The Man She Left Behind (9 page)

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Authors: Janice Carter

BOOK: The Man She Left Behind
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As she lowered the suitcase lid, Leigh noticed a slight bulge in its interior pocket. She stuck her hand in, pulling out a rectangle of tissue paper and found inside the faded remnant of a powder blue baby blanket.
I don’t believe it,
she thought.
I haven’t seen this in
years. Leigh fingered the worn flannel fabric, vividly recalling every detail of the mystery of its disappearance. The blanket had traveled everywhere with her until she was about to start school. The family of ducks printed on it had almost been obliterated by time, washing-machine cycles and Leigh’s sweaty clutching right up to the day of its sudden loss—coincidentally, a week before she first began school.
Years later she and Jen had once compared babyhood stories, and Leigh had confessed to owning a security blanket. Jen had suggested searching the house for the blanket, insisting Leigh’s birth mother might have sent it along with her from the hospital. When Leigh had mentioned the idea to her parents, they admitted hiding the blanket prior to her starting school. They also confirmed that Leigh had arrived wrapped in the blanket, which was the reason they’d saved the remaining piece. From that moment on, the powder blue duck blanket had an almost mythical aura to Leigh.
And here it is.
Leigh raised the blanket to her face, returning herself to her childhood for a long moment before tucking it back inside the suitcase on top of the baby outfit. It occurred to her she might also have come to the Randalls wearing the white knitted sweater-and-bonnet set.
And if that was the case, perhaps her birth mother had bought or even knitted the outfit. Leigh hesitated, tempted to take the outfit out from its wrapping again. Not today. She began to close the lid when she realized there was something else inside the pocket flap. Pulling the flap out, she saw a brown business envelope at the bottom of the pocket. It was addressed to her parents and had as a return address an official-looking stamp that read Bennington Adoption Agency Inc., Raleigh, North Carolina.
Leigh pulled a typed letter from the envelope. She noted the date—April 14, 1980—and began to read. After the introductory sentence, the words seemed to move around on the paper. Beads of sweat dripped from Leigh’s forehead. She frowned, trying to take in what her eyes were reading but her brain was refusing to register. She wiped her face with the corner of her T-shirt and climbed onto the bed.
Okay, relax Let’s have a look at this again where the light is better.
Leigh propped up the feather pillows behind her back. Sunlight filtered through the filmy curtains. No need for electricity, but she switched on the lamp at her mother’s side of the bed, anyway. She didn’t want to misread a single word. Then she unfolded the letter again.
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Randall,
The Bennington Agency has recently received an inquiry from the birth mother of your adopted daughter, Leigh. The birth mother is interested in establishing a correspondence with you and her daughter that might possibly, in the future, lead to a meeting.
As you are aware, in spite of the state laws around adoption disclosure, we at the Bennington Agency stand by our pledge to honor confidentiality and privacy of all concerned parties. Hence we will not reveal your address to the birth mother unless you specifically request us to do so. We have reminded the birth mother of the contract she signed at adoption time and she has agreed to abide by your decision on behalf of Leigh.
Should you wish to discuss this issue further with us prior to arriving at a decision, please feel free to contact one of our social workers. Thank you....
Leigh skimmed over the closing paragraph and read the letter a third time. Then she fell back against the pillows, letting the piece of paper flutter to the bedspread. Through the opened window she could hear the roll of waves and distant cries of seabirds. She stared vacantly at the wall opposite the bed where her eyes projected still shots of the letter. Then she rose from the bed like a sleepwalker and went to the window.
The eastern view from the house was one Leigh had looked upon most of her growing-up years. The village and Silver Lake Harbor stretched to the south, while the band of the highway separating the sandy yard of tufted sea grasses from the surf telescoped north, up the island and beyond. The usual view, she thought. Yet nothing seemed usual at all. Colors shrieked and sounds were muted. Leigh ran her tongue over her lips. Her mouth was coated with a dry metallic film.
Every nerve and muscle in her body clamored for action, but her mind was frozen. She wanted her mother, her father. She wanted answers to the questions booming in her head.
Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you keep this letter from me? Why? Why?
She, wanted a drink. She fumbled her way downstairs and into the kitchen, finding the refrigerator, cold beer and the kitchen screen door all on automatic pilot. Frosty can in hand, Leigh managed to cross the road to the beach without making physical contact with any object or person and sank onto the first grassy knoll she reached. Then she drank a third of the can in one go and paused to catch her breath, rolling the can across her hot forehead.
The surf broke and crashed before her, its monotonous consistency somehow reassuring. The ocean breeze carried with it the tangy stench of dried eel grass and, somewhere on the beach, a rotting fish. Leigh’s heart slowed. She finished the beer, savoring its yeasty coolness, and slowly let the outside world in.
The questions that had been pounding inside seconds ago ebbed to a faint beat. Leigh shook her head. If only there was someone who knew the answers. Her parents had always been so candid and open about the circumstances of her adoption. The letter had arrived in the spring of 1980.
I’d have been fourteen, turning fifteen that July.
Old enough to make a decision about contacting her birth mother. She remembered a conversation with Jen after watching a talk-show reunion of birth parents and their adopted children.
Aren’t you even curious?
Jen had asked. But Leigh had never had the questions that haunted other adoptees. Pete and Ellen Randall had been her parents in every sense of the word and her life a secure and peaceful passage.
Until graduation night, anyway.
The thought made her release the handful of sand she’d been trickling through her fingers and reach for the empty beer can. She stood up and turned around to face the house across the road. For seventeen years the frame house perched on wooden pilings had been a haven of love and tranquillity. A safe place in a world of unsafe places. Memories oozed between its weathered slats. She knew she could summon an event, a moment or even a laugh or tear for every inch of every room.
Leigh brushed the sand from the back of her shorts and crossed the road. From the end of her drive she spotted a cyclist weaving up the slight incline from the village. She squinted, sensing a familiarity about the person. Grandpa Sam!
The bicycle, two full shopping bags in its carrier, wobbled to a stop a few feet away from her, as if Sam had expended all his energy just cresting the small rise from the village. Leigh walked over to him.
“I can’t believe you’re out riding a bicycle in the hottest part of the day. Sam Logan, have your senses left you, as my mother used to say?”
Sam’s red face bobbed up and down. He crossed his arms over the handlebars and leaned into them, gasping for air.
“Stay there,” Leigh ordered. “I’m getting my car keys to drive you the rest of the way.”
Sam held up a palm. “No...wait...minute...”
Leigh hesitated. He didn’t look well. His flushed face was now edged in a chalky pallor.
“Water. Tha’s all I need,” he finally managed.
Leigh jogged up the drive and into the house. Seconds later she was back, carrying a plastic tumbler of water and her car keys. She handed Sam the water without a word, then urged him off the bicycle and wheeled it up the drive to her car. She stowed the bike in her trunk, along with the bags, noting how heavy they were and realizing what effort they must have cost him in his ride up from the village, especially in the heat. Her thought was confirmed when she saw how unsteady his gait was as he made his way to the car.
Once they were in the car, with the air-conditioning blasting, Leigh said, “Don’t tell me you always shop that way. Can’t Spencer drive you into town?”
“He usually does, Leigh, but he’s been so busy lately I didn’t have the heart to ask. Today he was taking out an important client. Spence needs the money, you know. It’s a long winter ahead of us.”
Too true, Leigh thought, recalling the erratic seasonal flow of cash into the Randall home when Pete was still a commercial fisherman. “Sam—” she turned toward the old man, softening her voice “—you know, I’m sure you could afford the taxi ride back and forth.”
His brow knotted slightly, then eased into an expression of resignation. “To be sure I can, but there’s no telephone handy. And I won’t have one at my age,” he insisted.
Leigh shook her head, frustrated. “But even one way, Sam. The hardest part’s the ride home.”
