Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family (3 page)

Told him what? Wayne wondered. That he was some kind of dumbass who probably didn’t even know the name of the vice president of the United States? Well, he didn’t. So what? He didn’t know what the two doctors had been talking about before they’d stopped, and at nineteen years old he was too young—and too low in rank—to ask. But he probably blushed down to his boots. He was humiliated in front of a half dozen people for no other reason than for some arrogant surgeon’s amusement. At that moment Wayne promised himself he’d never again be caught in a position where someone could make fun of him because of something he didn’t know. He’d always felt confident being a good ole boy from a blue-collar family. The Maineses never tried to make themselves appear to be something they weren’t. But Wayne was no longer satisfied just being a kid from rural upstate New York. Before his four-year hitch in the air force was up, he’d decided when he got out he would enroll in college on the GI Bill.

Pragmatic, like the woman he would later marry, Wayne first studied for his associate’s degree at a community college near home, then made a huge leap into the unknown when he applied to, and was accepted at, Cornell University. He was in his midtwenties, and it wasn’t easy being older than everyone else in college, or being just about the only promilitary conservative on a liberal Ivy League campus in the 1980s, but by the time Wayne was awarded his bachelor of science degree in natural resources in 1985, he was ready for more. Five years later, he’d earned a master’s degree and doctorate, both in safety management, from West Virginia University. That’s where he was living when he met and fell in love with his future wife.

Not quite three years later, Wayne and Kelly were married in Bloomington, Indiana, in a small ceremony at the Fourwinds Lakeside Inn. Kelly wore a white tea-length dress and a wide-brimmed hat. Wayne wore a tuxedo. He was so relaxed the day of the wedding he played a round of golf and took a nap beforehand. They honeymooned in Georgia, first at the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, where they camped out at the headwaters of the Suwannee and St. Mary’s rivers, then spent a few days on Jekyll Island before finishing their trip in Savannah. When they returned, they briefly settled back into life in West Virginia, then decided to move to Northville, New York, to be closer to Wayne’s parents and the rural life he loved.

K
ELLY HADN’T SEEN HER
cousin Sarah since she was a baby. She was the daughter of Kelly’s cousin Janis, whose mother, Donna, raised Kelly and Janis under the same roof. When a teenage Janis got pregnant (Sarah was her second child), the pattern of family dysfunction looked to be a harsh hereditary burden. Like Roxanne, Janis had multiple husbands and boyfriends and didn’t raise her own children. Sarah was brought up by her biological father and grandmother in Montana and later, as a teenager, lived with her mother in Tennessee. She was smart and artistic, but also stubborn and reckless. Still, she imagined going to college, perhaps even becoming a veterinarian. Getting pregnant at sixteen had not been part of the plan, but dashed expectations were a familiar family trope.

Wayne and Kelly had transformed their lives through sheer force of will, and both had already achieved more than their parents had. They’d been willing to accept the risks that came from moving outside their cultural comfort zones, not to mention others’ expectations. So if Sarah’s unexpected phone call gave them the chance to have a family, well, then, they would take it. Maybe there was a kind of cosmic logic to Kelly not being able to bear children of her own. Maybe this was a balancing of the scales. She’d been ready to move on with her life when the fertility treatments didn’t work. Then came Sarah’s phone call. Kelly believed in fate. Maybe she was the right person at the right time to usher a child into the world who otherwise would have been set adrift in a family with a legacy of chaos.

It didn’t take long for Wayne and Kelly to decide they wanted the baby. Part of Kelly also identified with Sarah, and she knew better than anyone the importance of getting the teenager and her unborn baby out of her family’s toxic environment as soon as possible. So when it was clear Sarah would bear their child, Kelly and Wayne asked her to come live with them until it was time to give birth. She was four months pregnant when she moved into the house in Northville in April 1997. Kelly and Wayne wanted to make sure Sarah was comfortable and had the right food and medical attention, but Kelly also wanted to help Sarah get her life together. She encouraged her to apply for her driver’s license and study for a general education diploma.

By this time, Wayne was commuting fifty miles every day to a job as the corporate director of health, safety, and training at a chemical company in Schenectady, and he often daydreamed about the baby that was soon to be his. A sonogram had revealed it was going to be a boy, and Wayne imagined all the things he’d be doing with his first male child—playing catch, shooting baskets, firing deer rifles.

