American Daughter

by Stephanie Thornton Plymale

  “We didn’t put anything on it,” she said. “Unless you count the Fels-Naptha.”

  “The what?”

  “That’s a stain remover,” a nurse broke in.

  “Stain remover?” the doctor repeated. He sounded baffled.

  “It’s laundry detergent,” she clarified.

  “We had her scrub her skin with it,” my mother added.

  “Good God!” the doctor exploded. “You scrubbed open sores with laundry detergent? Are you out of your mind? You could have killed her!”

  It felt so unfamiliar and so good: the realization that someone was angry on my behalf.

  I was admitted to the ICU and would remain there for a full week. No one was allowed inside my room without a gown and mask. I learned later that any infection I contacted during my time there might have been fatal. I was as vulnerable as a burn victim.

  I liked being in the hospital. They had given me pain meds. I had three hot meals a day, and I thought the hospital food was wonderful. Every day my tray held unexpected treats like silk-smooth mashed potatoes, mounds of cut corn, butterscotch pudding. I could choose my drinks from a paper menu, and I loved the little bottles of juice and mini cartons of cold chocolate milk. I felt the same way about the free breakfast and lunch I was given at school every day, despite the humiliation of standing in a separate line for it. I felt nothing but covetous toward the canned vegetables, the gravy-drowned meat, the reheated french fries that tasted like sweat. Often I had nothing else to eat on any given day.

  My bed in the hospital was comfortable, and there was a color television in my room. I loved sitting up in bed, propped up like a princess against the bank of pillows, changing the channels with the remote control.

  The staff was kind. The nurses were soft-spoken and mild. When they bathed my body or changed the dressing on my wounds, they spoke in soothing tones and touched me gently. If I needed anything, day or night, I could press a button by the bed and someone would come and help me. I’ll never forget what a pleasure it was to be surrounded by people who cared whether I lived or died.

  When I had recovered enough to leave the hospital, I was sent to another foster home. For months afterward, I was streaked like a brindle dog, vast swaths of my skin discolored, mottled with shades of pink and lavender and mauve.

  A FEW DAYS after I’d filed the paperwork for a temporary residence permit, another call from Rebecca lit the screen on my phone. I was in my home office this time. A painful rush of adrenaline surged through me. If God Himself had called me just then, I could not have been more breathless or frightened.

  “Rebecca?” My voice was a pathetic squeak.

  “Stephanie,” she said. “Are you sitting down?”

  The same words she’d used to open our last conversation, those terrible words I’d never wanted to hear again. I didn’t think I could make it to my desk chair.

  “What is it?” I whispered. My hand was over my face.

  “Your adoption has been finalized,” she told me.

  Finalized. Finalized? I was so filled with fear I could not make sense of this sentence. Finalized sounded ominous, dark, like we’d reached the end of the road, like game over.

  “What . . . what does that mean?” I quavered. My whole body was trembling.

  “You’ve been cleared,” she said.

  “Cleared?” This, too, sounded bad—as if our application had been wiped out, erased.

  “The baby . . . is yours,” Rebecca said, putting emphasis on each word as if sensing my incomprehension. “You can go to Guatemala at any time to pick her up.” Tears came into her voice as she added: “And bring her home.”

  * * *

  ANDREA HAD BEEN with us for more than a decade now, and Jim had doted on her every day of her life with us. What would she do if we divorced? How could I turn my back on the man who’d gone into hell with me to get her?

  I was spent by the time I left the Heathman—spent of rage, of conviction, and even of any confidence that Jim would be glad to see me when I returned. He hadn’t called my cell since I’d left or tried to get in touch in any way. I’d paid to stay in the room through the next morning, but I didn’t want to sleep there another night. I wanted to go home.

  The streets were cleared of snow when I set out for our house, but everything was still hushed, still sparkling. I drove slowly along the wide downtown avenues, the radio playing low, wondering what I would say when I came through my own front door.

