Look Again (8 page)

Chapter Twenty-four

The next morning as Ellen put on her coat, she was already wondering how soon she could call Amy Martin. Will's fever had broken, and he was running around the living room with a new Penn State football that Connie had just brought for him. Ellen withheld the lecture on not introducing new toys before school. Working mothers had no time for spontaneity unless it was scheduled.

"He knows just what to do!" Connie said, delighted. "My Mark was like that, too."

"Look at me!" Will circled the coffee table with the blue football tucked under his arm. "Look, Mommy!"

"Watch where you're going, buddy," Ellen called back, and Oreo Figaro jumped out of the way as Will hurtled past him, turned left into the dining room, and ran into the kitchen. He ran through the kitchen, up and over the stairway, and ended up back in the living room, a circular floor plan designed for little boys and NASCAR drivers.

Connie said, "You know, he looks like a natural athlete."

"You think?" Ellen picked up her purse and briefcase, listening to the pounding of Will's feet through the kitchen. Whoever coined the expression pitter-patter-of-little-feet had a kitten, not a child.

"I should get Mark over here to throw the ball with him sometime."

Will came running back into the living room and looked up grinning, his cheeks flushed. "I did it! I made a yesdown!"

"You mean a touchdown?" Connie corrected him, and Ellen laughed and held out her arms.

"Gimme a hug. I gotta go to work and you gotta go to school."

"Mommy!" Will ran to her, and Ellen hugged and kissed him, brushing his bangs from his eyes.

"Love you. Have fun at school."

"Can I bring my football?" Will's eyes widened with hope.

"No," Ellen answered.

"Yes," Connie said, at the same minute.

"I WANT TO!" Will hollered, jiggered up.

"Hey, quiet down, pal." Ellen held his arm, trying to settle him. "No shouting in the house."

"I want to bring my ball, Mommy!"

"Fine, okay." Ellen didn't want to leave on a bad note, another axiom of Working Mother Guilt.

"Goody!" Will rewarded her with another hug, dropping the football and throwing his arms around her neck.

Ellen felt a twinge of separation anxiety, worse than usual.

Maybe because she knew what she was about to do, after she left.

Chapter Twenty-five

Ellen eyed the cars stacked ahead, their red taillights a glowing line, their exhaust trailing white plumes. The day was overcast and cold, and freezing rain had left an icy sleeve on the tree branches and a black veneer on the roads. The traffic stayed bad on the two-lane roads to Stoatesville, and in time, she found Corinth Street among the warren of rowhouses in a working-class neighborhood around an abandoned steel mill. She traveled down the street, reading the house numbers. Suddenly her cell phone started ringing in her purse, and she fumbled for it. The display showed a number she didn't recognize, and she hit Ignore when she realized that the house coming up was number 393.

Amy Martin's house.

A woman was standing in its driveway, scraping ice off the windshield of an old black Cherokee. Her back was turned, and she wore an Eagles knit cap, a thick black parka, jeans, and black rubber boots.

Amy?

Ellen pulled up in front of the house, grabbed her bag and file, got out, walked up the driveway. "Excuse me, Ms. Martin?" she asked, her heart thumping like crazy.

She turned, startled, and Ellen saw instantly that the woman was too old to be Amy Martin. She looked to be in her late sixties, and her hooded eyes widened under the Eagles hat. She said, "Jeez, you scared me!"

"Sorry." Ellen introduced herself. "I'm looking for Amy Martin."

"Amy's my daughter, and she don't live here anymore. I'm Gerry."

Ellen tried to keep her bearings. Gerry Martin had been one of the witnesses on the consent form. She was looking into the eyes of Will's grandmother, the first blood relative of his she had ever seen. "She gave this address as hers, two years ago."

"She always does, but she don't live here. I get all her mail, all those damn bills, I throw 'em all away."

"Where does Amy live?"

"Hell if I know." Gerry returned to scraping the windshield, shaving fragile curls of ice, making a krrp krrp sound. She pursed her lips with the effort, sending deep wrinkles radiating from her mouth. Her black glove was over-sized, dwarfing the red plastic scraper.

"You don't know where she is?"

"No." Krrp krrp. "Amy's over eighteen. It ain't my business no more."

"How about where she works?"

"Who said she works?"

"I'm just trying to find her."

"I can't help you."

For some reason, Ellen hadn't imagined there'd be an estrangement. "When was the last time you saw her?"

"Awhile."

"A year or two?"

"Try five."

Ellen knew it couldn't be true. Gerry had signed the consent form two years ago. Why was she lying? "Are you sure?"

Gerry looked over, eyes narrowed under the fuzzy hat, scraper stalled on the windshield. "She owes you money, right? You're a bill collector or a lawyer or somethin"?"

"No." Ellen paused. If she wanted the truth, she'd have to tell the truth. "Actually, I'm the woman who adopted her baby."

Gerry burst into laughter, showing yellowed teeth and bracing herself against the Jeep, scraper in hand.

