Even Now (2 page)

And a thank you to God Almighty, the greatest author of all — the Author of Life. The gift is yours. I pray I might have the incredible opportunity and responsibility to use it for You all the days of my life.

Christmas 2006

It was time.

Emily Anderson had waited all her life for this moment.

The box on the floor in front of her held the hope of a lifetime . . .
her
lifetime. Inside could be a window, a glimpse, a pathway to the past, to a time still littered with question marks. But what if it wasn’t? What if it was nothing?

For a moment Emily could only sit, stone still, and stare at it. Doubts gathered around her like summer storm clouds. This was her last chance. If the box held only high school mementoes, framed photographs, and old stuffed animals, then she’d know she’d reached her final dead end.

And barring a miracle, her search for her parents would be over.

She laid her hands on the dusty cardboard top and traced her fingers across the words.
Lauren’s Things.
The box would be nearly nineteen years old now.

A lump stuck in her throat and she swallowed, forcing it down. “Mom . . . ” she stared at her mother’s name. “Did you leave me a trail?” She closed her eyes and hugged the box. “Please, God, let there be something here.”

Downstairs her grandparents were fixing dinner. They’d given her this time. Her tender old papa had found the worn box in the garage stashed away in a cobwebbed corner with a dozen other forgotten cartons. He had known how much it would mean to her, how long she’d been waiting for a breakthrough like this.

“Emily, honey,” he’d told her when she came home from college that day. “This belonged to your mother.” He held the box in his hands. As tall as she was, she still felt tiny next to him. He had to look around the brown edges of the box to see her. “I’ll take it to your room. You’ll need some time.”

Indeed.

She opened her eyes and stared at the box, hard and long, drilling imaginary holes through the flimsy cardboard. As if maybe she could see inside before she tore into it and found out for sure. Panic tap-danced around her, and she grabbed two quick breaths. What if she went through the whole thing and found no clues at all? Two more breaths.
Come on
,
Emily. Exhale.
She tightened her middle, pursed her lips, and blew out.
God
,
get me through this. There has to be something.

How many times had she prayed for a clue or a sign? A trail that would lead her to her parents, even for a day? Then she could ask them why they’d left and how come they never cared to find out what happened to their little girl?

Emotion flooded her, tightening her throat, closing her eyes. Memories rushed back like forgotten classmates — hateful ones, who used to laugh when you weren’t picked at recess.

Suddenly she was in kindergarten again, at the Mother’s Day luncheon. She and the other boys and girls had made place mats with bright green handprints and pretty painted flowers coming from the top of every finger. They sang a song, and Emily could hear their young, off-key voices booming out, “Thanks for all you do . . . Mommy, I love you!”

As with everything around Mother’s Day, Emily directed the words to her grandma.

Even back then, she’d known. She was the only kindergartner without a mother. The only one whose mommy left when she was just a few weeks old. Now she watched her kindergarten self as the memory of what happened next played back, every painful detail intact . . .

“Grandma,” she asked, “where is my mommy? Do you know?”

Her grandmother got sort of nervous. “No, sweetie. Papa and I tried to find her but, well, we haven’t had any luck.”

Emily had felt suddenly lost. Like the day she was at the park and couldn’t find her papa. Then an idea came to her. She smoothed her fancy dress and swung her legs, setting her patent-leather shoes in motion. “Maybe
I
could find her!”

“Honey.” Her grandma patted her hair. “I don’t think she wants to be found.”

And that was that.

Emily drew a shuddering breath, relieved that the memory was over. But on its heels came another. The time she was thirteen and all of eighth grade was getting “the talk.”

“I feel funny talking about girl stuff in school,” she told one of her friends at lunch that day. “Seems like it should be private.”

“So talk to your mom.” The friend smiled. “Moms are great for that.”

The emptiness and loss were so terrible, Emily felt like an actual hole in her heart, a hole so thorough she bet her friend could see straight through her. That afternoon, Emily went home and made a promise.

Someday
,
I’m going to find my parents. No matter what.