  It was ten o’clock at night when I let myself in. The house was mostly dark. The only light was coming from the kitchen along with the plaintive strains of a Black Sabbath song.

  As I came near the kitchen, the unmistakable aroma of cigar smoke—cigar smoke?—and whiskey hung in the air. And then on the threshold of the room, I was faced with a very unexpected sight. Jim was sitting there in a white undershirt and boxer shorts, a glass of amber liquid in front of him, a haze of smoke wreathing his face. He hadn’t shaved since I’d last left the house. His face was drawn, his eyes bloodshot and bleary. He looked ten years older than he had two days ago.

  Suddenly I was overcome by the last thing I expected to feel: a rush of tenderness, of tender amusement. I bit my lip to keep from smiling.

  “Really, Jim?” I said. “Drowning your sorrows in Maker’s Mark and heavy metal? I mean seriously? Are we back in high school?”

  I moved to the table and took the seat across from him. Tears slid out of his eyes and ran down his face and suddenly they were sliding out of mine too. And then he was out of his chair and on his knees beside me, his hands on my waist, his face pressed against my belly.

  “I can’t live without you,” he said.

  I bent forward awkwardly to hug him back, running both of my hands through his hair. “Shhh,” I said. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  “I’ll do whatever I need to do,” he said. “I’ll go see a marriage counselor. I’ll come home by six every night. Our family is my first priority. Nothing else matters.”

  “Shhhh.”

  “And you want to go on dates? I hear you. I do.”

  “Jim—”

  “We married so young. You feel like you missed out. You want that novelty, the romance, the excitement. I get it. I want that for you too.”

  I sat back, disbelieving. Jim was so possessive. Was I hearing right? Was he proposing we open our marriage?

  “So here’s my promise to you: Whenever you get the urge for that kind of adventure, you can have it. Anytime. Fun and flirtation and dates. As much as you want.”

  “Jim . . . ?” I asked. I looked down at him, stunned.

  “You can go out on all the hot dates you want,” he repeated, raising his wet eyes to mine. “With me.”

  Chapter 16

  Dear Owen,

  Obviously our working relationship has strayed into an awkward place, and over the last few days, I have been able to find clarity around this. The past several months have been a very troubled time within my marriage, and because of this I allowed my own professional boundaries to blur in a way that wasn’t appropriate. I regret this deeply and feel it would be best to avoid further contact . . .

  No. Too confessional; too intimate. Best to avoid any further disclosures about my personal life; best to be brief and to the point.

  Dear Owen,

  Given the circumstances of our last interaction, I’ve decided it would be best to end our working relationship. Fortunately, the work on your house is just about finished. I will arrange for the final delivery of your drapes, and . . .

  This was no good either. It was too formal and stilted. It was right to cut him off completely, but I didn’t have to be icy. We had both gone too close to the edge, and we both bore responsibility for that.

  Finally, I decided to skirt acknowledgment of our last encounter altogether. I would just make it clear I had no intention of returning to his home.

  Dear Owen,

  Your drapes and pillows were delivered today, and I won’t be abl
e to drop them off. My husband Jim will be bringing them by late this afternoon.

  JIM AND I were having breakfast when the drapes arrived on our doorstep. It was the first such breakfast we’d eaten together in months: facing each other in the sun-splashed kitchen, with coffee and eggs and toast on the table between us. It was hard to believe how good it felt just to begin the day this way. It had been so long.

  When the doorbell rang, we were caught off guard.

  “You’re early,” I said, upon opening the door to find one of the men from my workroom on the porch.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I have a delivery.” He was holding a heavy stack of folded drapes sheathed in plastic. They were for Owen’s master bedroom.

  “What’s this?” Jim asked, appearing in the foyer.

  “Um,” I said, flustered. “It’s a shipment of drapes and pillows for a customer.”

  Jim took them from the workman while I signed the delivery form.

