Sunlight on My Shadow (24 page)

While I was living in Colorado, my mom’s health continued to decline. She ended up in a nursing home; Jeff would visit her and take her out for an ice-cream cone. On one trip Mom had probably just taken her narcotic pill for pain relief and was talking nonstop. Jeff turned to her and said, “Mom, I’ll give you a nickel if you can stop talking for five minutes.” Mom said, “You cheapskate, keep your nickel. I’d rather talk.”

By the time Kiona was a toddler, Mom suffered serious complications from the steroids she had taken to relieve her arthritic pain. She lingered in the hospital for several days and died peacefully at Passavant Hospital at the young age of sixty-eight. I was thankful that Jeff and my sister-in-law, Mary Ann, were with her. The nurse told them to go out and get some fresh air; when they got back Mom’s breath was labored. They prayed and held Mom’s hand as she took her last breath.

I regret that, after it was all over, I was never able to talk to Mom about my teen pregnancy. I know she felt responsible because of her illness and absence in the home. I wanted to tell her again that it wasn’t her fault and that I made my own choices. But thirty years ago I wasn’t ready for such conversations, since I was still protecting the secret. I took comfort in the memories I have of caring for her, answering the buzzer at night, and helping her to the bathroom. I was able to give a bit to atone for the problems I had caused her. In the end, she still called me her blessing in disguise, so I believe that she had forgiven me long before I was able to do that for myself.

It was about eight years after Mom’s death and a few winters before Dad died that I went down to visit him in his Florida home.

“The doctor says I have congestive heart failure,” Dad said. “That’s my ace in the hole.” I didn’t know what he meant. His ticket to death? An ace in the hole is a good thing. How could congestive heart failure be good? I took it to mean he was ready to die.

He might have been ready, but I wasn’t. I longed to get closer to Dad and believed that nursing him or caring for him could be a good way to do that. We had never talked about my teenage pregnancy. It stayed as he wished, like it had never happened. I could feel the wall between us. I knew he was disappointed in me, and it was just another example of my not being able to live up to his expectations. It ran like an underground river in our relationship. The unease hurt me. I longed to be close.

If I could just spend some quiet afternoons with him—maybe tuck the covers around him or bring him a drink of water—it would have been comforting to me. I would then be the person giving, and Dad would be admitting his vulnerable side. It could bring us close. I offered several times to come and stay with him, but he wouldn’t have any part of it.

He told me, “Judy, your children should never have to take care of you. It isn’t right. It should be the other way around.”

“But what if your children want to take care of you?” I asked.

“You don’t want to do that. You have your own family. You need to tend to them,” he said.

I was angry at him for not understanding that I was the one who needed and wanted to help him. Dad could give and give, but he was very uncomfortable with receiving. He hated depending on others. Getting closer to Dad was something I needed, but I didn’t quite know how to get there.

Dad used a heavy dose of hard work as his antidepressant. He often said, “When you get down in the dumps, you just get busy working and before you know it, you feel better.”

In his lively years, he spent hours in his tool house by the cabin, cleaning, organizing, or making gadgets out of wood and metal. He cared for his workshop like a baby. Rows of gray cardboard boxes were lined up on his homemade pine shelves, each box numbered with a black Magic Marker. Next to the shelves, tacked to the wall, and protected by a plastic sheath, was an alphabetical list of assorted screws, nails, and hinges, with the box number indexing their location.

As his health began to fail, the muscles in Dad’s legs weakened; he couldn’t stand long enough to complete a workshop project nor could he get in and out of his fishing boat. Dad’s responsibilities at the factory diminished, as my brother John no longer depended on his advice in business matters. By the time Dad was eighty-three, he was often feeling down in the dumps, but he was no longer able to rely on his “get-busy-and-get-to-work” method to help him snap out of it. In his last few years, Dad told me several times, “All my friends are gone. I’m way overdue.” Like death would be a relief. I hated it when he said that.

It was mid-September 1986. Fall comes early to the northwoods of Wisconsin. All the families were settled back in Chicago, their cabins closed after Labor Day. It was an unusual circumstance, because Dad had not made his end-of-season plans to have his car driven to Florida nor to purchase his airline ticket. He had worked with my brother Jeff extensively, getting his affairs in order several years earlier. Dad seemed quiet and reflective when I talked to him on the phone a few days earlier.

My dad’s youngest brother, Uncle Phil, drove the 450-mile trip from Chicago to visit Dad that lonely day in September. The leaves were starting to change and fall off the trees. Most of the lake people had their piers out of the water in preparation for the winter freeze that would soon cover the lake with several feet of ice. Deer-hunting season was right around the corner.

On September 14, 1986, I got a call from my brother Jeff saying that Dad had died in his sleep. He was eighty-three.

As far as Dad was concerned, the secret of our black heritage was buried with him. When his body failed him with weakness and incontinence, I don’t think he could tolerate this loss of control over his own body. As he lived, so he died. It was just like Dad to decide for himself when he was done with it.

