Bastards: A Memoir (18 page)

While I listened to his messages, Abigail, Sadie, and Elena were on the other side of the room mixing diet Coke with vanilla vodka and assessing one another’s outfits in the full-length mirror, deliberating over boots and fleeces. Classes were done for the week, the snow had barely begun to fall. It was Friday night and no matter how old I felt, or how panicked I was at being berated by my estranged father, I could grab on to that. It was Friday night, I was eighteen years old, my roommates were going to a party, and I would join them. Because that is what eighteen-year-olds did. They put on fresh eyeliner, borrowed their girlfriend’s sweater, and they went out.

It would be my first real college party, my first party where there was sure to be beer and vats of spiked punch. I had never been able to separate drinking from the sad, drunk adults of my childhood, the sweaty oblivion that played across their faces as they guzzled bottles malt liquor, alongside the fear of what would come out of me if I lost my self control. But something inside me craved that tonight. Something inside me knew that booze was just the thing to quiet the dull thudding in my gut.

Abigail looked at me through the mirror and said, “You really want to go?”

“Absolutely,” I said, taking a long pull from the spiked diet Coke bottle. “I want to get hammered.”

Like a Hole in My Head

A
fter that, I partied like a college girl. Which is to say, probably a little too much.

I picked up a boyfriend at the beginning of my sophomore year. We met during a musical revue put on by the Student Musical Theatre Company. After a few beers at the cast party, I kissed him just to see if I was capable of it, and he wouldn’t let me forget it. Joshua was achingly normal. He designed posters and played guitar. He was a charismatic, gentle boy who was prone to professions of love. Though he was willing to stick to saying, “I like you a great deal,” when he saw me cringe repeatedly at the
l
-word. He showed up at my lunch table in the dining hall and in my pew at Sunday Mass. He wrote songs for me and slid mix CDs under my door. He became so ubiquitous that one day while walking on the quad I realized I was holding his hand, only I couldn’t remember who had reached for whom.

I’d begun my sophomore year in the highly coveted position as a resident advisor. Even kids who weren’t on work-study wanted to be RAs because you got to live in a giant single room with the shortest walk to class. I liked those perks, but what I enjoyed most was that my residents needed me, even if it was only because I was the person who signed out the vacuum cleaner.

I was on duty on a Tuesday night in early September when my life changed forever. It was my job that night to walk three laps through the freshman dorms and keep my door open until midnight in case any residents needed something. Most of my residents would be busy with practices and study groups until nine o’clock or later. The building would be quiet until then; I’d have plenty of time to finish a paper for my poetry class before I’d have to enforce quiet hours. But I made the mistake of checking my email before I settled into my desk and began my work.

The first unread message was from an account I didn’t recognize. The subject line read,
Hello
. I saw the first sentence in the preview panel:

My name is Lisa. You don’t know me, but you’ve known about me your entire life.

MY HEART
beat fast. I was hot. I ripped my wool sweater from my body so quickly that it caught on my ears. I sat back in my desk chair. No. I needed to stand up, twitch, pace. The reflection in my bay window was foreign. It seemed as if I were watching myself and also gazing at a stranger. I lay on the floor, where I couldn’t see any part of me.

I don’t know how long I lay on my floor staring at the ceiling. Along with the walls, it had been repainted weeks before I moved into this room. The carpet, the furniture, everything had been cleaned or replaced, erasing any trace of the previous occupant. When I moved out of this room, there would be no hint of me, either.

I shook the leg of my desk until the cordless phone fell off its dock and into reaching distance. Then I dialed Becca in her dorm at Oklahoma State, but I got her voice mail. To reach Jacob I’d have to call Michael’s house and I wasn’t ready for that, and calling Peggy . . . I didn’t want to do that until I knew what to say.

I’d thought I had more time. Lisa, the oldest of my long-lost little sisters, would not have been old enough to legally search for her birth family until March of my senior year of college, which was when she would turn eighteen. That’s what I had planned for. My sisters were supposed to find me when I was teaching English in Japan, interning at a congressional office, or starting law school. I didn’t have the particulars planned yet. All I knew was that I would be well adjusted when my sisters found me. But now she was here, and I was still me: nineteen years old and confused.

