The Search Angel (8 page)

T
here’s something wrong with me, she thinks, later that night. The teacups. The shortbread. Four years later. Throwing a graveside party every Sunday.

She goes about the process of unpacking her basket, dumps the cookie crumbs into the sink. Washes the old thermos. The saucers. The cups. Wipes them dry with one of the embroidered towels Marion made herself. She sets each piece carefully on a tray and slides it across the counter to its customary spot by the stove, safe from the counter’s edge and Angus’s inquisitive snout, then remembers Angus barely enters the kitchen these days.

The tea set has had it. Hairline cracks in the handles. The chip at the edge of her mother’s saucer. They’re too fragile to survive much more to-ing and fro-ing. It’s time to retire them. She opens the cupboard above the stove and pushes a few glasses out of the way. Then she drags over a chair and, with Angus watching, packs away her mother’s tea set. Drying her hands on her jeans, she wanders into her bedroom and opens her top drawer. She pulls something out and turns it over and over. A tiny, plastic hospital bracelet.

It was a summer day and Marion had been out. The doctor or the dentist, doesn’t really matter. What mattered was Eleanor had a definite time period during which the house would sit empty. She’s wondered, since, what she was hoping to find that day. It wasn’t as if there hadn’t been doctor or dentist visits before. It wasn’t as if she’d never been alone. But this day she’d woken up feeling outside of herself, and slipping back in made her entire body feel hoarse and scratchy like a bad throat.

She watched her mother’s Jetta round the corner at Hawthorne Boulevard and disappear. Her father, she knew, would be gone all day. He was playing golf at the club, had for weeks been looking forward to drinks with his friends at the nineteenth hole.

Thomas’s office had once felt like a haven. A place to retreat to when the thunder grew too loud or her stomach hurt. Many an evening, she curled up on the tufted leather sofa across from his desk and read while he sorted the bills or played a game of solitaire. When she was younger, he would sometimes look up and ask if she’d like to play Go Fish. But now she was thirteen. Too old for baby games.

She tiptoed across the plaid carpet, stepping, as she always did, only on the navy stripes, and opened her father’s desk drawer. Creased receipts from hardware stores, a car magazine, a box half full of loose change and a couple of pairs of tarnished cufflinks.

The second drawer proved much more satisfying. Here she found old passports of her father’s—the goggled glasses, the slicked-to-one-side hair! She came upon seed packets and money from Italy and Greece. It wasn’t until she felt around behind the crumpled cottony bills that she discovered
the envelope. Written across the yellowed front, in her mother’s cautiously loopy script, was one word.

Eleanor
.

Something tapped against the window. She started, then relaxed when she saw the sky had darkened, raindrops were striking the glass.

She pulled folded papers from the envelope. Something fell and she bent down, picked it up. It was a small hospital bracelet, the clear plastic sliced beside the metal clasp from when it was snipped off.
University of Kansas Hospital
. The name:
Baby Girl Smith
.

She might have stared at it a minute. Or it could have been an hour. Time didn’t matter. Only the truth mattered.

She was adopted.

With pain shooting through her left shoulder, Eleanor laid the wristband over her skin like a Band-Aid.
Baby Girl
. Her mother—who on earth was her mother, then?—didn’t even give her a name.

All at once everything and nothing made sense.

She hadn’t yet opened the papers when the back door squeaked. A heavy thud from the mud room, then, “Damned weather. Marion? Eleanor? Game called for lightning.”

Eleanor stuffed the sheets back inside the envelope, dropping the bracelet. Her father’s footsteps rang in the hallway. She grabbed the plastic band, stuffed the envelope back into the drawer and slammed it shut. No time to get out of the room; he’d be walking in any moment.

Quickly, she pulled down the blind and hopped onto the sofa, lying there with a cushion over her head, hoping her pounding heart wouldn’t give her away.

“Ellie?” Her father—was he still her father even?—flicked on the overhead light. “What are you doing?”

“Headache. Must be the weather.”

It was the perfect ruse. He rolled his eyes and emptied his pockets into the desk drawer she’d just looked through. She hoped she’d placed the passports back the way they were. “Don’t get me started. Three spits of drizzle, God-damned marshal clears the course.”

She climbed off the sofa and headed for the privacy of her room with the plastic wristband tucked inside her fist.

The next time she went back to the drawer, the envelope was gone. It would be a whole year before she would get up the nerve to tell them she knew.

Now, she drops into a chair in front of the computer and stares at the screen. Heart hammering in her chest, she types in
searching for birth mother Kansas
. A host of sites come up and she clicks on the first one: “Adoption Search and Connect.” A page comes up with options to search by name and location.

