“Who? Me? I haven’t given it much thought. I mean sure, I’d love to be a dad, but I don’t think I’m ready,” he said.
“I don’t think anyone is ever ready to be a parent. There’s no way to be 100% prepared. Look at me.”
“Yeah, but Jake was an accident—Sorry! I didn’t mean that.”
“It’s okay. It’s not like I haven’t heard it before.”
“You’re a good mother, Sis. I’m proud of you.”
“Thanks.”
Although Sebastian was not completely aware of how I got pregnant, he knew there was no Andre. We were only two years apart, closer in age than any of the kids, which meant Sebastian had graduated high school with the real Andre that I had a crush on. Sebastian had never said anything, but I saw it in his eyes. He may not have known the truth—no one did except me—but I knew he worried about me.
I also knew something about Sebastian that he may or may not have known. Shelly, Lind’s roommate, had got a job at the diner where I worked as a waitress part time. She started shortly after Lind died in Sebastian’s apartment. After noticing my last name on the schedule, she asked me if I was related to Sebastian. I lied and said no, but that I had read about him in the paper. If she chose to talk bad about him, I’d set her up to get fired. I thought any information she shared might be useful if Sebastian ended up in trouble.
It was all that she talked about for several shifts when we worked together. I was the quiet type, so I let her spill her guts like the stupid ditsy blond ones love to do. A lot of the regular patrons who she spoke to about it said nothing and just glared at her like she was an idiot. They knew Sebastian was my brother. I pretended not to hear her, but I was always listening.
The diner was open 24 hours, but I never worked passed eight because of Jake’s sitter. It was a slow night and my shift was about to end. The tables were clean and prepped, and there wasn’t really anything to do so Shelly and I were just standing there until time to change shifts. She asked me if I’d seen the paper that day. I said no, knowing it was just her way of bringing up something about Lind or my brother. Lind’s memorial service had been the day before.
“Did you get to see her and say good-bye?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
She looked at me like I was bleeding out of my eyes.
“Was the memorial at the funeral home or at her parent’s house?” I asked, trying to explain myself.
“Oh! No, it was just a get together at a friend’s house. It’s what Lind would have wanted,” she said.
I somehow doubted a beer bash pool party at a friend’s house in honor of Lind counted as a memorial.
“That’s nice,” I said out of a lack of words, and my typical response to her pageant queen tone.
“Did you know they burned her?” she asked.
“What?”
“Her parents had her cremated.”
“That’s nice.”
“You think so?”
“Sure, I want to be cremated too.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“I wonder if they knew about the baby.”
“The baby?” I asked, puzzled.
Shelly revealed to me that Lind was about eight weeks pregnant when she died. She was with Lind when she bought a home pregnancy test. Lind was not completely sure if the baby was Sebastian’s, but intended to tell him it was. I had little sympathy for a girl, now dead, who had been pregnant and still using illegal drugs. Apparently, the words drug use and pregnancy had not registered as a bad combination with Shelly, or Lind for that matter.
Having immediately given up drugs, drinking, and smoking when I feared I was pregnant, I had certainly not been an angel but I did care enough about the well-being of my baby. Finding myself sitting in an abortion clinic contemplating the fate of a child—
my child—sent me over the edge. I needed no further convincing that cleaning up my life was the best choice.
Somehow, I convinced myself that the baby was not Sebastian’s, and I wanted to dismiss Shelly’s story as pure gossip giving the turn of events. For the most part, I chose not to tell Sebastian because the whole situation had been life changing enough for him. I had never met Lind, but was pretty sure she was a negative person. I don’t know why members of the White family have a tendency to attract such people, and why the result is always horrific and unbelievable. The outcome always tends to be the secretive dirty laundry that curses a family and parades itself in the newspaper for the entire town to see. Any therapist would be rich off our family alone.
“You still have the nightmares, don’t you?” I asked Sebastian.
“How did you know?”
He was surprised.
Everyone seemed to forget that I was a user too. By some means, me having a baby wiped that from everyone’s memory. I wished I could forget.
“I still have them too.”
“Lind is in every single one of mine,” he said.
“It’s because no matter how sad and terrible, she’s responsible for turning you around. It’s like the last thing someone remembers in an accident before they lose consciousness. It’s what haunts you the most.”
“How do you know all of this?”
“I’ve gone to a couple of meetings. Nothing serious. I just sit there and listen to other people tell their stories.”
I had stood up and told my own story once, but I didn’t tell Sebastian that.
“It’s anonymous so I’m not really supposed to say, but believe me. Everyone else feels the same. It tears them up inside.”
My own nightmares started out with me and my girlfriend drinking and using. Sometimes, we were in her trailer or my apartment, or at a party I don’t ever remember going to in real life. We were playing music and singing out loud while snorting lines of coke off a mirrored coffee table. Then, I’m putting on make-up in the mirror, only now it’s floating in the air so that I don’t have to hold my head down to look into it. My girlfriend was floating in the air too.
