What Was Mine (7 page)

Her new name couldn't begin with an
A
,
E
, or
O
. I'd avoid initials that could turn into acronyms. In grade school, I'd had a friend, Zena Thomson, whose middle name was Isabelle and for years she had been taunted with “Zit.”

Bella. Chloe. Haley. Mia.

Besides an actress whose work I admired, Mia was also the name of a friend's older sister, a girl who was pretty, poised, sophisticated—all the things I hadn't been as a girl.

The name in the mouth produced a sound similar to Natalie: Mee-a.

“Mia,” I tried, and the baby looked up.

Y
ears later, after a playdate with a friend whose sitter spoke Spanish, Mia told me that her name in that language meant “mine.”

“Did you name me that or was that my born name?” she wanted to know.

“Your born name,” I said. “It's beautiful. I didn't want to change it.”

“My first mommy named me that because she didn't want to give me away, right?”

“Right,” I said, lifting her, pressing her against me, swallowing the lump in my throat, until she demanded her freedom and wriggled away.

T
he day after I named her was a Monday, and at 9 a.m., I called Sandra, the creative manager at work. I told her I was in Kansas. She knew about my quest for a child—everyone at work knew about it at that point. I said I was picking up a four-month-old baby from a high school student who'd changed her mind about raising her. Such deception is unimaginable now, when caller ID would display the area code of the landline I was calling from, but then it was possible. Sandra was a single mother herself. She told me to take as much time as I needed.

In the first days with Mia, I wouldn't let her out of my sight. I'd take her into each room with me, strap her into a high chair while I
worked in the kitchen mixing formula, heating it, mashing banana, which Dr. Spock suggested should be the first fruit. I'd stand there working the fork, pressing tines into the soft white pulp, crossing and recrossing patterns until the banana was mushy enough for a baby to eat, thinking how lucky I was not to be at the ad agency, hashing and rehashing client copy instead. I even set her up in a bouncy chair in the bathroom so I could keep an eye on her while I was taking a shower. I carried a monitor around the house while she slept, listening for the reassuring sound of her breath. I'd sometimes keep watch, hovering over her crib rail, gazing at her as she fell asleep, marveling at the rise and fall of her little square back, the glisten of sweat on her dimpled arms, the daintiness of her baby snores.

You'd think a four-month-old taken from her mother would put up a fuss. But I recall her in those first days with me being less upset than she seemed to be puzzled. Perhaps I am deluding myself. Perhaps I have blocked out a wailing resistance. But I don't think so.

Picture it
, my friend had said,
and it will come true
. I was filled with gratitude for my good fortune—and remorse for the way it had come to me.

I'd sometimes call my sister “from Kansas,” putting questions to her, but most things having to do with taking care of a baby—how to burp them, carry them, get them to sleep—couldn't be explained over the phone. Cheryl kept offering to fly down to help and I had a devil of a time talking her out of the trip.

Every few days, I'd call in to the office, reporting progress. “She rolled over today for the first time!” I'd say, failing to mention that the bed she'd rolled over in had been mine in New Jersey. Or “Another delay,” I'd lie. “The birth father needs to cosign and they can't find him.”

I got a message from the art director who'd helped me place the ad saying how happy she was for me, but that deadlines were urgent and she was pairing up with another writer. I didn't care.

I lived those first weeks of motherhood in dread of the doorbell. The few times it rang, I felt every hair on my body upend. I feared that something would break in my case and that the authorities—or even the wronged mother herself—would show up at my door to take her back. The few times the bell rang, I never answered it. Instead, I'd peep through a gap in the drapes. The bell ringers wore benign-looking uniforms in post office blue or UPS brown. But what if they were disguised to gain access? What if I was a suspect being spied upon? They'd leave packages on my doorstep but I'd wait until after I put Mia down for the night before creeping out to retrieve them. The packages were baby gifts. Baby clothes from my sister, a Sony video camera from friends at work. (The agency I worked for had the Sony account.) Once a flyer fell from the door when I opened it:
Missing Infant
, it read beneath a photo of
Baby Natalie
. I crumpled the paper and threw it away, glad that the photo looked nothing like her.

