The Secret Daughter (7 page)

It was only once we were seated, and I’d taken a gulp of the hot tea, that I realised that the easy silence that had once characterised my relationship with my parents was gone, and in its place was a tension and awkwardness. I tried to find the words to put together an intelligent question, then failed, and my bewilderment and hurt came out as a hopeless sigh.

‘Mum, what the hell?’

She nursed her tea and stared at me.

‘Where do you want me to start?’

‘How about at the beginning? There is so much I don’t understand. Can you just tell me the whole story? Tell me more about the problems you had having kids of your own?’

‘You
are
my own,’ Mum said, and her gaze flashed with a fierceness that startled me a little. I cleared my throat impatiently.

‘You know what I mean.’

‘I didn’t give birth to you. But I was there for you from then on, from the beginning right up until now. And you are
my
daughter.’

‘Okay. I get it.’ I sat the tea down on a coaster on the rattan coffee table and rubbed my forehead, then offered her a helpless shrug. ‘I’m sorry, Mum. I don’t even know what words to use here.’

‘Dad and I tried for years to have a baby. We just couldn’t. When we were first married I seemed to fall pregnant easily enough, but the pregnancies never lasted.’ Mum nursed her tea in both hands, up close to her face as if she needed the warmth. ‘After a while, we stopped falling pregnant at all, but there was nothing available to us like IVF, not back then . . . it was still years away. We saw a bunch of different doctors and they tried a lot of different things but . . .’ she sighed and shook her head. ‘It just never happened for us.’

I heard the front door open and close, and Dad called out,

‘Sabina?’

He would have seen my hatch in the drive, and I could hear urgency and desperation in the way he called my name.

‘In the sitting room, Dad,’ I called back, and I listened to his heavy footsteps as he rushed through the house towards us. I rose and reached onto my tippy-toes to brush a kiss onto his cheek.

‘It’s so good to see you,’ he said, then surprised me by adding a slightly-too-tight bear hug to our usual polite kiss.

‘You too, Dad.’

‘You’re having a chat, then?’ He released me, and I saw the warning in his gaze as he looked to Mum. She shook her head, just a little, and I frowned.

‘I came to chat to you guys about . . .’ There was another strange pause while I figured out if saying the word
adoption
was going to be like dropping an awkward-bomb into the conversation, ‘. . . things.’ I said eventually. ‘Can you sit and talk with us, Dad?’

‘Of course,’ he said, and he sat right beside me and leant back, as if he was open to my questioning. ‘What can we tell you? Where were you up to?’

‘Mum was just explaining to me about the issues you had with pregnancies. So, I take it you decided to adopt?’ This question was almost rhetorical, but neither one of my parents seemed to know how to answer it. The pause stretched until it was uncomfortable and I prompted, ‘Mum? Dad? Obviously you decided to adopt?’

‘Yes,’ Dad said suddenly. ‘We tried for a long time, then decided to adopt.’

‘And this maternity home? How did you end up there, Mum?’

‘We wanted a change. I think you’d call it a tree change these days; we just packed up and we moved to Orange for a fresh start. But the job at the maternity home just wasn’t what we’d thought it would be, and . . . well, I hadn’t dealt with our own fertility issues properly, so it was a very bad situation for me to be in. I didn’t last long there.’

I pictured the building I’d seen online, and now when I formed the mental image, the scared young woman who looked like me, was also somehow half my Mum too.

‘So, what was it like?’

‘It was the worst experience of my life,’ Mum whispered, then cleared her throat. When she spoke again, her voice was clear and proud. ‘Sabina, I really don’t like talking about that time. I was only there for a few months. Even now I don’t really like to revisit the memories.’

‘Okay,’ I said. That seemed reasonable. And she’d lasted only a few months? That was
surely
a good sign – she would hardly have become a kingpin of the forced adoption industry in such a short period of time. I looked to Dad.

‘What did you think of all of this?’

‘It was a difficult situation,’ Dad agreed slowly. ‘But nothing in life is clear cut, Sabina. Mum just was not a good fit for that place. It was probably the most difficult period of our entire marriage, to be honest with you.’

