The Secret Daughter (4 page)

It jarred me. It had before, but
that
night, hearing Dad speak to Mum with such sharpness . . . it was almost too much – I cringed, averting my gaze to my husband, my anchor. Ted sat down on the sofa opposite us, resting his elbows on his knees, dangling his hands between his legs. He really could be very sensitive when he needed to be, but more than anything, Ted was rational. He would find a way through the mess of this to a truth that I could digest.

‘So, who was she?’ he asked quietly.

No one answered him, not for a long time. The silence was ragged, then it was awkward. It hadn't occurred to me to ask, but now that the question was out there, I desperately needed it to be answered. When I finally realised that they were just ignoring him, I prompted,

‘Mum?’

‘We never knew anything about her.’

Was she lying? Mum was avoiding my gaze again, but her guilt was palpable. She slumped when she spoke, as if the heaviness of the words was pressing her into the earth. I glanced at Ted, and he raised his eyebrows at me. He saw it too – the hallmarks of a lie.

‘Megan, she deserves to know everything you can tell her,’ Ted spoke softly, reasonably.

Mum shook her head and the tears started again.

‘I’m really sorry Sabina, there’s nothing I can tell you. I don’t know anything else.’

‘Well, are there records?’ Ted said. ‘Surely there is paperwork. What about Sabina’s birth certificate?’

There was the glimmer of hope I’d been holding my breath waiting for. I sat up straight again and turned my attention to Dad.

‘It lists
your
names.’ I felt washed in relief, too confused to note how ridiculous the notion was – as if, perhaps, they could be mistaken after all. ‘I’ve had a copy of it for years, Dad. It lists
your
names.’

‘Is it not the original?’ Ted asked softly, and I slumped again.

‘No, it’s the original.’ Mum shook her head. ‘I told you, it was a different time. We adopted you at birth so we were listed as your parents, and we
are
your parents. Sometimes back then, hospitals didn’t even bother to keep records to the contrary.’

‘So, I can’t find her, even if I want to?’ I was instantly grieving, feeling an acute loss for something I hadn’t even known existed until minutes earlier – something I wasn’t even sure that I wanted yet.

‘I doubt it very much, love,’ Dad said quietly.

We sat for a moment, all of us lost together in the mess of it all. No one spoke, but the room was noisy anyway: the television was still on in the background. Someone had won big on the game show, and triumphant music played while rainbow balloons and streamers rained on them from above.

I’d never been diagnosed with anxiety, but I supposed this was probably the best label for the way my fears ran out of control sometimes. When caught off guard, my mind would churn a situation over and over, until I could almost lose myself in the swirling tornado of thoughts. I’d learned, almost by accident over the years, to manage that panic by being mindful of the hard facts about a moment, to ground myself in reality, instead of floating around in my fears.

So yes, the sun
was
still streaming through the window, a patch of bright light reflecting uncomfortably into my face from the polished floorboards in the kitchen – the world had not ended. The oven was still ticking down, and judging by the hearty smell, the lentils and lamb were just about done. Time was marching onward, just as it always had. My bare feet on the floorboards were comfortably cool. I was still me, and I was still here. The red lines on the skin of my stomach caused by my too-small work trousers would have faded now.

And as for that tiny life sprouting deep inside me, I felt a supreme confidence that no circumstance on this earth could inspire me to give it up, and no force in the universe could make me. It was the physical manifestation of the soul-solidifying love I felt for Ted.
How
could someone ever part with such a thing? An answer came to me almost instantly.

Her story . . .
my
story . . . might not be one of love.

A chill came over me. I released Mum, and stood.

‘We should go and let you think about this.’ Dad rose too, extending his long body to its full height, and I took a moment to think back to the fear I’d had when he first arrived and I thought he might be sick. I’d have preferred that outcome – sickness, we could fight together. Sickness and age were inevitable. Sickness meant there was still some kind of hope, even if it was fragile.
This
. . . this meant that everything would immediately and forever be topsy-turvy.

