What Was Mine (24 page)

W
hen I turned the corner that day, after hearing the news, I saw TV trucks on our road. So I knew it was true, that Lucy was who they were talking about.

As soon as my tires crunched onto our driveway, truck doors opened and reporters spilled out. They rushed my van, which terrified me. Hands and cameras were everywhere suddenly and I was glad it was winter and my windows were up. I gunned the engine up the hill. I used the remote to open the garage, and how relieved I was when it went down behind me. Doug was already home. He'd had to pass through the same gauntlet. We called the boys. Both of them live in towns nearby. They were still at their jobs—Sam sells insurance and Jake teaches at a high school. They hadn't heard the news and no one had come to bother them yet.

Doug and I thought if we stayed inside, behind closed doors and blinds, the reporters would get discouraged and go away. But they didn't. They stayed and stayed. Finally, that night, we opened our front door, and gave in to a few questions, thinking that would get rid of them. But the next day, we realized our mistake. The newspapers twisted our words in the statement, making it sound like I knew all along.

Lucy didn't call us until she was already in China.

“Is it true?” I asked her, and she said that it was. “How could you?”
I shouted, and she said it was “complicated.” That is so like her. Making what's straightforward appear to be complicated. Taking black and white and pretending it's gray.

What Lucy didn't think about is how doing what she did doesn't just affect her and Mia. It affects all of us. The paper isn't the
Emmettsville Echo
anymore. It merged with the county journal that now goes to every town in the district. We don't have a friend at the paper anymore, so Lucy's story was headline news.

Doug is on the school board and said no one mentioned a thing at the meeting, but also, no one wanted to sit next to him. Now Jake says his fiancée's parents are worried about her marrying into a family with criminal genes; he says the wedding is still on, but I wonder. I know the influence mothers have on their daughters. My own mother worried that Doug came from the wrong parish. We go late to church now so we don't have to talk to anyone.

I've spent my life trying to do the right thing: to be there for family, to be a good citizen. I never wanted a big life like Lucy did. I never wanted to stick out. And now she's made me famous all over town: a kidnapper's sister.

I know people assume I covered for her. Old friends from school knew I used to do that. Her teenage antics were harmless by today's standards, but I kept them secret from our mother, my stomach always clenched worrying she'd get hurt or do irreversible harm. But I didn't tell on her because we were sisters and sisters stuck together. That's how we were then.

Maybe I should have suspected something. But I only saw Lucy for holidays. Thanksgiving, Christmas. Those were busy days, my getting the house, the meals ready. There wasn't time for long, sisterly chats when I might have sensed something was wrong, or she might have divulged her secret to me.

I am grateful she didn't tell me her secret. If I'd known, I would have been sick with having to keep it inside. I wouldn't have told, but I wouldn't
have been able to live with it either. It's one thing to protect a relative who's done, say, a murder. Your telling won't bring the dead person back. But here, she had someone else's baby. The baby's poor parents waking up day after day, never knowing what happened to her. How could I have remained a silent party to that?

Of course, the one who's hurt most in all this is Mia. Poor Mia. I've tried to call her, but she doesn't answer her phone. Sam says she's taken down her Facebook page. Who can blame that poor girl.

I wrote her a real letter, addressing it to where her family lives in San Mateo. (Her family!) I told her how sorry I was to find out what happened. I wanted to let her know that we haven't abandoned her. We're still her aunt Cheryl and uncle Doug. Our door is always open to her.

W
e spent this weekend, just Marilyn and me, on a Forgiveness Retreat. It's a place where you go to get rid of your anger so it doesn't eat into you and cause cancer.

I hope that the person I hate most of all in the world stays in China forever. I cannot believe Marilyn can forgive her for what she did, but Marilyn says she's had decades of experience learning how to do it. She doesn't expect me to learn in one weekend.