Emily brushed a hand across her face, as though she could free her mind from the haunting thoughts. She opened her eyes and stared at the box.

Eventually her grandparents got Internet access. After that there were days of typing in her mother’s name — L-a-u-r-e-n A-n-d-e-r-s-o-n — and searching through lists of schoolteachers and scientists and track stars, but never — not in all the thousand entries that popped up, making her breathless with possibility — did she find her mother. Same with her dad. She’d spent hopeless afternoons looking for him any way she could imagine.

And now, at eighteen, she was no closer to finding them than when she first started. What she wanted — what she’d
always
wanted — was the truth. Because the sketchy details she knew made up barely a handful of dots. Nowhere near enough to connect.

Cobwebs stuck to the top of the box, and Emily brushed them off. She let her hands rest on the old, worn carton, wondering. Could it be? Did this box hold the secrets — secrets that would answer the questions that had haunted Emily all her life?

Why did her mother leave? Where was she? Why hadn’t she been in touch since she ran away? Had her parents ever connected again?

She gripped the top of the box. Maybe . . . maybe she was about to discover enough pieces to put together a trail.

And maybe the trail would lead her to the story.

She couldn’t wait another minute as she opened the side flaps. It was really happening; she was about to see her mother’s things, touch them and read them and breathe them in. Her heart beat so hard and fast she wondered if her grandparents could hear it downstairs.

She peered inside. The first few items were framed photographs of her parents. Emily reached in, lifting them with careful fingers. Beneath them were yearbooks and folded handwritten letters. Emily’s heart jumped. Hours of exploration stretched before her. As she pulled out the contents of the box, she lay each item on her bed, staring at it even as she reached for the next item.

Did the letters hold declarations of love from her dad to her mom, maybe words that explained the feelings they had for each other or their plans for after their baby was born? She would read them later. For now she had to keep digging, because she had to make it through the entire box, just in case.

In case the answers lay somewhere near the bottom.

She reached back into the carton and pulled out another layer of pictures and photo albums, and two-thirds of the way down, a tattered stuffed bear. Only after the bear was removed did she see something that caused her loud, demanding heart to jerk to a silent halt.

Journals. Eight . . . maybe ten of them. And beneath those, what looked like notebooks, dozens of notebooks.

Emily rifled through the carton, collecting the journals and placing them on the bed next to the photos, yearbooks, and letters. Then she pulled out the first notebook and opened it. The pages were a little warped and yellowed, filled with page after page of narrative and dialogue. Emily scanned the text and caught her breath.

She’d found it. A missing piece.

Her mother was a writer! She set that notebook on the bedspread and reached for another. This one was thicker, and on the front someone — her mother probably — had written, “
Lauren loves Shane.”
Emily stared at the words and felt the sting of tears in her eyes. Her hands trembled and she ran her thumb over the words.

She slid further back on the bed, until she was leaning against the wall. She propped a pillow behind her and settled in. The clues she’d been hunting for all her life had to be here, buried somewhere between the paper covers of these spiral-bound notebooks. In the stories her mother had written, the stories she’d left behind.

Tales of her parents’ love. Maybe the story of their loss. And perhaps even the reason why they’d gone away and left their baby to live without them.

Biting her lip, Emily turned the page.

And then, carefully so as not to miss a single detail, she began to read.

March 12, 1988

The death of a friendship was usually slow and insidious, like the wearing away of a hillside after years of too much rain. A handful of misunderstandings, a season of miscommunication, the passing of time, and where once stood two women with a dozen years of memories and tears and conversation and laughter — where once stood two women closer than sisters — now stood two strangers.

But Angela Anderson had no time to consider those things, no warning that such a death was about to occur. Because her friendship with Sheila Galanter died a sudden death the afternoon of March 12, 1988, in the time it took Angela to say a single sentence:

“Lauren wants to keep the baby.”

That was it. The look on Sheila’s face said it all.

