Switched at Birth: The True Story of a Mother's Journey (5 page)

I felt her relax beside me, felt the tension drain from her shoulders. She snuggled closer to me and I squeezed her tighter.

“And you will never be my J. Crew catalogue,” she said softly.

I took that for the compliment she’d intended it to be and laughed.

“You’re stuck with me, kid,” I whispered.

“Thank God,” she whispered back.

Five weeks and three days after finding out that our Bay had come home with us by accident, the hospital spokesperson (a generic term if ever I heard one) called the house. It was 9:15 on a Tuesday morning; I remember because I should have been halfway to my Bikram yoga class by then. But I wasn’t. The mood I’d been in for the last month hadn’t exactly been conducive to outside activities. Absently, my hand went to the limp ponytail at my neck. When had I last washed my hair?

We took the call in John’s den. He hit the button for speaker phone, and the counselor cut right to the chase.

“I have excellent news. We’ve found the other child.”

My stomach reacted in much the same way that it had two years ago when Bay dragged me onto the Rock ’n’ Rollercoaster at Disney World.

“Where is she?” I heard myself ask; my voice was shaking.

“Nearby, actually,” the counselor reported. There was a note of triumph in her tone, as though this fortunate proximity was somehow her doing.

“And when can we …,” I swallowed hard, “meet her?” The thought of being introduced to my own child put me back on the roller coaster—dead center in the upside-down and backward loop, to be precise.

“Soon.”

But I had been waiting and wondering for over a month, and soon did not sound soon enough for me.

“The hospital board will be meeting day after tomorrow to decide when you can—”

“Excuse me,” John interrupted. “Are you telling me that the hospital board is going to tell me when I can meet my own daughter?”

“It’s complicated, Mr. Kennish,” the counselor explained.

Before John could reply to that, I cleared my throat. “Can you tell us where she is, at least? Where she lives, exactly?”

There was a pause, followed by an evasive answer. “Missouri.”

Like “soon,” this told us nothing.

Struggling to maintain his cool, John asked, “Can you narrow that down?”

Of course she could. But she wasn’t about to.

“Nearby,” the counselor repeated. “As I said, it’s complicated. But we think … that is to say, we here at the hospital
feel
it would be best for all concerned if we keep that specific information to ourselves for the time being.”

Did she actually think I gave a rat’s patootie about how “they there at the hospital”
felt
? They there at the hospital were the ones who lost my daughter in the first place.

“This is ridiculous!” I shouted, leaning close to the speaker.

“I understand,” she assured me. “But we feel it’s for the best.”

“Fine,” John conceded with a roll of his eyes. “Just promise me you’ll call us the minute the board adjourns.”

“I will do that, sir. And thank you for your patience.”

John punched the “off” button and gave me a look. “It’s complicated,” he mimicked dryly.

I was on my feet now, stomping around John’s den, powered by pure adrenaline. “I can’t believe they won’t tell us where she lives! What do they think? That if they give us the address we’re going to just show up and take her home with us? Spirit her away in the middle of the night?”

It occurred to me that that was probably exactly what they thought.

“Kathryn …” My husband leaned back in his desk chair, a bemused expression on his face. “She’s nearby.”

I stopped pacing. I nodded, smiled. “She’s close,” I whispered, and reached up to wipe the tears from my cheeks. “John …”

“Yes?”

“I have to wash my hair.”

Ten minutes later, I was reveling in the silky sensation of shampoo in my hair. I had the shower head turned to “massage” and I’d let the water get extra hot, so the master bath was shrouded in a steamy mist.

It was in this dreamlike setting that I was hit with an incredible realization.

Somewhere—
nearby
—another mother had just received the same phone call I had.

Another mother had been told that her biological child had been located … which would likely seem exceedingly strange to her, since she hadn’t even known her child was missing.

I recalled a formula I’d learned back in tenth-grade chemistry:
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Now, somewhere nearby, a woman was waiting to meet Bay.

But then what? What would she expect? What would she be willing to give? And worse, what would she want to take?

Suddenly, the steamy cloud in my bathroom felt more like a cold, ominous fog, and even under the stream of hot water I felt a chill.

“Nearby” became the concept that consumed me. All I could think of was that if this child had been “nearby” all this time, maybe I’d seen her somewhere, maybe we’d crossed paths.

She could be living as close as the next town over. She could be as “nearby” as the next block. She could be living in the same school district! The girls had been born in the same hospital after all; evidently the family had stayed local, and there were only a handful of elementary schools in the area.

This thought had me searching my memory to recall if, over the course of Bay’s elementary school years, there had ever been another little girl in her class or grade whose birthday was October 22, 1995. Did I remember any drama about overlapping party dates? Had another mother ever sent in celebratory peanut-free birthday treats to be passed out during snack time on the same day that I had? No, Bay assured me. She’d always been the only kid whose name was block-lettered on the classroom birthday calendar for October 22.

All right, then maybe my missing child and her mystery mom had visited the same kid-friendly places my children and I had frequented over the years. I might have passed right by my daughter at the farmer’s market or sat beside her on the gym mat at Bay’s Mommy and Me music class. Was there a chance that, at some point in the last decade and a half, this little girl and Bay had needed new undershirts or colored pencils or tennis shoes at the same time? If so, she could have been at the mall riding the down escalator at the exact same moment that Bay and I had been riding the up one. We could have glided right past each other on our opposite shopping trajectories and never even known it.