Mum nodded, but I watched her eyes drift downwards to the table between us. She seemed drenched in sadness just reliving the time she’d spent there. Once again I found myself in the strange position of being forced to ask her questions about something which was clearly very painful for her.

‘So . . .
did
you know her?’ I asked softly.

Mum looked at her cup now, as if the answer to my questions could be found in the thin liquid.

‘I suppose I probably knew her,’ she whispered.

‘But there were a lot of women in the home,’ Dad added. The words were measured but he spoke far too quickly, cutting off the natural pause after Mum’s admission. ‘Mum wouldn’t have known all of them.’

‘A
lot
of women?’ I repeated. ‘That’s not what I read online. How many women are we talking about here? Hundreds?’

‘No, dozens,’ Mum admitted. ‘Somewhere between twenty and thirty, most probably.’

‘And you really have no idea which one she was? Did they all give birth on the same day or something?’

‘Of course not.’ Dad was impatient. ‘Look, it was always the same story. These girls were sixteen or seventeen, they got themselves pregnant, and their families dropped them at the home until the baby came.’

‘Always the same
story
? Jesus, Dad, you make it sound like they were disposable baby incubators.’

‘No, God no—’ Mum said, shaking her head. ‘They were wonderful girls, they really were.’ She was pinched and pale at Dad’s careless phrasing. I waited, as I always did, for her to shoot him a glance that put him in his place, just as she’d have done with me if I ever said something so offensive. Mum did not shoot Dad those glances, though. They were reserved; for me, for my teachers, for my friends and our extended family, and even for strangers on the street . . . but never for Dad. He was, and always had been, off limits somehow. ‘Dad just meant that I really only dealt with the other side of things, Sabina . . . the actual adoptions.’

‘Well, what was it about me that made you keep me? Was I especially cute or something?’ I tried for a joke and it fell heavily flat. Dad half-smiled and shrugged at me, Mum didn’t even acknowledge my attempt at humour.

‘You
were
a beautiful baby . . . perfect, actually. Things just worked out; you needed a home and we needed a family.’

‘
Tell
me about it, Mum. Where did the idea to
keep
me come from?’

‘I told you, you needed a home and we—’

‘Mum,
listen
to me,’ I interrupted her, but I was calm. ‘I want you to tell me
about
it. I need the detail . . . some context. Surely you must remember – were you walking down the corridor and you saw me in the nursery? Did someone tell you about me? Was there a memo on the noticeboard that a “perfect” new baby needed parents? You must have seen a lot of adoptions, so why did you keep
me
?’

‘You would have gone to the orphanage,’ Mum said stiffly. ‘We didn’t have a family for you yet, and I was worried that if you went to the orphanage, you’d
stay
there. That happened sometimes and it wasn’t a good outcome for anyone.’

‘
Why
wasn’t it a good outcome?’

‘No one wanted to adopt the older children. Babies who weren’t placed quickly tended to go into the orphanage and then stay there for a long time. A child
needs
parents and stability.’

‘So had you decided to adopt and you were just waiting for a baby to be available?’

‘No, not really,’ Mum admitted. ‘It was a little impulsive – things happened very fast. I heard that a girl had been born and there were no families ready to place her with. Then I went and saw you and I suggested to Dad that we take you.’

‘But
once
we saw you, we knew that this was just meant to be,’ Dad added. ‘So we made it work.’

‘So . . . you
weren’t
—’ I stopped and frowned, trying to understand. ‘Are you telling me that you weren’t even
going
to adopt until I came along?’

Mum and Dad stared at each other. I could see that they were communicating with their gazes, but it was like the meaning was encrypted somehow – I had no idea how to interpret their expressions.

‘We would have, eventually,’ Dad said slowly. ‘We were still coming to terms with our infertility. You brought healing to us. You were
ours
from the first moment you entered our lives, and we never, ever looked back.’

