Year of the Monsoon (5 page)

By Sunday afternoon, all the arrangements were made. Nan was lying on the couch reading while Leisa flipped through television channels from the recliner with Bronwyn snoring next to her. Leisa finally settled on a football playoff game. She turned the volume down and said, “I think I’m going to go to work tomorrow.”

Nan slowly lowered her book. “Why?”

Leisa stared at the television. “I feel like I’d rather keep busy. I don’t know what I’d do, just waiting for Friday to get here for the funeral.”

“I took the week off to be with you,” Nan reminded her.

“I can’t remember the last time you took a week off,” Leisa said.

Nan sat up, swinging her feet to the floor. “We could go somewhere for a few days if you’d like.”

Leisa looked over at her. “I don’t feel like going anywhere, and I don’t want to be away if Jo needs anything. I just need to stay busy,” she repeated. “It might be a good time to catch up on all the old files you never have time for,” she suggested as Nan stood.

“Or it might be a good time for you to deal with your feelings,” Nan said pointedly as she started to leave.

“Are you angry?”

Nan stopped, her head bowed as she said over her shoulder, “No, I am not angry. I just think it’s a strange time for you to be at work. And I bet Maddie will think so, too.”

“Where are you going?” Leisa asked as Nan headed down the hall.

“To re-schedule some of the people I canceled.”

In the office, Nan punched her computer keys with angry jabs, despite what she’d just told Leisa, as she entered her password to check her e-mail. Ten new messages. Clicking her way through them, she stopped abruptly at the sixth message. There it was again.

“Leave me alone,” she whispered through clenched teeth as she hit the delete button.

Chapter 4

MARIELA SAT IN THE
playroom, cutting shapes out of construction paper. She was singing to herself, using a glue stick to fasten the colorful bits of paper to the aluminum paint can. Leisa sat down next to her.

“That’s really pretty,” she said, brushing a loose strand of black hair off Mariela’s forehead.

“They’re flowers for my mama,” Mariela said. As Maddie had predicted, Mariela had slowly begun interacting with people, occasionally playing with the other children, but still often preferring to be by herself. The paint can was always with her.

“That’s a very nice thing to do.”

Leisa looked up and saw Maddie watching from the far side of the room. Leisa went over to her.

“Should we do something?” she asked.

Maddie considered for a moment before she answered, “Not yet. This is probably the most normal relationship she’s ever had with her mother.”

They stood side by side watching Mariela continue decorating the can of ashes.

“Have you ever felt like you wanted to take anyone home?” Leisa asked tentatively. “For real, to adopt?”

Maddie looked down at Leisa. “Are you saying you feel that way about Mariela?”

Leisa shrugged. “I’ve never felt this way about any of the others. There’s just something about her that –” Her throat was suddenly too tight to finish.

Maddie put an arm around Leisa’s shoulders. “Come to my office.”

Wishing she had kept her mouth shut, Leisa accompanied Maddie downstairs. Maddie closed the door of her office and sat behind her desk as Leisa took the other chair.

“How long have you been thinking about this?” Maddie asked.

Leisa plucked a loose thread off her jeans and twisted it between her fingers. “Actually, she’s been on my mind pretty constantly since the night I was called out to get her.”

“Leisa,” Maddie said gently, “it’s only been a couple of weeks…”

“I know that,” Leisa said defensively. “I didn’t say I was ready to do it.”

“Have you talked to Nan about this?”

Leisa exhaled in exasperation. “I can’t talk to Nan about anything lately.”

“What’s going on?”

“I don’t know. I guess she’s still angry that I came to work the week of the funeral.”

Maddie frowned. “It’s not like Nan to stay angry. Do you intend to talk to her about Mariela?”

“Would you like to have children? Someday?” Leisa had asked Nan once as they were getting to know one another.

Leisa had always envied her friends who came from large families. Thanksgiving and Christmas had always felt as if something was missing with only her parents and Aunt Jo and Uncle Bruce. Her favorite television show growing up was old re-runs of
The Waltons
. She had no desire to get pregnant, but had always hoped she would meet someone who would be open to adopting two or three children. “Not just one,” she insisted. “One is lonely.”

“No. Absolutely not,” had been Nan’s unexpected reply.

Leisa was caught off-guard by the finality of Nan’s response. Nan, who never saw anything in black and white, who always took the trouble to try and see every issue from the other person’s side, was adamant about this.

Puzzled, Leisa asked, “Why not? Don’t you like children?”

Nan’s expression had hardened perceptibly. “No, I don’t.”

Leisa swallowed her disappointment. She knew she was already beginning to fall in love with Nan, but to give up her dream of a family….