  “Do you want me to bring them out to your truck?” he asked once the man had gone.

  “Well—” I said. “I don’t think I should be the one to deliver them. They’re for Owen.”

  “Oh,” said Jim.

  “I mean, I don’t think I should go back there.”

  “No,” he said grimly, firmly. “I don’t think you should either.”

  “I’ll get someone from the company to take them over,” I said.

  “I’ll take them over,” Jim replied.

  “You?”

  “I’d like to.”

  I felt my forehead crease as I considered this. “Really?”

  “Yes.” His tone was unequivocal.

  “Well . . . okay. If you really want to,” I said. “You won’t do anything unprofessional, will you?”

  “Of course not.”

  I IMAGINED I would laugh about it someday: Jim’s account, afterward, of how Owen came to the door looking like a guilty dog. How he asked my husband whether he’d like to see my handiwork, as if to prove my presence there had been merely professional. How Jim had taken an unlikely tour of the house, looking at the newly painted and furnished rooms and mustering pointed commentary from time to time.

  “Wow. My wife sure knows how to put a house together.”

  “My wife is truly talented, isn’t she?”

  Yes, surely I’d be able to laugh about it someday. But not today.

  THE SUN WAS just setting that Friday as my Uber pulled up to the curb in front of the Nines, a hotel in the heart of downtown Portland. Only one weekend before, I’d gone to another downtown hotel for a very different reason. Everything was different tonight. The snow had melted, the air was almost balmy, the sky was pink and I was in a little black cocktail dress.

  I loved the look of the Nines lobby: an open atrium that somehow managed to feel intimate. I loved the vast purple area rugs, the high-glossed wooden tables, and the velvet furniture in jewel colors—wine, crimson, peacock, gold. As I stepped inside the entrance of the lounge, a tall and handsome man detached himself from the throng at the bar. He wore a midnight blue sports jacket and dark jeans. His shoes had been buffed to a high shine, and cuff links glinted at his wrists.

  “Stephanie?” he asked. His voice sounded just a touch uncertain and yet hopeful.

  I smiled at him. “Yes.”

  He broke into a dazzling smile in return. “I’m Jim,” he said, extending his hand.

  I clasped it briefly, watching my own hand disappear into his and feeling glad I’d just had a manicure. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  “The pleasure is mine.”

  I actually felt nervous as I allowed him to guide me, with the lightest touch at the small of my back, toward one of the tables for two scattered around the lounge.

  “I hope this won’t sound too forward of me, but you’re even more beautiful in person,” he said.

  I flushed with pleasure. “Well, aren’t you charming,” I said, dropping my eyes to the cocktail menu, unable to suppress another smile. “I hope you don’t say that to all the ladies.”

  This was ridiculous, as ridiculous as my flirtation with Owen had been, and even more heady. The whole game had been Jim’s idea.

  You haven’t had enough first dates? he’d said more than once during the week after I came home. We can fix that.

  He spent the week planning this dinner, securing a reservation, arranging for Josh to spend the evening with Andrea, outlining the rules. We were strangers, set up on a blind date by friends, meeting tonight for the first time. We would exchange only the information about our lives that didn’t include marriage or children. We would not break character throughout the planned portion of our evening and possibly not even after that.

  He understood the allure of novelty, of unpredictability. He wanted to give that to me.

  And it was working! I was actually looking at my husband as if for the first time, studying his features, his sense of style, the way he held himself. I liked all of it. He came off as confident but not presumptuous, gentlemanly yet down to earth. I felt a little flutter in my pulse each time our eyes met.

  Jim closed his menu. “You run a school in town, a school for interior design, I believe?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “The Heritage School, in the Mississippi district.”

  “I want to hear more about that,” he said. “But first, how was your day?”

  “It was very long and full, but everything went well,” I said. “How was yours?”

  And on it went. Jim asked me questions. He listened to the answers. He offered me the full intensity of his attention. He was thoughtful and sincere, a man of substance.

