And Then I Found You (9 page)

In the end, she wanted to offer this baby, her child, every chance in life she could
have. And she questioned—every day she questioned—whether or not she could give that
child her every chance. It was with those very questions that she found herself in
an adoption agency in downtown Savannah, her heart almost dead inside, seeming to
beat as little and as slowly as possible.

The small blond counselor, Barbara, leaned forward on her desk. “Kate, I know it’s
incredibly difficult to talk about this. We can move as slowly as you’d like. I am
here to listen and I’m here to help you answer all of the questions you have to help
you decide whether parenting or adoption is the right plan for you and your baby.
You want to consider adoption?”

Katie nodded and with that acknowledgment, she began to weep, bent over with the force
of her own admission. “Yes,” she stuttered. “I need to talk about it … consider it…”

For what seemed like hours, but was probably much less, Barbara talked to Katie, going
through “parenting plans” and “adoption plans.” The counselor asked questions Katie
could barely answer. “What does parenting look like to you?” “What does adoption look
like to you?” “What is the life you envision for your child?”

Confusion blurred her mind, and Katie finally said. “I want to keep this baby. I want
to … keep it. That’s what my heart says.”

Barbara smiled. “I know. I know what you want to do. Of course you want to keep this
baby. I can tell how much you love her already. But are you prepared to parent this
precious baby, to give this baby the life you so desperately want her to have? Sometimes,
just sometimes, being a ‘good mother’ means choosing adoption.”

For the first time since she’d entered the office, Katie’s tears stopped. She exhaled
and saw as clearly as she did the moon on a cloudless night—there was a difference
between
keeping
and
parenting.
What she wanted to keep was this part of Jack, to
keep
what remained of their love. But could she actually be a parent?

“What are my choices?” Katie asked, dry-eyed, staunch, her voice not sounding like
her own. “What happens if I choose adoption? What kinds of adoption are there?”

She returned home that afternoon, and it was Katie’s mother who set her mind in direct
opposition to adoption. “We can raise this baby, Katie. Your dad and I can do it.
Please don’t give her away. It’s not nineteen sixty. We don’t have to hide.”

The words—
give her away
—tore every last piece of fragile flash in Katie’s soul. “Mom, you know that can’t
be—my child in your house thinking that I don’t want her. I could never do that. You
have no idea what it does to a young girl if she thinks she’s not wanted. It is by
far one of the most devastating beliefs in the world.” Katie fought for control.

“Don’t use your wilderness-therapy psychology speech to explain what you want to do.”

“What I
want
to do? For God’s sake, Mom. Jack is married. I’m twenty-two years old and hiding
in my parents’ house. I’m pregnant and alone. At this moment, I’m not doing a damn
thing I
want
to do. I can now only do what is best.…”

“I’m sorry, baby. I’m sorry.…”

“Mom, I’m begging you to stop and see what I see. To know what I know.… I’m not giving
up, and I’m not giving her away. You can’t ever say that again. It’s a choice, mom.
I’m choosing not to focus on everything in me that is screaming, ‘keep her,’ so that
I can focus on what I want to give my child. I’m choosing. I’m offering. It’s a gift
to another family, to my child.”

“So you could give her to a stranger but not to us?”

The conversations ended this way every time, and often in weakness Katie agreed to
allow her parents to raise her child, her and Jack’s child, until her strength returned.
Always underneath the tension and arguments and deathly silent days and nights while
her child grew within her, Katie’s decision remained the same: she would offer her
child the gift of a beautiful, hand-chosen family.

Katie began to show, her belly forcing its way past the buttons and zippers of her
clothing. She had to make a decision. At the very least, she had to buy herself some
time. Kate knew that if she brought the knowledge of this child into her hometown,
she’d need to bring the child itself. And she wasn’t prepared for the questions or
the well-meaning advice that was bound to come her way. That’s why, when she asked
her dad to rent a small cottage on the lake an hour away, Katie felt she was protecting
her child and herself, not hiding her pregnancy. Norah and Katie’s family were the
only visitors, and they often spent the night, watching movies and reading books.