That’s pretty much what Wayne was thinking about when his cellphone rang one spring afternoon as he was driving home from work. It was Kelly, and she was shouting. He could hear Sarah yelling in the background. Oh my God, what’s wrong? he immediately thought.

“It’s two! It’s two!”

“What two?”

“Twins!” Kelly screamed. “We’re having twins!”

It almost seemed too good to be true. Kelly, who’d had multiple miscarriages, had always wanted two children, and now they were getting their instant family. After the initial shock and wonderment wore off, Wayne thought: Oh, no, two college freshmen at the same time! He was thrilled about having a baby, even two babies, but he also knew all the concerns about being an expectant father had just doubled. As a safety expert, he didn’t like surprises. He liked plans, analyzing a situation, and assessing all the risks and consequences. Now everything had to be rethought.

For months they had been preparing for one infant. How much harder, Wayne wondered, would it be to take care of two? Everything was swirling around in his head as he found himself swept up in a kind of giddy anxiety. He took a deep breath and pushed the worries to the back of his mind. By the time Wayne reached home and embraced Kelly, he was smiling, thinking not about the added expenses but about the double joy: two baseball gloves, two basketballs, two rifles for his two baby boys!

O
n an unseasonably warm autumn afternoon, October 
7
, 1997, at 12:21, Wyatt Benjamin came into the world, born in the county of Fulton, in the city of Gloversville in upstate New York. Ten minutes later he was joined by Jonas Zebediah. Both babies were five pounds, two ounces, and two weeks early. Wayne and Kelly were present in the delivery room. Doctors had induced labor at about nine in the morning and Sarah had refused pain medication, so Kelly and Wayne, dressed in surgical gowns, held her hands as the babies emerged. It was both terrifying and exhilarating. Sarah had difficulty delivering the placenta and lost quite a bit of blood. It was strange, but Kelly felt like she was intruding and yet at the same time as though she was exactly where she was supposed to be. As one infant emerged and then the other, they were placed into Kelly’s and Wayne’s arms. It felt surreal to hold them, Kelly thought. They each had wispy dark hair, the softest pink skin, and tiny little squeals.

There was no family significance to either name. Jonas Kover was the name of Wayne’s favorite college professor at Fulton-Montgomery Community College in Johnstown, New York. Wayne liked the old-fashioned name Zebediah, which was his vote for the other baby, but Kelly prevailed with the slightly more traditional Wyatt.

Three days later, Kelly, Wayne, and Sarah left the hospital with the twins, but only after the nursing staff made sure the new parents knew how to feed and change their babies. When it was Wayne’s turn, he sucked in his breath and tried to settle his nerves. Okay, I can do this, he said over and over to himself as he prepared to give them each a bottle. Slowly, he lifted each infant, remembering to cradle their heads in his hand, then coaxed them to suck.

“Don’t worry,” the nurse said. “They won’t break.”

That’s when it hit Wayne: He was really a father now. These two little boys would rely on him and Kelly for the rest of their lives. After feeding each, Wayne carefully placed one and then the other over his shoulder to burp. Nervously he patted their little backs.

“We’re going to have so much fun together,” he whispered in his boys’ ears. “We’re going to go hunting and fishing and I will teach you everything I know.”

“My boys,” Wayne said over and over. Wayne loved the sound of those words, and he said to Kelly not long after their births, “They are your boys now, but someday they will be my boys.” He wasn’t being mean, he explained. It was just his way of saying it’s every dad’s dream to bond with his sons, especially as they grow from children to teenagers to young men. There were certain rites of passage that he wanted to help them through, certain “guy” things, even silly things, such as arguing about sports, that he, not she, would probably be doing with them. That was how father-son relationships worked, he said.

Kelly was thinking about more immediate things. A week after the babies were born, she drove Sarah to Albany the night before her flight back home to Tennessee. It was only an hour’s drive, but Kelly thought it would be good for both of them if they had a chance to talk before parting. As ebullient as she felt over her babies, she couldn’t help feeling a sense of dread for Sarah, sending her back to an unstable mother and an uncertain life in the South. She hoped she and Wayne had been able to offer a little bit of perspective on all that she could do with her life if she just got herself out of Tennessee one day. In Albany, Kelly took Sarah out to dinner, and the two shared stories and a few laughs. Then Kelly thanked the teenager for the incredible gift she’d given her.

