As Simple as It Seems (2 page)

Lots of people are adopted—I know it's not that big a deal. My birth certificate said that Tom and Ellen Colter were my biological parents, and even though I didn't look like either one of them, I had no reason to suspect that it wasn't true. There's a good chance I would have spent my whole life in the dark if I hadn't found the square red envelope addressed to Grace Kincaid tucked into the pocket of my mother's wool coat one afternoon about a week before my eleventh birthday.

“Who's Grace Kincaid?” I asked, holding the envelope out to my mother.

She was standing in the kitchen slicing apples for a pie, a mound of curled green peelings tangled like snakes on the counter beside her. When she saw what I was holding, she turned white as a sheet.

“Where did you get that?” she asked.

“It was sticking out of your coat pocket. I saw it when I went to hang my jacket up in the closet. I thought maybe it was a Christmas card you forgot to mail. So who's Grace Kincaid?”

My mother put down the apple she was holding, reached out, and took the envelope from me. Her fingers brushed against my palm and I noticed they were ice-cold. Without looking at it, she slipped the red envelope into the pocket of her apron. Then she picked up the apple again and with a paring knife began cutting the pale flesh into moon-shaped slivers.

“I've been thinking about your birthday cake,” she said. “Which do you think would go better with red velvet—buttercream frosting or cream cheese?”

She could have told me that Grace Kincaid was an old friend from high school, or one of my father's summer customers she'd gotten friendly enough with to exchange Christmas cards. I wouldn't have thought twice about it. But it was clear from the way she was acting that my mother was trying to hide something.

“Who's Grace Kincaid, Mom?” I asked again.

Instead of answering, she covered her face with her hands and burst into tears.

 

Half an hour later, I found myself sitting on the living room couch wedged between my parents, fidgeting and feeling nervous as a cat. Even though it was the middle of the day, my mother had called my father at work and told him to come home, something she'd never done before. I knew whatever it was I'd stumbled upon was big.

“Are you sure about this, Ellen?” my father said. “Once it's done, it's done—there won't be any turning back.”

“She has a right to know,” my mother told him. Then she reached into her pocket and pulled out the red envelope. “Open it,” she said, handing it to me.

I slipped my finger under the flap and tore the envelope open. Inside was one of my mother's homemade Christmas cards with a drawing of a sprig of holly on the front. “Happy Holly-days!” it said. When I opened the card, a photograph fell out. It was a picture of me, standing on the front steps of our house with my yellow-and-black plaid book bag slung over my shoulder. My mother had taken it back in September, on the morning of my first day of fifth grade. On the back she'd written “Verbena, age 10.”

“Okay,” I said. “But I still don't know who Grace Kincaid is.”

“She's your uncle Mike's wife,” my mother told me.
“I send her a picture of you every Christmas.”

I was surprised to hear that Uncle Mike was married, but it wasn't exactly earth-shattering news. I didn't mind if my mother wanted to send them pictures of me. They were family, after all.

Maybe somebody else would have put two and two together and realized that something was up, but I had to have it spelled out for me. The first part of the story my parents told me that day was something I had heard many times before. When Grandpa Colty made his dying wish to see his son, my parents drove to New York City to find Uncle Mike. That story had always ended with Uncle Mike not being found, Grandpa Colty dying, and me getting born, all on the same day. But there was more to the story than that.

My parents followed a lead they'd gotten on an address where someone thought Mike Colter might have lived at one time. The apartment was on the west side of Manhattan, the basement of a brownstone with a wrought-iron gate and three steps down to the door.

“We rang the bell, but there was no answer,” my mother said.

Just as they were getting ready to leave, my father thought he heard someone moving behind the door.
Finally it opened and there was Grace.

“She was in a bad way. Soaking wet and shaking like a leaf.”

“Was she sick?” I asked.

“No,” my mother said. “She was in labor. It had started in the middle of the night, and by the time we got there she was nearly out of her mind from the pain.”

“Why didn't she go to the hospital like you did?” I asked. “And where was Uncle Mike?”

“Let your mother finish, Bena,” my father said.

My parents went inside and helped Grace to lie down. Then my father said he would call for an ambulance, but Grace got upset. She didn't want him to do that, she said she had no way to pay for it, and besides, she had already made up her mind.

“About what?” I asked.

An uneasy look passed between my parents.

“Grace was an alcoholic,” my mother said. “She'd been warned not to drink while she was pregnant, but she hadn't been able to stop. The doctors told her that if the baby lived, it would be damaged. Fetal alcohol syndrome it's called.”

“Did the baby die?” I asked.

“No,” my mother told me.