Katie walked through the paths and hiking trails around the small lake, and she continued
to collect feathers. Wherever she went or walked or sat, there seemed to be a feather
floating beneath her feet or at her side. She placed them in a bowl. She mixed the
wilderness feathers with the new ones until the individual was indistinguishable region
from region.

She found feathers so blue they shimmered, the red ones and brown, the soft down and
the coarse bristly ones. Her favorite was all white, so white it seemed bleached and
yet had a single dot: a freckle. Bluebird, raven, hawk, chickadee, cardinal—and then
she found some that she couldn’t identify, ones she hadn’t yet found a name for. She
became obsessed with the nameless ones. She checked Audubon books out of the library
and they were piled on the dining room table. Engrossed in discovering what bird had
lost a piece of self, she tied tiny labels to the quills. She didn’t have any plans
for the feathers, and maybe that was the best part—they existed for beauty only.

She brought something wild to the tame and rational. She brought heart into a place
where she must soon give away her heart.

Jack shut down, or that was the best way Katie knew to describe what happened to the
man she once knew. He disappeared and another man, a married man who wanted to get
on with his life, took his place. She felt it wasn’t true, that deep down Jack still
existed, but the facts proved otherwise. He left her alone to go through family profiles
until she decided on a closed and confidential adoption.

Through terrible phone calls and months of agony, Katie chose a mother and father
who had been trying for nine years to have a child and were unable: a couple with
a large extended family and a seemingly solid (as solid as one could look on paper)
background.

Still and yet, through all this agony, Jack never told his wife, Maggie.

seven

BLUFFTON, SC

1997

The cramps weren’t bad. Really, they were little more than a stomachache or muscle
spasm. Katie still had another week and anyway, the agony she’d heard about—head-spinning
pain that tore women in half—would be much more severe than this. She wouldn’t panic
over muscle aches. It wasn’t time yet.

Katie sat back against the tub and let the warm water soothe her. Twilight was turning
into night, and the bathroom was dusky and serene as the first knife-searing stab
thrust itself through the middle of her body. She bent over with its force and lost
her breath into the darkness.

“Mom…” she called, tentatively at first, then louder, then loudest of all. “MOM!”

Nicole ran into the bathroom where Katie stood in the middle of a puddle, naked and
round, doubled over and dripping water onto the tile floor. “Are you okay?” Her mom
placed her hand on Katie’s bare back.

Katie looked up. “I think … it’s time.”

“Get dressed. I’ll get the bag and start the car.”

Another knife ripped through Katie’s body, a searing heat that she’d never felt before.
“Oh…”

Her mom uttered the same soothing sounds she’d used when Katie was sick as a child,
the sounds a mother uses with any child in any world, rubbing her hand up and down
Katie’s spine until the pain dissipated.

Nicole rushed into the bedroom and grabbed the prepacked bag as Katie wobbled, wet
and bent, into the room to pull on sweatpants and a T-shirt. Within two minutes, they
were on their way to the hospital.

Fluid gushed from Katie’s body, drenching the towel that had been placed on the passenger
seat. She knew from her classes that her water had broken, meaning that the baby would
come quickly now. “Mom.” Katie uttered the name, feeling its shape change with each
contraction. She would be a mother soon. And then she would relinquish the right to
be called by that same name.

Nicole gunned the car, placing her hand on Katie’s leg. “You are going to be okay.
This will be fine.”

“I’m scared.”

“Of course you are.” Tears dripped off Nicole’s chin and Katie turned away.

“We forgot to call Jack. I promised…” Katie’s words were stopped short by a quick
contraction, her body disobeying her commands to be still. Her body’s unrelenting
defiance left her breathless.

“I’ll call him as soon as I get there. Shhh … be still. Focus on your breathing.”

Tears blurred Katie’s eyesight and as they drove, the Spanish moss hanging off the
live oak trees blurred into winged birds.

“Katie, I will take care of everything. Focus only on your body. On the birth. Let
go of everything else.”

