Found (10 page)

“You need glasses, buddy,” I tell him.

He was a Class-A jerk.

 

 

WHEN WE STARTED dating, Jeff Means told me he wanted to play football but he knew it wasn’t going to happen because he was too short.

Jeff was cute enough but he was so young, so boring, and he was doomed between the sheets. The guy didn’t know up from down and was all over me like an overexcited puppy. I didn’t have the heart to tell him how bad he was and instead endured whatever he was trying to do.

From the very beginning, I looked for a way to end it but Jeff was an amalgam of persistence and confidence. Jeff also insisted he
loved me and that I would never find a guy like him again. I remember Richard saying a version of this to Peggy.
No one will love you like I do, Baby, heh heh heh.

A part of me—the old, wise, and cynical part—knew that Jeff didn’t love me. Jeff loved having sex with me. He also loved that I used birth control.

Another part of me, the part that kept going out with him and who was so hungry to be loved, wondered if he was right about never being loved again. I hadn’t been loved up to this point—I had only been used. How would I know the difference?

 

 

IN THE BEGINNING, I put up a good fight against Jeff and his intention to take complete occupation of my body, my home, and my life. I manufactured a story about being Catholic. I made a big deal about this spiritual affiliation, and with as much authority and mystery as I could conjure, I said being Catholic meant we couldn’t live together. I explained that cohabitation was a
huge
sin. I added that people who lived together had to be married—not because I wanted to be married, I didn’t. I said this to scare him.

 

 

WHEN I MOVED from Richard and Peggy’s, I packed my
Columbia Viking Desk Encyclopedia
set in a big box marked “childhood.”

A few weeks after Patty found her mother—I unpacked the set. Under the letter C, I found the sheet that described my birth parents.

I don’t know why I did it. It was insanity. A kind of selfmutilation. Emotional suicide.

I suppose what drove me was the
possibility
that my first mother might be out there waiting for me. Within Patty’s success, I felt my cynicism—that great protector—finally slide aside. Like the tiny beating wings of a moth racing to the deadly light, I called the number on the top of the page and spoke to a woman in Nevada who worked at the Department of Child and Family Services. In a matter of moments, I was transferred to the adoption registry and a nice woman told me to write a letter. She said that if my first mother wrote a letter too, we’d be matched.

I wrote the letter.

 

 

A MONTH AFTER I sent the letter, I sat on my bed with the telephone on my lap. I called the Nevada Adoption Registry.

“Hello,” a woman answered.

“Yes,” I said, “I wrote a letter, um, let’s see, about a month ago. I was just wondering if you received it and have a file in my name.”

The lady put me on hold. I looked around my bedroom—just to have something to do. My bed was queen sized and covered with a soft comforter. There were pillows, from big to small—at least six—and at the end I kept a fuzzy throw. My favorite thing was to be in bed, reading and doing homework. I loved my bed.

The woman came back on the line and said yes, they had opened a file in my name.

I cleared my throat and forced words.

“Opened?” I asked. “Meaning you didn’t have a file already? No one else has written? ”

“Yes, that is correct. You are a new case.”

“Case?”

“Adoptee making a request,” she explained.

There was a thickness closing my throat, that predicable precursor to tears.

“No one has written?” I asked.

I knew the woman was probably rolling her eyes about the wack job on the line. How many times a day did she get this kind of call? Her voice was brisk and professional, as if we were talking about a deposit I made at my bank or a magazine subscription I submitted.

“No, not yet,” she said.

“Are you sure? ” I asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” she said. “I’m sure.”

I should’ve hung up. That was the most obvious next step but I didn’t. I held the phone against my ear as if something else would happen. The lady said, “If you move, be sure to send in a change of address.”

“Okay,” I said.

 

 

“YOU KNOW, HAVING Sex without being married is a sin too,” Jeff said.

He was at my place, in my lovely bed, and we just had another
round of his sloppy puppy sex. He was so happy and so oblivious. He had his hands behind his head.

I was at the edge of the bed, willing him to leave.

“My buddy at the store is Catholic and he says using birth control is a much bigger sin than living together.”

I flushed with embarrassment and shame. He was talking about me at the RadioShack store? I considered this to be the perfect time to dump his ass. The words were at the tip of my tongue.

Jeff looked up at the ceiling, laughing a little—
heh heh heh
.

“Look, I don’t care if we get married,” he said. “I think we should. I’m just saying that before we get married, we should live together. It would save rent and I could work toward getting my own store. Being a manager at RadioShack is a great deal. You can make a ton of dough. My brother, you know, he’s a regional manager and he says he’ll help me get a step up.”

Jeff closed the distance between us. He was muscled from lifting weights and exercising all the time. He was covered with little freckles and his hair, cut in the shape of a bowl, fell in his face.

“I was thinking about getting a store in Montana. That’s big money. I want you with me. We could, you know, make a life.”

“Is this supposed to be some kind of marriage proposal? ”

“It could be,” he said, “if you play your cards right.”

I moved away from him. Another inch and I would have tumbled from my own bed.

“First, I have a life. I live here. I’m in school. I’m going to
get an internship at the paper next year and I’m going to Eastern Washington University. Why would I change my plans and go to Montana?”

Jeff pushed his lower lip into a pout. He looked like he was ten years old. “For me,” he said. “You know you couldn’t live without me, Baby.”

 

 

EVERY DAY, WHEN I came home, I checked my mail in hopes that a letter might come from Nevada. Every day I found an empty mailbox. Every day, I died a little death.

My mother was dead or she didn’t have the courage to search or she didn’t want to know how I was doing. All options—as I considered them in front of the empty mailbox—were devastating.

