Looking for Jane (4)

Your father did not want to tell you, even then. And then he was gone, and still I didn’t tell you. I have no excuse for myself other than cowardice. I am so sorry, Nancy. If I have learned anything from this, it is not to keep secrets. They fester like wounds, and take even longer to heal once the damage sets in. It’s permanent, and crippling, and I want more for you than that.

Your mother’s name was Margaret Roberts. She was much younger than me when she gave birth to you, so she may still be alive. I would encourage you to seek her out, to find solace in my death by reuniting with your Other Mother, as I have called her in my mind all along. I want you to move forward, and I hope you will not hold resentment for your father or I.

I have loved you with the deepest love in my heart, my darling. And so I know how hard it may have been for your Other Mother, for Margaret. Since I read her note, I have prayed every day for her forgiveness. I have taken care of her child, my child—our child—with tenderness. But I suppose God will settle our accounts as He sees fit. It is in His hands now.

Please forgive me, dear. I pray we will meet again one day, a long time from now.

Mum



Angela places the letter down on the writing desk and reaches for a box of tissues to dab the tears that have sprung to her eyes.

“Jesus Christ.”

She thinks of her own family, of the mother she knows as Mom, and the woman who gave birth to her, Sheila, whom she finally met five years ago. To have lived her entire life not knowing she was adopted is a foreign, devastating concept. Her heart bleeds for all three of these women: the daughter Nancy; her mother Frances, who carried the weight of this secret for so long only to have the confession go astray; and Margaret Roberts, scribbling in a hidden note that she was forced to give her baby up for adoption…

The note.

“Where is it?” Angela asks the empty store. She checks the desk, then leans down to scan the floor. When she shakes the envelope, a small piece of paper flutters onto the desk like confetti. It’s yellowed, and a bit wrinkled. One of its edges is singed, as though it were nearly burned at some point.

Angela reads the brief handwritten missive. It’s only two lines long, but she lingers on the last five words, her vision blurring.

She rereads the note several times before setting it on top of the letter. She needs advice. She reaches for her phone, cradling it in her hand as she considers whom to call first. After a quick scroll, she clicks on the name and puts the phone to her ear, wipes away a lingering tear from her cheek.

“Mom? Hi, it’s me. Do you have a minute to talk?”





CHAPTER 2 Evelyn




TORONTO | OCTOBER 1960




When Evelyn Taylor arrives at St. Agnes’s Home for Unwed Mothers, her first thought is that she’ll be lucky to make it out alive.

It looks like an abandoned castle whose residents have long since packed up any joy they once possessed and handed over the keys to the rats and creeping ivy. It might have been a beautiful manor once, with the curving peaked facade of the top-floor windows and deep brown brick exterior surrounded by lush trees. But as Evelyn’s father pulls the car over to the side of the street in front of the house, her gaze flickers up and she glimpses a pair of pale eyes staring back at her out of one of the upper-floor windows. Two hands emerge from behind the curtains and pull the girl away. Evelyn blinks, and the figures are gone. She wonders briefly if she imagined them. The aura of the place is forbidding, and a cold sense of dread plunges down deep into Evelyn’s gut before she’s even opened the car door.

Her father remains in his seat, staring resolutely at a space in the middle distance, somewhere on the hood of his car. She wonders what’s going through his mind. He clears his throat.

“Well, goodbye, then,” he says, not meeting her eyes.

Evelyn reaches for the door handle. Once she’s upright on the sidewalk, she opens the back door of the car and tugs out her travelling case. Her father doesn’t offer to help. He hasn’t even turned off the ignition.

After Evelyn shuts the door, there is a brief pause before she hears the gearshift lock into place, and the car pulls away from the curb. She watches the shiny, clean bumper of the sedan retreat around the corner, the back of her father’s head visible over the top of the beige seat.

As she stands outside the home in her low-heeled buckled shoes, she’s unable to move, her mind dully processing her new reality. Her mother made a phone call, Father Richard visited the house for tea, and the decision to send her to St. Agnes’s was reached by the time the priest requested his second cup of orange pekoe.

On the one hand, she’s grateful to be out from under her mother’s dark glances, to have a little room to breathe while she waits out this pregnancy. But on the other, she’s heartbroken and appalled that she must be here at all, and afraid of what awaits her behind that heavy wooden door with the large brass knocker. No one told her what to expect. She feels as though she’s been swept up by a tornado like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz and dropped miles away from her home in a strange place. Everything seems upside down. Distorted and wrong.

She can feel the pressure of the neighbours’ eyes on the back of her neck, imagines their nosy pink faces pressed against the glass of their sitting room windows, peering out at the new resident with her disgrace on full display.

She knows she isn’t the first, and won’t be the last. Perhaps by now the neighbours don’t care much anymore. Maybe the spectacle of the pregnant girls wore off years ago, long before Evelyn unfolded herself from her father’s car onto this well-worn curb on Riverdale Avenue. She briefly considers making a run for it, but then turns, with an air of tense resignation, toward the steps up to the front door.