"Why is that funny?" Ellen asked, and after Gerry stopped laughing, she wiped her eyes with the back of her big glove.

"You better come in, honey." "Why?"

"We got some talkin' to do," Gerry answered, placing her gloved hand on Ellen's shoulder.

Chapter Twenty-six

Gerry went into the kitchen to make coffee, leaving Ellen in the living room, which was barely illuminated by two retro floor lamps, their low-wattage bulbs in ball-shaped fixtures on a stalk. Beige curtains covered the windows, and the air was thick with stale cigarette smoke. Flowered metal trays served as end tables flanking a worn couch of blue velveteen, and three mismatched chairs clustered around a large-screen TV.

Ellen crossed the room, drawn to photographs that ran the length of the wall. There were over-sized school pictures of boys and girls in front of screensaver blue skies, photo montages cut to fit the various circles and squares, and a wedding photo of a young man and a woman in an elaborate bridal headdress. She shook her head in wonderment. They were Will's blood, but complete strangers, and she was his mother, known and loved by him, but having none of his blood. She went from one photo to the next, trying to put together the puzzle that was her son.

Which girl is Amy?

The photos showed girls and boys at all different ages, and Ellen tried to follow each child as he or she grew up, picking blue eyes from brown and matching young smiles to older smiles, age-progressing all of them in her mind's eye, searching for Amy. One of the girls had blondish hair and blue eyes, plus Will's fair skin, with just the hint of freckles dotting a small, pert nose.

"Here we go." Gerry came into the room with a skinny brown cigarette and two heavy glass mugs of murky coffee, one of which she handed to Ellen.

"Thanks."

"Siddown, will ya?" Gerry gestured at the couch, her cigarette trailing an acrid snake of smoke, but Ellen stayed with the photos.

"Can I ask, is this one Amy, with the blue eyes and freckles?"

"No, that's Cheryl, her sister. The girl with her is my oldest. I had three girls, one boy."

Ellen remembered the name Cheryl Martin as the other signature on the consent form.

"This one's Amy, the baby of the family in more ways than one." Gerry tapped a smaller photo in the corner, and Ellen walked over, feeling a frisson of discovery.

"So this is Amy, huh?" She leaned close to the photo of a young girl, maybe thirteen years old, leaning on a red Firebird. Her dark blond hair was in cornrows, and her blue eyes were sly. She had a crooked grin that telegraphed too-cool-for-school, and Ellen scrutinized her features. Amy and Will had the same coloring, but their features weren't alike. Still, one picture wasn't a fair sample. "Which of the other photos are Amy?"

"Uh, lemme see." Gerry eyed the photos with a short laugh. "None! I tell you, by the time you get to your fourth, you're a little sick of it, you know what I mean?"

Arg. "I only have the one."

"Oh, after the first, you stop springing for the forty-five-dollar pictures, the refrigerator magnet, the keychain, all that happy horseshit." Gerry motioned to the couch again. "Come on, sit."

"Thanks." Ellen walked over, sank into the couch, and sipped the coffee, which was surprisingly good. "Wow."

"I put in real cream. That's my secret." Gerry sat down heavily, catty-corner to the couch, pulling an ancient beanbag ashtray onto the chair arm. Her expression looked softer, her hard lines smoothed by the low light. Her hair was a tinted brown with gray roots, the ends frayed, and she wore it tucked behind her ears. Her nose was stubby on a wide face, but she had a motherly smile.

"Why did you laugh outside?" Ellen asked, her fingers tight around her glass mug.

"First, tell me about Amy and this baby." Gerry took a drag on the brown cigarette.

"He was sick, in the hospital. I did a story on it, a series." Ellen reached into her purse, pulled out the clipping from her file, and showed it to Gerry, who barely glanced at it, so she put it back. "You may have seen them in the paper."

"We don't get the paper."

"Okay. Will, the baby I adopted, was in cardiac intensive care when I met him. He had a heart defect."

"And you think he was Amy's baby?"

"I know so."

"How?" Gerry sucked on her cigarette, then blew out a cone of smoke from the side of her mouth, meaning to be polite. "I mean, where'd you get your information?"

"From a lawyer, who died. My lawyer, mine and Amy's. It was a private adoption, and she brokered the deal between us."

"Amy brokered it?"

"No, the lawyer did. Karen Batz."

"It's a lady lawyer?"

"Yes. Does the name mean anything to you?"

Gerry shook her head. "You sure it's Amy? My Amy?"

"Yes." Ellen set the coffee down on the metal tray, reached into her envelope, and rifled through the papers. She found Amy's consent to the adoption and the letter with the Corinth Avenue return address and handed them to Gerry, who took them and didn't say anything for a minute, reading to herself and dragging on her cigarette. The smoke hit the court papers and billowed back on itself, like a wave crashing against a seawall.

"This is nuts," Gerry said, half to herself, and Ellen's chest tightened.

"Is that Amy's signature, on the consent?"

"It looks like it."

"How about on the letter?"

