Waking Beauty (25 page)

Off we went then. Shopping side by side. I picked up some staples for myself and bought expensive cookies to take to the cottage. My mother kept on jawing as we rolled our carts down the aisles. More words than I had heard from her in a decade. When a man who looked like a young Gabriel Byrne smiled at me in the condiment aisle, my mother said, “Holy moly. That guy was a hunk! He looked like that actor…what’s his name?”

“Gabriel Byrne.”

“Yes. Gabriel Byrne. You should go talk to him,” she said, nudging me friendly with a rough elbow. “What have you got to lose?” Nudge, nudge. “Just go talk to him.”

I was sick of talking. I was sick of her kind of talking—the endless insipid prattle, the humorless blah blah blah. Was this what I had missed out on and craved all those years as ugly Allison? Was this the fabulous persona she reserved for her pretty companions, this shallow, annoying chatterbox?

It sure wasn’t much.

Time to take her home and get what I came for.

“
I have to tell you
,” she said, “it’s a pleasure to be riding with an assured driver.”

“Is Allison not a good driver?”
And am I not Allison
?

“She’s a nervous driver. Gets distracted.”

I felt my hands tighten on the wheel. “Speaking of Allison,” I said, “she asked me to pick something up for her when I dropped you off.”

“Oh, what’s that?”

“Her adoption documents. She said you have them.”

“Oh! Well, how about that.” She put down the window and lit a cigarette. She was silent for at least fifteen seconds.

“I guess it can be kind of upsetting when a child wants to find their birth parents.”

“I’m not upset, I’m just surprised. She’s never wanted them before. And I’ve offered.”

“People change, I guess.”

“Well, you’re welcome to take them.”

“So you don’t think it would be upsetting for her father, your ex-husband?” Now was my chance to pump her for info.

She laughed. “He won’t know one way or the other. And he wouldn’t give a hoot anyway—the prick. Pardon my French.”

“So you never talk to him?”

“Never. Unless he misses a payment. Then my lawyer talks to his lawyer.” She laughed.

“I guess you were pretty young when you got married, huh?”

“We were both young. I was nineteen, he was twenty-three—no, twenty-four.” She took a deep drag. “God, he was gorgeous. You should have seen him. Tall, dark, chiseled features, the whole package. With these incredible blue, blue eyes.”

“Is that why you married him?”

“It was one reason.” She flicked her cig out the window. “He was also
extremely
determined to marry me.” Laugh. “He wooed me like crazy.” Sigh. “I don’t know…. I don’t think I made the wrong choice. I just think that circumstances rendered the choice bad.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I’ve thought about it a lot over the years, and I’m pretty sure that if I had been able to have children, we’d still be together today.”

“Is that right?”

“Mmm. A barren wife just didn’t fit into Simon’s idea of the picture-perfect lifestyle.” Pause. “He’s a designer. He likes things just so.” She fished out another cigarette, lit it, and blew smoke dragon-style out the nose. “That was one of
the things he used to say before we were married. ‘Oh, we’re going to make such beautiful babies. You and me, kiddo, we are going to make the finest-looking babies in the land.’” She said it sarcastic. “He did not like the fact that we had to adopt. And unfortunately…Well, as you can imagine, Allison didn’t exactly fit the bill as Simon’s picture-perfect child. Although she was very cute when we got her.”

I felt a small thump in the solar plexus. Is that how she saw it? Everything spiraling because of me? No. That couldn’t be right. Although it would explain how she treated me my entire life…But it didn’t make sense. He fought for me. In court he fought for me. She told me there was a custody battle. Fierce and protracted. He ran away, yes, but he wasn’t running away from me. “Allison mentioned that you were divorced.” I swallowed hard, tried to sound casual. “I think she said something about a big custody battle between the two of you.”

“Yes.” Bitter laugh. Then confidentially, in a lowered voice through mouth corner she said, “But it was a battle in reverse. Neither of us wanted full custody. I mean, I was willing to share it, but he didn’t want to have anything to do with it.”

