Somebody Else's Daughter (36 page)

Candace had not gone to college. Although Joe had offered to send her, she had declined. She had never been much of a student. This whole college thing was out of her league. And it was one of the reasons she kept quiet when they had company, often other Pioneer parents, who would launch into lengthy discussions about government and politics, subjects that she did not fully understand— usually she'd clear the plates. Of course, Willa was going to college, it was simply assumed she would go and would want to go, but Candace could offer her daughter little guidance. Already, Willa had long surpassed Candace in academic terms.

She looked around the room at the other parents. Some of them were taking notes. Claire Squire was sitting across the room, slouching in her chair with her knees up, rather rudely, on the back of the seat in front her. She seemed to be half-listening, sketching on her appointment schedule. Based on what Willa had told her, Claire's son didn't have much of a chance of getting into college. He had academic issues, Willa had said. Rumor had it that the only reason he was at Pioneer in the first place was because his grandfather had built the gymnasium, and it was the only reason he hadn't gotten kicked out. For several months, Candace had been under the impression that her husband had fallen in love with Claire Squire. She would see them at parties, all wound up with a kind of electricity, as if someone had tied them up in Christmas lights. Claire had a certain sloppy beauty that appealed to her husband and that Candace almost envied. She supposed it made him feel younger, being with a woman like her as opposed to with his wife, who'd taken on middle age with a certain anguished diligence. For years, her husband had betrayed her with other women, she knew it, she had known it all along, yet she had done nothing to stop him. When she thought about it now, she came to the conclusion that her husband cheated because it reinforced his contention that sex could be casual, especially for men, and that, because of what he did for a living, he was entitled to casual sex as one of the recreational perks of his industry. Unlike other heterosexual men, whose sexual habits were about as daring as painting by numbers, he could enjoy sex without any hang-ups. “Men need sex more than women,” he had told her once. “It's in our DNA.”

At first, she'd been hurt by his philandering. She'd threaten to leave, he'd promise to stop. But he didn't; he only got cleverer about hiding it. In truth, she didn't really want to leave him. She saw no point. When she was young, her body had been used for sex, with little regard for her feelings on the subject. She had shoved all those memories into the darkest, deepest parts of her. And even now when Joe made love to her she couldn't completely let go.

For a long time in the marriage, she too had been under a kind of spell. She'd pulled away from him; she'd retreated, as if in defeat. Defeat was like an instinct to her, a place to rest. Yet now, after all this time together, the world was suddenly brighter, her senses sharper. It was as though she had been lost, for years, in a shameful foreign city and had finally, at long last, found her way out.

“The word
packaging
comes to mind.” Greer was answering another parent's question about what to do if your child was a mediocre student. “Try to find a way to make your child stand out, a certain trait or talent you can emphasize.” More hands went up. People were fixated on the SATs. Candace recalled taking the test in high school at St. Theresa's—she'd gone to the lavatory and when she came back she found her pencil broken in two, the girl behind her snickering. It had upset her so she could barely finish the test. “I'm afraid that's all the time we have,” Greer said. Parents began to file out of the auditorium, judiciously holding their schedules. Mr. Heath was standing on the side, greeting people as the group came out, a kind of impromptu receiving line. Whenever Candace saw Heath she found herself fumbling, nervously, as if he were the president. He seemed like a perfect man, she thought, if that were possible. His good, clean looks, his impeccable clothes. The way he'd take his wife's hand whenever she came near, or whisper in her ear, or guide her gently from room to room, his hand perched on her back. He spoke gently, in the sort of voice people used with very young children. The Heaths were an ideal couple, it seemed, and very much in love. Candace wondered what it would be like to have a husband like him, so devoted, a true partner.

It had been Joe's idea to send Willa here. On the day he'd taken Candace to see the school for the first time, she'd been impressed with the campus, the buildings, the lush green playing fields and the woods beyond. There was the lake, on which the crew team competed, and the fully equipped boat house. It was spring at the time and the dogwoods had been in bloom, sugaring the air with their blossoms. In the Main House, on an antique table in the oversized foyer, there was something called The Kindness Jar. The enormous glass jar was the sort of thing you'd find at Costco with pretzels in it, and it was filled with little cards on which the students had recorded their routine “acts of kindness.”

“Our first goal is to produce good citizens,” Jack Heath had told them on their tour. Candace remembered feeling particularly warmed by the idea—it was a far cry from the tirelessly evil antics of her old classmates. And unlike the somber, punitive atmosphere she'd endured in high school, the teachers at Pioneer actually seemed happy to be there. Everyone walked around with a dazed and pleasant expression on their face, as though they were all members of an exclusive cult.

She found herself wondering if her life would have turned out differently if she'd gone to a school like Pioneer, if an education like the one their daughter was getting would have made her into someone better, someone more confident, smarter. But she couldn't imagine it without recasting the other people in her childhood, her ineffectual foster parents, and her mother, who could think of no better solution than to leave her in a bus station locker and throw away the key. If she had her druthers to do it over again, she'd choose a father like Joe, who stopped at nothing to give his daughter everything he could. After years of therapy, Candace had finally come to terms with her childhood. Joe had taken her away from all that. Like two thieves, they'd fled the city. Joe had brought her up here to get away from her past. And she had; they both had. She'd gone from having nothing to having more than she'd ever dreamed of, no questions asked. And yet, after all these years, she couldn't fully relax. The truth was, she'd never felt like she'd deserved it. Even now, she walked with the unsettled gait of a fugitive, as though, at any moment, a hand would come down on her shoulder and proclaim her guilt.