I didn't answer the phone. I rarely went out, waiting for dark before backing the car out of the driveway, so no one could see that I had a car seat, to buy groceries in distant towns.

What worried me most during those weeks was that she would get sick with something. I'd have to bring her to emergency and the jig would be up. I guessed there were alerts to airports and hospitals for a baby fitting her description. Each time I changed her diaper, I did a complete body check, scouting for redness or rashes or lumps. I kept careful notes on her feeding and poop schedules, as one book advised—although later, I realized that advice had been for nursing mothers, to inform them if their babies were getting enough nourishment.

Mia usually slept through the night, but one 3 a.m. she was crying inconsolably, though her diaper was dry and she didn't have a fever. Remembering the little lump I'd felt in her gum, I guessed she was teething. In despair, not knowing how else to soothe her, I sat on
the rocker with her in my lap and undid the top of my nightgown. I thought maybe milk would come, maybe I could calm her with it. Weren't there stories of wet nurses and women in bomb shelters nursing babies whose mothers had died? These thoughts were crazy, but I didn't care—I was desperate to give Mia whatever she wanted.

The sight of my breast did calm her immediately and I guessed that she'd been breastfed before, though she'd been weaned by the time she came to me—I knew by the odiferousness of that first diaper. She stared at what was being offered, with a glance at my face as if asking permission, then moved her face forward and seized my nipple between her gums. It hurt like hell, as if my nipple was being crushed between stones. I winced and pulled back and she resumed her crying, screaming louder this time, as if I had tricked her, which I suppose I had.

I wished that those first weeks could have gone on forever, our tiny world of eating, sleeping, rocking, reading.

It was as if Mia thought she was on a great adventure. She seemed to take pleasure in exploring new sights, new surfaces, new smells, new sounds. She didn't take naps, though the books said she should. She hadn't read those books. She slept through the night, though. I was grateful for that. I'd begin each day with a feeling of excitement, as I used to feel as a child on Christmas morning. I'd never been a light sleeper, but now I was out of bed at the first sound of her “talking” to herself in her crib in the morning, my heart somersaulting, hurrying to the nursery to take in the gratifying sight and scent of her, realizing anew—I was somebody's mother!

I'd sing her little songs and talk to her as I attended her toilette. Then, I'd settle her in a jump chair, I'd go to the front door, and after checking from the window to make sure no neighbors were about, I'd duck out and grab the paper from the front porch. I'd sit at the table feeding Mia and turning the pages slowly, cautiously, scanning
headlines for news of what had happened, closing the paper, grateful for yet another twenty-four hours with her.

Generally, people in advertising consider PR to be a lesser profession, but my own estimation of the field rose considerably when I saw that after a few days of media attention the story was made to sink out of sight. IKEA was opening a new store in Los Angeles. They didn't want bad publicity.

Each day, she curled her tiny fist around my fingers, becoming more and more mine.

T
he night of the day that Natalie was taken, state troopers brought in dogs to find her scent. They asked me to give them a piece of her clothing. I went to her room—it felt empty as a tomb—and stood in the middle of it, trying to see through tears, to find something to give the troopers. I didn't want to part with a single thing that had been hers. Finally, I lifted the blanket from her crib. It was still a soft heap on the mattress. I hadn't folded it after her nap. It had little lambs on it. Soft, so soft. I pictured them finding her, giving it to her. She would be comforted by something from home.

Later, much later, I asked for it back, but they said they had to keep it sealed in a baggie, for dogs.