I felt a wave of heat pass down over my face, sink into my throat, then plunge to the center of my chest, where it coagulated in a throb of shock and shame, strangling off my ability to breathe deeply or even properly.

“He just did not like that child. Do you know what he used to call her?
Thing
. He’d come home from work and say, ‘Where’s Thing? Is Thing in bed yet?’ I swear, I’d have to stick her in bed two hours early so he wouldn’t have his nose out of joint when he got home. And he’d make all these bad-taste jokes like: ‘Maybe Thing would like to go play in traffic…. Maybe Thing would like to go to the basement and play with matches.’” She laughed and flicked her cig out the window. “Oh, well,” she said. “He was happy to pay for his freedom. And I was happy to take his money. As they say: The
marriage was a failure, but the divorce was a success!” Big cackle. Small sigh.

I don’t remember how I did it, but somehow I moved the Audi through a blur of shifting car shapes and colors; somehow I guided the Audi through traffic to the curb.

“Are we stopping for some reason?”

An outdoor patio came into detached focus. It was like looking at a word disassociated from its meaning. People were laughing with their teeth in the yellow day. I pasted a smile on my face. I pasted one on and I said, “You know what would really hit the spot right now? A drink.” I turned the engine off and pulled the keys from the ignition.

“How about you?” I said. “Could you use a drink?”

11    

Twenty-four hours later I was lying on a lounge chair
on George’s boathouse deck, digesting lunch and waiting for warm moments when the patchy clouds would drift away from the sun. George was showing Don and Dawn the charred ceiling beams above the boat slips where old wood-burning engines from an ancestor’s steamboat had left their dark mark. I had already surveyed the burned beams, as well as the collection of classic wooden boats—the sporty eighteen-foot Greavette Gentleman’s Racer, the sturdy MacCraft patrol boat, the thirty-two-foot picnic boat with its built-in mahogany tables and benches, and the streamlined thirty-six-foot Minette-Shields—all beautiful and gleaming. George had taken me on a tour of the boathouse early in the a.m. to make sure that everything was in order should Don and Dawn choose to sleep there instead of in one of the five bedrooms in the Behemothic so-called cottage. The boathouse was a cottage in its own right, with at least a thousand square feet of living space atop the vessel-storage area. It had two bedrooms
with quilt-covered spool beds; a tiny cedar bathroom with a porcelain tub; a cornflower blue kitchen with propane stove, microwave, and dishwasher; and an open dining/living room with peaked ceilings, the exposed trusses and rafters painted creamy white to match the antique wicker furniture below. It also had a sundeck, where I reclined on a heavy Mission-style lounge chair and, feeling rather dyspeptic, mulled over the preceding twenty-four hours.

I had dropped off my mother and departed her place with my shopping bags, adoption documents, and the keys to the yellow Audi in hand (just in case she had any inebriated ideas about taking the thing for a sloppy spin). With juice in her system she had become even more gabby and indiscreet, spilling, on the drive home from the bar, an anti-Allison rant from which I will probably never fully recover. Before leaving, I pretended to go upstairs for a pee, sneaked into her bedroom, and vigorously cracked the spine of
A Little Bush Maid
.

When I was safely out of range of the house, I opened the folded manila envelope that contained my last chance at familial affection. I pulled out the papers creased stiffly down the middle, and scanned the contents until I found what I was looking for. Jeannie Coombes. Jeannie Coombes was the name of my birth mother. My father’s name did not appear anywhere on the forms, but Jeannie Coombes appeared. She was there all right. In quaint, old typewritten black and white. Jeannie Coombes, who twenty-two and a quarter years ago lived at 187 Winchester Street. A street that I knew of. A street in a formerly seedy, now sporadically gentrified neighborhood not ten miles from where I resided. Jeannie Coombes, who did not want to keep me with her at 187 Winchester, who had never made the effort to reach me, but who just might be interested, if I happened to track her down and pop by, to see how beautifully I’d turned out. Jeannie Coombes, who might not be disappointed (“That’s nuts. You’re lovely. Why on earth would she be disappointed?”). Who just might open
her arms, fold me warm into her bosom, and say:
Daughter, how I’ve wondered and missed. Daughter, how I love love love
.

