Just Mercy: A Novel (13 page)

TWENTY-ONE

It was well past dusk and the dinner dishes washed, dried and put away as Bernadette and Marty lingered over cups of decaf coffee at the kitchen table.

“Annie took it pretty well,” Bernadette said.

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Marty said.

“Don’t worry, I’m not counting on her help.”

He stood up and pushed in his chair. Then he leaned down behind her and nuzzled his nose into the curve of her neck. “Come to bed,” he whispered.

“I want to do a few things first,” she said as she stood up. “You go on ahead.”

The crestfallen look on Marty’s face compounded the guilt already churning inside her. She pushed it aside and kissed him full on the lips, then strode over to the kitchen sink, turned the water on, and set about rinsing out their cups. “I won’t be long,” she called over her shoulder.

She waited until she heard his footsteps in the bedroom above the kitchen and then slid open the drawer to retrieve the piece of paper on which Maxine Blackwell had written the names and birthdates of her children. She brought her laptop to the table and clicked on the web browser icon. For good luck, she lit a candle.

“Damn it,” she said when she realized she couldn’t decipher Maxine’s writing. Thinking that having more light might help, she brought a reading lamp over from the counter and plugged it in. She squinted at the little squiggles of handwriting, her fingers positioned on the keyboard like swimmers ready to dive into a pool. When the Google search space flashed on the screen, she typed in
Timmy Blackwell, DOB June 16, 1977.
She hit the return key and a daunting 300,000 results popped up.

She scrolled down the list until she came to one that said
We found Timmy Blackwell, current phone, address, age and more.
She clicked on it. The People Search site had found Timmy Blackwell, all right, eighteen of them, but only one was even close to the age Rae’s brother Timmy would be now, and that one had never lived in Texas.

“Not likely,” she muttered as she forged ahead anyway, charging $14.95 to her credit card for an in-depth follow-up search. It confirmed that this was not the Timmy Blackwell she was looking for, just as she’d suspected.

She repeated the process for Anthony and Jenny Blackwell, plodding through exhaustive lists of names and charging over a hundred dollars to her credit card for in-depth searches that resulted in only one dubious possibility—and even that one turned out to be a dead end. Since Maxine had given Rae’s youngest brother up at birth without naming him, she knew it was hopeless to even try to search for the baby.

Fighting exhaustion, she rolled her head around and stretched her neck from side to side. She looked at her watch. It was two o’clock. She grabbed a can of Diet Coke from the refrigerator and gulped it down while staring at the computer screen and wondering what to do next. A long, drawn out burp moved up her windpipe and out of her mouth, along with the realization of what she had been doing wrong.

“Good lord!” She slapped her forehead. What had she been thinking? If Rae’s siblings were adopted, they would no longer be named Blackwell. They would have been issued new birth certificates showing the adoptive parents’ names as their mothers and fathers. Like when they had adopted Veronica. Had she become so obsessed with all this that she’d lost her ability to think straight?

She dropped her head onto the table and moaned. All that time and energy. Wasted. For nothing. She went over to the sink and splashed cold water on her face, then stepped out onto the deck and breathed in the fresh night air. That’s when it occurred to her that not finding Rae’s siblings under the name of Blackwell might actually be good news. It could mean that they
had
been adopted. But without knowing their new names, how could she ever hope to find them?

She went back into the kitchen, sat down at the computer, and typed in
How to find an adoptee when all the information you have is a birth date?
She scrolled down the first ten pages of 48,000 results until she came to the one that seemed to be the most promising: How to Find Someone Who was Adopted (An Adoptee) with Limited Information. She clicked on it twice for good measure.

In order to find an adoptee
, the text at the top of the web page said,
there are three things you will need: persistence, a bit of luck, and stubbornness.

She grinned—so far, so good—and read on.

If you know only the birthdate and the state in which the adoptee was adopted, don’t be discouraged.

Even better.

