Anthony Pfalmer, I had wondered about Lindsey Hurst. And asking Anthony all the questions for both of them seemed not quite right.
“You do, you have her face. That long nose and narrow jaw, and your cheek bones. I swear, if you two looked in a two sided mirror together your faces would match up.” He cocked his head to the side. “I hope you’re don’t mind, but I asked her to come meet you.”
“No!” I about screamed at him. “I don’t mind at all. Is she coming now?”
“When I talked to her we worked out getting her a train ticket. So she should be.”
“Of course it's okay! Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Well, put yourselves in our position. We gave you up for adoption. Most people are usually bitter about that kind of thing.” His eyes looked sad when he spoke, but still comfortable, unapologetic. Like he knew who he was and was at peace with the decision he’d made. I realized that there was a time, not so long ago, that I had been bitter about it.
“You were young,” I said, trying to comfort him. He laughed and nodded his head.
“We were young, that’s true. But that’s not all of it.” He sat down at a beautiful mahogany table. I followed. “If I knew then what I know now, I would have kept you. But that’s one of the tricky things about life – we can only make decisions based on what we know, not on what we might know in the future. At that age, the age when we had you, everything seemed like it was going two hundred miles per hour, and the only way we were going to stop was if we crashed into something.”
I understood. That was the first time I had realized that I wasn’t always going to feel this way. The feeling of not knowing if I was coming or going and that everything was out of control. Relief is not the word for what I felt just then, but it was pretty close.
“We wanted the best for you, and we knew that were weren’t going to be able to provide for that. Not even close.”
<
br /> “Fifteen? Wow.”
“I know. We thought that because she hadn’t had a period yet that she couldn’t get pregnant.”
“How old was she?”
“Fourteen.” It was the first time that he had looked sad all day. I had no idea they were that young when they had given me up. It made a lot more sense now. They were years younger than I was right now, and I sure didn’t feel like I would have been able to handle a baby.
“I have spent a long time blaming myself for the way Lindsey’s life turned out and that I lost my first son.” He wiped a tear out of his left eye soundlessly. “I wanted to meet you a long time ago, but was afraid to.” He smiled tenderly at me. “What you were six I started this company I’m running right now. I was making good money so I wanted to make sure you had an account. I was pleased to find out that your father…” he pulled his collar, uncomfortable saying “father” and not referring to himself, “..that he already had a savings account for you. He gave me the information and let me deposit money.”
“I was shocked when I saw that. Thank you.” I just realized I had never thanked him. He waved his hands at me, willing me to stop.
“When I gave my number I asked him to keep it unless you asked about me.”
“He has had your number since I was six?” I couldn’t believe it. That was three years before I had gone to live with a foster family because my adopted father had almost ripped my eye out. Anthony had wanted contact with me for a long time, and maybe things would have been so different if we had met before today. If I had just asked. A surge of emotions rushed through me, pulling me in different directions. He could see the struggle on my face.
“I’m sorry. I’m just a coward.” He put his hand out and placed it on mine. It was big, like mine were.
“My mom died a few months after I was born.”
“Jane died?” His mouth flew open and he put his hands on his head like he was about to pull his hair out from the roots. I guess she had made a good impression on Anthony Pfalmer. “Did your father get remarried?”
“No, it’s just been me and him.”
“So you’ve had no mother this whole time?” He started pacing, hands on his hips, bent over a little like he was going to be sick.
“No, actually.” I smiled with confident reassurance. “My mom’s mom, my grandma, was about the most amazing mother I could ever ask for. I live with her right now.” I realized too late what I had said. I had already decided I wasn’t going to say anything about the way my dad had treated me while I was growing up. Too much information too soon, and it was going to mess with my “what if” avoidance to bring it all out in the open right now.
“When I turned eighteen, I moved in to help her,” I lied quickly. I realized that I might have to tell Anthony what happened someday, but it wasn’t going to be right now. The man looked like he was ready to cry when talking about giving me up for adoption, then rip his own face off from grief when I’d told him about my mom. I wasn’t going to tell him that the man who was my dad had beaten me on a regular basis. Talk about causing a nice guy never-ending guilt.
My birth father just nodded at me, like he was forcing himself to believe what I was saying. He could see my scar, and he had to have wondered why I wore make up and dressed in these clothes. The huge, colorful tattoo that stretched to my forearm probably rounded out the “what did I do to him?” package.
“Whatcha’ guys doing?” Dillon walked in and climbed straight into his father’s lap, fresh clean face and wet curls. The tips of his hair were making his Superman pajamas wet on the shoulders. Marty followed him in, smiling and wielding a towel, which she used on his curls before popping out again, leaving Dillon with us.
“We’re talking, son, what are you doing?” My heart ached at the word son.
“Getting weddy for bed.” He looked over at me and frowned in concentration. “What’s your name?”
“David Johnson.”
“I’m Dihwwon Daviiid ANfonie FFFFawmer.” He spoke with a finger up in the air, like he was making a great point that should be remembered. Jealousy surged through me. So he had named his second son almost the exact same name as the first and after himself? If at first you don’t succeed…
My birth father saw the emotions trying to take over my face, and put his hand on top of mine. I tried very, very hard not to jerk it away.