“You’re free now to go live the life you want,” she said. “We can have a relationship and you can be a part of the twins’ lives, if you want that for yourself.”

Driving back to Northville, Kelly was filled with mixed emotions. She worried about how Sarah would fare, but she also felt relieved that she and Wayne could finally begin their journey parenting two beautiful boys. At the same time, she knew she had to anticipate contingencies. Things could change quickly, and she needed to be ready for whatever was thrown at her. Sarah didn’t talk about wanting to keep the babies, but Kelly felt the need to steel herself against the possibility anyway. If it came to that, Kelly would deal with it. Once those babies were placed in her arms, they were hers and Wayne’s, and she would do everything humanly possible to make sure it stayed that way.

T
en months after the twins were born, on August 
21
,
1998
, a revised birth certificate for each infant was filed, this time with their new last names: Jonas Zebediah
Maines
and Wyatt Benjamin
Maines.

The boys quickly put on weight and were healthy and happy. Kelly stayed at home with the babies while Wayne continued to work as the corporate safety director at the plant in Schenectady. It was a hefty commute, but there was very little traffic on Route 30, the main artery connecting Northville and Schenectady, so it was usually just Wayne and the deer for fifty miles or more.

The company had four plants in New York at the time, and nearly two dozen overseas. With a total number of employees between four hundred and five hundred, it was doing about $800 million a year in sales. The plants manufactured chemicals involved in the production of various industrial and commercial products—they were caustic ingredients few others wanted to make. The company did not have a very good safety record. Wayne’s job was to get it back in compliance, which he did in short order. Under his watch, the injury rate plummeted to just two or three per one hundred workers.

Wayne was the company’s first professional safety officer, and much about the plant remained redolent of times long gone. The men’s locker room, for instance, was still a gang shower with no privacy. These were towel-snapping, tobacco-chewing workers and if, for instance, you were gay, this wasn’t the kind of place you’d feel comfortable coming out.

The day Wayne began his new job he walked into his office and found its previous occupant had plastered the walls with graphic centerfold photos from
Hustler
magazine—all of them laminated. Wayne was aghast, even more so when a safety supply sales representative, a woman, walked into the office to say hello.

“Please, please don’t come in here,” Wayne said, trying to prevent the woman from seeing the pornographic pictures. “I’m so sorry.”

Wayne did not immediately endear himself to the down-home employees of the company, including management. It took time to change the culture, and Wayne knew that he’d have to lead by example. At the same time, he wanted others to know that even though he came from the outside, he also was one of them. The first time Wayne wrote a permit for a welding job in a place where the workers had to climb into a tank that had once been full of caustic formaldehyde and flammable liquids, he told them, “I’m coming in with you.” They said he didn’t have to do that. Wayne told them he knew, but he was coming anyway. He wasn’t going to let them risk everything just so he could write out safety permits in the comfort of his office. He needed to understand the dangers firsthand, and one of the immediate payoffs was that his credibility among the employees shot way up.

Away from work, Wayne and Kelly busily restored the nineteenth-century farmhouse they had bought in Northville, a village located in the town of Northampton, New York, about sixty miles north of Albany in the foothills of the Adirondacks. Northville rests on the cusp of the Great Sacandaga Lake, and when the village was established in 1788, Northampton was known as Fish House because of a large fishing camp on the lake. Today Northville is a village of barely a thousand residents, and fishing remains a recreational mainstay of the area. Northville was the setting for a 1997 two-part episode of
The X-Files
in which agents Scully and Mulder discover a UFO at the bottom of the Great Sacandaga. The town’s real-life residents were proud of their
X-Files
connection, but they also were comfortable being ordinary. It was a conservative family town, and that’s what Wayne and Kelly loved about it.

Six months after the twins were born, Sarah’s mother, Janis, began calling regularly, something she’d rarely done before. She also seemed overly chatty. Kelly was suspicious that Janis was angling for something, and it quickly became clear what it was. She’d recently remarried, an Englishman this time, and after living in Great Britain for a while had returned to Tennessee. In one of those early phone calls she told Kelly, “We’re going to be best friends.” Then she said that her daughter Sarah was living with a man who was doing drugs. When Janis called yet again, this time to say she thought the biological father of the twins wasn’t the man listed on the birth certificate but someone else who was now in jail, Kelly got off the phone and turned to Wayne.

