Somebody Else's Daughter (23 page)

Willa gathered her tallit around her shoulders, pushing her hair over to one side so that it undulated like fire down her arm. Over the years, her hair had darkened and it was full and thick. Candace glanced at Willa's face as she sang a prayer in Hebrew. Her voice was sweet and fine—it made Candace proud. Unlike Candace, her daughter didn't question her faith. It was simply a trait, like her hair or her long tapered fingers. It belonged to her. Gratefully, Willa didn't seem overly concerned about her biological roots, but Candy sensed it wouldn't last. As her daughter grew older, she would want to know more. It was only natural. They had told Willa that her birth parents had been young and unprepared to raise a child, and they'd answered her questions when she had them, but Candace knew it might not be enough. On the day Willa came into their lives, her biological father had handed Candy an envelope. This was after the mother had died, after the coroner had taken the body away. To this day she could not remember the man's name—she'd blocked it out—but he'd sat out in the car for over an hour. At the time, Candace had worried that he'd changed his mind. Eventually, he came to the door holding an envelope. “I wrote this for her,” he'd said. “Give it to her when she turns sixteen. She'll probably need it by then.” He'd looked at her, a young's man's face that was already old. “Will you do that?” She'd promised that she would.

But she hadn't. Willa had turned sixteen last November; she would be seventeen in less than two months.

Although she'd wanted to, she'd never opened the envelope. Instead, she and Joe had put it in the safe and tried to forget about it. And for a long time they did. Willa was such a good, sweet baby, an easy baby, and those first few weeks Candace rarely put her down— Joe had to coax the infant out of her arms. In her happiness, Candace decided that perhaps there was a God after all. He had finally come around for her, and this child, this miracle, was His apology for all those years she had suffered.

Early in their marriage, when they'd tried to conceive, Candace had somehow known it wouldn't happen. As a result, their intimate life was overshadowed by a burgeoning sense of failure. They went to doctors, a fertility specialist, even an acupuncturist, but none of it worked. In her mind, she believed it was her own fault. God was punishing her for her past. The films she had made for Joe, although they were few, and the awful things that her foster brothers had done to her, when she was still a child. In the great court of heaven, God had deliberated the evidence, then pounded his gavel and cried:
Your womb is a gutter! A gutter full of dirty things! Your womb is not suitable for an infant!

Then a friend of Joe's, an adoption lawyer, heard about a baby out in California. The lawyer's brother was a doctor in an AIDS clinic— miraculously, the baby showed no signs of having the disease. They deliberated and Joe convinced her. Arrangements were made; the birth parents requested to drive the infant there themselves—it was highly unusual—generally there was a third party—but, considering the mother's ill health, they agreed to it. Since the baby was already three months old, Joe and Candace promised to keep her name. Candace could remember borrowing the Willa Cather book from the library and reading it through the night without stopping. After she'd finished it, she'd decided that she liked the idea of the child being named for a woman with a powerful voice and even now it pleased her whenever she spoke the name aloud. It had happened so fast, so suddenly. One day they were childless, the next day they were not. They'd rushed out to buy a crib, a car seat. Tiny little clothes. Musical toys. She had wandered the aisles of the baby store with the light-headed fascination of an astronaut on the moon.

It had rained that day. When their car pulled up, she'd run out with an umbrella, her feet getting soaked. She didn't care—she would walk a thousand miles in the pouring rain just to have that child in her arms. Her love for Willa had already bloomed. It had stretched out inside her like some kind of beautiful flower. But still, in those first moments after they'd arrived, in the time it took to get to their car, she felt completely alone, more alone than she'd ever felt, and consumed with doubt. She didn't know if she could
be
a mother, if she could be
this child's
mother. She was terrified. Joe had come up behind her and she could hear him saying something to her, muttering instructions, and there was the shock of the white sky and the awful rain and the strange car in their driveway and the shadows up front, where the woman sat, unmoving. And then the door opened and the man got out, stretching like it had been a long drive, and he gave Candy a little wave, unconcerned about the raindrops splattering on his forehead and running down his face, and then wordlessly, stoically, he took the infant out of the car and brought her up under his chin the way you'd hold a kitten, as if he was breathing her in for the very last time. And then he handed her to Candace and she felt this warmth—a feeling so strong it was like the breath of God pushing through her, and she knew, right then, that it was meant to be.

