Next of Kin

by David Hosp

  Sally had been quiet throughout the conversation, just watching Ms Tesco as she spoke. Now she said, ‘You gave up a child.’ The words came out simply and plainly, without judgment. She could have been commenting on the woman’s jewelry.

  Ms Tesco was taken by surprise. She looked at Sally as though she’d forgotten she was in the room. ‘No,’ she said quickly.

  ‘That’s why you work here now, isn’t it?’ Sally said.

  Ms Tesco looked back at Finn. ‘I’m just trying to explain the law to you. It has nothing to do with …’ She took a deep breath. ‘There is only so much information I could give you, even if all of the information was there, which it likely isn’t.’

  Finn looked back and forth between Sally and the older woman. ‘Is she right?’ he asked. ‘Did you give up a child?’

  ‘Does it matter?’ Ms Tesco said.

  ‘Maybe, maybe not,’ Finn said. ‘But I want to know.’

  The woman looked away, her hands clenched, the wiry cables of muscle on her wrists flexing nervously. She nodded. ‘Yes, it’s true. I gave up a little girl for adoption when I was young.’ She drew her lips in tight to her teeth and closed a file sitting in front of her. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a lot of work to do. I will put in your request, and we will try to get back to you in two weeks.’

  ‘Great,’ Finn said slapping his thighs in anger. ‘So the system is set up to prevent adoptees from finding their real parents, and just to make sure the system works, people like you with a vested interest in keeping their secrets are made the gatekeepers. That’s just wonderful.’

  She turned on him angrily. ‘I have no secrets, Mr Finn,’ she snapped. ‘And I would give anything in the world – anything – to find my daughter. To talk to her, even once. To know whether she was happy growing up, whether I did the right thing. You have no idea what it’s like to give up a child. In some ways, it’s worse than having a child die; at least when your child dies, you know where they are – you have closure.’

  ‘Except that giving up your baby was your decision,’ Finn pointed out.

  ‘You have no idea what you’re talking about,’ Ms Tesco said. ‘None of it was my decision. I lost control over everything in my life the moment I got pregnant. In many ways I still haven’t gotten that control back.’

  Finn said, ‘You had all the control, and you still do.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ Ms Tesco said. ‘And I don’t. I don’t expect you to understand.’

  ‘What happened?’ Sally asked. ‘What wouldn’t we understand?’

  Ms Tesco looked at the girl. ‘There were no choices back then,’ she said. ‘Things are different now. If it ever happened to you, you could make your own decisions.’

  ‘What’s different?’

  ‘Everything.’ She shook her head angrily. ‘I was a good girl, you understand? A good, upper-middle-class girl. I was a straight-A student. Things like that didn’t happen to girls like me. They happened to other girls. Bad girls. At least, that’s what they told me.’ She looked down at her hands, but her demeanor remained steely, her voice clipped. ‘My father hit me when he found out. My poor father, the most mild-mannered, non-violent, decent man I’ve ever known, and he hit me. Hard enough to knock me off my feet. I could tell he was sorry about that, but he never said so; that’s how awful it was. A young, unmarried daughter getting pregnant?’ She shook her head. ‘It was enough to destroy a family. I could see that in my father’s face; I could see his fear that we would lose everything he’d worked so hard to build. He was a vice-president at a local bank, and something like this, if people had found out, could have destroyed his career. We were Italian, and he always felt like he was under suspicion as it was. He felt like my pregnancy would confirm all of the unspoken prejudices.’

  ‘What did you do?’ Sally asked.

  Ms Tesco looked up at her. ‘I did what I was told to do,’ she said. ‘I did what hundreds of thousands of other good girls did back then when they got into trouble. I kept my mouth shut and kept to myself for months. I wore baggy clothes to hide the changes. And then, when the baggy clothes weren’t enough to keep people from noticing, I went away.’

  ‘You ran away?’

  She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not ran away, went away. It was all arranged. It was what girls did back then. I went far away to a place where I could give birth without anyone knowing. I went away. That was what they called it back then.’

  ‘Where did you go? Here?’

