Bastards: A Memoir (22 page)

So today I let Peggy sleep. And I cooked pancakes. We finished the coffee and made a fresh pot.

After breakfast, the apartment filled with the spruce and cedar scent of Jacob’s shaving cream. Lisa and I primped in the same mirror in the guest bedroom, littering the top of the dresser with flatirons and lipsticks. Becca had never been interested in feminine things; she always turned to me to do something with her hair or apply her makeup for a rare date. But Lisa offered to style the back of my hair, asked could she borrow my lip gloss.

This was what we would have been like. This was how it would feel to have a sister whose sweaters I could borrow, who would wear my earrings and tell me if I put on too much eyeliner. We would have fought over who, in fact, had bought that buttery leather jacket, our tempers raising the same high color to our cheeks. I could see it as we gazed into the same mirror. Another life was contained in our matching faces, in which we were safe fighting and hating and forgiving one another because the force of our affection was great enough to withstand anything.

The doorbell rang. Lisa and I dropped lip balms and mascara tubes on the dresser and closed the bedroom door to the disarray of half-unpacked suitcases and toiletries strewn over the furniture. Our sister was here.

The apartment floors creaked under the weight of seven pairs of feet as Peggy, Jacob, Lisa, and I joined Rebekah and her parents in the living room. The small room squeezed us together, forced us to brush shoulders and stare into each other’s eyes. Rebekah was five feet tall, with brown bangs sweeping across her forehead. Brown eyes, fair skin, delicate features. She was the spitting image of Peggy’s mother, Joan, right down to the crooked front incisor.

Her parents hovered in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. It hadn’t occurred to me that this sister wouldn’t come alone. She was nineteen, after all; old enough for autonomy. Her mother was slender, with short red hair, and her father rotund and quiet. They shared a wide-eyed glance when they noticed a photograph of their daughter on Peggy’s wall.

I smiled at them as I introduced myself; hoped that my voice sounded warm. My sister’s parents stayed tense and tight-lipped; their hands were cold. They watched their little girl plop onto the love seat with Peggy and spread a photo album across their laps. An act that seemed to sting in its simplicity. These parents had come along as a security blanket, and now they were discarded as their daughter gazed deeply into photos of previously unknown ancestors who looked like her.

Jacob, Lisa, and I squeezed onto the facing sofa. Rebekah’s parents hovered in the doorway, blinking. I would have understood their discomfort as apprehension and nerves, but I was hung up on the fact that I seemed to be a part of the thing they feared. My skin prickled. I didn’t like being appraised like that by strangers.

Thankfully they didn’t stay long, and after a couple of hours Peggy left, too. She hadn’t been able to get the day off work on such short notice. So Jacob, Lisa, Rebekah, and I were alone in the living room, surrounded by photos of our separate childhoods. We were all visitors here, waiting for a tour guide to point us in the right direction. Lisa was the first one to offer a plan.

“Let’s go into Philly,” she said, flipping her hair over her shoulder.

Tom let us take his convertible; he was working until late in the evening and wouldn’t need it. When my siblings and I were together, we got whatever we wanted. Jacob slid in the driver’s seat and we three girls crammed in the back. We put the top down and turned the radio up. The voice of a pop singer spelling the word
BANANAS
thumped through the speakers. I started giggling uncontrollably. The lack of sleep caught up to me. Lisa stared at me and started laughing, too.

“I hate this song!” I said when I caught my breath.

“This song is BANANAS,” Lisa agreed.

“You’re BANANAS,” Jacob hollered from the driver’s seat.

“No, we’re BANANAS,” Lisa said.

She was right. The four of us in a yellow convertible driving into Philadelphia on Memorial Day weekend was bananas. It was absurd. It was wonderful and odd. The bubble that I recalled from my first meeting with Lisa began to slowly form around us. The sun felt like butter on my bare shoulders, the radio blared top 40 hits that we all knew, and for a moment we were just kids, soaking in a beautiful summer day. We drove forward. We insisted that the force of our will would eventually make this day happen the way we needed it to. We needed our fix, the feeling that we were a world unto ourselves; that we shared things that belonged only to us. That the universe would hand us the things we wanted because we had lost so much and the scales needed to be balanced. But something was off. We shot past cars headed the opposite direction from us; Philadelphians were headed out of the city and toward the Jersey Shore. We were driving against the tide. Rebekah squinted, silently, beneath the shelf of her bangs. The bubble was forming, but she was on the outside of it.