Of course, Jeannie Coombes might slam the door in my face. Jeannie Coombes might have moved out of the city long ago. Jeannie Coombes might even be dead, God forbid.

Thoughts of Jeannie Coombes filled my head as I made my way to the nearest phone booth, as I scanned the directory for a J. Coombes—there were none listed—as I left the booth and started walking. Then I was walking faster and still dreaming of Jeannie as I flailed my arms to hail a taxi, and told the driver to please take me to the corner of Winchester and Parliament. I don’t really remember the journey, or the paying and getting out, but I do remember my heart pumping hard as I moved nervous down the street, past yuppies and rummies, until I came to number 187—a tiny single-story row house, bookended by two other workers’ cottages. All three houses had been painted yellow with white trim. All three had postage-stamp front lawns that had been turned into English gardens with herbs and flowers bobbing in the breeze, and not a blade of grass in sight. All three had a sweet picket fence, and a darling flagstone path that led to the front door.

Jeannie Coombes, I thought. This is the house where my mother lived. Or possibly still lives? She could be behind that pretty white door right now. Perhaps all I have to do is knock. Just knock.

I lingered on the sidewalk opposite, until a fire engine came screaming down Winchester, blasting its big horn, which I took as a sign to get my ass across the street and up that flagstone path.

I knocked and waited. I could hear activity inside. A few moments later the pretty white door was opened by a pretty brunette woman with a baby in her arms. The woman was short and plump, and for a nanosecond I thought:
Mother
? Then it registered that she was only about ten years older than
I was. She must have been baking. I could smell something good, like warm chocolate-chip cookies, coming from inside.

“Hi.”

“Hi. Um, sorry to bother you, I’m trying to find someone who used to live in this house. Jeannie Coombes was her name.”

“Oh. Coombes? Hmm, no, never heard of her….”

“Cute baby,” I said, to be courteous and put her at ease.

“Thanks! It’s her first birthday tomorrow, isn’t it?” She said it to the baby in a nursery-rhyme voice.

“That’s nice,” I said, smiling big at the baby until it was polite to shift focus: “So, you’ve lived here for quite a while?”

“No, we’ve only been here about three years, three and a half years. But, uh, the woman who we bought the place from was definitely not the name you said.”

“Not Coombes?”

“No. Definitely not.”

“You wouldn’t happen to remember the woman’s name by any chance?”

She studied my face. “Well…what is this about?”

“I’m just, um—I was adopted and I’m trying to track down my birth mother.” As the words came out of my mouth, I suddenly felt tremendously sorry for myself. I actually had to fight back a swell of tears.

“Oh,” she said, giving me an empathetic look. She held the baby tighter. Her right breast started to leak a spot of milk through her T-shirt. “You know what, I think I do remember. Her name was Lewis. Something Lewis. Gosh, I’m sorry, I really can’t remember her first name.”

“You sure it wasn’t Jeannie?” Jeannie could have remarried and become Lewis.

“I really can’t remember. But it was definitely Lewis. L-e-w-i-s. And she still lives around here. I see her on the street all the time.”

“Really?”

“Should we quickly check the phone book? We can see if there’s a Lewis on one of the streets around here.”

“That’d be great. Thank you.”

“Come in for a sec.”

The house was small and pretty. “It’s nice in here,” I said, imagining Jeannie Coombes/Lewis in the wingback chair by the window.

“Thanks! We did it ourselves. You should’ve seen it when we got it. Oh, my Lord!” The woman made a face and flipped through the phone book. I looked over her shoulder. There were hundreds of listings for Lewis. “Holy moly,” she said, running her finger slowly down the list. The baby, held tight in her left arm, gurgled.

“Sorry to inconvenience you,” I said.