  ‘Goodness, no,’ she said. ‘My family lived two towns over from here. You never went away to someplace nearby; someone might see you, someone might find out. I went to another place in western Massachusetts.’

  ‘For how long?’ Sally was fascinated, Finn could tell.

  ‘Three months,’ Ms Tesco said. ‘For three months I was alone, literally a prisoner. My family didn’t give me any choice. My father told me that I would either do what I was told, or I would be thrown out of the house and disowned. I was sixteen. I didn’t think I would survive. Probably wouldn’t have.’

  ‘What did your mother say?’

  ‘Not much.’ The older woman laughed bitterly. ‘She prayed a lot. That was her reaction to most things that were difficult for her to deal with. She prayed, and she told me to listen to my father. We were a very traditional family.’

  ‘You must have been pretty pissed at your mom,’ Sally said.

  Tesco shook her head. ‘That’s just who she was. At least she visited me once when I was at the home. My father never did. She came and she brought me a Bible. She told me it was to mark my rebirth. She told me that when “it” was done – everyone referred to my pregnancy, the birth, my baby, as “it”, as if they couldn’t use real words to describe what was happening – when “it” was done, I could start life over.’ She closed her eyes. ‘I can remember sitting there, wanting to scream at her. Wanting to tell her that I didn’t want to start over. Wanting to beg her to save me, take me back home.’ She breathed heavily. ‘I didn’t, though. Because that’s not what good girls did. Good girls did what they were told to do.’

  ‘So you gave up your baby,’ Sally said.

  She nodded. ‘I gave up my little girl. I remember when labor started, I was so happy because it was finally going to be over. They didn’t tell you anything about what childbirth was like, though. They never told me anything to prepare me. It took fourteen hours, and I kept screaming in pain, asking why, and they said it was a punishment. They told me, This is what happens when you’re bad. And I believed them.

  ‘All through the birth, I kept promising God that I’d be good from then on. I promised that I would do what I was told, that I’d give up the baby and go back to being a good girl. And then it was over, and I heard her cry. My heart broke when I heard my daughter cry that first time. All I wanted was to make everything okay for her. And they put her on my stomach and she stopped crying. Just like that, she stopped crying and clung onto me. I looked up at this one young nurse who’d been there with me the entire time – she was a nun, and she was so nice, so kind, she couldn’t have been more than five or six years older than me – and I said, “She knows.” I was crying, and I said, “She knows I’m her mommy.”

  ‘And this nurse smiled at me, and said, “She does. She’ll always know you’re her mommy. Even if she doesn’t remember, she’ll always know.”’ A tear trickled down Ms Tesco’s cheek, only to be brushed aside with the flick of a wrist. ‘I thought, That’s something, at least. At that moment, I even thought maybe that was enough.’

  ‘But it wasn’t?’ Sally asked.

  Ms Tesco shook her head, wringing her hands nervously. ‘Some of the other girls never spent any time with their babies. They encouraged that at the home – complete separation from the start. Sometimes they didn’t just encourage it, they enforced it. They said it made it easier. I don’t think they were right, but I wouldn’t know, because I didn’t take their advice. I spent three glorious days with my daughter, telling he
r how much I loved her, and how I was doing the right thing for her. It was all lies, I knew it the entire time, but I said it anyway. Because I was a good girl, and that was what they told me to say.

  ‘And then, three days later, they came to take her away. They had papers for me to sign, and I screamed at them and told them that I wouldn’t sign them. I told them that I was keeping my baby. Oh, I made such an awful scene, they had to bring in orderlies. And then the man who ran the place came down to talk to me. He was very calm; I got the feeling he’d had this conversation before with other girls. He explained to me how much better it would be for my little girl to be adopted. He called her the girl, because we weren’t allowed to name our children – that was up to the adoptive parents – but I named my little girl anyway. I called her Christine, and I would talk to her and tell her to remember me, and remember that her real name was Christine. Anyway, he told me that the girl would be better off with a real family. He said that he’d called my father, and my father had told him that I couldn’t go home with a child. He said my father told him that they wouldn’t come get me. I told him I didn’t care.