Most people stay in the same state and can be found by acquiring a birth date search by sex for that particular state.

Okay then, all she had to do was find the birth date search engines. There were several such websites for Texas, some free, some not. She tried all of them, entering over and over again each child’s name, gender, birth date, mother’s name, and birthplace—Austin being her best guess since she hadn’t thought to ask Maxine Blackwell that question.

She didn’t know how much time it took, but it must have been a lot because when she finally stopped and moved her neck, it sounded like walnuts cracking. She walked stiff-legged over to the counter, reached up into the cupboard for a glass, and popped a couple of Advil. Back at the table, she picked up the box of matches and passed it from hand to hand, then slowly opened it. She took out a match and held it between her thumb and index finger. She stared at it, imagined lighting a cigarette, inhaling, and blowing out smoke rings in a string of perfection the way she used to when she was a chain smoker, back in her college days. Good lord. She hadn’t had the slightest craving for a cigarette since she quit in her mid-twenties, but right now the idea of smoking sounded awfully good to her, too good.

She touched the match head against the striking surface on the side of the box and moved it briskly across the surface until it ignited. The flame beckoned to her. With one hand cupped around it, she watched it flicker until it burned her fingers. She blew it out and let the charred remains of the match drop onto the table.

The instructions about how to find an adoptee with limited information called out to her from the computer screen. What could she do but follow?

What you need is a search angel, someone experienced in looking for adoptees in your state.

She leaned forward. This just might be the answer. The instructions referred her to another site, and then another, and yet another, until she came to a website for a search angel in northeast Texas. Plump babies bounced across the screen on pastel pink and blue clouds while rescue angels played harps and sang for them. In the foreground flashed the words

Hello, my name is Hannah Newcastle and I am an adoption search angel and an adoptee myself.

This was followed by a story about how Hannah had helped a man in his seventies with terminal cancer find his two sisters before he died. Even though it turned out that her angel experience was limited to that one case in one small town, Bernadette nonetheless composed and sent a lengthy email to Hannah Newcastle asking for her help.

By the time she finished, streaks of pale blue, white and pink bands were brightening the sky outside the kitchen window. She felt her anxiety rise along with the rising sun.

“Just one more,” she whispered as she clicked on the website for another adoption registry service. How could she quit now?

Just fill out a search form and it is forwarded to a team of search angels who are very generous and helpful people with a lot of skills and experience in conducting adoptee and birth-parent searches in your state.

Her heart beat faster. Maybe this was it. She typed in all the information she had about Rae’s siblings on the form and clicked the Send button.

“Bernie, what are you doing?” The strands of baby hair poking out from the top of Marty’s head didn’t match the scolding-parent look on his face.

Like a child caught with her hand in the cookie jar, Bernadette slapped the lid of the laptop down.

“Were you up all night?”

“I didn’t mean to be.”

“You need to stop this, Bernie.”

She stared at the lump of wax that was once a candle in the middle of the table, realizing she knew nothing more now than when she had lit it. She dropped her head into her hands. What was she doing? Why was she being so obsessive about this? But even as she asked herself that question, she knew the reason she couldn’t stop: because she had to do something, and this was the only thing left to do.

TWENTY-TWO

The title of what promised to be an inane teen movie scrolled across the flat TV screen as Annamaria snuggled closer to Patty on the couch and thought about what her daughter had just said, that she would feel better if she helped her mom. Maybe she could at least give her some legal information related to searching for adoptees. What could it hurt? Nothing was going to stop her, anyway, why not humor her? And it would be something she could do for Dad. Besides, with the execution now rescheduled, this whole nightmare was soon going to be over for good.

Annamaria tried to get into the movie, but she found the star—an insipid girl who fell in love with a bad boy who, of course, was incapable of loving anyone—to be as tiresome as the plot. Still, when the movie reached its predictable tearjerker ending, Annamaria savored the way Patty laid her head on her breast for comfort.