Her first appointment was with Mr. Gallagher, the writing instructor. Gallagher's class was held in Walden House, a free-standing structure that had been built years before by some students as some sort of existential experiment, whatever that meant—she'd never understood that term and she still didn't, even though she'd heard conversations about it at her own dining room table. Apparently, Walden House was a special place at Pioneer and Gallagher was a special sort of teacher. When she stepped into his classroom, she was struck with an uncanny sense of déjà vu. Something about his eyes seemed so familiar.

“Come right in, Mrs. Golding,” Gallagher said.

She sat down at the large round table. The school touted itself for teaching at tables, and not at desks, but sitting there so close to him made her nervous. At St. Theresa's, they'd sat in chairs with one-armed desks, she'd been left-handed and they didn't have any left-handed writing desks and the nuns made her use her right hand instead.
Stop causing trouble,
they'd admonish.
Learn to write with your right hand like everyone else!
One nun, a Sister Belinda, seemed to derive pleasure from watching her struggle, erasing so hard the paper inevitably tore and she'd have to start again.

Unlike the nuns, Mr. Gallagher had on a blue work shirt and jeans, red suspenders, a skinny black tie, and his hair was longish, a bit too long for her taste—and that beard—he had the wild glare of a man who'd walked out of the woods. On his feet were heavy work boots. His hands were large and sprawling, a working man's hands. His eyes flashed like a good storm.

“Your daughter can write,” he told her. “She has an ear for language.”

Candace beamed with pride, but then the pride turned bitter and she started to cry. Gallagher looked troubled and reached across the table and touched her hand. “What's wrong? She's doing fine, you don't have to worry.”

Candace shook her head, that wasn't it. “Please, forgive me. I feel so silly.” He placed a tissue box before her and she took one and blew her nose. “I don't know what hit me,” she apologized.

“It's the room. Everyone cries in this room. It's okay to tell the truth here, that's what I tell them. We say what we feel.”

“That's great. That's really great.” She blew her nose again. She couldn't seem to articulate what she was feeling. She didn't tell him that her smiling little girl had vanished and someone else had taken her place. “I know it's her favorite class,” she said finally. “She's always writing in her journal.”

“The journal helps them organize their thoughts,” Gallagher explained. “My hope is that the students find out something new about themselves, through writing. That's the goal.”

“It's been a hard year,” she said. “She's changed a lot. It may have something to do with the Sunrise Internship.”

“How do you mean?”

“I think it's been hard for her. Going there, I mean.”

“Why's that?”

“Well . . .” She thought about it a moment. “The women there, for one thing, with those sorts of problems. I think it's alarming to her. Frightening.”

Gallagher nodded. “It's not easy, I agree.”

“I think it has to do with the fact that she's adopted.”

“How so?”

“I could be wrong, but I read somewhere that adopted children often make the assumption that they come from terrible circumstances. That their birth parents didn't have the wherewithal to raise them. It's not necessarily true, but in her case it was. The birth parents were indigent.”

He frowned. “Indigent?” He spit out the word like something foul.

“She may identify with these women somehow.”

“You're making the assumption that
they
come from terrible circumstances, socioeconomically speaking—as if money accounts for happiness. As if in families with money women
don't
get battered, which we know isn't true. But that's a totally different conversation.”

“Yes, I see your point,” she said, feeling slightly patronized. “I know. And you're right, it's not true. Money has very little to do with happiness.”

“An easier claim to make, of course, when you have it. Money, I mean.”

She looked at him. “Yes, that's true too.”

“You may be reading into it. How much does Willa know about her biological roots?” he fished.

“Not very much,” Candace admitted. “We weren't sure it was necessary for her to know. She's always known she was adopted, she's grown up knowing. We've always tried to give her the feeling that it's a special thing, a wonderful thing.”

“Which it is,” he said. “Her birth parents—what do you mean by
indigent?
”

“Well . . .” She didn't really want to get into it and regretted bringing it up. It wasn't the sort of information she should be sharing. “They were poor. The father was into drugs, heroin. They both were. The mother had AIDS.”

Nate Gallagher shifted in his chair. He couldn't seem to look at her. Perhaps he was distracted. Perhaps she was taking too much of his time. “Go on,” he said.

“He didn't have a steady job. They had very little. They were living in a tenement in San Francisco.”

Gallagher looked down at his hands. He didn't say anything for several minutes, which she thought was somewhat odd. “I'm not a psychiatrist, Mrs. Golding, but I don't think it matters all that much,” he said, finally. “People make mistakes. They get into stuff that they shouldn't. Things happen.” He looked at her very carefully, his eyes tinted with his own brand of wisdom. “It's nothing to be ashamed of.”

“You're right. I know.”

“As corny as it sounds,” Gallagher said, “life is very long. You're supposed to mess up when you're young and other people sometimes benefit from your mistakes—as you did in this case. But things rarely stay the same. People grow up and change. They move on. The truth is that you probably know close to nothing about those people who gave birth to your daughter. We're told certain things, information that pushes us into tidy little categories, but they're just words. We're rarely told the whole story and the story is always changing.”

She looked at him and held his gaze. For several seconds they were perfectly still, staring at each other. Something seemed to be knocking at her brain, she didn't know what, an old scrap of memory that she couldn't quite grasp. She felt like he was almost angry with her.
You're too stupid for him,
Sister Belinda mocked. But then he smiled, warmly. He'd been intent on communicating something to her, some essential information that might help her with Willa, and she appreciated his effort. She could understand why the students liked him so much. He made the world make sense.

“Maybe you should ask her,” he suggested. “Ask her if she wants to know.”

“I will,” Candace said. “She's old enough now. She has the right to know.”

“It's been my experience, Mrs. Golding, that teenagers seem to yearn for the truth in the same way that adults yearn to ignore it,” he said. “If nothing else, it's always liberating. But you should remind her too that people change. Her birth parents, I mean. The fact that they were indigent. It's not a reflection of her. It's who they were at the time, not who
she
is now.”