Angela’s teenage daughter, Lauren, had been in love with Sheila’s son, Shane, since the kids were ten years old. Both families were Chicago upper crust with healthy six-figure incomes, known in all the right circles across the city, prominent members at the most elite clubs. Their husbands owned a bank together, and by all estimates the kids’ futures were figured out.

On afternoons when Angela and Sheila bared their hearts, snickering about the pompous women they knew, planning trips to London, and complaining about the five pounds they’d gained over the holidays, they sometimes dreamed about their children’s future. The engagement that would likely come after college, the ring, and, of course, the wedding.

Then, to leave room for the kids to make up their own minds, they’d laugh about how silly they were and let the dreams pass. But as the years wore on, Shane grew smitten with Lauren, and there seemed more truth than silliness to the possibility. When the kids started their junior year in high school, Shane had — between baseball games — started referring to the impending wedding.

“After I marry your daughter,” he’d tell Angela and her husband, Bill, “the four of us can vacation in Mexico.” Or he’d look at his own parents and say, “Where should we have the reception?”

Shane’s pretentious statements made Lauren blush and kept the adults amused, but secretly every one of them believed it would happen. That one day, sometime after the kids finished university — probably at Wheaton College — after Shane found his place at the family-owned First Chicago Trust, he and Lauren would marry. And the four of them — Angela and Bill, and Sheila and Samuel — would finish their years not only the best of friends and business partners, but family. Family in every sense of the word.

The bombshell came the day before Christmas.

Lauren and Shane called a meeting after dinner. The talk was held at the Galanter house, and Sheila slipped a frozen pie in the oven for the occasion. Whatever the occasion might be.

Lauren looked thin and pale, her light blonde hair almost white against her black cable-knit sweater. “Shane and I . . . ” Her mouth hung open and she stared at her tennis shoes. “We have something to tell you.”

Shane sat next to her, holding her hand. Their knuckles were tight, their posture tense. Only then did Angela sense that whatever was coming couldn’t possibly be good. Shane slipped his arm around Lauren, shielding her. He was tall and dark and rugged looking, a product of his Greek heritage. Lauren seemed even more fair than usual next to him.

“What Lauren’s trying to say is — ” Shane ran his tongue along his lower lip; his voice trembled — “she’s pregnant. It was an accident, but it . . . ” He looked straight at his father. “It was an accident.”

Angela would never forget the silence that cloaked the room. She wanted to reach for Bill’s hand, but she didn’t dare move, couldn’t consider drawing a breath or trying to process the news. It was impossible. Shane and Lauren were good kids, kids who spent less time together than they did practicing their sports — Lauren her sprinting and Shane his pitching and throwing and hitting. They were raised in the church! Maybe they weren’t regular churchgoers, but the kids went to youth group every Wednesday, right? Wasn’t that supposed to count for something?

Across from the adults, Shane pulled Lauren close and whispered something near her ear. Their faces were masked in fear and shame.

As the first bit of air seeped through Angela’s teeth, she glanced at her friend. Sheila sat at an unnatural tilt, frozen. Next to her, Samuel dug his elbows into his knees and hung his head. But it was the look on Sheila’s face that caused a ripple of offense in Angela’s heart. Sheila was staring at Lauren, her eyes angry and intense, like two lasers drilling into Lauren’s being.

It wasn’t a look of shock or horror or sorrow. Rather it was a look of blame.

Sheila was the first to speak. “Well — ” she stood and smoothed the wrinkles in her dress slacks — “when is the . . . baby due?”

Shane blinked. “Uh . . . ” He looked at Lauren. “Mid-July, right?”

“Yes.” She tried to sit a little straighter, but she looked sick to her stomach. She crossed her arms over her midsection and leaned into Shane once more.

Angela wanted to go to her, take her in her arms, and rock away the hurt, like she used to when Lauren was little and came home sad after a hard day. But this was so much bigger. And with everyone watching, going to Lauren would only look like she approved of the situation somehow.
Honey
. Angela gripped the seat of the chair and stayed put, her eyes on Lauren.
Honey, I’m so sorry.