"There, too."

"Good. Now we're getting somewhere. So it's your Amy." Ellen reached over and turned the page to the consent form, pointing. "Is that your signature?"

"No way. I never signed this." Gerry's lips flattened to a grim line,

again bringing out the wrinkles around her mouth. "And this other signature, it's not Cheryl's, either."

Ellen's heart sank. "Maybe Amy forged the signatures. Maybe she wanted to put her baby up for adoption and didn't want her family to know."

"That can't be it."

"Why not?" Ellen asked, and Gerry shook her head, the papers reflecting white on her face.

"Amy couldn't have kids."

Ellen's mouth went dry.

"She had an operation, when she was seventeen. She had a problem with her ovaries. What was it called?" Gerry paused a minute. "One day she woke up in cramps real bad, so I knew she wasn't fakin' to get outta school. We took her to the emergency and they said she had a twisted ovary, it was called. The ovary got all full of blood, and they had to take it out right away. They said she had almost no chance of getting pregnant."

Ellen tried to process it. "But not no chance. She still had one ovary left, right?"

"Yeah, but they said it was very, what did they say, unlikely she could have kids."

"But she had a child."

"I think if you take out an ovary, it affects the hormones, at least that's what they said, something like that, is all I remember." Gerry looked confused. "Whatever, if she had a kid, it's news to me."

"She didn't tell you?"

"No, like I said, we haven't talked. She didn't tell me nothin' anyway. I don't even know where she is. I was tellin' you the truth, outside."

Ellen couldn't accept that it was a dead end. "What about any of her sisters, or her brother? You never heard from any of them about her having a baby?"

"I don't think she talks to anybody but Cheryl, and she lives down in Delaware. I can call her and ask. I will, later." Gerry snorted, her nostrils emitting puffs of smoke. "Nice to know if I had another grandchild."

Ellen tried another tack. "Or maybe when the baby got really sick, that's the kind of thing you might tell someone."

"If Amy had a baby that got really sick, she couldn't handle it. She'd be lookin' for an easy out."

Ellen cringed at the harsh words. "That's the sort of thing that would overwhelm anyone, especially a young girl."

"It didn't take much to overwhelm Amy. If I asked her to take out the trash, that overwhelmed her."

Ellen let it go. She needed more information. "Can you just tell me a little more about her? What is she like?"

"She was always my wild child. I never could get a handle on that girl."

Ellen found it hard to hear. She had imagined Amy so differently. She wondered if all adoptive mothers had fantasy birth mothers.

"Smart girl, but got lousy grades. Didn't give a shit. I always thought she had, like, ADD, but the teachers said no." Gerry took another puff. "She did her share of drinkin' and drugs. I had no control with her. She was outta here after graduation."

"She ran away?"

"Not like that, just left."

"No college?"

"No way." Gerry smiled crookedly, and Ellen caught a trace of Amy's wisecracking grin.

"Why did she go, may I ask?"

"Didn't like my boyfriend, Tom. They used to get into it all the time. Now she's gone and so's he." Gerry emitted another puff. "I made her stay and graduate high school, but after that, she went off on her own."

"Hold on a sec." Ellen rifled through the papers and handed Gerry the father's consent form. "Look at this. My son's birth father is Charles Cartmell, from Philly. Do you know him?"

"No."

"The name isn't familiar at all? He lives on Grant Avenue in the Northeast." Ellen had checked online last night but couldn't get a phone number or find a listing of the address.

"I don't know the name."

"If Amy is twenty-five now and gave birth to Will three years ago, it means she had him when she was twenty-two. So maybe the father was someone from high school, or the area?"

"She didn't go steady in high school." Gerry shook her head. "She saw a lot of different guys. I didn't ask no questions, believe me."

"Do you have her high school yearbook? Maybe we could look at it?"

"She didn't buy the yearbook. She wasn't the type." Gerry waved her off. "She was my baby, and I spoiled her, yes I did."

"Could I see her bedroom? There might be something in there that would help me."

"I cleared it out a long time ago. I use it for my son's girlfriend now."

Ellen began thinking out loud. "She must have stayed in the Philadelphia area, because she chose a lawyer in Ardmore. She even had meetings with the lawyer."

Gerry shrugged. "Cheryl might know."

"Can I have her number?"

Gerry hesitated. "Why exactly are you tryin' to find Amy?"

"It's a medical thing, about the baby," Ellen lied, having prepared for the question.

"Does she have to give it a kidney or something?"

"No, not at all. At most it's a blood test. His heart is acting up again, and I need to know more about her medical history."

"She didn't have no heart problems. None of us have heart problems. We got cancer, runs in the family."

"I'm sure, but the blood test will show more than that." Ellen was freewheeling. "If you'd prefer it, maybe you could give Cheryl my number and ask her to call me?"

"Okay, I'll do that." Gerry reached out and patted her hand. "Don't worry. I'm sure the baby will be okay."

"I don't want to lose him," Ellen added, unaccountably.