Looking for Jane (95)
“I found that note in a drawer in my mother’s room, back in the eighties. That’s how I knew I was adopted. But I cleaned out her room when she died, and it was missing from the drawer. I always assumed she had destroyed it, to be honest. I guess she sent it before she went into the hospital.”
“Yes, that’s explained in the letter. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you knew.”
“Yeah. I went looking for information I shouldn’t have when I was young and stupid. You know how it is.”
“For sure.” Angela isn’t quite sure how to broach what she wants to say next. “So, do you mind if I ask… have you ever tried to find your birth mother?”
Silence on the line. Angela knows she’s overstepped.
“I’m sorry, I realize that’s a really personal question, but—sorry, I’m trying to gather my thoughts here. When I first found the letter, I figured I would try to find Margaret, your birth mother. And…” Angela takes a deep breath. Her stomach flutters with a wave of nausea. “I’m really sorry to have to be the one to tell you this, but she passed not long after you were born.” She waits another beat, then plows on. “I found an obituary with her name, and that, combined with a news story about the maternity home… Well, I kind of put the pieces together, and an old friend of hers confirmed it for me. Again, I’m so sorry.”
There’s a long pause where neither of the women seems to breathe. Then a deep sigh whispers through the receiver, followed by a nose being blown. Angela immediately regrets relaying the information, but what should she have done? Left Nancy Birch to go do the same digging she herself did, only to have it end in certain heartache?
“Okay. Thanks. Thanks for telling me,” Nancy says. “Would you be able to send me my mother’s letter, and Margaret’s note? And maybe the obit and article, too? I just need to see them for myself, I think.”
“For sure. No problem.”
Angela is relieved Nancy isn’t screaming at her, and she’s fulfilled what she set out to do: Margaret’s daughter will read her note and know that she never wanted to give her baby up.
Her hand rests, as it often does these days, on her belly button. She hardly dares to say anything more to Nancy. And yet, she does.
“Nancy, there’s another reason why I wanted to speak on the phone instead of texting. It’s a long story, but I’ve come across a woman who was a good friend of your mother’s—I’m sorry,” she curses herself for the slip, “of Margaret’s. They were at the maternity home together. She’s the one who confirmed Margaret’s death. I’ve met with her, and if you’re interested, she’d like to speak with you.”
A long silence follows Angela’s words. She bites her lip again, waiting.
“Nancy…?”
“Thank you, but I don’t think so.” She sniffles. “I really appreciate you tracking me down for the letter. I’ll be glad to have the note back, but I don’t think I can meet with this woman. I’m just—I’ve been trying to move on from it and I’ve done pretty well, to be honest. I don’t want to pick at that scab again, if you know what I mean.”
Angela nods to the empty store around her. “Yeah. Yeah, I get it. Totally.”
“So, I’ll send you my address. If you can mail everything over, that would be great. Thanks again for your help.”
And before Angela can respond, the line goes dead.
CHAPTER 27 Nancy
SPRING 2017
The package has collected a fine layer of dust.
Nancy’s been avoiding opening it since Angela Creighton sent it over a few weeks ago. It’s been moved from the sideboard in the front hall to the kitchen counter, to the desk in her office, to the top of the dresser in her bedroom. Every time she moves it during a weekly tidy-up blitz, she half-heartedly considers opening it and just getting the whole damn thing over with. She figured she knew what was in Frances’s letter, but had no desire to willfully rip open a wound that she had carefully stitched together over the past thirty-seven years. That scar is fine and faded now; sometimes she can hardly even tell it’s there. Unless she inspects it too closely, which is exactly what this package is calling her to do.
On a warm Saturday afternoon, Nancy finally gets up the courage to open it. She fetches a pair of scissors from the overflowing junk drawer in the kitchen and climbs the stairs back up to her room. She sits down on the bed and with a sigh, snips open the white bubble mailer, emptying the contents onto her lap.
Nancy picks up Margaret’s note. She notices that the edges are singed on one side of the note, burn marks that weren’t there when she first discovered it all those years ago. She pictures her mother, striking a match over the sink and holding the flame to the note before having a change of heart. Nancy knows that the prevailing wisdom at the time was to not tell children they were adopted, but her mother obviously had some reservations about that, even though she never acted on them. She wonders if Frances had kept the note and booties as some kind of shrine to Margaret, the girl who had given her the child she and her husband so desperately wanted.
She unfolds the photocopy of the obituary Angela Creighton found, sees Margaret Roberts’s name in black and white. She reaches over to her bedside table and opens the drawer, digs in the back, and withdraws the small drawstring pouch she’s kept Margaret’s booties in since her mother gifted them to her at her baby shower.