Had she been there, right before my very eyes and I’d missed her? Had I been close enough to touch her and blown my chance?

John told me it was silly to even think like that. If, by some incredible coincidence, by some utterly random accident, I had encountered our missing daughter, it wouldn’t have mattered because I wouldn’t have even known I should be looking.

I said, “Don’t talk to me about incredible coincidences and random accidents, pal! I’m living in the eye of the storm of an incredibly coincidental random accident.”

He laughed, and once again I understood that testosterone is a major obstacle to the creative thought process.

The only thing I can compare those weeks to was the way I had felt when I was pregnant. It is a time, as any mother knows, that is characterized chiefly by an overwhelming sense of anticipation and wonder. With both my kids, I’d firmly instructed the doctor to keep his ultrasound findings to himself so I could experience that old-school sensation of hearing him announce, after my final, heroic push: “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!” I didn’t care which, as long as the words “healthy and normal,” followed closely thereafter. (This decision, by the way, irritated my mother to no end; she couldn’t understand why I would forgo the benefits of current technology, especially since the information would have been so helpful to her in purchasing the layette.)

But I liked the idea of the baby’s gender being the first news that he or she and I would hear together.

Anticipation, of course, has its downside. I tried not to listen to the “horror stories” of incompetent doctors, undetected congenital conditions, and errant umbilical cords. Because the truth is, although billions of women have billions of babies every single day, there is so much that can go wrong. So along with the pink-and-blue daydreams came the black-and-white nightmares—the panic, the worry, the knowledge that occasionally Mother Nature slipped up and this resulted in “complications.”

But then John would come home at the end of the day and place a big, loud smackeroo in the center of my enormous belly, and I’d forget the fear and jump ahead to hope.

And in those hopeful moments (which far outnumbered the panicky ones), pregnancy reminded me of a poem I read in college by Emily Dickinson: “I dwell in Possibility.” The whole world would be open for this little person I was carrying. I would tell myself, “He could be a surgeon; she could be president of the United States,” and then I would laugh at how colloquial and old-fashioned those plans sounded. “He could be a rock star; she could be a groundbreaking artist.”

All of these feelings were similar to the ones that soothed and assaulted me over those weeks of waiting to hear from the hospital. Just as I had as a young expectant mother, I was preparing to bring a new child into my family and into my heart.

Only this time, the child was going to be a full-fledged teenager, raised who-knows-where, by who-knew-whom.

So I didn’t just dwell in possibility.

I also dwelled in abject terror.

This is a confession:

The next day, the hospital called again to set up the meeting. It would take place in three days, back in the genetic counselor’s office where Part One of the “Switched at Birth” story had been told to us. The sequel would include two additional characters: my biological daughter and the woman who raised her.

I suspected they wanted to hold this meeting at the counselor’s office because they didn’t want what they feared could potentially become an unpleasant scene playing out on their turf, where anyone with a camera phone could make a bad situation worse. And by worse, I mean public.

I immediately called John at the car wash and told him. After that, like any well-organized Mission Hills mom, I wrote the date and time of this meeting on my kitchen calendar, and then I felt stupid because it was noted between the square where I’d written
change baking soda box in fridge
and the one that said,
book club
.

That night, I woke up holding a scream back in my throat.

My heart was racing. I was sweating and my hands shook as I slid out of bed and grabbed my bathrobe. I bit down hard on the shriek that was trying to release itself into the night.

“Call it off.”

That is what the scream wanted to say. Those were the words it was made of, the words that would have shattered the silence of my sleeping house if I had only opened my mouth and let them.

“Call it off.” I could call it off. I could cancel the meeting, tell the counselor, “Thank you anyway, but I’ve decided to keep my life. To keep my daughter all to myself. To let these enormously complicated bygones be bygones and go on as though nothing happened.”

I ran barefoot down the hall and pushed opened Bay’s bedroom door. She was, for once, not pulling a Facebook all-nighter. She was sleeping. Like a baby.

Like my baby.

I sat on the edge of the bed and shook her gently.

“Mom? What’s wrong?”

“We can call it off,” I whispered, taking her beautiful, sleepy face into my hands. “We don’t have to do it, Bay, we don’t have to. We can just call it all off.”

She looked at me, lost somewhere between wakefulness and dreams, lost in two worlds, and she tried to make sense of what I was saying to her.

“You don’t want to meet your biological daughter?”

No, it’s your biological mother I don’t want you to meet.
All I could manage in reply was a pathetic little shrug.

She sat up and gave a slow shake of her head. Her mass of onyx hair was a riotous tumble of glossy curls. Bay must have realized that I was trembling, because she tucked the blanket around me.

“We can call it off,” I said again.

“We can,” she agreed.

The night settled around us, like shards of broken glass, and I felt the silence cut me.

“But we can’t,” I said. “Can we?”

Bay shook her head.

Because to call it off, to change our minds and say, “You know what? Never mind. We’re just going to pretend this never happened and get on with our lives,” was simply not an option. These were wounds that needed to be cleansed; this was a gash that had to heal.

“Okay then,” I said softly.

And I went back to bed.

But I needed to tell you this, to confess to having had that moment, that cowardly, selfish urge to leave everything the way it was. I had been tempted to abandon my biological child and to prevent the one I already loved from having the chance to love someone other than me.

And I needed to tell you because it is evidence of something very, very important to the course of this journey....