Much later, she crept into her daughter’s room and sat down on the chair next to her bed. Patty was sound asleep, her fingers curling into the palm of her hand next to her face, her thumb forming a dimple in her cheek. Patty’s soft, gentle breath tickled Annamaria’s ear when she leaned over to kiss the knuckles on her daughter’s hand. She kissed Patty’s upturned nose before tiptoeing from the room, careful to dodge the items of clothing scattered across the polished hardwood floor.

Across the hall, her own spacious white bedroom—which she usually considered well suited to her proclivity for order over chaos—seemed sterile tonight compared to the cluttered energy of Patty’s cozy and colorful room. As Annamaria undressed and washed up, she realized that her evening with Patty must have softened her toward her mom, because right now she felt more of a need to understand her than to fix her. If she could figure out the motivation for her mom’s latest antics, then maybe she could make some sense out of helping her. Doing it for Dad wasn’t enough of a reason unless, of course, it would make his cancer go away. But unlike Fin, she had never cottoned to that kind of magical thinking.

Annamaria believed there was always a logical reason for one’s behavior. There had to be. In fact, the essence of what made her a good lawyer was her ability to figure out why people did what they did. She got into bed, asking herself why her mom had such an urgent need to search for the offspring of the idiot who spawned Veronica’s murderer, knowing that sleep would elude her until she found a satisfying answer to that question. It was tempting to throw up her hands and write her mom off as crazy, but she couldn’t do that. Her mom might be a lot of things when she set her mind on something—more loving than God and clever as a fox were the first two that came to mind—but crazy was not one of them.

There were times, of course, when her mom seemed insane, like when she tried to fix things she had no business or hope of fixing. But her motivation, once you understood it, had never been crazy. So could it be that all her mom was trying to do was somehow atone for the rough life Veronica’s murderer had had by helping her before she died? No, that would imply that people committed murder because life had been unfair to them, and her mom would never, ever accept excuses for bad behavior like that. No one knew that as well as Annamaria did from her own experiences as a teenager. She remembered one time in particular when she had been grounded.

“It’s not fair!” she had screamed.

“The punishment fits the crime, young lady,” her mom had answered.

“But Bill asked me to the dance a long time ago.”

“You should have thought of that before.”

“He’ll never ask me out again. I just know it.”

“If he likes you, one dance won’t change that.”

“So what do I say when he shows up tonight?”

“You haven’t told him?”

“I can’t.”

“Well, young lady, you need to call him right now and tell him you’re grounded. Go ahead and blame it on me.”

Annamaria remembered how hopeful she had been when she saw the pained look in her mom’s eyes then, the way her hand had trembled as she handed her daughter the telephone.

“Please, Mom.”

But she hadn’t backed down. Not even when Annamaria ran to her room, threw herself on her bed, and let out the loudest, highest-pitched wail she could muster. Later that night, though, her mom had come back to Annamaria’s bedroom with an apologetic look on her face and a bowl of popcorn, asking if she wanted to watch a late-night movie on TV with her.

So that was it. That was the answer.
Mom felt guilty then, and she feels guilty now.
If her mom was still opposed to the death penalty, like she said she was, then she’d have to feel guilty about supporting it in Raelynn Blackwell’s case, wouldn’t she? It all made sense now. That’s why she searched for Maxine Blackwell and, after that, for information about her children. She was just trying to find a way to live with herself. Who could blame her for that?

Something new came over Annamaria then, almost a sense of admiration for her mom. In spite of her moral opposition to the death penalty, Bernadette was being true to her principle that the punishment should fit the crime. And in the case of Raelynn Blackwell, she was absolutely right that it did. Annamaria yawned, pulled the covers up to her chin, and fell asleep.

TWENTY-THREE

The bedroom was cool, almost chilly, a sure sign that Marty had readjusted the temperature on the air-conditioner again. The next-door children were screaming outside the window, squirting each other with the hose, a signal that it was way past time for her to get out of bed. But Bernadette was glad she’d slept longer than she meant to because the more rested she was, the more clearly she could think. She threw on an old tee shirt and jean shorts with an elastic waistband and hurried downstairs.