The lawyer had told her they were junkies, but even at the time it had seemed an ungenerous description, because she could sense in the father a certain dignity and intelligence and pride. The father worked part time in construction and he was built that way, wiry and strong and tall and he had that particular electric energy that drug addicts get, teetering on the cold edge of need, and she remembered the sleeves of his borrowed suit were too short. He had the same lovely color to his hair that Willa had now, like the leaves outside, reddish brown. And the eyes of a sailor, gray as the ocean in winter. Their eyes had met only once, she recalled, when he'd handed her the baby:
Take care of her
.

And she had nodded that she would.

Over the years, especially when Willa was little, people would squint at her face, comparing her features to Candace's and Joe's, and they'd make that irritating, humming sound of confusion and say, “Let's see, who does she look like?” To which they'd respond, “Willa's adopted. She looks like herself.” And the person, chagrined, would reply, “
Well,
isn't
that
nice!”

Inevitably, whenever she told people that Willa was adopted there was a pause—not necessarily an awkward one—maybe
thoughtful
was a better word. And people generally felt the need to express their feelings about it. Some were naive enough to ask what had prompted them to adopt.
How good of you to take a stranger's child into your hearts,
some would say, as though it were a kind of pitiable charity
. What a marvelous thing adoption is. It's so wonderful.
But underlying the sentiment they never let you forget that you were raising someone else's baby. It was a subtlety that seemed to separate her from the other mothers, even now. And it wasn't only evident in conversation. Often the newspapers would print the phrase
adoptive parents
or
the adopted child of . . .
which burned Candy up. Willa was
her
daughter, no one else's—and
she
was Willa's mother—the whole adoption thing had become irrelevant.

Filled with sudden emotion, she inched her hand over and took hold of Willa's and squeezed, but Willa gave her an imploring look, apparently mortified:
What's your problem?
So Candace let go, reminding herself not to take it personally. Adopted or not, Willa was a teenager. She was supposed to disparage her mother.

The minute they got into the car after services, Willa took off her heels and stockings and put on her high-tops. On the way home, they stopped for apples—it was Joe's idea. Candace stayed in the car while Joe and Willa went up the hill into the orchard, pulling apples off the trees. She watched them climb the hill, eating apples as they went, and she wished now that she had joined them. She imagined running barefoot through the wet, muddy grass, the feeling of the cool grass under her feet. She watched them for a long time, weaving in and out of the trees, laughing, filling up their bags, until the afternoon sun became so bright that she had to look away.

20

They would talk in the van. Mr. Heath would look at her in the rearview mirror and she would look at him and she imagined that she could see beneath his headmaster's façade into the person underneath. They talked about all sorts of things. He confided in her, she thought. He trusted her. The idea of him whirled up in her dreams. Sometimes she'd imagine him touching her, recalling the way he'd brushed her knee that night in his car, by accident of course, when he'd opened the glove compartment. It had sent a thrill up her leg, like the sting of a yellow jacket. Sometimes, when she was bored, she'd try to imagine him with Mrs. Heath. She would bet Mrs. Heath didn't give blow jobs. God Forbid! Willa knew she was no expert, but she couldn't imagine a man who would refuse that. In a way, it made her feel a little sorry for him, having a wife like Mrs. Heath. He was trapped, he'd told her, like a mime in a glass box.