“I think she’s trying to take the kids. I’m getting passports.”

It would take eighteen months for Kelly to get those passports, but when she did, she felt reassured she and Wayne could flee the country with their babies on a moment’s notice.

A few days later Janis called again. She had a proposition to make, she told Kelly.

“Why don’t we keep one of the twins?”

Kelly cut Janis off.

“Nope, that’s not how it works,” she told her. “These babies are not going to be split up. If you want them, you take both of them, or you take neither.”

It was a threat Kelly felt comfortable making. There was no way Janis would take both. She’d already had four children. Two infants would be way too much work. Kelly was right. Janis backed off.

O
N
M
AY 
17
,
1998
,
Kelly and Wayne sat in the front row of a courtroom in Northville with the seven-month-old twins in their laps.

“Okay, who are we going to do first?” the judge asked.

“How about Jonas?” Kelly answered.

“I’m pleased to say we have two adoptions at the same time,” the judge announced. “We want to make sure we are identifying you as the parents in court….We also want to identify the children, that they are, in fact, the right children. That’s essentially why we’re here.”

The adoption almost hadn’t happened, or at least was almost postponed. A couple of days earlier, red blotches had appeared on Wyatt’s face, arms, legs, and torso. Kelly thought it might be chicken pox, and if it was he’d have to be kept home for several days. The date for the adoption would be postponed, and any delay was just more time to worry. Now, the day before it was all going to be official, she found herself rushing Wyatt to the doctor’s office, afraid not only that he was sick but that another roadblock was going to delay the babies’ legally being hers. The pediatrician quickly noticed the “slapped cheek” look of the rash and diagnosed fifth disease, a common childhood virus. It is contagious, but by the time a rash appears the infection is over. There was nothing to worry about.

Inside the courtroom, the judge looked at Kelly and Wayne. “Raise your right hands,” he said. “What are your names?”

“Kelly Maines and Wayne Maines.”

“Sir, who are you holding?”

“Jonas.”

“Ma’am, who are you holding?”

“Wyatt.”

“Are these your signatures on the papers?”

“Yes.”

“You are married, is that correct?”

Kelly and Wayne nodded.

“I’ve done this before and there is a difference between males and females,” the judge said, trying to make a joke. “When I ask a date, it’s a lot easier to get it from the woman. What day were you married?”

Kelly answered: “May 16, 1992.”

“I’m signing the order of adoption, and you’ll each get a copy of this and we’ll send it to the appropriate agencies and they’ll send you a new birth certificate. That takes care of Jonas. Congratulations.”

Kelly’s mother, Donna, and Wayne’s father and mother, along with a smattering of other people in the courtroom, clapped. The judge then added his signature to a second document.

“That makes it official for Wyatt as well. Congratulations to you. I know this is a special day for you, and it was a very pleasant one for us. We’re adjourned.”

Wayne and Kelly posed for photographs holding the babies with the judge between them. Then the judge posed with both babies, holding each in the crook of an arm and smiling broadly for the camera. At home, dessert and champagne awaited the family’s celebration. Written in red icing atop a chocolate cake were the words:
FINALLY THEY’RE OURS!

A sense of relief overwhelmed Kelly and Wayne. They wouldn’t need those passports. Now they could just concentrate on being the parents of two normal, healthy baby boys.

I
T WAS CLEAR FROM
the beginning that there was an almost physical bond between the two babies. They seemed to always want to be in close proximity to each other. In the first year of their lives, they spent a lot of time snuggled together in a playpen in the living room. When they began to crawl they’d take naps with the two family dogs, Ethyl, a Doberman/Rottweiler mix, and Emit, who was mostly German shepherd. Usually the two dogs would growl and snap at each other, and both infants would mimic them, grunting just like Ethyl and Emit.

But as they grew into toddlers, Wyatt loved everything Barbie, while Jonas loved everything
Star Wars, Power Rangers,
and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. He spent hours making his own imaginative action figures out of clay, then liked to smash them with makeshift weapons. Wyatt tended to take out his frustration on Jonas; Jonas took his out on his toys. From an early age, Jonas was more of an interior child, with an unusual gentleness.