“Did the alcohol hurt it?”

My mother's eyes grew moist and her lower lip trembled.

“Yes,” she said softly, “it did. But it could have been much, much worse.”

She explained that she and my father had finally convinced Grace to let them call for an ambulance and that she'd stayed behind in the little apartment while my father took Grace to the hospital. Before Grace was carried out of the apartment on the stretcher and loaded into the ambulance, my mother told me, she leaned over Grace and whispered, “You be me.” Then she placed her wallet in Grace's hands and kissed her good-bye.

I didn't understand.

“Why did you say, ‘You be me'?” I asked. “And why did you give Grace your whole wallet, instead of just giving her some of the money out of it?”

My mother began to cry.

“Do you want me to tell the rest?” my father asked her gently.

But she shook her head, dried her eyes, and continued.

“I wanted a baby more than anything in the world,” she told me. “We had tried forever.”

“I know,” I said. “You've told me a million times how you spent years knitting little booties and sweaters, and then when I finally came, the clothes were all moth-eaten and I couldn't wear them.”

My mother got a faraway look in her eyes.

“You were so tiny,” she said, “but you had quite a pair of lungs. You could wail all night, and for weeks you did, too. I'd wrap you up tight, and rock you and sing to you until you finally fell asleep. Poor little thing, you had a hard time of it in the beginning.”

I had heard all of this before. I knew that I'd come earlier than expected and that I'd been so small and fragile, I looked like a tiny baby bird—all pink and wrinkled. I'd seen pictures of my scrunched-up little self, swaddled in a blanket and cradled in my mother's arms. But I didn't understand why we were going back over all of this now.

“We'd waited so long,” my mother continued, “I couldn't believe you were really mine. I couldn't believe I was finally—”

“You haven't finished the story,” I interrupted impatiently. “What happened to Grace and the baby? And where was Uncle Mike?”

My mother seemed lost in thought. When she didn't
answer my questions, my father stepped in.

“Your uncle Mike was in jail,” he said, “and he still is.”

This news came as a shock.

“What did he do?” I asked.

“That's neither here nor there, Bena,” he told me. Then he picked up the thread of the story where my mother had left off.

“I rode in the ambulance with Grace,” he explained, “and when we got to the hospital, I told them I was the baby's father so that they would let me go in with Grace while she had the baby.”

“Did she have a little boy or a little girl?” I asked.

“A sweet little girl,” my father said. “No heavier than a sack of flour.”

“Willow,” my mother said softly. “That's what Grace said she would have called her.”

“What do you mean,
would have
?” I said. “I thought you said the baby didn't die.”

“She didn't,” my mother said. “Though it was touch and go there for a while. Remember, Tom?”

“Of course I remember,” he said reaching across me to pat my mother's hand.

“Where is she now?” I asked. “Where is Willow?”

My mother smiled at me, but her eyes were full of
tears again and some of them spilled out and ran down her smooth, wide cheeks.

“She's here, Sugarpea. With us where she belongs.”

I felt as if the world had stopped spinning and time was standing still as I struggled to understand what I'd just heard.

“Me?”
I asked.

My mother nodded.

“You.”

“I was there when you came into the world,” my father said. “I was the first one to hold you in my arms. But it was your mother who saw you through those first few difficult weeks. She never left your side.”

I was confused.

“What happened to the other baby?” I asked my mother. “The one that
you
had?”

“There was no other baby,” she said. “People couldn't tell, because of my weight. Everybody knew we'd been trying; they just assumed we'd decided to keep it a secret.”

“When we brought you home, they kidded us about how we'd pulled the wool over their eyes.” My father laughed.

I was so shocked I could barely breathe. My mother took my hand and squeezed it.

“I wanted a baby more than life itself, Verbie, but I couldn't do it myself. So Grace did it for me. That's why I send her a picture every year. It seems like the least I can do to let her see who you've become.”

I could hear my mother's voice, but I wasn't listening to the words anymore. No wonder I'd been feeling so mixed up and mean inside. Mike Colter was bad news, trouble from the get-go, warped, and it was his good-for-nothing blood that was running through my veins. After all these years of thinking I was somebody I wasn't, the real me had finally decided to show up.

Annie was the first person I told. It was the week before Christmas break, a few days before my birthday, and I remember we were standing together out on the playground at school in our winter coats.

“Lots of people are adopted, Verbie,” she said. “Are you going to try to meet your real parents? I'd be dying to know what they were like if I were you.”

“They're not my real parents, and I don't ever want to meet them,” I said angrily.

“You don't have to take my head off,” said Annie defensively. “I was just asking.”