When Mom died, I had plenty of warning and knew that her death finally brought her peace from her suffering. I felt like she had led a full life and was ready to go. But when Dad died, I felt ripped off. I wasn’t ready. I was left with a lonely sadness of incompletion. Since his death, I have found ways to commune with him, writing him a letter, doing a role-playing session imagining him talking to me. These days I have peace about his life and death; as an adult, I also have a clearer understanding of his life choices. I love him dearly and Mom, too, and believe they are with me in spirit, guiding me and still loving me as I do them.

In November of 1993, Dave and I went to see a movie that propelled me into further action. It was called
The Joy Luck Club
, based on a book written by Amy Tan. The story opens with a woman carrying twins across the countryside in China. She becomes deathly ill and reasons that it will be bad luck for her twin girls to be found next to a dead mother. So she sets them next to a tree, believing they will be found and cared for and continues on her trek, barely able to walk. She ends up living through it all and moving to San Francisco and birthing another child, June. After the mother dies, June receives a letter from the grown twins in China searching for their mother. June goes overseas to meet them and to tell her half-sisters of their mother’s death. Their faces fall with sadness and grief as the twins realize they will never be able to meet their mother and wish they had written the letter just a few months sooner. It was a tale of longing and sadness. My throat tightened and I sobbed silently as I thought of how happy this mother would have been to meet her thriving, adult children and to know that they had survived.

The movie brought on a sense of urgency. What if something happened to my child before I was ever able to meet her? I left the theater with a resolve to do whatever it took to move ahead in finding Baby Helen. I was forty-three, and Baby Helen was now twenty-six.

I found the phone number of a professional search artist through an ad in
Mothering Magazine
.

I was nervous as I punched the numbers on the desk phone. It was a late autumn day; dried leaves were blowing against the windows and the wind whistled through the cracks. I took a breath. I looked at the phone number and dialed.

I hired Mary Sue that day to find my Baby Helen, who was now a woman; she told me it would take four to six months. Mary Sue’s fee was $600: I would pay half up front and the rest when Helen was found. I asked how she would go about finding her.

Mary Sue told me that they know her down at the county courthouse, because she does a lot of research. She said that once she had the date, place, and exact time of birth, she goes through all the birth certificates of babies born on that day until she finds the time that matches. This is the identifying clue. Then the baby’s given name is available on the certificate.

“Do you have the date and time of birth?” she asked. I was thankful I had the information from my medical records and relayed this to Mary Sue.

I hung up the phone and looked out a nearby window. Light flecks of snow were spinning around the outside corner of the house. Wind whistled through the weather stripping on the glass door. I knew in my gut that I was on the way to finding my child.

Mary Sue had told me that she was only allowed one visit to the courthouse per month and that she was working on several cases. So each month after I hired her, I expected some news. But the waiting trailed on for many months.

It had been twenty-five years since I spoke to Mick; it was uncanny that he would be calling now, just before I would be making contact with our birth daughter.

My heart thumped as I sat down on the bed with phone in hand and leaned against the pillows. Every shred of attraction and excitement from years ago came down on me. I could hardly think. I didn’t know I still cared about him.

He had been thinking of me, he said, was now living in California, happily married with three boys, had his own golf course out back, and his own business as an electrical engineer.

“Geez, it’s good to hear your voice,” Mick said. Was he throwing me a bone? This time I might sniff, but I wouldn’t chomp.

I told Mick that I had just started looking for the child he fathered.

“I always wondered what happened to the baby,” he said. “I kind of thought maybe your sister raised it or something.”

Mick told me that he wanted to help out, to ease his guilt.

“Why do you feel guilty?” I asked Mick.

“I guess because of how it went down … not cool, on my part. I told my kids about this and they think I’m a real jerk,” he said.

I told Mick that if he wanted to, he could pay half of the searching fee. My brother Jim had offered to pay for the other half.

“Sure, I’d love to do that,” Mick said. “I’m doing well financially, so it’ll be no trouble.”

He was doing well financially? My heart sank. I remembered the days when Dave and I lived in the cabin and had to collect coins in a jar to buy milk, the single-wide trailer in Utah, scraping together money for rent when the snow flew and we couldn’t teach hang-gliding lessons.

His voice still had that dry wit about it and he still had that contagious laugh. But then I stuffed the fireworks in my gut. It felt disloyal to my husband to linger, even though by now Dave and I were on shaky marital ground.

“I better hang up now, Mick. Do keep in touch. I’ll let you know if I hear anything about the search,” I said.

I set the phone in its cradle, still pumped with adrenaline. I was shy about showing the silly grin that was plastered to my face.

Dave was in the basement watching TV, so I lit down the stairs to tell him the news.

“That was Mick Romano,” I said.

“I know,” Dave said as he clicked the remote.

“Are you jealous?”

“No. I don’t get jealous.”

“Even if I talk to an old boyfriend?” I said.

“No, it doesn’t bother me.”

Dave was nonchalant and uninterested in the conversation, still staring at the TV.

“He just called me out of the clear blue sky,” I said. “I couldn’t believe it.”

“Why’d he call?” Dave asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “He just said he’d been thinking about me. It’s so weird that I just started looking for my birth daughter and he called. He said he’d help pay for it.”

“That’s nice,” Dave said and flipped the channel.