  At the table next to ours, two women were having what appeared to be a girls’ night out. I noticed the way they both stole glances at Jim throughout the evening. But he never let his gaze stray from mine.

  “I don’t usually do this on a first date,” I said a few hours later, when Jim eased the car to the curb in front of our house. “But would you like to come in?”

  THE NEXT MORNING, I woke up smiling. It had been a perfect evening, and now it was the weekend, and Jim was coming into the bedroom with coffee for me the way he always used to. Just then I heard my cellphone vibrating on the nightstand and looked over to see my mother’s name on the screen. I realized I hadn’t spoken with her in over a week.

  “I’ll call her back,” I told Jim as the call went to voicemail.

  “You know, I’ve been meaning to tell you: Your mom left four or five messages while you were away,” Jim said.

  Startled, I took the mug of coffee from his outstretched hand. “She did?” I asked. “Is she all right?”

  “Oh, there was no emergency or anything, but she kept asking about a newspaper story,” Jim told me. “She said: Did Stephanie look up my story yet? It was in all the papers. Do you know what she was talking about?”

  I went cold all over again, just as I had in my mother’s apartment.

  “It’s like I blocked it out of my mind,” I said slowly. “With everything that happened over the last few days.”

  “Blocked what out?”

  “My mom said something insane the last time I was there. I mean, I know better than to believe the stuff she says, but still.”

  Jim got back into bed to drink his own coffee with me, both of us leaning back against the headboard. “What did she say?”

  “Well, she told me that she . . . was raped.”

  “Well, that’s not news,” he said. “I mean, we knew that.”

  “Yes. We knew about the rape outside the apartment she shared with Louie,” I said. “But she said there was another rape.”

  “When?” Jim asked. “Where?”

  “That’s the insane part. She came out with this horrific story. I didn’t believe her,” I repeated. “I mean, we know my mom’s a pathological liar. She’s lied to me all my life.”

  “Sure,” said Jim. “But what did she say this time?”

  “Okay, she said that when she was a
kid, she was snatched by some guys with a van. This was supposedly in Baltimore when she was eleven years old. She said they took her and her cousin to some building and kept them there for a long time, doing terrible things, unspeakable things, things she never wanted to think about again.”

  “Wow,” said Jim. He set his cup of coffee on the nightstand beside him. “Was there anything else to it?”

  “She said there were a lot of men. She mentioned the mayor’s son. And an Indian who kept her alive with his love.”

  “Well, okay,” Jim said. “That does sound pretty far out there.”

  “Yes.”

  We sat for a moment in silence, until finally Jim broke it.

  “But still,” he said. “Did you look into whether it checked out?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That’s what she wants you to do, right? She keeps saying it was in all the papers. If it really was a story of that magnitude, and if it really involved the son of Baltimore’s mayor, there must be a record of it. If not, we’ll know it’s just another delusion.”

  “I haven’t gone looking for any newspaper stories, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  Without another word, Jim took his phone from the nightstand beside him.

  “Okay, your mother is, what, seventy-five now?”

  “Seventy-six.”

  “So she would have been eleven in . . . 1953?”

  “That sounds right.”

  “So first, who was the mayor of Baltimore in 1953?”

  He wasn’t asking me. He was typing into the search engine, which returned an answer within seconds: Thomas L. J. D’Alesandro Jr. I looked over Jim’s shoulder at his Wikipedia entry. It said that D’Alesandro was the mayor from 1947 until 1959.

  The mayor’s son was there, my mother had said.

  Jim cleared the search and began another: D’Alesandro son gang rape 1953.

  The first link to come up was a blog about organized crime. The headline of the entry read: FBI Files: “Baltimore Mayor Thomas D’Alesandro Jr. Was ‘Constant Companion’ of Notorious Mobster Benjamin Magliano.”

  Again, my mother’s words came back to me. They were powerful men, society men. They had ties to the mob.