The FBI was brought in. A police detective set up shop on our coffee table. Detective Brown showed up every day at 8 a.m., started making calls on a special phone they installed. Others would come by—neighbors, friends—and he'd assign them tasks for the day: paperwork, mostly, so he could do his job of trying to find Natalie. Whenever the phone rang, my stomach contracted. The detective quieted everyone. Everything stopped, so the only sound in the house was those long rings. I'd reach for the handset, fingers shaking, wondering if I was about to talk to Natalie's kidnapper. We were expecting (dreading) a call for ransom. Tom and I had been told to sound calm and keep a caller on the line for as long as possible, so
the FBI would be able to trace the call. It had been decided that I'd answer the phone instead of Tom, my voice would be less threatening. Each time the phone rang, I'd reach for the handset, and try not to sob. But a ransom call never came.

I nurtured hope, against odds, that someone would call to say our baby had been found unharmed, that they had taken Natalie by mistake, there'd been some terrible misunderstanding. But, of course, that call didn't come either.

For months, day and night, we searched for our baby. We couldn't stop looking. Friends and neighbors, some we'd never met before, joined us in the search. Every evening, car pools drove out to IKEA, volunteers fanned out through fields surrounding the store, flashlight beams playing on the grass after dark. People waded through ditches and opened trunks of abandoned cars. I was relieved that nobody found her in one. I didn't want her to be found dead.

We put up posters everywhere: telephone poles, malls, school bulletin boards. Tom's office made copies and paid bike messengers to leave them at the offices they went to. We hired teenagers to leaflet neighboring towns. We turned the living room into headquarters for a “Take Back Natalie” campaign. Our home didn't feel like a home anymore, it was a public place. Our lost child belonged not just to us, but to everyone. We were inundated not only by people who wanted to help, but by curiosity seekers coming up on our lawn, peeping through windows, leaving smears on the glass that separated them from unthinkable disaster. People tied yellow ribbons on everything that was vertical: trees, shrubs, the mailbox post. On the news they said local stores had run out of yellow ribbon stock. Then someone tied a bunch of yellow balloons to the wishing well. Those balloons bobbed for weeks. I realized whoever had put them there must be replacing them, day after day. Then one morning I saw the balloons deflated, drooped on the grass. I knew that person had given up hope.

On our living room credenza were always coffee and sandwiches. For years afterward, the smell of coffee urns made me nauseous.

AT&T offered to extend my leave, but I quit instead. I couldn't stomach the idea of going back to work. How could I return to the life I had once considered normal, of doing something all day that took me away from what was now my purpose—to find Natalie or help people who could. I couldn't imagine summoning interest in a job anymore. Because of a job, I had lost my child.

Detective Brown showed up every morning just as Tom was heading out to work. How can you function at work? I asked Tom and he told me that work was the only place he
could
function. “We still need to pay the mortgage,” he said, which was true, though I knew if he'd asked the firm for paid leave, they probably would have given it to him. He was a partner by then. We began dealing with the tragedy in different ways. His way was denial. Mine was denial of everything except the loss of our daughter. We lost the language we had together. He rarely spoke. We no longer touched. Once, he brushed by me in the kitchen and said “excuse me” as if I were a stranger on a subway. I felt pushed away by those words, as if he had actually shoved me.

Months passed and one day, after being there every morning, Detective Brown didn't show up. When he hadn't come by noon, I called Tom at the office and Tom tracked him down. The detective was back at his desk in the precinct. He said he'd been assigned to move on. Move on! How could he move on, knowing our baby was still out there, somewhere, without us? I never doubted her continuing presence on this planet. Every pore of my skin was alive with the certainty that though she was gone from us, she was still part of this earth.

I
t was all so believable. I remember Lucy calling from Kansas to tell us the news. I knew she'd put an ad in the paper out there. So I believed her when she said she was in Wichita to pick up a baby from a girl who had gotten in trouble.

I recall her telling us how expensive private adoption was. She told us what it cost, a sum that rocked Doug and me and made us even more grateful we'd been able to have our two boys the natural way. It never occurred to me to question the adoption. Why would I? I never imagined my sister would lie about that.