One by one my residents repopulated the building. Their voices caught in the corners of the hallway and bounced into my room. Doors slapped open and closed, open and closed. I started to breathe in rhythm with them. Open and closed, open and closed, in and out, in and out.

I stood up and stared deep into my computer screen, read the rest of the message. Lisa’s parents had agreed to help her search for us. It wasn’t a long process because they knew Michael’s full name and he hadn’t moved far. She called him on the phone, though they hadn’t yet met. He gave her my email address. She couldn’t believe I was so close.

WITHOUT SOMEONE
else to watch react to this news, I wasn’t sure how I felt. In fact, I was certain that I didn’t feel anything. My nerve endings seized, in the midst of a psychological reboot. Every system in my body needed to be updated with this new information.

I’ve been found, I’ve been found.

Becca called me the following morning. She’d gotten an email, too. I called Peggy. Jacob was at her place and we all arranged to meet Lisa at Peggy’s apartment over Thanksgiving weekend. It would be the first time the four of us were together since the day I’d left New Jersey twelve years before.

Peggy lived in a two-bedroom apartment with her longtime boyfriend, Tom. Their place was above the pizza shop that Tom ran with his brother. The apartment was always filled with the warm smell of yeasted dough emanating from the shop below. I’d stayed with them the year before over Thanksgiving, too. In the mornings, Tom took me down to the shop and showed me how to make pizza dough in the giant mixer at the back kitchen, how to portion it, proof it, and place individual dough balls in flat racks with the date and my initials on them. “That way, if there’s anything wrong with ’em, we’ll know whose ass to kick,” he’d said in his dusky monotone. He wasn’t kidding.

It was simple, honest work, and Tom took pride in it. He could not have been more different from Michael. Where Michael was gregarious, creative, and scheming, Tom was quiet, steady, and generous. Until I saw Peggy with Tom, I hadn’t realized how depressed she must have been when I was a kid. I no longer saw her sleep late into the day or sit at the kitchen table with her head in her hands. Now she was up in the mornings making pancakes for breakfast. Unlike our apartments in Marigold Court and Camden, here Peggy hung things on the walls. She decorated with pinecones and bottles of herb-infused olive oil, chattering pleasantly about where she had found this trinket or who had given her that jar of peppers. Except for the fact that I didn’t know anyone she mentioned, it felt familiar, homey.

I couldn’t help thinking that this was what we could have been like. If Peggy had met and married Tom instead of Michael, I could have stayed with her. I could have grown up to be like one of Tom’s sisters, mouthy but charming, telling people to sit down while I fixed them a plate.

On the day of the reunion, Jacob, Becca, and I sipped coffee around Peggy’s kitchen table while she fussed with pot holders on the countertop. “I can’t sit still,” she said, pouring herself a glass of water.

“Ma, you already have two glasses of water,” Jacob said, and pointed to one glass on the table and one on the countertop. “You gotta sit down before you have a heart attack.”

Peggy gulped from the glass in her hand and placed it in the sink. She shook her head and smiled. “I’m fine,” she said. But her voice wavered and she kept rubbing her hands.

I was glad for the solidity of the oak table. Without it to cling to, I was certain that I would float away like a helium balloon, out the window and through the atmosphere, higher and higher, until the too-thin air crushed me.

Jacob and Becca were subdued by matching hangovers. When I had taken a dose of cold medicine and gone to bed early the night before, my brother and sister went to a party at one of Jacob’s friends’ house, where Becca had snorted some cocaine. Just a bump, she said. But when she was still wide awake at four in the morning, she started downing whiskey to counteract its effect and Jacob joined her. They sat pale and glassy-eyed at opposite ends of the table. In twenty-four hours Becca would be headed back to Oklahoma State University and Jacob was scheduled to ship out to a U.S. base in Germany after Christmas. It seemed like a waste of time to be pissed about the previous night’s shenanigans; I focused instead on being grateful that they’d left time to shower.

I felt my new sister’s presence before I saw her. There was a knock on the door and suddenly my head filled with a ringing tone so loud I could feel it in my fillings. I didn’t think I was the only person who felt it, but before I could check with Becca and Jacob, Peggy had opened the door and Lisa was standing in the kitchen with us.

