And Then I Found You (19 page)

He shrugged. “I wanted to say hello.…”

“Hello,” she said, smiling.

“You want to go get lunch together?” he asked.

Lida slipped out of the room to leave Rowan and Kate alone. “I can’t,” she said, pointing
out at the store. “It’s really busy and Norah couldn’t come in today.”

He nodded. “Okay.”

Kate’s cell phone, sitting on the desk, face up, buzzed.
JACK
—only four letters—flashed on the screen. Four letters that could hurt Rowan more
than a hundred sentences combined.

Rowan cringed and turned away. “Later, Kate. I’ll see you later.”

Kate put her hand over the phone, as if hiding
JACK
made any difference at all. “No, it’s okay. I can call him back.”

Rowan stood still, quietly looking at her. The only sound in the room was the buzz
of the phone against the desk. When it quieted, Kate lifted her hand.

“Do you want to go to Rich’s tonight?” Rowan asked. “He caught a ton of redfish yesterday
and he’s having a big fish fry. You in?”

Kate shook her head. “I promised Tara I’d watch the monsters so she and Kyle could
go to some parenting seminar at church.”

He nodded. “Got it.” He was halfway out the door when Kate grabbed his hand.

“Rowan. Don’t be mad.”

He kissed her on the cheek, as if she were a child. “I’m not mad.” Then he was gone.

Kate thought to follow him, to run after him and soothe him. But she didn’t know how,
and the helplessness only made her feel worse. How long had it been since they’d been
alone? A week? Two?

Since Emily found her weeks before, time had become odd and sporadic—moving too fast
and then too slow as the days unfolded and e-mails were sent, slowly unraveling the
years of not-knowing. Kate forwarded every e-mail to Jack and to her sisters. Through
the years, while they’d been living their life, Emily’s world had run parallel, and
now it was as if train tracks were finally converging.

During these days Kate had gone to her closet and dug out the hidden box containing
pictures, feathers, and journals from the days of her pregnancy. She read her own
entries almost as if they were someone else’s words. Had she really felt that way?
The days after the adoption seemed distant and foreign, and then suddenly immediate
and familiar.

Kate still held the phone in her hand, and when she was sure that Rowan had reached
his car and driven away, she hit “return call” for
JACK.

“Hey,” his voice was quick and tight; it always was. He answered every call and e-mail,
but never wanted to talk about anything but the facts. Every time Kate drew near to
any subject other than Luna, from his art studio to his law office, he steered the
conversation away or said he had to go for something urgent.

“What’s up?” Kate asked, forcing lightness into her voice.

“Did you check your e-mail?” he asked.

“Only every five minutes. Why?”

“Check again.”

Kate bent over and clicked refresh. “Oh…” she said. “An e-mail from her.”

“Yep,” Jack said. “You gonna go?”

“Let me read it,” Kate said.

My mom and dad said that maybe we can see each other at the end of this semester.
What do you think? Love, Emily.

Maybe? Was she serious? Kate would have been on a plane within five seconds of the
first Facebook request if she’d been asked. “Oh, Jack. Oh, this is amazing. Of course
I’ll go. Will you go with me?”

“She isn’t asking me. She’s asking you. Her mom copied me.”

“I want you to go.”

“Not this time, Katie.”

“You don’t want to meet her?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“How are you feeling about all this?” Kate asked quietly. “You won’t tell me.”

He didn’t answer and the silence became long and uncomfortable. Kate closed her eyes
and forced her mouth to be still, not fill the empty spaces he wouldn’t.

“So, I gotta go. Caleb is home. Have a good weekend, Kate.”

She didn’t say good-bye because she didn’t need to say good-bye. He was already gone.

Her hands poised over the keyboard, she typed six different responses with varying
tones of positive agreement until finally she typed,
Yes! You give me dates and times and I’ll be there.

twenty

BRONXVILLE, NEW YORK

2010

The clouds below the plane were meringue, whipped above the unseen world below and
seeming thick enough to walk on. Staring out the window at the twilight-tinged earth,
Kate marveled how time wasn’t linear, how it didn’t move in a straight line, but made
sporadic lurches forward to destiny. If she tried, she couldn’t tell this story in
a straightaway manner, from Jack to the wilderness, to his marriage, to her jobs,
to the birth and adoption, and then to now when she would meet her daughter. No, not
meet, reunite.