Over the years, any hopes Leisa had that Nan might change her mind were dashed when friends began having children. Nan never held the babies or played with the toddlers. She often excused herself from get-togethers where she knew children would be present. Leisa had had to accept that Nan really didn’t like being around children.

“Do you intend to talk to her about Mariela?”

Leisa shook her head. “Not now. It’s not the right time.”

She couldn’t help noticing that Maddie looked relieved. She knew Maddie most likely thought this impulse to take Mariela home was a reaction to Rose’s death. And if Leisa were absolutely honest with herself, “there is a grain of truth in that” she would have had to admit.

Home was a very lonely place lately, but Leisa couldn’t talk to Maddie about what was going on. She missed her mom so much it hurt. There was a constant emptiness inside, compounded by a sense of guilt that she had told no one about. That day in the car, when she had thought about calling her mother, but hadn’t. “Why?” she kept asking herself. “Why didn’t you call?” She knew the question didn’t really make sense – “how could you have known?” argued a more logical side of herself – but she wished with all her heart she could re-do that day. Nan asked often how she was doing, and held her when she found her crying. But as warm and solicitous as Nan was in regard to Leisa’s grief, there was a distance in her recently that Leisa couldn’t bridge. “It’s nothing,” she said whenever Leisa found her, brooding and taciturn, staring into space. As empty as the world felt without her mother in it, it seemed even emptier with Nan so far away.

Leisa and Nan climbed into the Mini and drove to Rose’s house, passing beautifully-kept Craftsman, Tudor and Colonial style houses. The early February sky was flat and gray, looking as if it might snow again. Leisa pulled into the driveway and sat there, her hands tightly gripping the wheel.

“Are you sure you’re ready to tackle this?” Nan asked, reaching over to Leisa’s shoulder.

Leisa hadn’t been inside the house since Rose’s death. Jo Ann and Bruce were the ones who had come over to pick out clothes for Rose to be buried in; Leisa hadn’t been ready then.

“Gotta start sometime,” Leisa answered.

Jo Ann pulled in behind them, and they entered the house together. “Where to start?” Jo asked, depositing a bag of groceries in the kitchen.

“Would you two be willing to start in the bedroom? I’ll start in the office,” Leisa suggested.

The third bedroom upstairs had been turned into Daniel’s office, and Rose had continued to use it for that purpose. Leisa paused on her way down the hall, looking in on her old bedroom, still decorated with old movie posters from
Grease
and
Star Wars
. With Jo and Bruce being the only remaining family, no one had stayed here, even as a weekend guest, since Leisa had moved out. Rose had left it exactly as it had been. Leisa swallowed the painful lump in her throat and moved on down the hall to the office.

She switched on the desk lamp and sat in the old-fashioned wooden desk chair, swiveling around to look at the photos scattered about on walls and bookshelves. Turning back to the desk, she sighed. She wasn’t really sure what to look for.

She pulled open the desk’s deep file drawer and began leafing through the files there. She’d had the utilities switched to her name and had been paying the bills that had arrived over the past few weeks, so those files were familiar. She found financial statements for IRAs and other investments – presumably Rose and Daniel’s nest egg to carry them through retirement. She had to blink back tears at the realization that neither of her parents had lived long enough to see the benefits of all their planning and saving. There was a file filled with medical and prescription receipts ready for the accountant for last year’s tax return, another with receipts for the new gutters and roof that had been installed on the house. There were files with two life insurance policies – one had been Daniel’s.

At the back of the drawer was a file marked “Will” and behind that another file which had no label. Leisa pulled these out and laid them on the desk. The will was pretty straightforward – Bruce’s partner had drafted it, and Bruce had already told Leisa that she inherited everything except for a couple of bequests to charities that Daniel and Rose had supported. She flipped open the last folder and stopped short – her hand hovering in mid-air.

She was staring at her adoption certificate.

Of course there would be paperwork with any adoption. She knew that. She dealt with this stuff all the time. Why had her parents never shown this to her before? Why had she never asked? She turned to the next page in the file. It was a birth certificate, but not hers. Or was it? She scrutinized it. It had been issued in New York State. The birthdate and gender were correct, but the name was not. In the space for the name was typed Margaret Marie. Just a first and middle name. No last name. Not Yeats. Not anything.

She slid the birth certificate to the side and saw a different birth certificate. This one had her name, Leisa Ann Yeats. It was also from the state of New York, but the issue date was six weeks after she’d been born.

There was a baptism certificate for Leisa Ann Yeats from St. Vincent’s Catholic Church in Albany, and some early immunization records.

The very last piece of paper in the folder was a hand-written note. It was written in pencil, faded and a little hard to read.

Margaret Marie likes her bottle not too warm. She likes to sleep with a fan blowing and one light blanket.

She is a good baby and will usually sleep through the night and hardly ever cries.