The Secret Daughter (10 page)

That’s why I spend so much time thinking myself away from here. I’ll be back in the embrace of my people when you come for me. I’m sure I’ll still miss the Wyzleckis, but you and our baby will be my family soon enough.

Love,

Lilly

SEVEN

Sabina—March 2012

‘How do you think I should play this?’

We were sitting in the car outside the café. Ted was in the driver’s seat, waiting patiently for me to make the first move and leave the car.
I
was waiting for some miracle burst of courage.

‘I think,’ he said quietly, ‘we should go in, just like we would any other day, and let the conversation take us wherever it goes. If it feels natural and things aren’t awkward, maybe you can ask again. But I don’t think they’ll bring it up if you don’t.’

‘Okay. So if it’s awkward, I’ll just stick to the safe topics – politics, religion, ethics.’

Ted barked a laugh.

‘Oh dear.’

‘You know how they love their opinions, Ted. I’ll just ask some meaty topical questions and let them fill the awkward space up with their arrogance.’

I thought Ted would laugh again, but instead, he turned to me with a very serious frown on his face.

‘Bean . . . I know that I made you talk to Meg last night so it’s probably my fault we’re even here, but we can go home if you want to.’

‘No, you were right last night. I can’t avoid them forever,’ I sighed, then glanced at him. ‘Can I?’

He shrugged.

‘I guess you probably could, if you really wanted to.’

I shook my head, and at last stepped from the car. I waited at my door until Ted walked around to take my hand. I let him lead the way, through the café into the courtyard behind – a path we’d walked dozens of times. I even knew exactly where we’d find my parents. We
always
sat in the courtyard in nice weather, often at the same circular wrought-iron table in the centre of the paved space.

A gentle breeze was blowing, and a few random leaves from a potted ash tree swirled around my feet. Mum and Dad were seated at our table. When I saw them, I felt a tension ripple down my body, a wave of nerves that surged from my head to my toes. Ted gave my hand a gentle squeeze. I took a deep breath and pushed down the feeling, focusing only on keeping my thoughts rational.

We will get through this. They will get used to me knowing, and they will come clean with the details. I will learn to understand, and to forgive. I will come to terms with this.

I took a few steps forward and was actually almost calm, until Mum seemed to panic and rose and then Dad rose too, as if I was a stranger and this was a formal meeting.

Only then, and maybe too late, did I realise just how angry I was at them. It wasn’t a deep-seated resentment, it was right there near the surface, ready to break through my skin and unleash itself on them. In an instant I was out of control – furious that they could be so arrogant as to assume that they could break this news to me,
now
, at the happiest point of my life, and just deliver it without any warning and without even having the decency to come absolutely clean about the whole story.

‘I can’t do this,’ I blurted the words far too loudly; they represented a near-shriek of panic.

‘Sabina, please,’ Dad held out his hand towards a chair. ‘Please sit down. We can have a nice brunch, just like we always do.’

People were staring. All over the courtyard, customers had fallen silent, and out of the corner of my eye I saw a waiter approaching us slowly. Ted released my hand at last, but immediately slid his arm around my lower back.

‘Honey, maybe we
should
go and do this another time,’ his words were gentle against my ear, although they were peppered with hushed urgency.

‘Sit down, and we’ll talk,’ Dad said, a quiet determination in his voice. Once upon a time, I might have interpreted that as strength but here I recognised it as control. Dad was
corralling
me. I looked at Mum, and tears were rolling down her face again. She was more vulnerable than she’d ever been with me before, because now I knew her secret. She pointed to the chair and begged me with her miserable eyes to stay.

I sat heavily and Ted pulled his chair right up close to mine before he sat beside me. Looking around, I realised that the waiter was Owen, one of the regulars who knew us by name. He breeched the last few steps across the courtyard to join the awkward circle of my life, standing in the oddly distant gap between Dad and Ted. He cleared his throat and said,

‘Is everything all right, Graeme?’

No, nothing is all right
, I wanted to say.
Everything is wrong, actually
.