There was something almost romantic about it. I could easily picture my parents in their youth, feeling the ache of loss at the family they would be unable to have. And then, just like that, I was there, alone too, and as soon as they saw me they realised I could be
theirs
. I felt a warm glow start to grow inside me after the confusion and ache of the previous days. Just as I let the beginnings of a smile creep toward my face, Dad glanced my way and I saw the shutters come down in his gaze. ‘Okay, Sabina? That’s pretty much the whole story. I hope that helps.’

And there it was, the finality again, and in spite of the more complete picture they’d just given me, I still had a million questions that he was trying to prevent me from even asking. My father still thought he could just cut this chat off with a shrug and wave of a hand. I’d seen him do this a million times when he and Mum were disagreeing about something. When I was very young, I’d thought of it as his way of preventing me from seeing or overhearing their arguments – I’d somehow assumed that the discussions had continued at a later time, when I wasn’t around to witness the tension.

But Dad had no intention of continuing this chat with me later. This was not a break in the conversation to cool our heads or to give me time to process what they’d told me; it was an attempt at an enforced end to the discussion. I thought about Ted’s comments about my parents being controlling. It was as if the rose coloured lenses he’d accused me of wearing shattered in an instant.

‘You are
not
getting off that easily. Those
breadcrumbs
give me an idea of the first part of the story. But what about
from
then? What right did you have to hide this from me?’

‘We honestly believed that it was best that we never told you. Wouldn’t you rather have never had to feel like you’re feeling right now? All of this confusion and turmoil?’ Dad said. I heard the rising frustration in his voice, and I could see it in his posture. He always sat up straight and tall, but in that moment, there was a visible tension in the way he held his hands against his thighs and in the set of his jaw.

The simplicity of his view was astounding.

‘But Dad . . . I don’t know who I
am
now
!
’

‘You’re the same person you were before we told you.’

‘But my heritage—’

‘Your heritage is
us
.’ Mum’s voice broke, and her eyes were filled with tears. ‘Sabina, you are
my
daughter.’

I loved my mother, with the passionate zeal that comes from having fought a long-term battle of wills and walking out the other side feeling that we understood one another. Things had been simpler with Dad; in spite of his flaws, he had always been a hero to me. But Mum and I had worked out our relationship by grinding one another down, often in all-out brawls as she forced me to attend speech therapy or do my school work. We had worked damned hard for the close bond we shared.

I knew that I had every right to insist that they tell me more about my own past, and I had no intention of backing down – but it was utterly heartbreaking to see Mum so hurt and to know that
I
was the one forcing the discussion.

‘Mum, of course I’m
your
daughter.’ I reached for her hand and held it tightly within mine. Her hands were bony, even her skin was thin. For the first time, I thought about my mother’s tiny, rake-thin build and my curves, the ones that I’d never quite curtailed. I had assumed that this was a failure in my character somehow, a lack of self-discipline. Could it have been simple genetics all along? ‘I
love
you guys. I appreciate the wonderful upbringing you gave me. But surely you can understand that now that I know this much, I need to know more.’

‘Well, I’m very sorry to tell you, but you just aren’t going to be able to find anything out. That’s not how things worked back then,’ Dad said tightly.

‘Surely there are
some
records—’

‘There just
aren’t
.’

There was a flat finality in Dad’s words. I released Mum’s hand slowly, then sat back in my chair and took a deep breath. Once I’d inhaled and exhaled again, and I felt like my temper was back under control, I met Mum’s gaze.

‘Are you really telling me that you could just decide to take a baby home and make it yours?’ I couldn’t fathom any hospital in the world just letting a random staff member help herself to some woman’s baby.

‘Our adoption criteria was pretty simple. All we were really concerned about was that we were placing babies with married white couples. It was brutally cruel, and brutally unfair, and racist and sexist and you
can’t even imagine
how awful it was.’ Mum’s words wavered around the edges. ‘But at the time, no one else – well,
no one
thought twice about it. That was just how things were.’ She slumped again. ‘When we told you it was a different time, I wasn’t kidding, love.’