You can hear the differences between the twins in two law enforcement videos taken when they were barely four years old. One after the other, they stand in front of a makeshift measuring stick (both of them are three and a half feet tall) sponsored by the New York Masonic Safety ID program, which keeps files of key statistics on children in case they ever go missing. On the video the twins, who are in preschool, are asked individually about their school, their friends, where they ride their bicycles, and where they’d go if they were hiding from someone. Jonas says he’d hide behind a tree in the front yard; an excited Wyatt explains he’d climb to the top of the roof. Wyatt’s best friend is Leah. Jonas’s best friend is Mommy and Daddy. When asked his nickname, Wyatt answers: Wyatt Zebediah Maines. Jonas isn’t sure, so the interviewer prompts him, “What does Mommy call you?”

“Angel.”

The biggest difference between the boys could be seen in the characters they chose to play when they acted out stories. Jonas was always the “boy” character and Wyatt the “girl” character. He loved playing Cinderella, Dorothy from
The Wizard of Oz,
Wendy from
Peter Pan,
and Ariel from
The Little Mermaid.

In fact, Wyatt was obsessed with Ariel, a beautiful, red-haired mermaid who is also voluptuous, in a Disney sort of way, with just a hint of cleavage above her bikini top and yet nary a suggestion of sexual anatomy. Part human, part fish, Ariel, with her shiny green scales, is decidedly a mermaid below the waist. But above it, with her long hair and luscious red lips, she is all girl.

Ariel’s problem, however, is that she lives in one world, under the sea, even as she yearns to be in another, on land. As she gazes at her image in a mirror beneath the waves, she feels comforted by the top half of her reflection. It’s the bottom that doesn’t make sense. Because she yearns to be a girl, a human female, she wants nothing more than to escape her mermaid’s tail, which is why, against her father’s wishes, she swims to the surface whenever she can to watch the humans aboard passing ships. When ships are wrecked in storms, Ariel collects the artifacts left behind—a teapot, dinner plates, a man’s pipe, and a sewing thimble—and spirits them away to a secret cave. For her, the most ordinary items used by humans are objects of beauty, because they symbolize something she is not but badly wants to be.

“Oh my gosh, have you ever seen anything so wonderful in your life?” she exclaims about a fork, even as everyone around her tries to tell her, “It’s better/Down where it’s wetter.”

Ariel had a kind of hypnotic power over Wyatt. He watched
The Little Mermaid
DVD incessantly and imitated Ariel’s long, flowing hair by running around the house with a red shirt halfway over his head trailing behind him.

One day, shortly before the twins turned three, Wayne stood in one of the bathrooms, hammering. Using Kelly’s design, he was renovating the room in a classic deer camp motif, complete with a vanity mirror bordered by fishing lures. Little Wyatt toddled in to see what his father was up to. For a minute or so he just stood there, quietly watching, then left. A few minutes later he was back, this time with his own toy hammer, and he began to bang on the wall with it just like his dad. Wayne gloried in the father-and-son moment, one of the few he’d had with Wyatt since he was born. He wanted to slow it all down, to savor it.

“Do you want a snack?” he asked his son.

Wyatt nodded and the two took a break. Wayne sat on the side of the antique bathtub. Wyatt stood next to him. Both nibbled on animal crackers. Suddenly, Wayne noticed his son’s expression darken. Wyatt looked up at his father.

“Daddy, I hate my penis.”

Jolted out of his reverie, Wayne tried to take in the words his precious son had just uttered. Then he reached down, scooped up the young boy, and hugged him fiercely. He kissed away the tears in Wyatt’s eyes. He kissed the tip of his nose, his cheeks, his lips, all the while fighting back his own tears.

“It’s okay,” he whispered. “Everything’s going to be okay. I love you very much.”

Wayne pressed Wyatt’s head against his shoulder, trying to comfort the boy even as his own chest heaved with emotion. The next moment, Jonas was in the bathroom, too, hugging his father’s leg. One twin was never very far from the other.

“What’s the matter, Daddy?” Jonas asked.

Wayne slumped down onto the floor, his back against the bathtub, and took his twin boys into his arms, hugging and kissing one and then the other, over and over.

“It’s okay,” he whispered to Wyatt and Jonas, stroking both boys’ hair. “Everything’s going to be okay.”