  ‘Then he nodded, and asked how I would pay. I said to him, “Pay for what?” And he told me that I hadn’t been charged for the three months board and the medical care and the hospital stay because that was all covered if the baby was being adopted. But if I didn’t intend to give the child up for adoption, then I had to pay. It came to almost a thousand dollars, which might as well have been a million, as far as I was concerned. I told him I didn’t have any money, and he said he would have to turn the matter over to the police. And while they got all that sorted out the girl would have to go into foster care with the state because if I couldn’t pay them, I clearly couldn’t take care of the child.’

  ‘What about the father?’ Sally asked. ‘The boy who got you pregnant?’

  Ms Tesco laughed in surprise. ‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘He never got involved. That was the accepted double standard; he was never really affected by any of this. Back then it was considered the girl’s problem, not the boy’s. If anything, it probably helped his reputation. I didn’t hear much from him after I told him about the pregnancy. It didn’t matter, he certainly wasn’t in any sort of position to offer an alternative – he was only seventeen.’

  ‘So, what happened?’ Sally asked.

  ‘I didn’t know what else to do, so I signed the papers. They told me I had five minutes to say goodbye. Can you imagine? Five minutes to say goodbye to your child? She was still tiny, but she had that three-day-old chubbiness that babies get, and I held her close to my face and I whispered to her the whole five minutes. I can’t remember everything I said to her, but I know I told her over and over how much I loved her, and that I was sorry. I promised that I would find her. And then they came and they took her.’

  ‘And you’ve never found her?’

  She shook her head. ‘I came to work here a decade ago, thinking it might give me some sort of advantage in my search, but it hasn’t worked out that way. The law is the law. Even for me.’

  The room was silent for a few moments. Then Sally said, ‘That sucks.’

  Ms Tesco nodded. ‘Yes, it does. I think the worst part, though, was afterward. When I got home, everyone expected me to be okay. My parents, my friends, everyone. They all thought I should be fine and just step back into my life like nothing happened. They even thought I should be grateful to have a second chance. I wasn’t allowed to talk about it. I tried – I tried talking to my parents, but they refused to discuss the topic. “That’s all in the past,” they would say. “It never happened.” Except that it did happen. I wanted to shake them and scream, It did happen! I didn’t, though.’

  She looked at Finn. ‘So, when you talk about your mother as if you know what she went through – remember, you may not know the whole story.’

  ‘That’s why I’m looking for more information,’ Finn said. ‘That’s why I’m here, but you’re telling me you can’t give me that sort of information. Why? Maybe you’re right. Maybe my mother didn’t want to give me up, but that doesn’t seem to fit with what people have told me. From what I’ve learned so far, she was exactly the kind of person who would willingly give up her child for her own convenience.’

  ‘Maybe she was,’ Ms Tesco said. ‘But I can tell you from having worked here for the last ten years – from dealing with women searching for their children ten, twenty, fifty years after giving them up – my story is far more common that you would ever think. I’ve talked to hundreds of women who never recovered from giving up their children. They spent years in torment. Some were so broken from the experience that they could never let themselves be happy.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Finn said. ‘But I’ll never know if that’s what happened to my mother because you won’t give me whatever information you have in my file.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Ms Tesco said, shaking her head. ‘The law –’

  ‘Fuck the law,’ Finn blurted.

  Sally leaned forward. ‘Ms Tesco, I’ve only known Finn for a year, but he’s one of the few really good people I’ve ever met. He took me in when my father was killed and my mother left me. He just found out who his mother was, and that she was murdered. If you were the one who’d been killed, and it was your daughter searching for information, what would you want the person on your side of the desk to do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  Ms Tesco looked at Sally for a long moment. ‘It may take some time to find the file,’ she said.

  ‘We understand.’

  ‘I’m not promising anything,’ she said. ‘But I’ll think about it.’

  Sally nodded. ‘That’s all we can ask.’

