What Was Mine (28 page)

What will become of me? Mia. My Mia. I can't even be sure of what she looks like anymore. Is she fatter, thinner? Has she cut her hair? Is she tanned by the California sun? There was no photo of her in the
Psychology Today
magazine I found on a table in the lobby of a Hilton Hotel where I go to buy American toothpaste. The article referred to me as Mia's “sociological mother.” I stared for a long time at those words on the page, reading them over and over, grateful to be recognized as any kind of mother at all.

In my mind, Mia is all the ages she was: the three-year-old tottering around in my pumps, plastic bag slung over her shoulder, going to “work”; the little girl chatting merrily with every doorman; the ten-year-old, tall for her age, longing to be elfin; the thirteen-year-old who still sits on my lap, trying to distract me from the computer; the sullen fifteen-year-old blasting music from the CD player behind her locked door; the poised young woman at our dining room table, poring over practice law school admission tests.

I envision her more and more at a distance, as if I am on one boat and she is on another, water rising between us, pushing us farther and farther apart. I get up to boil water and there is a heaviness in my stomach, so that I feel I must drag it after me across the room.

G
rant is teaching me how to drive. He is patient and a much better teacher than I had for driver's ed in New York. Quinton was a part-time bouncer at a bar, who was always bored or smoking or apologizing for not paying attention because he'd been up all night with his girlfriend who caught him hooking up with his other girlfriend again. Once, on Riverside, he made me pull over so he could steal rims off a parked car! He justified it by saying the size rims his car needed was really rare; he'd been looking for a long time. The funny thing was, he was the driving instructor all the private school moms requested. They had no idea. It was a good driving school and he must have charmed the first mom, who recommended him to everyone else's. I never learned enough to pass the test.

I didn't care about driving then, but I do now, because if I stay here, I'll need a job and all the good jobs are up in San Francisco. I could take the Caltrain to get up there, but as soon as the money from
People
comes in, I'll buy a used car to get back and forth.

I want to stop taking money from Lucy. My allowance is still automatically deposited. I thought her bank accounts would be frozen, but the detective said it's not like
Law & Order
, DAs don't hand out freeze orders like donuts. Lucy didn't take a ransom. Her money isn't related to illegal activity, so it's hers.

I want to start working, not only to earn money, but because I
need to get out of the house. I can't stay in the house all the time, even though Marilyn (she wants me to call her “Mom,” but I can't) would like that. She's happiest when we're all under one roof, when we're all holding hands around the table, saying grace before dinner, or playing “family band” in the living room—everybody in the family plays an instrument except me. Marilyn plays the piano, Chloe the flute, Connor and Thatch play guitar, Grant plays the harmonica. The only thing I know how to do is clap. I hated piano lessons. Lucy should have made me stick with them and not let me quit. She was the grown-up. She shouldn't have listened to a kid.

I know it sounds corny, but there is something really nice and warming about playing music with my new family because they do it sincerely. Irony can be tiresome when what you really need is a hug. But I wonder when I'll get tired of it. It's like a different planet here, from where I grew up. Manhattan is irony's world headquarters.

I
met Lin at our usual spot for language exchange yesterday, our Sunday date at the Golden Palace Dumpling House, a local eatery, a hole-in-the-wall despite its grand name. Stout older women in white coats and caps serve steaming bowls of dumplings plump with pork or beef or greens or whatever one's pleasure, dumplings so delectable that Lin says diners come from far districts for them. I've convinced him to stop calling me “Ayi.” I explained that American women like to be called by their names, not referred to, incorrectly, as somebody's aunt.

I am sure, now, that Lin knows my secret. He assiduously avoids asking me questions in the workbook having to do with whether or not I have children. What does he think of me? Am I a criminal in his eyes?

Oh, for the language to explain myself to him. But what would I say?