Through the whipping wind and my caffeine haze, I tried to focus on this new sister. It seemed imperative that I draw her in with the rest of us. “You’ve heard our story,” I said. “Tell us yours.”

Rebekah’s face went pale. The wind shattered her voice and sent it a million directions.

She had been home-schooled until she started college the previous fall. “That’s why I started my blog,” she shouted at me, “to connect with other home-school kids.” She had attended a Christian school until third grade, when the romantic overtures of a teacher caused Rebekah’s mom to pull her out. “He basically tried to kiss my mom a couple of times and she was totally freaked.” Rebekah laughed so it would seem offhand. It didn’t seem offhand. “I wanted to be home-schooled, though,” she insisted. Strangers were not her favorite thing. I understood that feeling.

Lisa nodded on the other side of the backseat, but I don’t think she caught more than a few words. She leaned over the passenger seat and turned the radio up.

Over the Walt Whitman Bridge Rebekah told me that her dad was “basically agoraphobic, you know, afraid of the outside world.” Her stories were full of friends she had never met in person. Her boyfriend, in fact, was one of these people. The boy was a home-school student in Oregon, so their interactions were primarily over the phone. They had planned visits many times, but something always fell through. So though they had “dated” for over a year, Rebekah at nineteen still hadn’t had her first kiss.

Rebekah’s hands fluttered like a couple of birds as she talked. She was electric with nerves. Something about her jitters forced me to be calm in a way that I was normally incapable of. I could see the blood pumping up the veins in her neck. She was two baby steps away from a full-scale panic attack. Pointing this out could possibly make it worse, I knew. Admitting that I knew anything about panic attacks would also destroy my carefully curated big-sister act. I wanted to pull Rebekah onto my lap and absorb the nervous shakes out of her. But she wasn’t a baby, and we were still relatively unknown to one another.

I reached out for one of Rebekah’s baby-bird hands, to still her if I could. I willed the calmness I felt toward her, imagining something akin to squeezing toothpaste out of a tube. If I had to will a connection, I would; I had always been the diligent sister, the diligent daughter. I had to find something we shared. Something that was us, not everyone. Something other than panic. Anxious Mary was not the person I was during a reunion. Anxious Mary was the girl in my other life. I didn’t want her to show up and ruin what should be an amazing day. We would have beautiful memories of today if it killed me.

“You have piano hands,” I said, “do you play?”

“I did for a while. When I was little. But not so much recently.” Rebekah’s hands were like mine—long tapered fingers, wide flat palms, tiny wrists. Hands designed to play instruments, or dance ballet, hands that “make it impossible to wear bracelets,” we said in unison. This sister, I thought, was the one I had expected the first Rebecca to be, all those years ago in Camden. My echo, my shadow. I wasn’t wrong to think that she was out there. I’d just had them in the wrong order.

Jacob parked off of South Street in Philadelphia, and we walked through the Italian Market. The scent of cooking sausages and grilled green peppers surrounded us. None of the strangers on the street gave us a second glance. When we stopped for dinner at a café, Rebekah kept her elbows in, carved up perfect bites. If crumbs fell on the table, she immediately tucked them into her napkin. It was a tense, studied way of eating. She noticed me watching her.

She giggled. “When I was little, I couldn’t eat at the same time as my dad because the crumbs would send him into a meltdown.” And she flipped her hair over her shoulder. In an eerie repeat of the precise way Lisa had performed the same gesture in Peggy’s apartment. I thought I had invented that style of mimicry when I was a teenager. Seeing my little sister perform the same adaptation chilled me.

After dinner we learned that Rebekah had never smoked a cigarette or tasted alcohol. “Just hang out with us for a while,” Lisa said.

Jacob and Lisa walked ahead, caught up in their own conversations about parties and people they knew that Rebekah and I didn’t.