‘Everything is fine thanks,’ Dad said, but the stiffness of his voice betrayed him. ‘Can we please order some coffees? Sabina, flat white? Make that decaf please, Owen. Ted, long black?’

Usually when we met for brunch, we sat and read the newspaper. Often Dad would start with the broadsheet and Ted would read the tabloid, while Mum and I rotated through the inserts. We’d take turns pointing out interesting movies or books, or the ludicrousness of world events, or discuss the movements of financial markets. Dad, ever the accountant, loved to talk money. Today, we all dove into the newspapers for refuge, before we even ordered our meals. Ted actually lifted his in front of his face. No one spoke, and while the others may have been reading, I was staring at a page blurred by my tears. This was the
very
thing I’d feared when Mum had called the previous night. Here we were, hiding behind our newspapers, pretending that nothing at all had changed. The forced normality was an insult to me, offensive, as if Dad and Mum were telling me that I didn’t
deserve
the truth about my own birth. My hands clenched into fists around the edges of the paper.

I looked to Dad, and found him staring at me. For a moment, we locked eyes, and I knew that he could see how upset and frustrated I was, which made it all the
more
frustrating when he quietly lowered his newspaper and pointed calmly to an article.

‘Have you heard about this project, Ted?’ He said. Ted peeked over the top of his own newspaper and glanced at the hotel Dad was referring to.

‘Oh yes, fascinating, so many challenges – inbuilt desalination, and the whole structure will be solar and wind powered. A first wave of Dubai sustainability, they say. It certainly wasn’t that way on my projects there, unfortunately.’

‘How
is
work going, anyway, Ted?’ my mother asked. Dad had broken the ice and she had apparently been waiting to strike up a conversation.

‘It’s steady,’ Ted said. ‘I have a manageable project load these days, much better than when we were living over there, isn’t it, honey?’

I nodded silently. We’d moved to Dubai shortly after our wedding, lured by Ted’s lucrative job offer. It was like a long-term honeymoon, isolated in the bubble of Ted’s company compound. In the first year, that had been marvellous, but by the third, we’d earned enough money to buy a house back in Sydney and Ted’s manic work schedule had long since worn thin.

So, we’d bought that house in Sydney – a huge, beautiful home in Leichardt, just a few suburbs from Mum and Dad’s house, and then
apparently
Dad had convinced me to switch our plans and move some strange family into it. It hadn’t felt like that at the time. It’d felt like we’d made a foolish decision and I had suddenly seen the light.

‘And you, Sabina?’ Mum asked, ‘How was your week?’

‘I wouldn’t exactly call it the best week of my life,’ I said, intending it as a light-hearted joke, but when the words left my mouth they were dripping with bitterness. The awkwardness rushed back in at us like a tide, and Mum shifted in her seat then cleared her throat.

‘Are you talking things over with someone, Sabina?’ she asked, and suddenly I felt like one of the patients she’d worked with in hospitals over the years. I could see her regarding me curiously, momentarily detached from the problem behaviour, conveniently forgetting that she herself was actually the cause of it.

‘I’d
like
to talk it over with
you
.’

‘Of course,’ Mum said, but then she looked back to her paper, as if she couldn’t bear the pressure of looking at me for a second longer. Ted squeezed my knee under the table, a subtly supportive gesture, and I caught his hand and entwined our fingers together tightly. Mum cleared her throat and added quietly, ‘although maybe in this case, a professional would be able to offer you better support.’

‘I don’t need a therapist, Mum. I need my family.’

‘And you’ve got us,’ Dad said firmly. ‘That’s why we’re here, isn’t it? To spend time together, as a
family
?’

Owen returned with the tray of coffees, and silently slid them around to their owners by memory. When he’d finished, we immediately ordered – no need to look at the menu because we’d all been there so many times that we knew our favourites off by heart. I always ordered the bircher muesli with low fat yoghurt, but
that
day, I ordered the double chocolate pancakes with ice-cream
and
cream. I knew it would drive my mother crazy, especially if I ate the lot right there in front of her, which I absolutely intended to do. She didn’t say anything, but I saw her eyebrows rise, and I chuckled inwardly like a rebellious teen.

