Switched at Birth: The True Story of a Mother's Journey (10 page)

“You do realize we’re talking about a love affair that lasted less than forty-eight hours, right? Oh, and, by the way, she’s eight.”

“That’s not the point. He made her cry, Kathryn.” John’s expression was one of sheer helplessness. “This was her first heartbreak.”

“I know,” I told him gently. “And unfortunately, it won’t be her last.”

This, of course, was the problem. John knew it was only the beginning. The world was full of Danny McMullens and Brianna Winslows. There were boys who would promise to call and then wouldn’t; there were dances she wouldn’t be invited to and valentines she wouldn’t receive; parties she’d find out about the day after they occurred and all kinds of middle school and high school drama waiting in the years ahead.

Kids can be cruel. It happens to everyone.

The trouble was that John just couldn’t bear the thought of it happening to Bay.

That night, when we tucked our daughter into bed, John kissed her on the forehead. “Forget about Danny McMullen,” he whispered in her ear. “It’s his loss.”

The following week Bay came home giddy about a new love in her life. His name was Alexander, and he’d spent the last three recess periods in the principal’s office. Luckily, John was playing in Chicago that week, so he wasn’t around to hear that his little girl had officially entered her inevitable “bad boy” phase.

But he was there for the next one, and the one after that. Some of them he liked, some of them were lucky to get out of our house alive; some of them broke her heart, and some, it has to be said, had their hearts broken by her.

John was careful to teach her that there was a right way and a wrong way to break a boy’s heart; naturally, he said, she wouldn’t always be interested in the boys who were interested in her (have you seen my daughter? she’s a stunner), and that was okay. The important thing, he explained, was that she always respected a boy’s feelings, and if she had to let him down, she should be as kind as possible in the process.

“Teenage boys are a lot more fragile than they look,” he confided in her. “Just imagine how you’d want a girl to treat Toby. That’s how to handle it.”

As advice goes, it remains among the best I’ve ever heard.

Not long after Bay found out that she had a biological father—when we were frenetically trying to pull together the lawsuit against the hospital for mixing up the babies—I was crossing the driveway and happened to overhear Bay and John talking in her art studio.

She was just finishing up a new piece she’d created by arranging masking tape on the canvas, then painting over it and removing the tape to reveal a series of brilliant white interconnecting lines and shapes. I’d seen it earlier that morning and couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Bay’s work, like Bay herself, had a depth that belied the age of the artist. I knew I would come to some understanding of it eventually (or I’d break down and just ask Bay to explain it to me). But this was one of those pieces I’d need to think about for a while.

“Hey,” said John, wandering into her studio. He had his hands in his pockets and he looked shy and boyish. “I just wanted to see how you’re doing.”

“Fine.”

I heard his shoes scuffing across the cement floor, I guessed to get a better look at her work. “Nice use of color and line.”

(Since “Art” wasn’t exactly John’s native language, I was impressed.)

“So what I didn’t get to tell you the other night,” he continued, “is that the lawsuit has nothing to do with you. Your mom and I, we’re so lucky to have you in our lives. You make us look at the world differently. Like, like … that painting …”

Uh oh
, I thought.
It was a good call on the line and color, pal, but don’t get cocky
.
One wrong word and you don’t get to finish this conversation....

There was a brief silence in which I suspected he was taking a closer look at the canvas.

“You took the word ‘MAN,’” John said with the confidence of a connoisseur, “and somehow turned it into an actual guy and a question mark at the same time.”

A guy and a question mark
,
huh
?
Go figure. I never would have guessed.

“It’s amazing,” he went on. “And I have no idea how you came up with that.”

“You saw that? The question mark?” Now Bay was the one who was impressed. And judging by her voice, very pleased as well. “I wasn’t sure anybody would get it.”

“I don’t know if anybody would,” John said. “But I did.”

I felt my throat tighten a little, and I left before the tears began. In just a few words, he’d summed it all up. Not anybody. Him. He was the one who would always see the things she needed him to see, the things other people couldn’t (or wouldn’t), the things no one but the man who drank tea with her from a tiny cup would ever get. They were connected—not by blood but by something far more magical. He was her hero. And in many ways, maybe now more than ever, she was his.

Sometimes, late at night when I can’t sleep, I find myself picturing Bay in an exquisite wedding dress—one utterly of her own choosing. I try not to picture it accessorized with combat boots, but with Bay, you never know. And if that’s what she wants, then honestly, it’s fine with me. I know she’ll look gorgeous no matter what.

And in this picture in my mind, I see my husband, as proud as any father has ever been, walking his little girl down the aisle. But in the next moment my heart goes cold because into this beautiful image creeps a dark-eyed man—a man claiming that he should be the one holding Bay’s hand and beaming with pride.

His name is Angelo. And he says that he is the father of the bride.

But he isn’t. He can’t be. He never kicked a paint-drenched soccer ball. He doesn’t know who Danny McMullen is. He wasn’t there.

It’s his loss.

But it’s not his fault.

And that is when I remember that there are still so many questions that as yet remain unanswered and that, although we’ve come so very far, we still have a long way to go on this wonderful, heart-wrenching journey of ours.

I will not say much about Angelo except that he is Bay’s biological father. He made a brief appearance soon after we discovered the switch.

He also made a lot of mistakes.

When Angelo arrived, Bay seemed to float on air. I think she’d been feeling that she’d gotten the short end of this new blended family. At first, all Regina would reveal about the man who had fathered her daughter was that he had taken off after Daphne went deaf. Since then, his whereabouts had been unknown.