And she did. Closing her eyes, Katie went inside her body, talking to the baby she
had named Luna, moving with the pain and the stirrings and the shifting of her bones.
When they arrived at the hospital, the nurse told Katie that she was five centimeters
dilated and moving fast.

In her last birthing class, Katie had decided she would not have a single medication,
and she stuck with that choice. Using every technique she’d ever learned, she took
control of her body, allowing the reckless spasms to move through her, crying when
needed and screaming when something begged to be released.

There was, she found, a tunnel of darkness that she willingly entered as she pushed
Luna from her body and into the world. Only the two of them existed—the crush of body
cooperating outside time and space, allowing life to endure. The doctor, the nurse,
and her mom were all in the room, yet they seemed somehow outside the world, another
dimension.

Bearing down one final time, Katie was silent and resolute as Luna was born. For the
briefest moment, the baby was simultaneously attached to Katie and in the world. The
doctor cut the umbilical cord, releasing Luna from Katie’s body. It would be Katie
who would have to release Luna from her life.

The nurse walked around the bed and placed a wide-eyed Luna into Katie’s arms. Katie
looked down into her daughter’s face. “Oh, she’s the most perfect. Most perfect.”
Luna’s hair was dark and thick, poking out in wet clumps after her journey. Her eyes
were green, clear: Jack’s eyes. If grief had a sound, it was the silence of that birthing
room.

Nicole walked over and took Luna from Katie’s arms, and the room filled with the deepest
and most awful knowing: They would hold Luna this once and then she would be gone.
Somewhere in the same hospital, a family waited to hold their new daughter.

Nicole held Luna and stroked her face, staring into her eyes. “We love you, baby Luna.
We will, from this day forward, pray for you every day.” Nicole handed Luna to Katie.
Pictures were taken as if it was a normal birth—a day of celebration even—and then
it was time to say good-bye.

“How do I do this?” Katie looked to her mom.

“I don’t know.”

Katie held her daughter, her heart yielded to the good-bye she hadn’t yet spoken.
“I can’t go through this pain if there isn’t peace at the end. I can’t. Please promise
me there is peace at the end of this.”

Nicole placed her hand on Katie’s forehead, but didn’t promise anything at all. The
nurse entered the room with her own tears. The social worker stood at her side with
papers and a sad smile. “Are you ready?”

Katie pulled back the blanket, memorizing every bend and curve and sinew of Luna’s
body. Touching her. Kissing her.

Jack was there, at the hospital, waiting in a separate room to both meet and then
say good-bye to his daughter. If a last living piece of Katie’s heart existed (which
she wasn’t sure about) seeing Jack would have killed it.

“You, Luna, are beautiful and special and you are going to have a wonderful mother
and dad. I want you to grow up to know your God, and be surrounded in and by love.
Be a good girl. I love you with every piece of me.” Katie kissed her daughter’s forehead
as a tear dropped on Luna’s wild hair.

In a motion she would have thought impossible, Katie handed her child to the social
worker and then reached into her bag. “I have something I want to send with her,”
Katie said in a voice suffused with sorrow. She handed the social worker a small feather.

“It will be up to the parents whether they will take this,” the social worker said
softly.

“I found it the first day I thought I might be pregnant. It’s my only gift.”

Nicole laid her head on the pillow next to her daughter. “Life is your gift, Katie.”

“Kate,” Katie said to her mom. “Now, from now on, call me Kate.”

Kate handed Luna to the nurse, and something felt torn away, a hollow feeling like
her insides had been scooped out. A great wind could blow through her without hitting
resistance.

Kate’s words echoed across the empty hospital room. “What will fill the place where
you were?” The question was meant for her daughter, who was now someone else’s child.

eight

BRONXVILLE, NY

2010

Science was Emily’s favorite class. She sat at the long black table with a plastic
DNA helix at each place. The model was constructed of colored plastic bubbles attached
by thick straws in a winding helix. Emily thought it beautiful. She was awed that
every body had miles and miles of these microscopic and twisted ropes inside. Human
bodies were so much more interesting than trying to decipher words.