Looking for Jane (30)
She can hear children playing out on the street, riding their bicycles in the spring evening. She thinks about her own childhood, full of love and joy and homemade jam. Pretty dresses and teetering piles of gifts at Christmas. Bedtime stories and summer sleepover camps. The best childhood a girl could ask for, really. Her parents are still her parents. They raised her and love her. Has she actually missed out on anything?
Nancy picks up the note in one hand, the yellow booties in the other. She reads the note four more times, the one sentence searing itself on her heart like a brand.
My name is Margaret Roberts, and I am your mother.
Margaret Roberts.
She repeats it over and over in her head, sees the letters appear in her mind’s eye like the leading lady’s name on a movie screen. Only they’re in Margaret’s unfamiliar handwriting. Her mother’s handwriting.
“Who are you?” she asks the walls.
And why did Margaret give Nancy up for adoption when she’s claiming in this scribbled note that she wanted to keep her? Her stomach lurches on a new thought: Why hasn’t she ever tried to find Nancy? If what she says in the note is true, and she never wanted to give her baby up… Nancy’s heart falls at the thought. Maybe she changed her mind after she wrote the note. Maybe she didn’t really want a baby after all.
But her parents did want her. They went out of their way to adopt her, didn’t they? Haven’t they shown Nancy how much she means to them, how much they love her? Do they deserve the pain of knowing their only child distrusted them so much that she snooped around their bedroom to uncover their lie? Maybe they never found this note, hidden in the booties. Or maybe they have and they’ve tried to contact her birth mother. Maybe they’re just trying to protect her.
Maybe.
The sun starts to set. Nancy continues to sit frozen on her parents’ bedroom carpet as the glowing orange light streams through the window.
The room has grown dark by the time she folds up the note and shoves it back down into the toe of the bootie. She places the booties gently back in the box and shuts it, rotates the dials to random numbers.
She walks back over to the open drawer, the contents carefully laid out on top of the dresser, reflecting their placement inside. Nancy lowers the leather box and slides it into its former place in the dusty back corner. She sighs deeply before replacing the other items and closing The Drawer. She leaves the room on legs that don’t quite feel like they belong to her. She can smell her mother’s perfume still. It follows her out of her parents’ bedroom like an accusatory lover.
She pauses at the top of the stairs to listen to the ghosts.
Her mother calling her name from the sitting room, beckoning her down to walk the six blocks to mass on Sunday mornings. Her father’s gruff but loving voice muttering, “Good night, Beetle,” as he turned off the light and closed her bedroom door, leaving it open just a crack so the moonlight from the hallway window could creep into Nancy’s room, soothing her fear of the dark. The creak of the floorboard right outside her bedroom, so inconvenient for sneaking in after curfew.
Nancy runs her hand along the banister, remembering how she screamed down at Frances from this very spot during their first blowout argument. It was about Nancy moving out to go to university.
“But it’s only a few streetcar stops away!” Her mother protested. “You’re not even married! Why do you want to leave us? What will people think?”
Nancy’s father calmed her mother down eventually, reminding her that Nancy was an adult and would be leaving home sometime soon anyway. He understood Nancy’s need for independence, for time away from her mother’s constant supervision. He isn’t a man of many words, and runs his household in the manner of a good-natured health inspector. But he loves Nancy deeply and she’s always known he would do almost anything for her.
Nancy descends the stairs in a trance and wanders into the kitchen, flipping on some lights that flicker to life, illuminating the gleaming countertops. She fills up the kettle and busies herself with some Earl Grey leaves, spilling them when she misses the edge of the tea ball. She absently sweeps them off the counter into her hand and shakes them into the garbage bin beneath the sink. A minute later, the kettle’s whistle makes her jump and she nearly burns her wrist in her haste to get it off the stove.
Tears are welling in her eyes now as she watches the brown tea bloom inside the porcelain cup. She shoves her hand into the box of Peak Freans on the counter and stuffs a whole raspberry cream cookie into her mouth, immediately hears her mother’s admonishment in her head for demonstrating such appalling manners.
Her mother. Her mother is Margaret Roberts.
Nancy lets the tears slip down her face. The only sound comes from the grandfather clock in the hallway. It ticks in time with Nancy’s thoughts as they fall into place, one after another.
“My name is Jane.”
She says the words aloud to the empty kitchen. No one heard. No one will know.
When Nancy finishes her tea, she washes the cup and sets it in the drying rack. The kitchen now smells like the lemon dish soap her mother has always used, and it takes Nancy back to childhood Saturdays, watching Frances clean the floors while she helped with the dishes.
She can’t confront her parents about this. At least not tonight. She needs to get back to her apartment, where ghosts don’t lurk in every corner and she can think clearly, rationally about this.