I skipped back upstairs to go to bed. Dave had been sleeping in the downstairs bedroom for several years, since he tossed and turned all night and neither of us got much sleep. I fell asleep alone, with sugarplums of Mick dancing in my head.

Why did Mick call me now, after twenty-five years, and right after I started searching for Helen? It was a bit eerie.

I remembered when I was in my first year of college at SIU. I was living in a high-rise dorm when an earthquake rumbled through. As I watched the pictures on the wall rattle and heard the clatter of perfume bottles dancing on my dresser, a shot of panic went through me. But within minutes, the tremors settled down and the phone rang.

“Hi, Judy. Is everything okay? I just had a feeling I should call.”

It was my mom. How did she know? Mom’s caring love and concern could travel like light.

Mom came to me in spirit during another incident when I needed her. In 1977, Dave was out hang gliding at the Widow Maker Ridge in Utah when he tumbled end over end in the rotor behind the ridge, breaking his back. I was at home when this happened: at that same moment I had an intense feeling that my mother was present. I felt her love wash over me.

About a half hour later, I got the news of Dave’s accident. He mended well and suffered no permanent damage except for lingering aches and pains. This incident caused me to suspect that we live on in spirit after our body has been covered in dirt.

So I took Mick’s call as another omen that the time was right to find my child. Remembering the story of
The Joy Luck Club
, I had a renewed sense of urgency, and hoped something happened before it was too late. I wondered if this anxious feeling was some kind of motherly instinct like my mom had when she called me after the earthquake.

Four months had passed since I hired Mary Sue. I waited day by day for news. Finally, along about February, we came home from a ski trip in Colorado and the answering machine was blinking. Mary Sue said that she was getting close to wrapping up the investigation, but first—did I want to be on a TV show and have the reunion filmed live in Chicago?

Wrapping it up? Did that mean she had found Helen? I assumed that meant I would hear something soon, but another month passed with no news. I had agreed to appear on the TV show, but since then I had heard nothing. I had the sick feeling that I would be waiting until the talk-show host had an opening or until all the logistics were worked out, so I told Mary Sue that I didn’t want to do the show after all. I just wanted to get my information as soon as possible. More weeks passed.

At long last, I received a call from Mary Sue with news.

“I have the contact information for your birth child,” she said. “I’ll give you the name when I receive the balance owed.”

“Do you know anything about her that you can tell me now?” I said.

“She has green eyes, brown hair, and is five feet, five inches tall,” said Mary Sue. “I still have to contact the Department of Motor Vehicles to get a current address.”

I wired the money to her. Days crept by one after the other while I waited for the final call.

One night that week I had this dream:

I am lying in a blow-up raft and floating at sea. The waves are lapping at the sides. I bounce up and down, afraid to be drifting so far from land. An offshore wind pushes me out in the dark, until the shoreline is gone. Then I hear a baby softly crying in the blackness, somewhere to the right of my raft. I know it was my baby. My lost baby. Then the whimper gets louder, and I reach out to grab her. It seems like I can almost touch the baby, the sound is so close, but I can’t see in the blackness. The wind is soft but chilly. I needed to get the baby so I could keep her warm. Then the crying stops.

I hear it again, to my left. The cries are softer and sound like they are farther away. I paddle with my hands to move the raft toward the cries. Then I look up and see someone in a lighthouse. I call out, “Please shine the light. Over here, over here.” The lighthouse man walks up a spiral staircase. I think he hears me and is going upstairs to turn on the searchlight. I can still hear the whimpering, faint in the distance. I paddle great dips of water with my bare arms, moving my raft in the direction of the cry. “Please turn on the light,” I yell again. Then the man descends the stairs. The wind starts to pick up and the sound of the child vanishes. I hear the waves lapping against my raft.

The man gazes out over the open sea. Wind and spray batter my raft and my body. I hear no further cries. I sob for the loss of the child who was within my grasp. She slipped away. I lay my head down on the raft and let the waves take me farther into the blackness. I am broken with hopeless despair.

Finally the call came with the treasured information.

“Now, Judy,” Mary Sue said. “I have your information, but you have to be very careful about contacting her. You can’t just barge into her life. She doesn’t know you. She might not even want to hear from you.”

I swallowed her words like a fish bone. I knew all this. She named my vulnerability. I wasn’t a dummy.

“You can’t just call her up. One lady who I helped did that; her approach was all wrong and the kid hung up on her and would never talk to her again. She has her life, you know, and she might not want you in it.”

“I understand that,” I said. “I will put a lot of thought into how I contact her.”

“So, do you have my birth daughter’s name and information?” I pushed. I’d had enough of the lecturing, enough of the waiting. Finally, the words spilled out of her mouth. I repeated the spelling and wrote it all down.

I hung up the phone and sat in stunned silence until my heartbeat returned to a normal clip. A sense of calm came over me. I was elated to be done with Mary Sue, the phone calls, and the waiting. I looked down at the paper. There it was in black and white: the information I needed to make contact. Her name was Karen. I ran my hand over the precious words. A shot of electricity pulsed in my veins. I finally had it. Twenty-six years after her birth, I could turn the corner. Perhaps all my questions would be answered very soon.