Then the waiter was gone and we were back to our newspapers. The elephant in the room sat quietly on the table and we all leaned this way and that to talk around it, discussing world events and the theatre, but every now and again I felt like the elephant might have just trumpeted a reminder to us that he was in fact there, and awaiting our attention. The trumpets were disguised as inexplicably tense statements and guilty glances, but
I
recognised them for what they were. Still, I forced myself to stay on topic, to avoid that nasty
a
-word, and most importantly to avoid another scene. When our orders arrived, I ate my pancakes;
every
last mouthful.

When I was a child, Mum had drilled into me that restaurants always serve too much food, and that it is proper manners to leave something on your plate. I looked over to see a perfect quarter of her egg white omelette resting on her plate beside her carefully aligned knife and fork. There was something so enraging about that – the healthy, pleasure-free choice of breakfast food, the sharp edges of her leftovers, and the cleanness of her plate around them. How many times had I felt the stab of shame when we ate out – that I
wanted
to eat my entire serving, and that she never even seemed
tempted
to? How many times had I stared at my body in the mirror and wished that I’d inherited her lightning-fast metabolism, or even wondered if I actually
had
inherited her blessed genes, but my weight loss efforts were hampered by a disgusting lack of self-control?

I stared right at my mother’s face, and without breaking that gaze I reached over to pick up Ted’s leftover toast, and then I took a determined, satisfying and unnecessarily noisy crunch of it. I’ve always been an emotional eater, and it was inevitable that I’d gorge myself that day, when it felt like my emotions were so out of control that they’d never be sated again.

We’d ordered a second round of coffees and swapped the papers all the way around the table when I felt it was time to push the issue again. I felt I’d done some kind of penance, some pretence of happy family time just as my parents wanted, but it was nearly time to go home anyway and if things became awkward again,
so be it
.

‘I know this is really difficult for everyone, and I’m trying to be mature about it, but I just want to understand. You seem so sure that I won’t be able to find her, but surely you have
some
idea …’

‘I don’t know what else you want from us, Sabina. I don’t know what else you think we can tell you,’ Dad said. I tried not to glare at him.

‘Well, I want you to know that I’ve decided to try to track her down anyway.’

‘Why can’t you just
trust us
when we tell you that is not going to be possible?’ Dad was frustrated, but calm. I hated the steely quality to his voice, the flat finality in the way he politely
enunciated
a question, but
intended
a statement to wrap up the conversation.

‘I just
need
to try.’

‘Then, by all means, try, but you won’t get anywhere. We’ve told you, there are no records. Megan worked in the home; if there was anything recorded, we’d know about it. And if we knew who she was, we’d tell you. From your birth you’ve been
ours
, and there’s nothing more to add to that.’

‘I’m going to contact an organisation that helps adoptees find their families,’ I said, hesitantly, and Dad’s hand shot out as if he was stopping traffic.

‘
We
are your family, Sabina.’

‘Dad!’ I groaned in frustration. ‘Of
course
you are. But I probably have another family out there, I just want to see if I can find out some further information about them. I was actually hoping, Mum, that you might come with me to meet with the social workers there.’

I hadn’t been hoping that at all. It was an impulsive test, to see if she’d support me.

‘
No
,’ Dad said, and I raised my eyebrows at him.

‘Mum can speak for herself, Dad.’ I tried to say the words gently, but as soon as I opened my mouth he gave a fierce shake of his head.

‘
No
, Sabina, I won’t allow it. Megan won’t be coming with you. We think this is a terrible idea, and we won’t be a part of it.’

‘Don’t
speak
for her, Dad!’ My voice was rising again, this time with a new kind of frustration. I’d been aware of Dad’s arrogance, but I’d never noticed how deeply it defined their interactions. His halo had slipped, and suddenly my wonderful, strong father looked a whole lot like a bully. Mum sitting beside him looked almost like a stranger too, someone who lacked even the spine to assert her own will.