Her strawberry blond hair hung past her shoulders. She was big-eyed, with impeccable highlights, expertly applied eye makeup, and a set of acrylic nails that clicked against each other in a rhythm that I recalled from the mothers of Marigold Court in my childhood. In her snug jeans, boots, and V-neck sweater, Lisa looked more mature than me. Her eyes were the same shade of blue-green as Becca’s, but the rest of her face was a carbon copy of mine. The slope of her nose and the round doll-like shape of her eyes were mine. Granddad would never have let me out of the house in that sweater, though. Not when I was Lisa’s age, and not now.

We moved into the living room and I caught a glimpse of us—Jacob, Becca, Lisa, and me—side by side in the mirror above the sofa. In that moment we appeared oldest to youngest, our hair and eyes getting progressively lighter as though the dye wore off with subsequent washings. I felt it in my stomach, in the mess of viscera in my gut: the sudden knowledge of another being who was like me, part of me.

I had focused so long on my goal of her finding me that I never considered how I would react to her presence. I hadn’t thought about what it would feel like to look into Lisa’s face, hadn’t counted on her face looking back at me so . . . expectantly? Hopefully? Nervously? I had imagined that the act of being found would be the finish line, but now I could see that we were just at the beginning. Of a marathon.

On the other side of the room, Lisa’s parents hugged the wall. They’d opened a door and they didn’t know where it would lead. Could there be two mothers in the same room, or did they cancel one another out? We were all a little skittish, unsure of what roles to play, until Lisa’s parents left.

After they left, we relaxed almost instantly. I was, for the first time, part of a club that I belonged to organically. I wanted to know everything about Lisa and she wanted to know everything about us. Peggy brought out photo albums. She pointed out cracked black-and-white pictures, saying, “This is your great-great-grandmother Durkin. She came over from County Sligo in Ireland during the famine,” and “Here’s your grandmother Taggart on Michael’s side, her people were from Cork.” Lisa clapped her thin hands together. “I always thought I was Irish! But I never knew for sure!”

When we got to the baby pictures of Becca, Lisa covered her mouth with her hands. “These look like pictures of me,” she whispered. “It’s like, it’s like . . .” she sputtered and couldn’t finish. She laughed as she wiped tears from her eyes. “It’s so weird! It’s awesome, but it’s weird.” I hummed my agreement.

I wanted more—the interior things, the thoughts and personality traits that wouldn’t show up in photographs. I needed to know if Lisa laughed at the things I did, and if, like I did, she sometimes got so filled with rage she thought she could die. Did she have that dream that Becca, Jacob, and I all had, where her teeth fell out? If she did, was that just us? Or did everybody have that dream? Did her eyes water when she saw babies, was she good at tests? Was this us or everyone? I had no idea what characteristics belonged just to me, or to me and my family, or to everyone in the world.

I kept remembering the day, all those years ago, when Becca came to New Jersey. How she was sullen and sad when I was so happy. How that day was like so many of our days together since, with my sister and me committed to opposite emotions. But today we were all excited. Lisa did not point out the ways we didn’t know her, and she did not turn away from us. She was game.

After the photo albums were finished, Jacob stretched up from the sofa.

“We should get going if she wants to meet Dad,” he said.

I knew this was coming and had decided to be fine about it. I wouldn’t say anything that might mar Lisa’s first experience with our biological father. She had the right to make up her own mind about Michael. I wouldn’t steal his chance to make a good first impression on his new daughter. Maybe he would be different with her.

Jacob drove us, in a minivan that he’d borrowed from Michael. Becca, Lisa, and I piled into the backseat. Peggy begged off, said she wanted to be home when Tom finished work for the night. But I suspected that she’d had enough reunion for one day. The thought of standing in the same house with her ex-husband and their ex-children would have been too much to bear.

In the middle of the White Horse Pike, Jacob turned on the radio and a song we all knew started playing. Becca, Lisa, and I instinctively sang the harmony parts. “Ohmygod,” Lisa shrieked. “With my friends I’m always the one that sings harmony! You do that, too?” I was smiling so big that my jaw hurt.