After three months of waiting, I made another call to the state of Nevada and spoke to the same lady at the adoption registry. I asked her to double-check that she had the correct birth date, place of birth, and delivering doctor. She said yes, they had all the information. She explained that if someone from my birth family sent an inquiry, she would let me know. “Try to be patient,” she said.

Patient?

Twenty years isn’t patient?

 

 

JEFF TOOK ME to dinner at a restaurant with linen tablecloths and candles. We sat at a table with a view of the waterfront and sunlight fell on the surface of the river, turning it into a mirror of the sky.

Jeff slid a velvet box between us. Even before I opened it, he
said, “Please be my wife. Please marry me. I’ll never love anyone more than I love you.”

He wore a wool jacket from Sears. I helped him pick it out. It had leather patches on the elbows. He had been promoted to manager at RadioShack. He was twenty years old.

The ring in the box was a humble little solitaire in a silver and gold setting. Patty’s engagement ring had been a glorious diamond that winked from a block away. It wasn’t like I wanted a huge, flashy diamond. The difference though, in the rings, stood as a symbol of the difference between Patty and me. She knew she wanted to be married. She had a ring that made her jump up and down. I didn’t want to be married and I had this tiny little diamond that screamed ambivalence.

Had I known anything about myself, I would have known that my mother married my father when she was nineteen. If I had been given some sense of her path, I would have seen that I was doing exactly what she had done and perhaps would have chosen differently for myself. But I knew nothing about my mother and her choices and thus knew nothing about myself. I was without a compass—although this is not completely true. My first compass, my first sense of being in this world, had been as an abandoned child whose mother did not hold her and later, did not search for her. Unloved. Yes, I had a strong sense that I was unloved and unlovable.

Who is closer to us than a mother but the lover? How hungry is the child who has not bonded with her mother? By nineteen, I was starving for human contact and for love. I didn’t care if the human
contact was cruel or painful or confused. That is why I endured Jeff and his fumbling attempt at closeness. That is why total occupation was inevitable.

“Okay,” I finally said.

Jeff laughed, as if surprised, and I thought he was going to cry.

While he got himself together, clearing his throat and looking around to order dinner, I took the ring out of the box and slipped it on my own finger.

 

 

JUST BEFORE I married Jeff, I called the state of Nevada one last time. The lady at the registry lost patience with my questions. “Look,” she snapped, “if someone writes a letter, we will call you.”

 

 

SIX MONTHS AFTER the wedding, I graduated from the community college and was taking classes at Eastern Washington University.

Jeff had a store in the Spokane Valley and worked ninety hours a week. He still had ambitions to be transferred to a store in Montana. He said the profit margins were higher in remote locations and, now that we were married, he wanted to be closer to his mom and dad. Jeff also revealed that he wanted to start a family in Montana. He now wanted four boys—like his own mother had had.

Just as he had worn me down to the idea of sharing a home and being married, he was now trying to foist motherhood on my back. He was pressing me, unwittingly, to the edge of what would be possible. I wouldn’t have one child with Jeff—let alone four. I wasn’t becoming a mother and I certainly wasn’t going to become a
mother with Jeff. My best friend was the birth control pill—which I took like religion—every single day.

 

 

I WAS HOME when the long-distance call came from Nevada. As the line crackled with that familiar sound of the far away, I thought:
This is it. My mother.

But the voice belonged to a cousin named Tracy who lived in Carson City. She was one of Auntie Carol’s kids.

“I haven’t talked to you for years,” I said. “How are you doing?”

Tracy’s voice was high and full of emotion. She got right to the point. Bryan had disappeared three days earlier. The Lauck family had been frantic trying to figure out where he went and she wanted to know if I had seen him.

“Me? No. Why?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “just a wild guess. We’ve called everyone else and I thought maybe you’d know.”

“You’ve called everyone else before me? You mean the whole family knows Bryan is missing? How long? How long have you known?”

“A couple days, I guess. Look, it’s not personal.”

I sat down at the dining table and the cord of the phone pulled tight.

Bryan had been at my wedding. He came from Oklahoma and we had a couple of conversations, brief and jagged. He said he had been at a seminary in Missouri, studying to be a priest but that didn’t work out. He planned to go to the University of Oklahoma to finish a
degree in philosophy. I asked what he’d do with a degree in philosophy. He laughed for a long time. He said I made a good point.

I had no point. I just wanted to know.

 

 

BRYAN AND I were strangers. With all the years of being separated, we had no common ground except the losses in our past and to Bryan’s mind, they weren’t my losses. They were his. And he was suffering. He said he felt depressed and sad. “You’re lucky you were adopted,” he said. “In a way, you are exempt.”

When Bryan and I parted, a dark thought entered my mind.
That’s the kind of guy who could end up killing himself.
I even said this to Jeff, as we left for our honeymoon. Jeff just shrugged as if he didn’t know and didn’t care. He didn’t know Bryan. He wasn’t interested in more than his plan to get to Montana and to begin that big family of boys.

 

 

WHILE TRACY AND I talked, the dark thought of suicide returned and grew into a knowing. I knew. Bryan was dead. My brother had killed himself.

 

 

THERE WERE TWO tracks of experience. On one, I searched for my first mother. On another, my brother did, in fact, kill himself.

On the first track, my mother was not looking for me. Even though the Nevada registry had been open for reunions for many years, she hadn’t written a letter. My father hadn’t either.

On the second track, Bryan was dead. He had been the last living relative from my immediate family, the last link to the chain.

 

 

I FLEW TO an impoverished and remote town in Oklahoma—where Bryan grew up with Uncle Larry and Aunt Ruth—and attended the funeral. Jeff didn’t come. “Why?” he had asked. “I didn’t know the guy.”