Bastards: A Memoir (24 page)

“The weirdest part was when we were little,” Meghan went on. “Lesley always said that she felt like she had a piece missing, like a hole inside that wasn’t right. She sensed it the whole time. She’s gonna shit when she finds out about all of you.”

I was eager to meet Lesley and complete our set. I could see from the glint in my siblings’ eyes that we all were. Just miles from this diner—a fifteen-minute drive—seventeen-year-old Lesley was asleep in her bed. The thought made my pulse race. We could go there right now. We sipped our coffee and considered patience.

Meghan was in the premed program at a rural Pennsylvania college. She planned to go directly into medical school and become an obstetrician. When she heard the college I had attended, she squealed.

“I applied there and didn’t get in! Can you imagine if I had?”

“We would have just missed one another,” I said. But she would have known people and places that knew me. Deeper digging revealed that she and Lesley had been in a summer martial arts class that Jacob had taught when they were kids. The realization of these near misses amazed all of us.

“I’m gonna be here the rest of my life. So you guys’ll have to move back.” Meghan gave me, Becca, and Jacob serious looks.

As soon as the statement was out of her mouth, it was the only thing I wanted to do. I could get a little apartment in South Jersey. We could meet once in a while for dinner. I wouldn’t demand to spend actual holidays with the girls—that would be too much—but we could find days around holidays. We’d meet each other’s friends and coworkers. We’d introduce one another as,
This is my little sister, this is my big sister.

“What the hell happened with you guys?” Meghan asked bluntly.

Jacob and Becca groaned loudly.

“Newcomer’s going straight for the jugular!” Jacob crowed.

Everyone looked at me. I was the only one who had been through all of it—who’d lived with Peggy and Michael, who’d stayed in Oklahoma when Jacob had left, who had been adopted alongside Becca. I’d pocketed the pieces of our story so I would be able to answer questions for my sisters when they returned, but now that I had the opportunity, I wasn’t sure I wanted to burden them with the truth. What was the truest answer to that question, anyway? What had happened with Jacob, Becca, and me?

“Peggy and Michael were broke,” was what I settled on. “When they divorced, neither one could afford to keep us and Peggy didn’t want to split us up.”

“But you did get split up,” Lisa noted.

“I didn’t like Oklahoma,” Jacob said. “And it didn’t like me, either.”

“Why the hell did they keep having kids?” Meghan asked.

It was a question that I wanted an answer to myself.

“I don’t know,” I said. “They were good at having them, just not good at keeping them. You’d have to ask Peggy.”

I knew that Peggy and Michael didn’t believe in abortion. Birth control in general was a murkier area. When I received my first prescription birth control pills in college, I recognized the plastic clamshell setup because I’d seen one in Peggy’s nightstand in Marigold Court. Either she wasn’t conscientious, or she couldn’t afford to get them consistently. Or she thought maybe having another baby would save her marriage, save the family she’d always wanted. But there was one thing I knew for sure; I’d heard my ex-father say it so many times.

“Michael thought it was God’s will; that it was their duty to bring you girls into the world and give you to people who couldn’t have children. It was his ministry.” My sisters nodded into their coffee.

As a little girl I had accepted my sisters’ births as facts. But with time to reflect, it was clear that they were the bombing campaign that my already fragile family was not strong enough to withstand. The girls around this table were people I loved, people I lost, and people whose existence had ripped my family apart. All of these things were true. None of these truths was strong enough to erase the others. It would be easier if one of them could.

MEGHAN EVENTUALLY
had to go home. It was her Christmas break and her days were filled with family obligations. We made plans to meet again at Peggy’s later that afternoon, if she could get away.

“I wish it could have been different,” I said when Meghan hugged me goodbye.

“Yeah,” she said. “Me, too.”

By the time the rest of us made it back to Peggy and Tom’s apartment the sun was already climbing up the sky and sleep seemed ludicrous. Jacob, Becca, Lisa, Rebekah, and I tried not to make any noise as we opened the door. Peggy was already awake, brewing a pot of coffee in the kitchen. The inviting smell of coffee and cinnamon wafted around her in her light blue pullover.