‘I think that’s a good idea,’ my ever vigilant husband was staring at my face, and I wondered what he was thinking and if he knew how shaken I was. I could taste panic simmering in my gut. When the shock wore off, I would be wrecked.

‘Do you still love us?’ Mum asked. While Dad was already making moves towards the door, it was obvious that she didn’t want to leave until I promised her that everything was okay. And in
any
other circumstances I’d have done just that, so she was probably expecting it.

I looked from her gaunt, tear-stained face, to Dad’s more subtly pleading gaze, and then to the floor.

‘Of course I st-still love you.’ I was mumbling and stumbling, the words clumping together into a mangled mess. ‘You just need to let me t-think this through.’

They left, and after Ted shut the door behind them, we stood in silent confusion side by side at the entrance, almost frozen in time until the oven timer rang. Ted moved first; he turned the oven off, removed the casserole dish onto the top of the stove, and then wordlessly poured me a glass of the ginger beer I’d made several months earlier with Dad. I followed Ted, meandering hopelessly in his general direction, not really cognisant of where I was or what I was doing. After a moment or two of standing near the TV staring at the floor, I took a few further steps to the dining room table and sank into a chair. The upholstered cushion was still warm from when I’d left it only five minutes earlier. How could so much have changed in the time it takes a seat to cool down?

Ted pushed aside my lesson plans to sit beside me. I stared at the bubbles rising through the soft drink he placed before me.

‘I wish this was real beer,’ I whispered.

‘I can get you one if you want, Bean. I’m sure
one
won’t hurt.’

‘No, no.’

I took a long, soothing sip of the beer and then turned to him. The evening’s normality had shattered, and in its place, I sat in the bubble of a nightmare. I tried again to re-ground myself in the warmth of the fading sunshine, in the glow of the floor lamp between the table and our little kitchen, in the bitterness of the ginger beer, in the closeness of Ted’s thigh near to, but not quite touching, mine.

It wasn’t working now. What kind of stress relief could I employ in this particular instance? Was there a mindfulness practice big enough?

‘Did that really just happen?’

‘I can’t believe it either.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘Did you ever suspect?’

‘Of
course
not.’ I drank more, until even the creamy bitterness reminded me only of Dad. Mum had the refined palate of a woman who could sip a merlot and comment on the hint of chocolate in its base, but to me, all wine tasted like vinegar. Instead, Dad and I shared a fanatical obsession with beer – all kinds of beer actually; ginger beers and stouts and pilsners and porters. He had a trellis in his backyard where he grew a series of hops varieties, and every few months we’d spend a whole evening cooking from scratch our own elaborate home brew. The last time, just a few weeks earlier, I’d soaked the grain at home during the day while I was at school, and then driven across the suburbs in my little hatchback, the giant pot nestled like a baby beneath a seatbelt. It took us nearly six hours that night to boil and strain the grain to just the right temperature, then to cool it and to apply the yeast, and to transfer it into a vat to ferment.

In another few weeks, it would be ready to bottle, and we’d spend half a day on a weekend chatting while we decanted it into glass bottles with bottle caps pressed on to seal it.

I thought I’d inherited from Dad that love of the intricacies of the craft, not to mention the satisfaction of the yeasty taste at the end of all of the work and waiting.

‘But everyone says I look just like them. Don’t I have Mum’s smile? Don’t I have Dad’s eyes?’

‘I thought so too.’

‘So everything they’ve ever said to me is a lie?’

‘I can understand why you would say that,’ Ted said, after a moment. ‘But it’s not true. For all of their faults, you can’t deny that your parents have genuinely adored you.’

‘If they
adore
me, Ted, why would they lie to me?’

‘I have absolutely no idea.’

‘I’m only thirty-eight. Surely even thirty-eight years ago people understood that denying someone the truth about their birth was not going to be
great
for them.’

‘Well . . . I don’t know about
that
, honey. I’ve seen the news about this forced adoption controversy, it really sounds like young mothers weren’t even given a choice about keeping their kids. Hiding the actual adoption from the child is not
much
of a stretch from there.’