Barely able to breathe, Eleanor scrolls down to “United States” and types in the only name she has to go on and possibly the least helpful name on earth:
Smith
.

The screen floods with Smiths: 5,581 of them, to be exact, and they load ten per page.

1. Smith: Leveque: I was adopted at birth out of Richmond, VA, March 28, 1978. My birth name was David Smith and my mother’s name was Jacqueline. Born in the evening, huge late-season blizzard. Birth mother came up from another state. Born with blond hair, blue eyes, please help.

2. Smith: Balliol: My name is Heather Lynn Balliol and I am looking for my mother. She was between 23 and 25 when she gave me up at two yrs old in June ‘69. She was from Houston area and a teacher. Birth father’s last name was Cochrane, also from Houston but adoption took place in Vermont. If you want to talk that would be great.

3. Smith: Straitman: Female searching for birth parents, Massachusetts. Adopted from hospital, January 4, 1976, adoptive parents present. Adoptive dad had personality of used car salesman, adoptive mom the hippie type with long graying hair. Birth mother had two other children adopted out and tattoo of a panther on right calf.

4. Smith: Rudolph: At age of two days on November 3, 1953, I was left on the porch of 1649 Lincoln Street in Philadelphia by a young woman with short black hair. I was taken to Kingsbury Hospital and given the name Honor Smith. The hospital sent letters out to women who’d given birth around the 1st but no one …

The list goes on and on. Eleanor sits back and stares into space. Finding her birth mother with a last name like Smith is going to be extremely challenging.

The phone rings, the call display flashing a number and
BACK BAY ADOPTION
.

Nancy.

Reluctantly, Eleanor picks up. “Hey, Nancy.”

“Hi, Eleanor. Listen. I don’t mean to pressure you, but my superior, Lorna, is breathing down my neck. She’s coming to
the speaker event in four days specifically to meet you, talk to you. How are you doing with your support scenario?”

Eleanor glances at the computer screen: 5,581 Smiths, each one as desperate as she is. “Terrific.”

“You have someone in place?”

“Yup. All set.”

“Oh, thank God. I was so worried. I know what you’ve been through and how much you want this. To be perfectly honest, I think I want it as much as you do.” The sounds of a drawer opening and pens being pushed around. Then the drawer slams shut and she sighs. “So we’ll see you on Thursday. Bye-bye now.” Click.

Eleanor hangs up the phone to pick it right back up again and dial. Four rings and a man’s voice.

“Galileo Travel, how can I help you?”

S
he sets a stack of folded, pressed T-shirts into a small suitcase and stops. Maybe Kansas City isn’t as balmy as she thinks. It has to be wrong to gauge the area’s probable temperature on what Dorothy wore in
The Wizard of Oz
. Though, with Lorna expecting a name from her in three days, a pair of ruby slippers is exactly what she needs.

Eleanor checks the Weather Channel online and returns to the bedroom to add a pile of vintage cashmere cardigans, a light jacket, two vests, and, at the last minute, two scarves. A pair of gloves would be ridiculous. The temperature isn’t supposed to drop below sixty-five.

The trip will take three days. Two for travel and one to visit the Office of Vital Statistics in Topeka, Kansas. A shuttle will take her to the Empress Inn, not far from the airport, but to get to Topeka, she’ll have to rent a car. She will leave Boston as Eleanor of Unknown Origin. With any luck, she’ll return Eleanor of This or That. Or the Other.

Most important, she’ll land at Logan at six o’clock Thursday evening and have one hour to get to Back Bay Adoption, where she will march straight up to Lorna to surrender her mother’s name.

The problem is Angus. She took him to the vet for a quick checkup that afternoon and the dog flatly refused to get out of her Volkswagen. The vet, after Eleanor explained the situation, came out to the parking lot to examine him, ultimately agreeing with Eleanor that he is depressed but otherwise healthy. The prescription: lots of love and keep him far, far away from the vet clinic. In other words, do not board him.

She yawns into her hand and glances at the clock. Nearly 1 a.m. Her flight leaves in ten hours. She’d love to sleep, but the problem of Angus needs to be solved. Jonathan is the only solution. He should care for Angus. Besides, it wouldn’t be a bad thing for him to be faced with a gigantic, shedding, drooling, depressed reminder of his inability to commit.

Eleanor buttons up her coat and marches down to Mass General.

She waits in a long row of plastic chairs in the ER, surrounded by sick and injured people slumped in seats and wheelchairs, lying on stretchers. Two men are asleep—one a young father whose two kids play on his iPhone, the other older and unshaven and wrapped in a blanket. A teen, being fussed over by his distressed mother, has a bloody towel wrapped around his head.