While suspended in midair, the mirror shatters into a million tiny pieces for no reason at all. All the tiny pieces pull away in slow motion. I look through the pieces and can see my friend screaming her head off, but I can’t hear her. I stand up and push the tiny mirrors out of my way so that I can step through them to help her. As soon as I sweep the pieces out of the air with my hand, it’s like someone pushes play on a recorder and everything catches up with real time.
I pull my hand away because it feels like I’ve cut it on the mirror. I look at my hand and there’s no blood or pain. I still can’t hear my friend screaming, but when I look back up at her we are no longer in the trailer. Now, we are in the club, Project X, and we are on the dance floor. She’s having a good time and looking at me all wide-eyed and wondering why I’m just standing there looking at my hand. All of a sudden, the noise of the club registers in my ears like someone pulled out a plug. The music is loud and covers the garbled chatter of the people around us.
Flash to the club’s bathroom where I’m standing in front of one of the mirrors while she’s in a stall with the guy we met. She screams and this time I can hear her. All the mirrors on the wall explode just like the one before, but this time they aren’t moving in slow motion. I can vividly hear all the tiny pieces of glass falling across the floor. I shut my eyes tight to protect them. Shock registers in my hand again and I jerk it up close to me to examine it. It feels like someone has a hold on my wrist.
When I open my eyes, I’m pinned beneath a man in a car in the parking lot. His hands are wrapped around both of my wrists and he’s forcing them down so I can’t struggle. I’m naked. I can’t see his face, only a yellow smile in the dark and the whites of his eyes. I don’t know where my friend is. This time, I scream. It’s a long continuous scream but it’s like only I can hear it. He laughs and puts a hand over my mouth, cutting off the noise. As soon as his large hand claps over my mouth I shatter
into a thousand pieces just like the mirrors, then I immediately wake up. I sit up in bed, usually in a cold sweat, and look at my hand because it’s actually hurting from the dream. I don’t know why.
It’s always the same exact dream, every time.
I just knew Sebastian was going to ask if he could come to one of the meetings with me, but he didn’t say anything. I think he knew it would be easier to discuss your problems without having a relative in the room. Besides, there were plenty of outlets and meetings around town he could go to; he knew that from working as a bartender. The groups hung up flyers on the bulletin boards in bars. I could see his head filling up with questions he wanted to ask, but he kept them to himself. Being a typical guy, he probably thought he was too macho to go to a meeting. Maybe hearing that his own sister went had changed his mind. Recovery is difficult, but we don’t have to do it alone. That’s one thing the meetings had taught me.
“Are you guys having fun?” Mom asked, walking in from the kitchen.
“Yes, Aunt Clare and I beat the boys twice,” Rachel said.
“You did?” Mom sang.
“Uncle Sebastian cheats,” Robbie teased.
“I do not.”
Sitting in my lap, Jake cooed and laughed at the excitement of his little cousins.
“Where did Ellen and Travis go?” Mom asked.
“Upstairs,” I said pointing.
I watched her playfully tip toe up the stairs to eavesdrop on them. She looked back at me and winked with a finger to her mouth to be quiet. I was too rebellious and still clutching to my youth to admit it to anyone, but I admired my mother so much. I knew she wasn’t that old, but I always imagined that she was a teen during the time of gentleman callers, like in that Tennessee William’s play. I smiled at the thought of my mom sitting on the front porch serving cold lemonade to a dozen or so men who came with hopes of escorting her to a summer picnic.
Frank White was the lucky man, standing among them, who later asked for her hand in marriage. She became a house wife while he went to work to support them. This was their first house. The bank probably loaned them the money in good faith, or maybe it was a wedding gift from their parents. Then, they started having kids and it all went downhill from there. Their cookie cutter lives were filled with disappointments all brought about by their own children.
I’m sure they thought they only got it right the first time with Martin. His life had turned out just like their’s was back then. But then, Ellen got felt up by her boss and her marriage was on the rocks. Travis was a gay. Sebastian and I were both insubordinate teen drunks who couldn’t get a decent job if our lives depended upon it. I had a mixed baby. I’m sure that topped her list of frustrations brought about by her kids.
It was her final answer to all of our confessions. And like she stated, she never really said much at all. She didn’t have to. The look in her eyes and on her face was enough to make you regret what you’d done. She never said anything like, “I regret ever having you.”
Those were the cruel words I’m sure lots of kids heard these days, but we never heard it from our Mom. Tears blocked her smile, but they eventually dried and her gleaming smile would come back. She always hugged us when we walked in the door, so tight as if she had not seen us in ages, even if she’d just seen us two days prior.
Being the last child, there was a brief amount of time when I had Mom and the house all to myself after Dad passed. I’d moved back in with her briefly because I thought she might like having someone in the house with her; the others thought it was a good idea too.
As a younger kid, I snooped through their dresser drawers and closets poking around for birthday and Christmas gifts. Mom’s closet was a palace full of dresses when I liked to play dress-up and pretend I was someone else. A few weeks after Dad died, Mom was napping on the sofa, and I was up in my room. For some reason, I felt the need to go through Dad’s stuff. I needed to take something of his—a tie tack, a watch, a photo, anything—and hold it in my hand. I wanted something to keep to remember him by as I felt him slipping away in my mind. The joint I’d just smoked at my open bedroom window didn’t help, but I still felt it was too soon to be forgetting him.