The retreat was weird but actually helpful. It took place deep in beautiful woods. There were about twenty of us. I wasn't the youngest. There were a few teenagers, girls and boys, and I wondered what terrible thing had happened to them.

The first thing we did was pick out our drums. There were lots to choose from: big ones, little ones, leather-topped, plastic. The retreat leader, Meribelle, made Marilyn and me sit across from each other, twenty-one feet apart, the number of years we were separated. With wooden sticks, we hit the drums hard, pounding out messages to Lucy, all the things she deserved to hear. We didn't speak words, but the drums said it for us, as we hit at the skin of them, over and over.

Liar! Thief! You. Never. Were. My. Fucking. Mother. You were my captor! You ruined my life!

After that, we sat in a circle and Meribelle passed around pen and paper and told us to write down blessings for our object person.
Lucy is my object person. I couldn't write anything. I walked into the woods and threw up instead. It was like I was emptying myself of the bad secret of those years, getting Lucy out of my life. Marilyn got up and came to me and held my hair back. She gave me a little packet of tissues. The tissues smelled like roses.

When we came back to the circle, Meribelle said all experiences must be treated as valuable. She asked me to say a good thing that had come from my bad experience. I couldn't think of one. Obviously, the retreat wasn't working for me.

But Marilyn hugged me and said she had one to offer. She told the group that if I hadn't been taken, I wouldn't be who I was and she loved me just the way I am. That made me cry. I guessed that's how a true mother feels. Lucy was never satisfied with the way I was, she was always trying to improve me. Dancing lessons, riding lessons, tutors, piano. I was never good enough for her, she was always concentrating on my outward manifestations. Lucy was all about outward manifestations.

A
reunification specialist helped me see that just as I once accompanied Mia through the natural process of birth, now my job is to midwife her spirit, assisting at the birth of the new person she is becoming. I spent twenty-one years trying to find my daughter. Now I need to help my daughter find herself.

Mia's anger is fresh, like a fresh wound. The sooner it is attended to, the sooner it will heal. I don't want her to have to deal with anger years old, like mine. We are practicing Unmasking Yoga together—a healer comes to the house and helps us process our anger, helps us turn the heat into light.

We keep anger journals—all of us, the whole family. I want to include the other children in this process. I worry that my intense work with Mia might make them feel neglected. But if one of your children is on fire, you run to that child to put out the flames.

O
ur family was fine until she came along. Now we're all so pissed off, we have to keep journals about it. I don't think Mom knows who I am anymore, even though she still sometimes brushes my back to help me process things better, saying, “I love you, I love you.” Last night she was sitting on my bed, doing the brushing thing and I looked up and saw Mia in the doorway, eating out of a bag of Goldfish, which Mom never allowed in the house until she showed up. She's like an exchange student, allowed to do anything. I knew Mom would get up right away and go to her, and she did. Mia doesn't ever come into our room. She told Chloe it smells.

I
woke up last night, knowing something was wrong. The sheets were damp. One minute, I was burning; the next, shaking with chills. I assumed it was food poisoning, that perhaps I'd gotten it from a mango I'd bought on the street, which I stupidly hadn't washed before peeling. My head started to pound and I couldn't stop coughing. I've been coughing a lot since I came here. The pollution, I thought. But these coughs were worse. I popped some Advils I had brought from home, but they didn't help. I was suddenly thirsty. I longed for seltzer. Why is there no seltzer in China?

By dawn, I was convinced I'd acquired something awful. SARS? Bird flu? I imagined dying alone in that little room. The last thing I'd see would be a pink chair covered with white antimacassars and a door hanger warning guests not to smoke or do other disgusting behaviors in bed.