Her eyes lit up at the sight of the five of us slinking into the house after dawn. “It’s all I ever wanted, for you all to find each other,” she said. Then she grabbed my hands and rubbed them between hers, demanding to know how I’d come to New Jersey in December without gloves.

Quarter-Life Crisis

M
eghan didn’t make it back to college for the spring semester. She said she was just taking a break. A month after she dropped out, she drove the wrong way on a freeway and crashed into another driver. The mangled remains of both vehicles made the local papers.

It was incredible that she didn’t die, that she didn’t kill anybody. But then, my siblings and I seemed to be charmed that way; we were just lucky enough to live after we unluckily torpedoed our lives. Her parents got her a great lawyer and she managed to avoid jail time. But Meghan had to plead guilty to some things, so she would never be a doctor now. She would have to find another way to be.

If I was willing to admit it, there was a pattern of chaos developing in my younger sisters. Peggy had sent them away from us when they were born so they could have lives free from the strange warping force of our family, but the cruel joke was that all of my sisters slid into a downward spiral soon after they met us. Even after all these years we were still a liability.

When I met her for the first time, Becca was a whip-smart little girl who absorbed knowledge like a sponge. After her stint in New Jersey she became a caterwauling ball of angst. She was searching and unsettled. Dropping out of college, getting into drugs.

Lisa, too, dropped out of college, and moved to Orlando, then Denver. She dated alcoholics and men who slapped her. Every few months my phone would ring at three in the morning with a drunk Lisa on the other end of the line sobbing. The reason behind her wails was never intelligible. What was clear, though, was that a stream of sadness had been turned on inside her like a water spigot and it needed to be released somehow. I cooed,
You’re okay, you’re okay
, and tried to stay awake until she was finished. We never spoke about those calls in the light of day.

Just after the New Year Peggy called to tell me that Rebekah was in the hospital after taking too many aspirin. When Rebekah told me about it herself a week later, she said she’d had a headache and she misread the label, silliest thing; the print is so small it’s no wonder.

Even after I spoke to Rebekah, the story haunted me. How many aspirin would a person need to take to be hospitalized? Was it truly a case of a misread label or did she have a self-destructive force in her?

For as long as I could remember, I had carried a sense of dread with me. It was a feeling, low and constant, that there was a black hole at my core that would swallow me whole if I relaxed my guard. This was what my childhood desire to disappear into the wind had become. My need to keep that great void from crushing me was what prevented me from trusting my own instincts. It was in me, and I could not escape it; it was a flaw in my foundational fabric that would draw tribulation to me unless I was vigilant and good.

I wanted to believe that Rebekah did not share this trait. But I was starting to believe that the impulse that drew us together was the very thing that tore us apart.

Our reunions were a brush with another dimension; with the people we might have been. All people fantasize about mythical ways their lives could have been different; in their minds they finally walk down the road not taken and play out new chains of events. Part of growing up is realizing that it doesn’t matter, in the end you would be the same person, as likely to have ended up where you are regardless of what choice you made. But for my sisters and me that sort of fantasizing is not ephemera. It is a complete alternate reality in which we had enough information to fill in the blanks. We saw the cracks we would have fallen through, the rooms where we would have slept, the woman who would have been our mother, the man who would have been our father. Maybe we loved them, hated them, or pitied them—either way, the emotions were real. The adoptions themselves suddenly seem arbitrary enough that they could easily never have happened. With a few minor changes of circumstance, we might not have become the people we know ourselves to be. Thoughts like that were enough to drive anyone to drink, swallow half a bottle of pills, run their car into oncoming traffic, date dangerous men.

It was only a matter of time before destruction found me, too. As I searched for a post-college plan for my life, each of my days became a repeat of the previous one: I temped in the legal department of a local bank, I administered Mimi’s breathing treatment, I watched the news with Mimi and Granddad, and then I lay in bed until the sun came up. After the reunion with Meghan, I stopped sleeping.

After a few weeks without sleeping my digestive system shut down. Food went in, but nothing came out. A stabbing pain ema nating from above my left hipbone was constant. In the mornings, I needed the hot steam from the shower before I could ease my body into standing.