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Finn was still adjusting to Saturdays. During the week, he was so busy working and taking care of Sally he had no time to think; he had to keep his feet moving just to keep things from falling apart. When the weekend came, though, there was time to draw breath and consider the complications of being the guardian to someone else’s child. It was that time that scared him most – the time he was most afraid of screwing up.

  That Saturday, Sally slept later than usual. They’d stopped to get dinner on the drive back from New Hampshire and had gotten home later than anticipated. Finn woke up at five-thirty, as was his habit. He would have liked to sleep later, but his body wouldn’t let him. It was one of the great ironies of growing older: it seemed the more sleep he craved, the less his body tolerated.

  He threw on a pair of running shoes and a tattered T-shirt and headed out for a morning jog. He’d never been a devotee of exercise for its own sake, but there was something about the city early on a Saturday morning that he loved. It was all his. There was a stillness to it as he swept through the early morning mist – down Bunker Hill, along the waterfront, then back up along the Charles. The Boston skyline slumbered off to his left. The brownstones along the river, with their multi-million dollar views, were dark and quiet; the office towers behind them gave no signs of life. It felt as though he were the last man alive, and it all belonged to him – the only one who truly knew the place for all its faults and beauty and grace. It was like watching a lover sleep – an exquisite moment of unrequited intimacy.

  By the time he crossed back into Charlestown the city was beginning to stir. Delivery trucks rolled slowly down toward the commercial district, and an occasional taxi passed him, lacking its accustomed weekday hurry. The spell had been broken, and once again he had to share the city he loved so much.

  He could see Kozlowski waiting for him on the stoop as he turned the corner at the bottom of the hill and headed up toward his apartment. The raincoat gave him away.

  ‘I rang the bell,’ Kozlowski said as Finn approached.

  ‘I was running,’ Finn replied. He slid the key into the lock and opened the door.

  ‘Sally?’

  ‘Sleeping,’ Finn said. ‘She’s a teenager. A terrorist attack wouldn’t wake her
on a Saturday morning.’ Kozlowski didn’t crack a smile. ‘What’s up?’ Finn asked.

  ‘Detective Long came to visit the firm yesterday. He wasn’t happy.’

  Finn frowned. ‘He found out we’re still looking into my mother’s murder?’ Kozlowski nodded, and Finn’s frown deepened. ‘That’s gonna cause some problems.’

  ‘There’s more,’ Kozlowski said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He was out questioning McDougal.’

  ‘Eamonn?’ Finn said. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because McDougal was your mother’s boss when she was working at Rescue Finance. She called him a bunch of times before she was killed.’

  Finn frowned. ‘My mother worked for McDougal?’

  Kozlowski nodded. ‘Apparently.’

  ‘And you needed to tell me about this at six o’clock in the morning?’

  ‘I was nervous,’ Kozlowski said. ‘I figured if McDougal had some reason to kill your mother, and he found out that you had been up in New Hampshire yesterday poking around, who knows? Maybe he’d think he had some reason to come after you. Stranger things have happened.’ Finn finally understood why Kozlowski had been concerned that the doorbell had not been answered. His eyes widened. ‘Oh my God,’ he whispered. ‘Sally.’ He turned and bounded up the staircase to his apartment in a panic.

  Long woke up on his couch. His arm was hanging off the edge, numb, and his face was mashed so far into the corduroy fabric that he could feel the pattern impressed on his skin. Pushing himself up with his one working hand, he caught a glimpse of the stain of his drool, spreading out on the sofa cushion like a map of Florida from the spot where his mouth had lolled open for most of the night.

  He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. The pain was intense, and radiated out from behind his eyeballs toward his temples.

  The sunlight was streaming through the windows, and opening his eyes to behold the mess from the night before was agony. The bottle of Jägermeister lay on its side on the coffee table, nearly depleted, a thin puddle having dribbled from the top onto the light-colored wood, like his own mocking, inanimate doppelganger. Even from where he sat, he could see the pile of broken glass spilling out from the top of his sink. For a moment, he wondered whether he should vomit but the impulse was not urgent enough to give in to just yet. Perhaps later.