When it was finally morning, Ada rang me from the lobby and I told the desk to send her away. The room was now freezing. It was March, one of the coldest on record. The way the wall heater worked, it started ticking down the hour as soon as you put in the coins. I'd run out of the right coins. I drifted all day in and out of sleep and the next morning I lay beneath all of the clothes that I'd brought, and the hotel's thin towels, piled on top of me for warmth, but still, I was shivering. I didn't send Ada away again. I asked her to come up. The
look on her face told me I was as bad off as I felt. Ada was scared, and I realized that underneath her sophisticated looks, she was just a kid. She couldn't help me. I gave her Wendy's number and asked her to call. I hadn't wanted to impose upon Wendy. What would I say? But fear made me do it. I needed her help. I needed a doctor.

Within the hour, Wendy and her husband were at my bedside, no questions asked. I wept with relief to see her familiar face, to feel the coolness of her hand on my face. The hospital they took me to was clean and efficient. I was nervous about trusting doctors I didn't understand, but I was reassured by Wendy's obvious faith in the kind, open-faced people wearing pristine white coats and jaunty white sailor's caps. Wendy stayed with me while the doctor examined me, staring at my tongue, which he coaxed farther than it's ever been from my mouth, probing my neck, pressing the cold eye of a stethoscope against my sweaty back. I was surprised to be comforted by the familiarity of that.

I couldn't understand a word he said and it took a long time for Wendy, flipping pages in her portable red vinyl-bound dictionary to find the right words to translate his diagnosis to me. It's the same little book she used to carry around when Mia was little. Now she needs reading glasses to make out its type.

She said something I couldn't understand and I looked to see where on the page she was pointing.

Pneumonia. My great-aunt had died of it. But that was in Scotland, before antibiotics.

Still, I was scared.

H
ow could I have managed without Wendy. She took me home with her after I left the hospital, telling me that her husband and son insisted I recuperate there. Their kindness is especially generous since their home isn't big, just four narrow rooms in a quaint old home on a cobblestone alley. Like my sister, Wendy lives in the same house she grew up in. Her parents are gone. Her mother passed away two years ago in the room I'm in now, which is Wendy's son's room. Lin professes not to mind sleeping on the sofa. He is thirty-six and waiting for a housing assignment, which he must receive before he can move out of his parents' house. The assignments go first to “marrieds.” He says he will probably be waiting a long time.

Wendy is healing me with soups and teas and a soft rice dish she used to make when Mia was sick,
xi fan.
Mia used to beg for this, even when she was well, and now I know why. It is a rich, delicious concoction, like rice pudding.

I have no idea what medicine I am taking. Three times a day, I swallow a spoonful of sweet sticky dark medicine poured from a bottle labeled with what looks like grapes. Wendy says they are loquats. I also take pills. They are pink and shiny and enormous as horse pills. Whatever they are, they seem to be working. There was no charge for medicine, or for the treatment. I'm not sure whether this is because Wendy arranged it, or because socialized medicine is
free to everyone, even foreigners. Wendy says being a doctor in China is a service job, like being a teacher.

I am writing this at Lin's computer, wearing—at Wendy's insistence—white gloves, so I don't pass on my germs, though the doctor says my contagion is over.

Lin's computer gets Internet. He's rigged it with something called VPN, which is a way to jump over the Great Firewall of China. I don't have e-mail anymore. The company must have suspended my account. I should have listened to the kids in the office who warned me to keep a personal account. I used to have AOL but closed the account after I unknowingly sent porn to everyone on my address list.

I'm surprised how much I miss the office. I used to look forward to escaping from it, not only vacations with Mia, but little getaways I'd give myself to preserve my sanity. Sometimes I'd leave for lunch early and take in a movie. If an end-of-day meeting was canceled, I'd surprise Wendy and take Mia to the park, and how privileged I felt to be with her then, getting to see my daughter as I rarely did, bathed in the caramel light of a late afternoon.

But now I'd give anything for office camaraderie, mindless chatter about weather or even awkward elevator silence. Of course, my desire for that is nothing compared to my longing for the company of Mia. The pain of missing her never goes away, like a bruise I keep touching to see if it still hurts.

I
n Wendy's home, I try to make myself as unobtrusive as possible.