“Why would I want to meet them? Grace practically pickled me before I was born. And Mike Colter is in jail—
for killing someone
.”

My father hadn't wanted to tell me what Mike Colter had done to get himself put in jail, but I had insisted I
had a right to know everything after having been kept in the dark for so long. Finally he gave in and told me that there'd been some sort of a fight, and that Mike had pushed a man so hard it broke his neck.

“I know what you're doing, Verbie. You're telling me all this stuff now to make me feel guilty about not coming to your birthday party this year,” Annie said.

“No I'm not,” I told her. “I'm scared, Annie. Scared I'm going to end up being like Mike Colter.”

It was starting to snow. Annie patted her pockets, looking for her mittens. When she didn't find them, she began blowing on her fingers to warm them up.

“That's just crazy talk,” she said. “We both know you wouldn't hurt a fly, Verbie.”

“I'm not the same person I used to be.”

“You look the same,” she said.

She didn't understand. Nobody understood. My parents said that the reason they hadn't told me the truth was because they didn't want me to worry, but I'd been worrying all year that there was something wrong with me. And now I knew what it was.

The bell rang and Annie and I started walking back toward the school building. Lacy snowflakes, like little white doilies, caught in Annie's dark hair and eyelashes.

“Listen,” she said to me, “I'm sorry about your party,
Verbie, really I am, but Heather invited me to go skiing with her family at Holiday Mountain for the whole week. I have to go—I already bought ski pants and everything.”

Heather Merwin was a stuck-up girl Annie had never shown any interest in before.

“It's okay,” I told her, even though it wasn't.

Best friends were supposed to be there on your birthday, and they were supposed to know when you needed them to give you a hug and tell you that everything was going to be all right. I'd thought that Annie Bingham and I would be best friends forever, but for the first time I found myself wondering if maybe that wasn't true.

 

Annie and I had met on the morning of our first day in kindergarten, and by the time we went home that afternoon, we were friends. We did everything together—rode our bikes, went ice-skating, baked a million chocolate chip cookies, and had sleepovers almost every weekend at each other's houses. One of our favorite activities was collecting things—pinecones, pretty rocks, bottle caps, it didn't matter. We'd come back to my room with our pockets stuffed full, sit on the floor, and spread our treasures out in front of us.
Then we'd choose a winner and two runners-up, like in a beauty pageant. Being best friends with Annie was like breathing; it was part of who I was.

In the beginning of fifth grade, when some of the girls in our class started coming to school wearing makeup and shoes with chunky heels, Annie and I made fun of them for trying to act older than they were. While we swung on the rings or jumped rope at recess, those girls would cluster in tight knots out on the playground whispering and giggling whenever a boy walked by. I remember telling Annie: “If I ever start acting like that, please shoot me.” And she laughed and said, “Don't worry, I will.”

Then one day Annie bought some lip gloss. “It's just clear, Verbie,” she said when she showed it to me, “Like Chapstick only shinier. It's no big deal.”

But the lip gloss was only the beginning. Pretty soon, Annie didn't want to have sleepovers anymore. She said that kind of thing was “babyish.” Not long after that, she started hanging around with Heather.

 

My mother always made a big fuss over my birthday, but that day after my conversation with Annie on the playground, I came home from school and told my mother to cancel my birthday party. She tried to talk
me out of it; she'd been planning the party for weeks. She was going to make a red velvet cake from scratch and decorate the house with streamers and balloons. She'd already bought candy for the goodie bags and prizes for the party games my friends and I would play.

“A party might be just the thing to lift your spirits,” she said.

“I'll run away if you make me do it,” I screamed at her. “I'll run away and you'll never see me again!” Then I threw myself down on the couch and cried.

My mother came and sat beside me.

“I'm so sorry you're hurting,” she said, stroking my hair softly with her fingers. “If I could take your pain away and put it on myself, you know I would.”

That night after I went to bed, my mother called all the people I'd sent invitations to and told them that I'd come down with a bug and didn't feel up to celebrating.

I spent the day of my birthday upstairs lying on my bed staring at the ceiling. There was a pile of presents waiting for me downstairs but I didn't feel like opening them. What I wanted couldn't possibly be inside any of those boxes. Even though I told her not to, my mother made my favorite dinner, steak and french fries, but I
didn't touch a bite. After the dinner dishes were cleared, she brought out the red velvet cake she'd made, with eleven white candles in a circle on the top and a twelfth in the middle “to grow on.”

“Make a wish, birthday girl,” she said as she set the cake down in front of me.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. And that was the first time I wished to be somebody other than who I was—somebody other than Verbena Ellen Colter.