Instead of going to their bedroom to rummage through his closest or bureau, I went to his office. Dad had an old roll top desk. I remember pretending it was an oven when I was a kid. Mom would send me up the stairs with a sandwich for him when he would be in his office grading papers. I wouldn’t let him eat it until we had sat it on the desk and rolled down the lid, then turned a few imaginary knobs to bake the bread. Dad had bought the desk at a yard sale with intentions of refinishing it. It also had a broken lock he never bothered to fix either.
It had been years since I had used it for bread baking, and I honestly couldn’t remember the last time I saw my Dad sitting at the desk. In the age of computers and less children in the house, he usually sat in front of a laptop at the dining table downstairs. The top of the desk disappeared with its soothing sliding noise as I opened it. In my head, I could still hear the heavy metal slam of an industrial kitchen stove which I dreamed up as a child.
The inside of the desk was filled with pockets and cubbies of all shapes and sizes. Some were open like an old post office from the past, and some had doors with little grooves in the wood, instead of knobs, for your fingers to open them. As a child, I envisioned a grand hotel for my dolls or a henhouse for chickens that laid magic eggs, but Dad never allowed me to play inside the desk. I was only allowed to bake in it with him in the room.
I could feel him standing over me now, scolding me, as I pried the doors open to look inside the little spaces. Most were empty. One was filled with blank envelopes, another with pens and pencils. Canceled checks, old receipts, and bills marked paid all had their own pockets. They were the thousands of pieces of paper that blandly ruled our lives but also held it together. I remembered seeing Dad almost pull his hair out when he couldn’t find a statement or specific paper he was looking for, although now it looked like he had always kept things in specific order.
At the bottom, there was a long slender drawer with no notch to open it. It could have been a secret drawer I would have ignored had it not been open just a bit now. I found a ruler in with the pencils and wedged it into the crack to open the drawer all the way. Inside, there was a single brown legal size file with a name written on it in large black block-style letters: HANNAH. Something, or someone, told me not to pick up that file, but when had I ever listened?
I picked up the file and opened it. A small Polaroid photo fell out and landed on the desktop. It was of an infant child and almost looked like a photo taken in a hospital when the newborn was just a few days old. I did not remember this picture being taken, but I knew the baby in the photo was me.
The other contents of the file were a thin stack of papers held together by a paper clip. Removing it revealed a clean white imprint of the clip underneath, indicating just how much the papers had yellowed over time. I sifted through small print lines of legalities and agreement terms, anxious for any key words jumping out at me which would immediately tell me what this document was. And there was just such a word. One word.
Adoption.
I learned that Hannah’s parents were both deceased. It seemed they were victims of a brutal murder. When no relatives came forward to claim the baby, Hannah was turned over to a Catholic orphanage in Savannah, Georgia. Frank and Lorraine White adopted her three days later. Baby Hannah’s last name was missing from any of the documentation, but there was a photocopy of a birth certificate showing her name was now Clare Marie White. The lines for the mother and father were filled in with Frank and Lorraine’s name.
My birth parents had been completely erased, and in some way I felt my identity had been too. I wanted to feel thankful to have a home and to be with this family, and be glad that I was not raised by nuns among other bratty orphans. I
should have felt that way. Yet, a part of me kept wondering about my real parents and who I might have turned out to be had I known them. Many believe that God has a predetermined plan for our lives, and before I was even born, I was destined to be right where I am. But rather than accept that, my free will thinking wanted to know how things might have been different if my birth parents had lived.
Looking back on my life, I couldn’t have asked for better parents than the Whites. I always had a playmate in the house with my four older siblings, and they were always watching out for me. I went to a good school and made friends. But I still thought about where Hannah might have been raised, where she would have gone to school, and what type of family she might have had. I still felt cheated when the reality of it sank in, although there was no way to know how my life might have been. I returned the papers to the drawer, walked out of dad’s office, and returned to my life as a White, never saying a word to anyone about my discovery and also wishing I’d never found it. Sometimes we yearn for the truth that we think is hidden from us. It’s only when we find the truth we’ve been looking for that we often wish we didn’t know after all, and then we see why it was kept from us in the first place.
Today, as I sat here on the floor across from Sebastian with our niece and nephew and my child around us, I looked into Sebastian’s eyes and contemplated if he knew who I really was. The others would have to have known since I was the youngest of them and Mom would not have been pregnant again after Sebastian. Why was this the one secret of the family everyone managed to keep so well?
I’ve been tempted to take Jake and leave. We could disappear in my car and head west cross country, but what’s out there for me? I couldn’t imagine starting over again as someone new. There was no birth family to search for, and who’s to say they would have known who I was anyway. If I did find them, maybe their answers to my questions were not ones I needed to hear. And so I stayed here, pretending I never discovered those adoption papers last year. I may not have been kin to this family by blood, but at least I had a family to call my own.