I fell into step with Rebekah, who continued to chatter about everything she could think to tell me about herself. Dances with the swing club at her small Christian college in rural Pennsylvania, her plan to study abroad the next year, favorite bands, and books she’d read. She was majoring in English, like I had.

I was suddenly self-conscious about the way Lisa recounted the DUI she got last year (“So, I
had
been drinking, but no way I ran that stop sign. Cop was a total liar”), and the casual way I discussed Becca’s recreational activities. “I’m pretty sure she’s growing magic mushrooms in her kitchen,” I had said on the drive, and we all laughed and shook our heads. I thought I was so clever. We needed to downshift, be gentler. Talk about movies and the weather; tell the story about Granddad’s father and the potato salad fiasco. Rebecca would like that one, I thought.

When we returned to Peggy’s, Lisa and Jacob continued their howling conversation about several times they had escaped death or public mortification. Their voices were like a leaf blower taking over the entire room. Rebekah sat politely at the other end of the table, her hands folded in her lap, watching them like a starved puppy watching a pork chop. Her parents would be back to collect her soon.

Unlike the previous reunion, today I saw the end before it came. I was fully aware of the impending comedown. I felt the universe slip way. My powers of command over the world started to wane. In a moment I would no longer feel like I could stop traffic with a smile. Jacob’s and Lisa’s voices would lose their brightness, their laughter would quiet. The vibrant colors of the world would start to run and bleed and everything would be covered in dust again. It would happen in an instant; we would go from in-reunion to post-reunion. We would crash.

The trip flashed before my eyes like a near-death experience: Rebekah’s shaking hands. My mushroom story; Lisa’s DUI; the frightened-rabbit look in Rebekah’s eyes. My anxiety; her anxiety; Peggy’s tiny apartment. Time, ticking away. It was over. And it hadn’t been that good to begin with. My stomach crept toward my throat.

I grabbed four beers from the fridge and placed them in the middle of the kitchen table. Rebekah grabbed one without hesitation. It wasn’t a test so much as it was an answer to a question that I couldn’t ask out loud. Rebekah wanted to be one of us. I wanted her to be one of us, too. But I also wanted to protect her along the way if I could.

We raised our glasses and bottles around the kitchen table and Jacob said:

May those that love us, love us . . .

For the last thirty minutes that we had together, Rebekah, Lisa, and I listened to Jacob’s stories about Germany; how he had driven on the Autobahn (“It’s scary as hell, but awesome”) and attended beer festivals and strawberry festivals (“Germans got festivals for any kind of food. They friggin’ love festivals”). In that half an hour, time flew by. But for a moment we were together, laughing about the same things; it was a shiny button on an otherwise strange day.

Rebekah’s parents didn’t come to the door; they called from the driveway and we walked her down to their waiting sedan. Her father eyeballed us through his rolled-up window as if he were on a wilderness adventure and we were a bunch of wild boars circling his Honda. As they pulled into the street, Rebekah kept her eyes on us through the rear window of the car. I waved until I was sure she couldn’t see me anymore.

The look on her father’s face touched something primal in me. He didn’t seem to like me, so I decided I didn’t like him right back. It was a response that had been grafted onto my bones as a child: that weak people get hurt and strong people get even.

Besides the little I remembered about meeting them when I was a child, I never gave much thought to my sisters’ parents, but now they were becoming a confounding factor I could not ignore.

I had always told myself that adoption was a kind of triple-win scenario—birth families relieve the pressure of a child they are unable to care for, adoptive families gain a much wanted child, child gains a stable, loving family—but I was beginning to see that there was a flipside. There can be no winners without losers. So in a triple-win, there must be a related triple-loss. Once adoption was on the table, everyone has already lost—lineage, origin, the vision of the future lives they thought they would live—and all our losses were attached to someone else’s gain in an endless, confusing loop.

Rebekah’s father did not steal my sister from me anymore than I planned to steal his daughter from him. But my regaining my sister was directly related to the anguish he felt at being left behind. And my sadness at having lived this far in my life without Rebekah was linked to his having raised her in the first place. So my face became the image he attached his pain to. And his was the symbol for my grief.