Instead, we do a module about the weather. I tell him no one in the United States really talks like his workbook. No one says, “Today precipitation exceeds the norm.” They say, I tell him, “It's raining cats and dogs.” He smiles, trying to picture this and I picture it with him: a torrent of pets, meowing and yelping midair, paws out to brace themselves before hitting the ground.

T
oday is my 212th day with my birth family. I've kept track. It's my new life and I keep track of how long I am living it.

Last night, like we always do, we sat at the wooden kitchen table that Grant made. It's a single piece of redwood; he is proud that it's all one piece, instead of pieces that had to be fit together. Once he pointed out to me discoloration at its side, near the bevel, proud of that, too, because a flaw is proof that something is real.

The table is covered every night by a cloth that protects it, but also obscures its beauty. The cloth is usually vintage and floral, from Marilyn's collection of them from her mother, and it's Chloe's job to put it on every night, and sometimes, as roses or peonies or carnations come fluttering down on that table, I admire the quality of the cloth and the light that comes through it from the big kitchen window. It's western light, which is a shade of light very different than you see back East. The light here at five o'clock is strong yellow, even in the fall, when light goes away in Vermont and is almost always too weak in Manhattan to exert itself beyond the front room of our apartment.

Our apartment in Manhattan. I've received several calls from the managing agent asking about our plans for it, but I haven't called back. I don't know what to say.

Last night, Marilyn made something called Vegan chop suey, thinking to please me by serving Chinese. She hadn't let me help with dinner, like I usually do. She'd wanted to surprise me, to celebrate my getting my license. I didn't have the heart to tell her that chop suey isn't Chinese. It's something dreamed up by Americans, like fortune cookies.

I
took Mia to the beach today and saw that she has a tiny tattoo on her lower back. Seeing it made me feel punched in the stomach.

How could Lucy have allowed Mia to mar herself in that way? It looks like a squiggle. She says it's a leaf. She says she did it without Lucy's permission. She snuck downtown with a friend after school one day instead of going home after volleyball practice. She was fifteen. Fifteen! How could tattooing a fifteen-year-old even be legal? Mia said the laws are for anesthesia. Kids don't get anesthesia.

Didn't it hurt? I asked her. She said it did. Her friend and she held each other's hands during the procedure. I think of the last time I bathed her, pulling a washcloth over the small of her back, not enough aware of its immaculate perfection.

I make a mental note to talk to the boys, to warn them of the dangers of infusing your skin with permanent toxins.

I ask her not to show it off to the kids.

Mia says Chloe has already seen it. But she told her it was only henna.

We are lying on sand, without towels, letting the healing earth draw out stress and poisons. This part of the practice is usually mind-clearing but my mind is anything but clear.

I sit up. Mia turns on her back.

The top and bottom of her bikini don't match. I guess this is a New York fashion.

What did Lucy say when she saw it, I ask. The sand is a great detoxifier, especially here at the edge of the ocean, the womb of the earth. I'm glad the tattoo is pressed into it.

Mia said that Lucy was angry at her for sneaking downtown but she wasn't grounded because Lucy said, “It's your body, not mine.”

That's not how a real mother thinks! A true mother can't ever distance herself from a body that began in her own.

Sand covers her navel. I resist the urge to brush it away, to clear the sacred place of our first connection.

I
got a job! I'm an education assistant at the San Francisco Zoo. I found it on craigslist. Relationships with animals are so underestimated. Just because they can't talk doesn't mean they're incapable of connection. I think not being able to talk makes the connection stronger. Creatures that don't talk are very sensitive to emotions. You can see it in their eyes, they can tell when they're unloved.

Chloe understands, even though they don't have pets because Thatch is allergic. She told me, “It's like we have magical powers, but we don't notice because to us the powers seem totally normal, but to other animals, they seem fantastic!”

When I came home from work the first day, Marilyn met me at the door and hugged me like I'd been gone a year. She's trying to cram twenty-two years of love into me all at once. Sometimes I get the feeling who she loves isn't me. It's someone she's been inventing in her head since 1990.

Here is what I miss: being normal.