Ada had been bugging Willa about helping her paint her room. She made it seem like Willa owed it to her, not as a favor, but as a payback. Why she owed Ada, Willa didn't know, but she thought it might have something to do with Teddy Squire, who obviously liked Willa better. Ada wanted to paint each wall a different color, something Willa's mother would never allow. Ada was not especially creative, and whereas she did better in the regular classes, Willa always did better in art. Willa felt sorry for her because her parents were weird and because she wasn't pretty and tended to put on weight. Plus, Ada had a mean streak. She was the kind of person who fought for things regardless of whether or not she wanted them. It was the competition that drove her, the idea of winning, and when it seemed like a futile pursuit, she'd get depressed and go on an eating binge. When she'd found out that Willa had gotten the Sunrise Internship, she'd stopped speaking to her for three days. Later, she'd admitted to Willa that she'd eaten four boxes of Yodels and a bag of beef jerky before throwing up.

Their house smelled faintly of cigarettes and something else, dirt maybe. In Ada's room, they painted one wall yellow, one pink, one blue. Ada's mother didn't use a decorator like Willa's mother did. Ada's room was small and messy. She had a double bed, lumpy with tattered, defected stuffed animals. Her closet door was plastered with pages from magazines, another thing her own mother did not allow, and the boy from Polo, the enormously cute one, was smack in the middle. He was the boy Willa had chosen when they were looking through magazines, picking out who they wanted to marry one day, but it was Ada who'd put him on her wall.

He was probably gay anyway.

“You like?” Ada held up a new pair of earrings. They were pretty, but Willa didn't wear dangly earrings. She thought they were trashy, but said, “Nice.” She only wore posts, tiny black stones. They did their nails and Willa told Ada what she'd done to Teddy Squire. Ada only shrugged as if she didn't care, as if she was above it, but Willa figured she was jealous. She used Ada's bathroom and saw that it was filthy with little hairs all over the place and all of Ada's beauty products, none of which Willa recognized. Ada bought most of her beauty supplies at the drugstore, whereas Willa bought hers at Gatsby's. Willa had a Mason Pearson hairbrush, like all the models, and used Kiehl's, and she'd had her own personal scent designed by a perfume company in the city. Her skin was better than Ada's, and her mother was prettier too and knew so much more about clothes and makeup and style than Mrs. Heath did, whose skirts hung down her hips like a pillowcase.

She heard Ada downstairs, fixing a snack. She glanced into the Heaths' bedroom and saw an unmade bed, books scattered across the floor, dirty clothes piled up on a chair. In contrast, her parents' bedroom was always neat, the bed always made, the small pillows her mother's decorator had ordered from Turkey strategically placed.

Downstairs in the kitchen, Ada had put out chips and salsa. They sat together at the table pigging out. As they ate, Willa couldn't help wondering if Ada was going to make herself throw up afterward. The kitchen was messy, dishes in the sink. There were some plants on the windowsill that needed watering. Willa's kitchen was always spotless, thanks to Argentina, their housekeeper. After they ate, Ada said, “I'll be right back,” and went up to her room. Willa figured she was going to throw up. It made her queasy. She sat there, waiting. She leafed through an L.L. Bean catalog. A few of the women's items had been circled with pen: a pink cardigan, a pair of woolen clogs, a dorky pair of khakis. A car drove up and parked and a minute later Mrs. Heath came through the door in her pillowcase skirt, flushed and rumpled. Willa closed the catalog and put it back where she'd found it while Mrs. Heath hung up her coat and her keys and bustled in. “How nice to see you, Willa,” she said.

“You too.” Willa smiled brightly.

“Where's Ada?”

“She's upstairs.”
Puking her brains out. It isn't easy having a mother who's two sizes smaller! How could you be so cruel?

Her mother looked confused, then called up the stairs, “Ada!”

Willa heard the growl of the flushing toilet. A moment later Ada appeared on the stairs. Aside from the fact that her eyes looked teary, you couldn't tell if she'd done it or not.
Your fingertips are yellow.

“Willa's helping me paint my room,” she told her mother.

“That's very nice of you, Willa,” Maggie Heath said. “I've heard some very good things about your work this year. Congratulations on the Sunrise Internship by the way.”

“Thank you.”

“I imagine you've been working especially hard.”

“Yes, ma'am.”