Kate’s mom had also come along, but she was two rows behind, reading an advance copy
of Tara’s new article for
MORE
magazine. At first, Kate had decided she would go alone and then knowing that not
everything turned out just like some made-for-TV movie, she thought she might need
some help along the way. Nicole was already packed when Kate asked, knowing her daughter
as well as she knew anyone in the world.

It was Rowan who had driven them both to the airport. Kate knew what this must have
cost him, such chivalry, as if driving your girlfriend to the airport so she could
be reunited with the daughter she had placed for adoption was the most natural thing
in the world. He had even rolled the suitcases to the curbside check-in, where he
hugged Nicole and then Kate. “Have a great time,” he had said. “And call me, okay?”

“I love you,” Kate said as she hugged him back tightly. She meant it. She did love
him.

For the past two months, Rowan had kept his distance, sometimes not calling for days
and yet attentive and quiet when he was with her. Only the night before he’d told
her “I want to be thrilled that you’re going to meet her tomorrow. I do. But this
is tearing me to pieces.”

“What’s tearing you to pieces?”

“It’s selfish and it’s terrible, I know that, but I can barely stand thinking of you
and Jack with a child, of you and Jack talking and e-mailing, of you and Jack all
together.”

“This is about Emily.”

But the conversation was stale and repetitive, something neither of them wanted to
repeat, but seemed to every time they got together.

They assured each other that after Kate met Emily, normalcy would resume. He kissed
her good-bye, and Kate didn’t tell him that what he thought was “normal” was far gone,
if there ever had been.

The closer the plane came to New York, the faster Kate’s pulse tapped against her
throat and wrist. Images of her daughter had once been made of fantasy, and now were
fashioned from photos, a cut-and-paste of a girl in situ, nothing moving.

When the flight attendant offered Kate a glass of wine, she almost took it but decided
that reuniting with her daughter with the smell of cheap chardonnay on her breath
was not the best way to begin.

She’d always believed this day would come. Even when her family pushed her to look
for Luna, she knew she needed to wait. They hadn’t understood her reasons, her desperate
and crawling need to give her child everything: the mom, the dad, the possible brother
and sisters, a full and complete family.

The family’s unspoken and hidden emotions exploded only once—on Luna’s first birthday
when her family had quietly and deliberately planned a dinner party at their favorite
outdoor restaurant.

Tara arrived first wearing her flowing skirt and tank top; her new baby, Colin, sat
in his stroller looking up at Kate with eyes as round and blue as new planets. Tara’s
husband, Kyle, held onto bags and blankets, looking confused and exhausted as if he’d
been dropped into baby world without any warning. Molly had been on spring break and
just shy of her twenty-first birthday and was a junior at University of South Carolina.
She ran up behind Tara, draped in a sundress of such bright yellow, as if she was
honoring the thick yellow pollen of a Low Country spring. Her hug was the longest.
“I miss you, sissy,” Molly said.

Kate’s mom and dad arrived dressed in almost-matching pressed khakis and white button-down
shirts: Nicole’s frilly; Stuart’s starched. They hugged Kate simultaneously, stumbling
over the end of the gangplank and laughing. Sitting at a round table, Molly reached
down into a bag she carried and pulled out what Kate first thought was a stuffed animal
and then realized was a real, live Shitzu, white and fluffy with a black-dot nose.

“You can’t bring a dog into a restaurant,” Kate said, irritation already rising above
the calm.

Molly pointed at their Dad. “Don’t tell me. Tell Dad. I told him it wasn’t a good
idea, but he won’t go anywhere without Mister, his new love.”

“Dad?” Kate looked to her dad who was trying, unsuccessfully, to look innocent and
preoccupied.

“Huh? I didn’t think it would be a problem.”

“That’s why you didn’t say anything?”

Nicole interrupted, changing the conversation to Molly’s outfit, and soon the family
was talking over each other and somehow carrying on a conversation in the way any
family in any world was probably able to do with half-finished sentences and incomplete
sounds, and silent meanings running underneath.