Things on the kitchen table were just as she’d left them: her laptop, the slip of paper with the names and birthdates of Rae’s siblings, the lump of wax, the opened box of matches. A message on a three-by-five card, in Marty’s almost illegible handwriting, was perched on top of the computer. “Went to the mall,” it said. “Need new running shoes.”

Bernadette looked out the window at the bright crimson hibiscus flowers in the back yard. The flawless blue sky beckoned to her, and she decided to fix a bowl of yogurt with granola, raisins, apples, and brown sugar and take it and her coffee out on the deck. But just then the telephone rang and she saw the number on the caller ID. It was Annamaria.

She was careful to answer in a calm voice, to not sound too pushy or eager. If Annamaria had decided to help her, Bernadette didn’t want to give her any excuse to change her mind by saying something to set her off.

“I did some research, Mom.”

Bernadette grabbed the pad of paper that said
Proud Grandmother of Patty
across the top and searched for a pen in the drawer.

“Here’s the problem,” Annamaria said. “All protective services and adoption records are confidential.”

“I
know
that.” Is that why Annamaria called, just to tell her what she already knew? Was it too much to hope that she had new information?

“So you need a court order to get any records released.”

“Okay. So I get one.”

“You can’t.”

“Come on, Annie.”

“You don’t have good cause.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Good luck getting any court to agree. You’re not even related by birth.”

“What if I were?”

“Don’t be silly. You’re not.”

“What if the biological mother requests the information?”

“She’d have to have good cause, too.”

“Good Lord, the woman is dying. Doesn’t she have the right to at least know whether her own children were adopted or not?”

“Not if her parental rights were terminated, she doesn’t.”

Bernadette wished she knew if that’s what Maxine Blackwell meant when she said she had given up her children. She bit her bottom lip, kicking herself for not asking more questions when she was in Killeen. “What if her rights weren’t terminated?” she asked.

“Then her children couldn’t have been put up for adoption.”

“How do I find out?”

“Well, if it was an involuntary termination, there would be court records. And before an adoption can be finalized, there should be a notice in the newspaper searching for the birth father. But just so you know: I’m not going to go looking for either of those, and neither should you.”

“Come on, Annie, stay with me, okay?”

“I’m trying.”

“Just tell me what a birth mother has to do if she wants to find out what happened to her children.”

“Look, Mom, that’s all on the Internet. But the best thing you can do is just tell Maxine Blackwell you couldn’t find any information.”

“So your lawyerly advice is that I should lie.” Bernadette knew that sounded sarcastic, but she didn’t care. She was beginning to wonder if Annamaria had done any research at all.

“I’m saying you should tell her you tried.”

“I guess my search angel team will have to help me. I’ve already requested one.”

“Good luck with that.” Annamaria went on to tell her it was ridiculous to think that strangers could just walk in off the street and get confidential information. She persisted in throwing out one more piece of discouraging information after another until Bernadette had no choice but to think she had called to dissuade her rather than to help.

“You tried, Mom,” Annamaria finally concluded. “You can quit now.”

Not if I can help it,
Bernadette thought, but she kept it to herself because she didn’t want to end the conversation on a sour note. No matter how useless the information Annamaria gave her was, at least she’d bothered to call. She guessed she could thank her daughter for that.

“How’s Dad?” Annamaria asked after an awkward silence.

“Your dad’s going to be fine, Annie.”

“You better be right about that.”

“Aren’t I always right?”

“Your granddaughter sure thinks so.”

“Then it must be true.”

With some goodwill restored, Bernadette said goodbye—making sure to say “I love you, Annie” before hanging up. She slid open the sliding glass door and stepped outside. She settled down in a shaded deck chair to review what Annamaria had told her and was happy to discover that her lawyer daughter had given her some new leads in spite of herself.