Next of Kin (16 page)

‘Great,’ Finn said in a hollow voice. ‘Everyone got what they wanted. Except for the kids.’

‘And the mothers, in many ways,’ Ms Tesco said quietly.

Finn frowned at her. ‘I don’t understand. Like you said, the mothers got to get rid of their mistakes. It’s exactly what they wanted.’

She shook her head. ‘In most cases, it turns out that’s not true. The girls – and these are
girls
we’re talking about for the most part – were usually never
informed that they could keep their children. That was never an option. They were told that the only way that they could have any sort of a life was to give up the child to adoption. Sometimes they
were told that they were evil for what they had done, and were unfit to care for a child.’

Finn scoffed. ‘Name-calling wouldn’t stop a mother from keeping her baby if she really wanted to,’ he said. ‘That’s a cop out.’

Ms Tesco’s eyes flashed at him. ‘I can understand your anger, Mr Finn. I’m sure people have told you over and over that your mother didn’t want you, that she gave you up
because she thought her life would be better without you. That’s always been the party line – the story that’s been sold to adoptees and adoptive parents and the public for
decades – it’s all okay, because the birth mothers didn’t want their children anyway.’

‘I’ve learned a little bit about my mother in the last day. It sounds like it was pretty true in my case,’ Finn said.

‘Maybe,’ Ms Tesco said, grudgingly. ‘I’m sure it was true in some cases. Not in a lot of others, though. Trust me.’

Sally had been quiet throughout the conversation, just watching Ms Tesco as she spoke. Now she said, ‘You gave up a child.’ The words came out simply and plainly, without judgment.
She could have been commenting on the woman’s jewelry.

Ms Tesco was taken by surprise. She looked at Sally as though she’d forgotten she was in the room. ‘No,’ she said quickly.

‘That’s why you work here now, isn’t it?’ Sally said.

Ms Tesco looked back at Finn. ‘I’m just trying to explain the law to you. It has nothing to do with . . .’ She took a deep breath. ‘There is only so much information I
could give you, even if all of the information was there, which it likely isn’t.’

Finn looked back and forth between Sally and the older woman. ‘Is she right?’ he asked. ‘Did you give up a child?’

‘Does it matter?’ Ms Tesco said.

‘Maybe, maybe not,’ Finn said. ‘But I want to know.’

The woman looked away, her hands clenched, the wiry cables of muscle on her wrists flexing nervously. She nodded. ‘Yes, it’s true. I gave up a little girl for adoption when I was
young.’ She drew her lips in tight to her teeth and closed a file sitting in front of her. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a lot of work to do. I will put in your request, and
we will try to get back to you in two weeks.’

‘Great,’ Finn said slapping his thighs in anger. ‘So the system is set up to prevent adoptees from finding their real parents, and just to make sure the system works, people
like you with a vested interest in keeping their secrets are made the gatekeepers. That’s just wonderful.’

She turned on him angrily. ‘I have no secrets, Mr Finn,’ she snapped. ‘And I would give anything in the world –
anything
– to find my daughter. To talk to
her, even once. To know whether she was happy growing up, whether I did the right thing. You have no idea what it’s like to give up a child. In some ways, it’s worse than having a child
die; at least when your child dies, you know where they are – you have closure.’

‘Except that giving up your baby was your decision,’ Finn pointed out.

‘You have no idea what you’re talking about,’ Ms Tesco said. ‘None of it was my decision. I lost control over everything in my life the moment I got pregnant. In many
ways I still haven’t gotten that control back.’

Finn said, ‘You had all the control, and you still do.’

‘I didn’t,’ Ms Tesco said. ‘And I don’t. I don’t expect you to understand.’

‘What happened?’ Sally asked. ‘What wouldn’t we understand?’

Ms Tesco looked at the girl. ‘There were no choices back then,’ she said. ‘Things are different now. If it ever happened to you, you could make your own decisions.’

‘What’s different?’