In fairness, when Angelo reappeared, he treated Bay with nothing but love, kindness, and respect. It was hard for John to watch them interact—as hard, I suspect, as it had been for Bay to watch John shoot baskets with Daphne. I felt for John, who was not used to coming in second, or even tying for first. Secretly (and I’m not proud of this) I took just the teeniest bit of satisfaction in watching him muddle through what I had been dealing with since the day Regina moved in. There were times I almost said to him, “See? How do
you
like it?” But I never did.

Angelo, sadly, reverted to type and disappeared again shortly after he arrived. Bay was hurt of course, and confused, but I am happy to say that she wasn’t devastated by the departure of the handsome, dark-haired man who, in reality, was and would likely always be more stranger than father.

The thing was, Bay didn’t need another father, and she knew it. She had John’s love, and she had his name, and she had his constancy.

And all these years later, under a paint-spattered tarp at the back of her garage art studio, she still had an impressive, six-by-six-foot piece of artwork she’d titled
Youth Soccer
.

No kid ever had a better legacy than that.

John and Kathryn Kennish v. Mission Hills General
has not been easy for me.

John wanted to sue, right from the beginning. The hospital was negligent to say the least, and we’ve all suffered as a result of this incompetence. John believed the institution must be held accountable.

The person who would be guiding us through this second phase of our legal pursuits was none other than Harrison’s daughter, Amanda Burke, who was a well-known and highly respected attorney in her own right. Harry (who I still secretly thought of as Captain Justice) had recommended her, and frankly, I didn’t mind that he was bowing out. I was intimidated by his aggressive style, and although it had served us well during our search for Daphne, I was happy this time to have someone who approached things with a little less zeal. His significantly less blustery daughter (or, as I couldn’t help but think of her, his sidekick, Subpoena Girl) was just fine with me.

Maybe that was because I wasn’t sure my heart was even in it. We had found Daphne, and now that we had her, I was not convinced that having our day in court was going to bring me any satisfaction. If anything, I worried that pursuing it further might cause us more pain.

Amanda’s first order of business was to direct us to get Regina to jump on the legal bandwagon.

“The hospital wants this to go away quietly,” Amanda explained. “If they settle with you and not her, she’s still free to run around town disparaging them.”

We told Amanda we could take care of that. Getting the other interested party, the other wronged mother, to join our crusade seemed like an easy enough task. But it wasn’t.

At first, Regina told us she’d think about it. John was careful to explain that taking part would cost her nothing; he even pointed out how much she could benefit from the monetary payoff if we won, which, of course, we had every intention of doing.

But Regina remained cagey.

When we approached her the second time, after giving her what we felt was more than enough time to contemplate such a no-brainer, she seemed clearly miffed. She even accused us of being those litigious vulture types who would sue for damages over something as stupid as having hot coffee spilled on them.

I was stunned. How could she possibly compare hot coffee to a missing child?

As she hurried off in the self-righteous huff that became her standard mode of departure, I felt a strange, menacing sensation; the hair was prickling at the nape of my neck and my stomach had gone cold.

“There’s something weird there,” I said to John, watching this stranger who had raised my child climb into her car and drive away. “I can feel it.”

It was more than a hunch. It was equal parts suspicion and intuition, a good old-fashioned gut feeling. At that moment, I had the overwhelming sense that Regina Vasquez was lying to us about something.

And as it turns out, I was right.

Even without Regina in our camp, John wouldn’t budge. He had every intention of soldiering on with the suit, even when things started to look a lot less open-and-shut than they had at the beginning. We could have just accepted the settlement. Or not even bothered; God knows we didn’t need the compensation and, really, it wasn’t about the money anyway. We could have walked away, but John wanted the hospital to admit they had been remiss, he wanted them to apologize, and he was determined to see this through.

We were fighting on the side of the angels, after all. How could we lose?

But what we didn’t have was the ability to see what was right there in front of us. We were preoccupied with so many things. There are conversations that echo back to me even now, reminding me of how naive and trusting we were. And how our trust had been so thoroughly misplaced.

So yes, we could have taken the money and run, donated it perhaps to a charity that benefits deaf children. But we didn’t. And then one day we were given the news that there was no longer any money to run with. The hospital had withdrawn its bid to settle.

And that meant they had something on us. But what was there to know?

“If they’ve dug up some ‘dark secret’ on us, I want to know what it is!” This was John’s reaction upon learning that the hospital’s monetary offer was no longer on the table.

I was appalled. “What do they want to hear? That I shoplifted once when I was twelve? That I fall asleep in church?” Frankly, I’d be more concerned about my mother learning of those things than some judge.

My husband looked at me and there was something strange in his expression. It wasn’t doubt exactly, but it was close. “You’re sure there’s nothing bigger?”

I flinched. In nearly twenty years of marriage I’d never seen him look at me like that, and my response was visceral. His faith in me was being challenged. More damage done by the switch. More cartwheels on unsteady ground.

“I’m sure, John,” I told him firmly, then hesitated. “And you? Are you ‘sure’?”

This implication took him aback, as it had me when he’d used it. “What?”

I kept my voice level. “Any ‘dark secrets’ I should know about?”

Just saying those words aloud made me queasy, but if he had anything to tell me, I’d rather hear about it now, in his den, than in open court.

His answer did little to reassure me. “None that you should know about.”

To this day, I wonder what he meant by that, but at the time, I just couldn’t (as Bay might say) “go there.”

Ultimately we learned that the hospital’s little game of “I’ve got a secret” had to do with Regina and not us. John approached her about it, and she wrote it off as something pertaining to the DUI convictions she’d accrued back when she was drinking.