“He is named after you, not after me,” he said, kindly.
“I’m named after my big brudder!” Dillon said loudly, not realizing that I was the one who he was named after. Before I could answer we heard a knock on the front door. It was soft, barely audible. My dad got up cautiously, pacing himself and trying to compose whatever was going on in his head. He placed Dillon on the floor absent-mindedly.
My heart started racing again, realizing who was there. Anthony walked to the front door and opened it at a measured pace. In the porch light stood a woman who looked older than she must have been. Her long, blond hair straggled to a stop near the middle of her back. Big blue eyes were dulled like someone in too much pain. Her face was wrinkled around the mouth, like a heavy smoker’s. And her nose was red, just like my dad’s. I almost took a step back, looking for somewhere in the kitchen to disappear. This wasn’t really how I had imagined my birth mother – as the perfect dysfunctional match for my alcoholic adopted dad. Dillon’s little hand reaching for mine steadied me.
“Lindsey. He’s gorgeous.” My birth father spoke first. I started to walk over to the little woman whose face held every feature I saw when I looked in a mirror. But I didn’t know what to say or what to do. This woman looked terrified of me. I didn’t know how to react towards her hesitant face. So, when I got to the door, facing her on the porch where she still stood, I just waited for her to say something. We stared at each other for several moments, her swaying on her feet like she was going to faint, looking even more stressed than I felt.
“David.” She held her hand out for me to shake. I took it politely. Then I started to laugh. Everyone else, even Marty who had snuck back in after she’d heard the knock, looked at me questioningly. Apparently laughing wasn’t totally appropriate, given the situation.
“I’m sorry; I’m laughing because I am beginning to see where I got my shyness from.” That made my birth father laugh, as well. He slapped my back affectionately and shook my shoulder a little. Lindsey started giggling quietly into her hand and walked over the threshold to give me a soft hug. The top of her head came up to my chest, almost exactly where Lucy came up to. My birth mother was soft and smelled like stale cigarettes.
“Hi, Mom,” I said. For the first time in my life.
23. MICHELLE
It was the most amazing weekend I’d ever had. I spent time with both of my birth parents, got to know my little brother, and actually met my father’s mother – my birth grandmother. She was a happy little woman who was soft spoken. She also cooked some of the most amazing food I had ever eaten. Unlike Grandma, Anthony’s mom still looked very young. She had obviously taken good care of herself. She was beautiful with the same black hair. Good looks ran in “my” family, I couldn’t deny it. I was beginning to think that maybe I had gotten a little bit of those genes.
My birth mother Lindsey was very quiet, but happy to be a part of everything that was going on. A couple of times throughout the weekend she would disappear. I would look around and usually found her on the back porch smoking, or in a corner of whatever ever room we were gathered in, trying not to be noticed. I sat next to her often, trying to pry some kind of emotion out of her which was hard because she didn’t have much to say. What I gathered from my birth father, and from bits and pieces that she accidentally let slip, she had a hard life after she had me. Although I could guess at the kind of stuff she had gotten into, I didn’t really care. She was my mom and I loved her.
With that said, I was sure that Marty, my step mom, was going to be more a part of my life than Lindsey was. Being around an alcoholic my whole life, I recognized the
shame that addiction caused Lindsey. But my goal was to avoid the “what ifs” and just love her for what she was to me right then: a shy, quiet woman who cared for me very much.
I spent most of the weekend talking about myself. My parents asked me every kind of “baby book” question in existence. When did you start crawling? When did you start walking? What was your first word? What kind of things do you like to do? Do you have a girlfriend? I made most of the answers up because I had no clue when I started walking or any of that other baby stuff. It’s not like me and my dad had sat around chatting about the good ol’ days in the last month or so.
But I wanted my birth parents to think that I had been raised the way they’d dreamed when they had made the decision to give me up for adoption. I wasn’t even angry anymore about the way I actually had been raised. I finally saw that my father was a broken man, put in a situation he had tried so hard to avoid, and then had kept trying, in his limited way, to make it right. Lately, I’d wondered (a lot) how much better I might have done in his same situation. Mostly, the answer was that I probably would have done even worse.
I told Anthony and Marty about Lucy. I told them about how I had helped her out of the lake and then she wouldn’t leave me alone and, in turn, I fell helplessly in love with her. My messy, unconventional, sporadic, hyperactive little beauty who turned my world inside out became well-known to the Pfalmers that weekend. We spent a lot of time discussing the night when she had given me her purity ring, and how much it had freaked me out. It was so incredible to hear their perspective. Their encouragement and acceptance was priceless.
“I’m so proud of you, David. Most boys would have jumped at Lucy’s offer.” My birth father said it like I was the greatest person in the world and Marty nodded in agreement. It was nice to talk to a father about girl stuff, and it came surprisingly naturally. It helped that he was the most welcoming and wonderful person I had ever met in my life. The three of us talked for quite a while about what it was that had motivated her to do what she did, and why I had responded the way I did. We didn’t solve the world’s problems or anything, but it helped me get a little clearer. It also clarified where I still needed to work and, the best part of talking with them, on how I could change some things. That “how” part was what I’d been missing for so long.
My Stupid Girl Page 32