‘Everything.’ She shook her head angrily. ‘I was a good girl, you understand? A good, upper-middle-class girl. I was a straight-A student. Things like that didn’t happen
to girls like me. They happened to
other
girls.
Bad
girls. At least, that’s what they told me.’ She looked down at her hands, but her demeanor remained steely, her voice
clipped. ‘My father hit me when he found out. My poor father, the most mild-mannered, non-violent, decent man I’ve ever known, and he hit me. Hard enough to knock me off my feet. I
could tell he was sorry about that, but he never said so; that’s how awful it was. A young, unmarried daughter getting pregnant?’ She shook her head. ‘It was enough to destroy a
family. I could see that in my father’s face; I could see his fear that we would lose everything he’d worked so hard to build. He was a vice-president at a local bank, and something
like this, if people had found out, could have destroyed his career. We were Italian, and he always felt like he was under suspicion as it was. He felt like my pregnancy would confirm all of the
unspoken prejudices.’

‘What did you do?’ Sally asked.

Ms Tesco looked up at her. ‘I did what I was told to do,’ she said. ‘I did what hundreds of thousands of other
good
girls did back then when they got into trouble. I
kept my mouth shut and kept to myself for months. I wore baggy clothes to hide the changes. And then, when the baggy clothes weren’t enough to keep people from noticing, I went
away.’

‘You ran away?’

She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not ran away,
went
away. It was all arranged. It was what girls did back then. I went far away to a place where I could give birth
without anyone knowing. I
went away
. That was what they called it back then.’

‘Where did you go? Here?’

‘Goodness, no,’ she said. ‘My family lived two towns over from here. You never went away to someplace nearby; someone might see you, someone might find out. I went to another
place in western Massachusetts.’

‘For how long?’ Sally was fascinated, Finn could tell.

‘Three months,’ Ms Tesco said. ‘For three months I was alone, literally a prisoner. My family didn’t give me any choice. My father told me that I would either do what I
was told, or I would be thrown out of the house and disowned. I was sixteen. I didn’t think I would survive. Probably wouldn’t have.’

‘What did your mother say?’

‘Not much.’ The older woman laughed bitterly. ‘She prayed a lot. That was her reaction to most things that were difficult for her to deal with. She prayed, and she told me to
listen to my father. We were a very traditional family.’

‘You must have been pretty pissed at your mom,’ Sally said.

Tesco shook her head. ‘That’s just who she was. At least she visited me once when I was at the home. My father never did. She came and she brought me a Bible. She told me it was to
mark my rebirth. She told me that when “it” was done – everyone referred to my pregnancy, the birth, my baby, as “it”, as if they couldn’t use real words to
describe what was happening – when “it” was done, I could start life over.’ She closed her eyes. ‘I can remember sitting there, wanting to scream at her. Wanting to
tell her that I didn’t want to start over. Wanting to beg her to save me, take me back home.’ She breathed heavily. ‘I didn’t, though. Because that’s not what
good
girls did. Good girls did what they were told to do.’

‘So you gave up your baby,’ Sally said.

She nodded. ‘I gave up my little girl. I remember when labor started, I was so happy because it was finally going to be over. They didn’t tell you anything about what childbirth was
like, though. They never told me anything to prepare me. It took fourteen hours, and I kept screaming in pain, asking why, and they said it was a punishment. They told me,
This is what happens
when you’re bad
. And I believed them.

‘All through the birth, I kept promising God that I’d be good from then on. I promised that I would do what I was told, that I’d give up the baby and go back to being a good
girl. And then it was over, and I heard her cry. My heart broke when I heard my daughter cry that first time. All I wanted was to make everything okay for her. And they put her on my stomach and
she stopped crying. Just like that, she stopped crying and clung onto me. I looked up at this one young nurse who’d been there with me the entire time – she was a nun, and she was so
nice, so kind, she couldn’t have been more than five or six years older than me – and I said, “She knows.” I was crying, and I said, “She knows I’m her
mommy.”

‘And this nurse smiled at me, and said, “She does. She’ll always know you’re her mommy. Even if she doesn’t remember, she’ll always know.”’ A tear
trickled down Ms Tesco’s cheek, only to be brushed aside with the flick of a wrist. ‘I thought,
That’s something, at least
. At that moment, I even thought maybe that was
enough.’

‘But it wasn’t?’ Sally asked.