‘But . . .
why
, Ted?
Why
weren’t they given a choice?’ I’d been stoic until that moment, but the idea suddenly slipped through my shock-cocoon and I felt myself dissolving. This concept was so monstrous and outrageous that I couldn’t even stand to think that it had anything to do with
me
. When I spoke again, my whispered words were uneven, punctuated by the tremors of barely restrained tears. ‘Are you seriously saying that women’s babies were just
taken
from them?’

‘Well . . . as I understand it,
yes
. I think it was about the shame of babies being born out of marriage,’ Ted murmured, sliding his arm around me. ‘We can do some reading . . . but I am pretty sure that single women, especially
young
single women who were found to be pregnant were taken to maternity homes, like the one Megan must have worked in. I think the mums were often coerced into signing the paperwork, and the babies were taken after the birth and adopted out from there.’

‘But I just can’t even believe Mum would be a part of such a thing,’ I whispered. ‘Surely that must be some mistake, maybe she didn’t understand what was happening there. But then, even if that was true—’ I was thinking out loud now, and I sat away from Ted so that I could stare at him, searching the blue depths of his eyes, seeking comfort. ‘Even if she didn’t know . . . she
definitely
knew about the adoption. And
hiding
that from me? Mum has always talked to me about
everything
.’ I slumped again and leant into him, and a sob escaped. ‘I thought she did.’ Ted pressed a soft kiss to the side of my head. ‘Do I even
know
them?’

‘I guess your parents’ role in all of this must be the hardest part to digest,’ Ted murmured. ‘The thing is . . . your parents . . . well . . .’

‘I know,’ I said grimly. He seemed uncharacteristically stuck for words but I didn’t need him to finish the sentence. I assumed that he was going to refer to how close I was to them, and how invested they were in my life. He’d eventually grown accustomed to us over the years, but in the early days of our friendship, he’d remarked often with suspicion and confusion at how fond I was of my parents. In turn, I’d always thought
his
family was the strange one, with their polite distance, and the convoluted web of ex-spouses and step-siblings and half-siblings that formed their structure. ‘My parents are just
wonderful
.’

Ted cleared his throat, and shifted just a little. I frowned.

‘What?’

‘Bean, your parents
can be
wonderful . . . but even so . . . I really feel like sometimes you look at your family through rose coloured glasses. This is a really, truly shitty thing they’ve done to you . . . and yes it’s come out of nowhere, but then again . . . I totally get that they
would
be capable of keeping a secret like this.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘I just mean . . . honey . . . they
can
be manipulative.’

‘Ted!’

‘Remember when we bought the house?’

‘They were delighted for us!’

‘They
were
delighted for us. The day we exchanged contracts, we went out for dinner and your Dad popped open the bubbles just as he always does and we talked with them for hours about our plans for the house, and how we’d rent this granny flat out for a bit of extra income. Remember?’ I nodded, but I was on guard.

‘So?’

‘So the very next day, you went shopping for décor with Megan, and when you came home, you were adamant that it would be
foolish
for us to move into the big house and rent the flat.’

‘B-but it didn’t make sense. There’s only two of us, and the house is huge.’

‘It was huge when we inspected it, it was huge when we bought it, and it was huge when we told your parents we’d gone ahead with the sale . . . and not once did you question the sense of that until
they
did. It’s a large, luxurious house. We went to Dubai and I worked ninety hour weeks for two years so that we could save up enough to buy that house and set ourselves up. What didn’t make sense was for us to buy the house, and then install some other family in it just to maximise our tax deductions. But that’s what Graeme thought was most sensible, and so that’s what Megan thought was most sensible, and eventually that’s what
you
thought was most sensible. And believe me, Sabina, when your parents convince you of something, you are loyal to that idea almost beyond rationality. Look at our situation now – crammed in here like sardines, and now we’re going to have to figure out how to break the lease and get the tenants out of the house before the baby comes.’