The Triage nurses must have told Jonathan she’s here, but neither of them suggested Eleanor wait in his office like they used to. Instead, they looked at each other, and hesitatingly suggested the patient area. They know what’s happened.

She doesn’t wait long. Double doors at the end of the hall swing open and there he is in faded hospital greens she’s washed, tumbled dry, and ironed hundreds of times for him.
His Littmann stethoscope hangs from his neck; the familiarity of the stylized
L
on the scope’s diaphragm almost makes her cry. Such a stupid thing. He strides toward her with his legs wide the way he does, as if he’s stepping around something unsavory. When he catches sight of Eleanor he heads toward her, no change in his expression. A spent woman in a wheelchair, bone thin with shoes that appear too heavy for her legs to lift, reaches out to tug on his arm. He bends over and listens to her lengthy complaint, speaks softly to her, then waves over a nurse, who wheels the patient through a doorway.

Now, Jonathan. Planted in front of her, hands pushed into pockets. Something about him is different. She can’t place what it is, exactly. She stands and he kisses her cheek. “This is a surprise. Not another fake sprain?”

She has to look away or risk vomiting from nerves. If he would only come back, life would be perfect. She could still search for her mother. But not with a loaded gun at her temple. “No.”

He checks his watch, revealing his left hand. His wedding ring. He’s still wearing it. “It’s so late.”

“I know.”

“Weird. I was going to come by the store later this morning.”

“You were?”

“I just thought, if you’re going ahead with things …” He stops, tilts his head to one side. “Okay, I’ll just spit it out. Remember I signed up for that Saturday class? To build the rocking horse?”

How could she forget? It was a program run through Emerson High School. Three weekday evenings to make
your own heirloom-quality wooden rocking horse with leather saddle and a janitor’s mophead for a mane. Jonathan signed up as soon as they learned the adoption was approved.

She’d imagined Sylvie riding it too many times to fathom.

“The first class was last night,” he says.

She waits, confused. “What do you mean?”

“I’m saying I went.”

“You’re building the horse.”

“I am.”

“For Sylvie.”

“Yes.”

Her heart hammers so hard he can probably see it through her coat. “Jonathan, what are you saying?”

“I’m saying I’m building the horse for Sylvie.”

Her mind whirls with what this might mean. It’s a gallant gesture to show her he’s back in? Or it’s a self-serving final kiss-off intended to assure the world he’s a perfect gentleman? “Wow. I’m shocked.”

“Anyway. I wanted to ask you what stain color you prefer. There’s a pale one called Yellow Oak, but I like American Walnut. It’s dark without being too dark.”

Her entire body could curl into a smile. “The American Walnut sounds nice.” That didn’t sound enthusiastic enough. “Sounds perfect, actually.”

“Good.” He nods. “That’s the one I thought you’d like. You’re always so smart with that kind of thing.”

A nurse pushes past with an old man on a stretcher, rolling the IV bag on a stand. In their wake a nervous silence floats between them. Eleanor fills it with “I was thinking of giving her a middle name. Once she’s here. Marion.”

“After your mom.”

“Plus …”

“Plus what?”

“I kind of need to know what you’re doing. Now. With this rocking horse. If you’re coming back, she’ll keep the name we submitted. Sylvie Sweet. But if not, I may go back to Prue. There are these personalized mobiles this artist makes for the store. I was going to have one done up for her. Even if Sylvie’s paperwork needs to be changed, she’ll use a mobile for such a short time, I want to know.”

“
That’s
why you want to know my plans? For a mobile?”

She searches all reason for what is wrong with wanting to know his intentions and comes up blank. “Yes.”

“I shaved my beard.” He rubs his jawline, which is, of course, smooth now. “First time since you’ve known me.”

He looks younger. Somehow, less married. She hates it. He was desirable enough before with his dark curls, his long legs. But the stubble hid him a bit. Kept him beneath a layer. Now he’s vulnerable, open. Now she’s going to lose him. “Yes. I mean, I saw. I noticed.”

He shakes his head sorrowfully and starts toward the elevators. “This is what I’m talking about, Eleanor. You’re gone. You’re no longer here for me.”

The memory of what was. It comes to her amid the blare of PA messages, the soft bongs of hospital machinery, the distant chatter. A low groan from behind a closed door. It started out just the two of them. The deal wasn’t baby. It was Eleanor and Jonathan, Eleanor and Jonathan. She was insane to walk away from that. Before the baby talk, they were great. They could be great with a baby. He just needs to see it.

“Jonathan, wait.”

He stops, turns around.

“You’re wrong. I am here for you.”

“Only if I’m here for her.”

She doesn’t breathe until the elevator doors slide shut.