Ms Tesco shook her head, wringing her hands nervously. ‘Some of the other girls never spent any time with their babies. They encouraged that at the home – complete separation from
the start. Sometimes they didn’t just encourage it, they enforced it. They said it made it easier. I don’t think they were right, but I wouldn’t know, because I didn’t take
their advice. I spent three glorious days with my daughter, telling her how much I loved her, and how I was doing the right thing for her. It was all lies, I knew it the entire time, but I said it
anyway. Because I was a good girl, and that was what they told me to say.

‘And then, three days later, they came to take her away. They had papers for me to sign, and I screamed at them and told them that I wouldn’t sign them. I told them that I was
keeping my baby. Oh, I made such an awful scene, they had to bring in orderlies. And then the man who ran the place came down to talk to me. He was very calm; I got the feeling he’d had this
conversation before with other girls. He explained to me how much better it would be for my little girl to be adopted. He called her
the girl
, because we weren’t allowed to name our
children – that was up to the adoptive parents – but I named my little girl anyway. I called her Christine, and I would talk to her and tell her to remember me, and remember that her
real name was Christine. Anyway, he told me that
the girl
would be better off with a real family. He said that he’d called my father, and my father had told him that I couldn’t
go home with a child. He said my father told him that they wouldn’t come get me. I told him I didn’t care.

‘Then he nodded, and asked how I would pay. I said to him, “Pay for what?” And he told me that I hadn’t been charged for the three months board and the medical care and
the hospital stay because that was all covered if the baby was being adopted. But if I didn’t intend to give the child up for adoption, then I had to pay. It came to almost a thousand
dollars, which might as well have been a million, as far as I was concerned. I told him I didn’t have any money, and he said he would have to turn the matter over to the police. And while
they got all that sorted out
the girl
would have to go into foster care with the state because if I couldn’t pay them, I clearly couldn’t take care of the child.’

‘What about the father?’ Sally asked. ‘The boy who got you pregnant?’

Ms Tesco laughed in surprise. ‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘He never got involved. That was the accepted double standard; he was never really affected by any of this. Back then it was
considered the girl’s problem, not the boy’s. If anything, it probably helped his reputation. I didn’t hear much from him after I told him about the pregnancy. It didn’t
matter, he certainly wasn’t in any sort of position to offer an alternative – he was only seventeen.’

‘So, what happened?’ Sally asked.

‘I didn’t know what else to do, so I signed the papers. They told me I had five minutes to say goodbye. Can you imagine? Five minutes to say goodbye to your child? She was still
tiny, but she had that three-day-old chubbiness that babies get, and I held her close to my face and I whispered to her the whole five minutes. I can’t remember everything I said to her, but
I know I told her over and over how much I loved her, and that I was sorry. I promised that I would find her. And then they came and they took her.’

‘And you’ve never found her?’

She shook her head. ‘I came to work here a decade ago, thinking it might give me some sort of advantage in my search, but it hasn’t worked out that way. The law is the law. Even for
me.’

The room was silent for a few moments. Then Sally said, ‘That sucks.’

Ms Tesco nodded. ‘Yes, it does. I think the worst part, though, was afterward. When I got home, everyone expected me to be okay. My parents, my friends, everyone. They all thought I should
be fine and just step back into my life like nothing happened. They even thought I should be grateful to have a second chance. I wasn’t allowed to talk about it. I tried – I tried
talking to my parents, but they refused to discuss the topic. “That’s all in the past,” they would say. “It never happened.” Except that it did happen. I wanted to
shake them and scream,
It did happen!
I didn’t, though.’

She looked at Finn. ‘So, when you talk about your mother as if you know what she went through – remember, you may not know the whole story.’

‘That’s why I’m looking for more information,’ Finn said. ‘That’s why I’m here, but you’re telling me you can’t give me that sort of
information. Why? Maybe you’re right. Maybe my mother didn’t want to give me up, but that doesn’t seem to fit with what people have told me. From what I’ve learned so far,
she was exactly the kind of person who would willingly give up her child for her own convenience.’

‘Maybe she was,’ Ms Tesco said. ‘But I can tell you from having worked here for the last ten years – from dealing with women searching for their children ten, twenty,
fifty years after giving them up – my story is far more common that you would ever think. I’ve talked to hundreds of women who never recovered from giving up their children. They spent
years in torment. Some were so broken from the experience that they could never let themselves be happy.’