Sam pressed his lips together and nodded. “Yes, yes, I know. It’s difficult to explain. I guess I’m a foolish stubborn old coot. No, don’t argue. I know my faults as well as anyone. The good Lord gave me eyes to see and I use them on myself quite a lot—especially now in my old age. Amazing how clear things become the older you get. Ah, well—” he shook his head and gave a tired smile “—that’s life for you. Always got one more trick up its sleeve just when you think you’ve figured it all out.”
Leigh pulled the car onto the shoulder at the sandy path leading to Sam’s. She knew better than to tackle the path in her car, having once marooned her father’s Buick in the soft sand.
“Here, let me get your bike and groceries out of the trunk first.” Leigh swung open her door and jumped out. Once she’d leaned the bike against Sam’s signpost with its dangling salt-sprayed board that read simply Logan, she retrieved the groceries and carried them down the path to Sam’s cottage.
“I can take those,” Sam protested, but his exit from the car was slow, and by the time he reached his porch Leigh had deposited the bags inside on the living room table that served as eating place, library and worktable. Sam’s housekeeping skills, never laudable, had deteriorated.
From the dirty cups and dishes lying about, scattered newspapers and bits and pieces of tools, Leigh figured that Sam had been living alone too long. When he pushed open the screen door, he gave a halfhearted gesture with his free hand.
“Don’t do much entertainin’ these days,” he said, breaking into a wheezing cackle that ended in a coughing fit. Leigh led him to a chair and got a glass of water from the kitchen.
While he sipped the water, she surveyed the room again, noticing the array of photographs mounted on the walls. They began in one section of wall near his bookshelf, with dog-eared black-and-white photos of Sam and his longdeceased wife—young parents each with a child in arms. Then an assortment of Sam and his fishing buddies standing in front of all the various boats Sam had piloted in Pamlico Sound and the Atlantic. There were familiar faces, but none Leigh could fix a name to.
She paused in front of one photograph—a young Sam with his arm around another man, both holding pipes and wearing squall gear. Nets hung heavy with fish behind them on the bow of a boat—the
Heron,
Leigh could just make out. Pride from a day’s fishing glowed in their faces.
“This one here—the other guy looks like my grandfather.”
“Why, sure it is! Your Pa’s daddy and I were good friends. Mind, he was older’n me, but we fished together a good ten years before his arthritis got to him.”
Leigh peered more closely. The resemblance between her father and grandfather was strong. She wondered if her grandparents on her mother’s side looked like Ellen. That set of grandparents had died when Leigh was still an infant, and she’d only seen a few photographs. Pete Randall’s parents—native Ocracokers—had passed away when Leigh was in elementary school, but she could still summon memories of them. When she was home, she’d go through her own family photos more diligently.
She inched along the wall, examining photographs of Jen’s parents. They were an eccentric couple for Ocracoke, she thought, even in the late 1960s. With their bell-bottom jeans, Nehru shirts and love beads they looked as though they’d been airlifted directly from Haight-Ashbury. Leigh remembered Jen’s whispered story during one sleepover.
Her mother had run away from the boring life on Ocracoke and traveled across the country. She’d met Jen’s father and had a whirlwind courtship, resulting in Jen and a sudden return to Ocracoke when funds ran out. Jen always said her father had tried to make a go of the local life, but his romantic soul had trouble adapting to a fishing village. Then, two short years after Jen’s birth, both parents had been lost at sea in an unexpected storm.
When she reached a big section of photographs of Jen growing up, Leigh stopped. Sam Logan’s love for his granddaughter came through in every shot. It was ironic, Leigh thought, that the tragedy that took a daughter from him also gave him Jen. For she doubted that Jen’s parents, had they lived, would have spent the rest of their lives in Ocracoke.
The collection of snapshots of Jen and Leigh were familiar. She and Jen had framed or stuck most of them on the wall themselves, tacking masking tape behind each one and arranging them artistically on the painted barn board. Leigh’s eyes flicked past them, settling on a bunch at the door she’d never seen before. Snaps of Jen and Spencer just after they’d eloped, judging by their clothes. They must have asked someone to photograph them, and there they were, posing awkwardly in front of Spencer’s father’s truck outside a motel.

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