I lived with a couple of septuagenarians; foods designed to keep a body “regular” were easy to come by. One night I ate half of box of apple crisp fiber wafers, leaning over the kitchen sink in the dark like some sort of fiber cookie junkie. But no amount of fibrous cookies, orange powders, or Smooth Move teas had any effect. After four weeks without sleeping, and three weeks without shitting, came the days when I threw up everything. The oatmeal and the coffee, the fibrous cookies consumed under the cover of night, the bile that couldn’t exit through the twisted coiled cramping mass of my stomach and intestines. I was exhausted and couldn’t sleep, hungry and couldn’t eat. I left telltale empty bowls and coffee cups in the kitchen sink so Mimi and Granddad wouldn’t notice.

When my breath reached the point where it could strip the paint off a car, I started taking a toothbrush to work. Every morning the cramps took longer to subside. I passed long afternoons at the legal department reception desk jamming pens into the fleshy parts of my hands to distract myself from the pain in my abdomen. Ink dots covered me like a pox. At two in the afternoon it was time for me to retire to the staff restroom and throw up my lunch. I hoped that if I behaved as if I were fine, then my ailment would pass.

One day the lead counsel at the bank nudged me after the morning meeting. “You’re too smart to be a receptionist,” he said. “Have you thought about law school?”

It seemed like a hint from the universe. Everyone I knew from college was in law school. Or they were working at investment firms. The advent of social media allowed me to see, in real time, the ways in which my peers—or, the people I wanted to be my peers—shot ahead of me on the professional ladder. I was living with my parents, temping in the legal department at a bank, and feeling like a loser. Next year the engagement photo bombardment would begin, then five years later the sonograms and baby pictures would appear on Facebook.

There was a word for members of my generation who—like me—failed to hit these milestones on schedule. The phrase
quarter
-life crisis
was enjoying a vogue. I didn’t like the term. It felt like a flimsy ailment for insubstantial people.

I left work that afternoon and drove aimlessly around Oklahoma City for hours. Trees, telephone poles, and stone fences brushed past my window. I toyed with the idea of pitching myself into one of these solid things, just so I could finally sleep. I imagined how the impact would feel. Cold steel would scrape against my bones, and those bones would stab into soft tissue. At every intersection, my mouth watered in anticipation.

I was crazed; I didn’t know what horrors I was capable of. I wasn’t even sure if I was awake or asleep. I guided the car into the parking lot of a bookstore. The nice one on the north side of Oklahoma City, the place where I met my math tutor in high school. Between Self-Help and Astrology I found what I was looking for: an LSAT test prep guide.

The store will be closing in fifteen minutes
, the voice on the public address system announced.

With the book in my hand, I attempted to turn toward the cash registers but my weary feet were glued to the carpet. There were no barriers, no forces holding me down. I was heavy with lack of sleep, my stomach and intestines were hard as concrete and it was spreading to the rest of my body; I could not move.
Move
, I thought, willing the word down to my limbs. But my body defied me.

I was frozen in the middle of the aisle. The weight of the book in my hand was the only thing that told me that I was not dreaming. This was real. The hum of the fluorescent lights and the nutty aroma of coffee and scalded milk. The voice entreated,
Shoppers, please make your way to the cash registers with your purchases; the store is closing in ten minutes
.

I negotiated with my feet, pleaded with them to move along the carpet.
Move move move
, I thought. When they wouldn’t, I glanced down at the taupe page in front of me and tried to appear absorbed. In the aisles around me, pant legs swished together as my fellow shoppers obediently hustled to the registers.

The lights were too bright. I closed my eyes. I felt sweat trickling down my spine, collecting in the waistband of my jeans. How long had my back been sweating? How long had my hands been sweating and why was it so hot in here and why were the lights so bright and strangers were laughing they could see me they
saw
me they
heard
me breathing and my heart thudded against my eardrums like it was trying to escape the immobile husk of me,
The store will be closing in three minutes
, the voice said.
Two minutes
. the voice said, and I told myself I was fine.