Looking for Jane (68)
She hits print.
* * *
The few responses Angela has received from the Nancy Birches have been the same as the ones she got from the Nancy Mitchells: Not me, sorry. A part of her is grateful; now that she knows Margaret Roberts is dead, she’s in no hurry to be the one to relay such news to the elusive Nancy. For the time being, she’s stashed the obituary and news article printouts in a storage bin under her bed along with the letter and note.
Since Angela works Sundays on a regular basis, Saturday afternoons have become her favourite opportunity to read. She and Tina spent the morning doing their weekly grocery shop and other dull errands, then Tina headed to the gym while Angela tugged on her chunky knit reading socks and curled up on the couch with Grizzly and a steaming mug of tea.
Snow falls outside the living room window. There’s something about a snowy weekend that feels like a freebie; like the earth is saying, Slow down, enjoy yourself, there’s nowhere to go anyway. It’s an invitation Angela warmly accepts as she sinks her teeth into her new book club pick.
The first chapter of The Jane Network is a sweeping survey of the history of women’s reproductive options until 1960, a year before the first iteration of the birth control pill was introduced in America. After that, things changed a bit for women—mostly white—who had the means and legal opportunity to access the pill, a category that certainly did not include unmarried teenage girls.
Captivated, Angela reads about the various homes for unwed mothers, as they were then labelled, which took in pregnant girls and hid them for the duration of their pregnancies. The babies were almost always adopted, and, from what Dr. Taylor describes of her own experience at one of these homes, many of the adoptions occurred under duress, and some blatantly against the mother’s will. Angela thinks of Margaret’s note to her daughter Jane; the one she’s read so many times now that she’s committed it to memory. The haunting lyrics of a mournful goodbye.
I did not want to give you up.
Angela rolls her shoulders back, refocuses her eyes on the page in front of her. She’s taken aback by the candidness of Dr. Taylor’s memoir. Her experience sounds as horrific as she imagines Margaret Roberts’s was, and the detail induces Angela to wrap one arm around her stomach. She can’t imagine being forced to give up her baby like these girls were. She’s about to set the book aside and give her emotions a break when she reads something that causes her breath to catch.
My best friend at the Home—I’ll call her “Maggie”—took her own life after the trauma she experienced at that place. I lost both my best friend and my daughter to lack of choice, and I knew, after I left, that I would find a way to make sure other girls would always—always—have a choice.
“Maggie?” Angela says aloud to Grizzly, who has curled up in a tight coil in the groove of her tented knees. “As in Margaret?”
Angela stares at the sentence, her thoughts whirring. In the introduction, Dr. Taylor said she would be changing the names of all the women she mentions in an effort to protect the true identities of anyone who might not want their criminal activity revealed, even all these years later. But Maggie? Margaret?
Angela chews her lip, then flips back a few pages, looking for where the author mentions the year she spent at the maternity home. She just says “the early 60s.” Surely there were plenty of girls named Maggie at maternity homes at that time. Margaret was a fairly common name back then.
She hears the clicking of a key in the lock, the front door shutting.
“Woo! It’s frickin’ cold out there again!” Tina stomps the snow off her boots on the front hall mat. “Where the hell is spring? Taking it’s sweet-ass time, apparently.” A minute later, she’s in the living room.
“Good workout?” Angela asks.
“Yeah, it was fine. Glad I went, anyway. Now I can have ice cream later and not feel guilty. That’s how that works, right?”
Angela smiles in a vague way but isn’t really listening. “Tina, would you be able to put me in touch with Evelyn Taylor?”
Tina’s shiny brow furrows. “Sure, I guess. Why?”
CHAPTER 19 Nancy
JULY 1984
On a Thursday afternoon in the height of the summer heat, Nancy and her boyfriend Michael are sitting in a patch of welcome shade outside the café in Kensington Market where they had their first date. They happily sip fresh-squeezed lemonade and share a piece of truly exceptional almond coffee cake while people-watching out of the corner of their eye.
Nancy is on her summer holiday from work this week, and Michael planned his to coincide with hers. And at his suggestion, they whiled away the morning in the cool air-conditioned refuge of the art gallery, wandering its wide halls and dark exhibits. It was a welcome respite for Nancy, who has spent most of her vacation with her parents. Her mother is in remission from the cancer now. Her treatment went well, but she’s a weaker, diminished version of her former self, somehow much more vulnerable than she used to be. Nancy worried that she should stay home with her, but when Frances heard that Michael was taking her out, she shooed her out the door.
Nancy had debated bringing Michael home to meet them last summer, but after a few dates, she’d realized quite quickly that he might be worth hanging on to, and decided to introduce him to her parents. The first time he leaned in to kiss her, on her front step after a date at the movies, he’d asked for her permission first. He supported her desire for a career of her own, worked hard, and didn’t drink too much. And he turned out to be incredible with Frances. He connected with her in a way that Nancy had certainly never been able to, helping her off couches she was too weak to stand up from and telling jokes to distract her from the bouts of nausea she was still susceptible to. Nancy had never heard her mother laugh like she did with Michael, not before the cancer, and certainly not after. He even cooked the whole family dinner one night when Frances’s blood pressure dropped so low that Nancy and her father had to rush her to the hospital. They came home to find Michael in the kitchen wearing her mother’s floral apron with a pasta dinner ready on the table, complete with salad and wine.