They talked about Molly’s first boyfriend, and Tara’s column for
Savannah Parenting
, along with her new Web site called Mothering Heights. They discussed Kyle’s possible
job change.

The waitress came by to pour the wine and Molly held out her hand for a glass. “No
way,” Nicole said.

“Give her a break,” Stuart said. “She’s twenty-one next week.”

Mister started to bark from his blue and white dotted bag and somewhere inside the
restaurant someone turned up the jazz music. Soon the world faded into a buzzing distant
image. The rhythm of Vaughn-ness that defined them as a singular unit took over.

“So,” Nicole finally said, holding up her hand to silence the family. “Kate, really,
how are you?”

She didn’t know how she was, really, the world a buffered and distant thing going
on outside a thick wall of fog. But she didn’t want to say this, so she waited too
long to answer and her dad saw an opening to say what he must have wanted to say all
night. “Today is our first granddaughter’s birthday.”

“Dad, I know that,” Kate whispered. “I know it’s her birthday. You don’t have to tell
me.”

“I wasn’t being informative as much as I was telling you that I remembered.”

Mister yapped in earnest, as if trapped at the bottom of a well; Molly swayed across
the table; baby Colin began to cry with a high mewling sound. Kate ignored the Vaughn
chaos to look her dad in the eyes. “It’s okay to talk about it. I think about her
all the time.”

Nicole made a noise, a whimper, and Kate turned to face her mother. “What, Mom?”

“We just wish we could find her. You know—just know that she’s okay. Isn’t there a
way?”

“Of course not. You saw the legal papers. You know. Please don’t do this.”

Molly leaned forward, clearly drunk, a shrimp bobbing off the end of her fork as if
dancing. “I have a niece out in the world somewhere. A girl. Today is her birthday.”

“Enough,” Kate said.

It was then that Mister’s barks became intolerable and Kate spun around in her chair.
“Dad, take the damn dog out of his silly bag and let him breathe so he shuts up.”

“It’s not a damn dog,” Stuart said, leaning down to free Mister. “I just want to see
her—my first grandchild,” Stuart said as he unzipped the dog bag.

“Stop,” Kate said, and her single word became a detonator that exploded the evening.

It all happened at once, but Kate could later recount each event as if they occurred
one after the other in perfect synchrony. Mister shot out from his imprisonment and
crapped on the deck of the restaurant while Molly pitched forward, grabbing Kyle as
she threw up, trying to catch it with her wineglass. Her dad cursed, a litany of many
curses strung together as one. The baby screamed as if Granddad had insulted him about
his grandchild status, and Tara jumped from the table while Kate dropped her face
into her hands and groaned.

In the pause, in the aftermath, in the moment when no one should have said anything,
they all heard Kate say, “Sometimes the future is just further away than we want it
to be.”

When they arrived home, somber and silent, Molly curled up in the corner of the couch
and pulled her knees up under her chin. “Sorry,” she said. “I guess I drank too much.
But when the dog pooped, I just couldn’t hold it in.”

Stuart stared at Molly but spoke to Kate. “What you said at the table is hard to hear.
You’re so factual about it, like this is happening to someone else.”

“What
I
said?” Kate asked.

“About the future being further away than we’d like for it to be.”

“It’s terrible and it’s true, Dad. If I could find out where Luna is and be able to
call her and say happy birthday, if I could see her photo or hold her and tell her
how much we all love her, I would. But I can’t and you can’t and we aren’t able to
change anything about it.”

“How can you be so resolute about this as if it isn’t the saddest thing in the whole
world?” he asked.

“I’m not resolute, Dad.” Kate’s voice cracked open on the truth. “I can’t
do
anything about it. What do you want me to do? Make the present turn into some imagined
future? You want me to be a magician and change the past? I don’t know what you want
from me.”

Nicole came to Kate’s side. “Stuart, stop.” She hugged her daughter. “Baby, we don’t
want anything from you. We just…”

“I know you hate what I did. I know I didn’t do it the way you would have. But it’s
done. Done. Done.” Her last word vibrated, anger finally arriving.

“It’s not done,” Tara said quietly. “There will be a wonderful day in all this. I
know it.”