I miss Lucy leaning against the counter or pouring coffee while I cut fruit. I say, “Do you want some of this mango?” and she says, “No, I'm okay.” And then, “Well, I'll just have a piece.” And so I cut off a slice and give it to her and she says “mmmmm” and her eyes widen. Maybe I sing an impromptu mango song. I miss her hands.

Tonight I ate mango that came in a fruit basket Aunt Cheryl sent. I'd been saving it and it tasted good, sweeter than the hard ones we used to get in New York, but it made me miss one of those anyway.

I have my birth mother. But I miss my mom.

T
hatch asked me tonight: Is your kidnapper going to jail? It still hurts when I hear them call Lucy that.

Marilyn has told the FBI she'll testify for the prosecution, but I haven't agreed.

Part of me is angry at Lucy and will never forgive her. But Sonya says that feelings are complicated. You can be angry at someone and still love them a lot.

How can I send the mom who raised me to some horrible place she'd probably be in for the rest of her life, where she can't talk to anyone, except through glass.

I'll never forget her rescuing me from what felt like jail. Lucy always wanted to go to sleepaway camp when she was little. I was just eight, and wasn't sure I wanted to go, but Lucy thought I should give it a try. I did try, for a week, but when I called her sobbing, homesick, she dropped everything to drive six hours to get me. The car she had rented was a convertible. We drove home through the night, hair blowing in my eyes as I reclined the front seat, looking up at the stars. I remember seeing a shooting star and breathing in the cool air and feeling free as that star streaking unexpectedly out of its place in the universe.

I can't ever just forget about her. She is always there, like a phantom limb.

I
was taking laundry upstairs and saw Mia sitting on the bed, her back to the doorway, and I walked into the room to talk to her. When I got closer, I saw she had a Chinese silk box in her lap. I knew what it was. I heard from Chloe that Mia keeps a memory box of things to look at when she gets sad. As I set down the basket on Chloe's bed, Mia put the top back on the box but I asked if she wouldn't mind showing it to me. She was reluctant, but I sat down on the bedspread next to her and I said I was grateful that she was sharing things from her life. There's so much of her life I want to know about—all of it. I want to hug her all the time, hug her hard, the reality of her. I half expect she'll disappear again.

She showed me her collection: a jar of sand from Coney Island, a Chinese flash card, a plastic ring, a wristband from a place named Polyester's, a curl from her first haircut, tied with pink ribbon. I couldn't help thinking of where Tom and I were when she got that haircut, what hell we must have been going through.

There was a Polaroid picture of her as a toddler under a Christmas tree. I asked her to tell me about the picture. Was this her house? Someone else's? But she turned away from me, shaking her head, and I saw a tear plop into the box.

I offered to add something to the box for her. I had her newborn bracelet from when she was in the hospital. Did she want that?

“Me being an infant is
your
memory, not mine,” Mia said softly, closing the box.

Sometimes I wonder if she says things to deliberately hurt me.

M
arilyn and Grant met with a lawyer tonight and I took the kids to Plant Heaven for dinner. It's easy to think of them as my siblings, but I still can't think of their parents as mine.

Chloe's Plant Burger came with a little plastic egg that opened and inside was a toy. It reminded me of a Tamagotchi.

“Remember Tamagotchis?” I asked the boys, but of course they didn't. It made me feel old.

And then I told them a story I'd forgotten, from when I was little. They—especially Chloe—loved hearing stories about growing up in New York.

It was a rainy Saturday, I said, back on the Upper West Side. I was about eight, doing errands with Lucy. There was a pet store in our neighborhood. I loved to go there to play with the puppies and kittens in the window, or go to the back of the store to talk to the birds who were silent and sad; their feathers were dull. I'd try to cheer them up through the bars of their cages, saying I would take them home if I could. I'd beg Lucy to let me, tell her how much better it would be for them to live with us than squished up in their cages. I'd say Pumpkin needed company, but she wouldn't listen.