The Night Visitors(71)

“Mattie,” I say. “She had Caleb here.”

Sister Martine places her hands together in a prayer position and then interlaces her fingers as if she is holding something inside them. “I can’t discuss any of my girls.”

“I understand,” I say, “only, I wondered . . .”

“Yes?” she prods when I hesitate. She opens her hands, palms up, and I have the feeling that I could spill whatever secret I wanted into those hands and it would be protected forever, the weight of it taken off my shoulders.

“I understand you can’t give out anyone else’s record, but what about a person’s own record? The thing is . . . I think I was born here. My adoptive parents lived up here in Ellenville, so I wondered if I have a file and . . . would I be able to see it.”

Sister Martine leans toward me, elbows on her desk, face grave. “Well,” she says, “as you may know, New York is a closed-records state, which is one of the reasons that if you were indeed born here I would not have been able to keep track of you.”

I nod. “When my adoptive parents died I ended up in the foster system. I always thought—”

“That if your birth mother had known she would have come to rescue you?”

“Yes,” I say, embarrassed that she’s guessed my secret fantasy. I look up and see from the look of compassion on her face that she’s guessed my other one. “It’s not Mattie, is it? I’d hoped . . . when I learned she’d had a baby . . .” I stop, unable to go on, all the longing to belong to someone rising up, cutting off the air in my lungs.

“That you were her baby?” Sister Martine says so gently it sounds like a prayer.

I nod, unable to speak.

Sister Martine gets up, comes around the desk, and perches on the edge of it. She takes my hand. “Do you think Mattie Lane could love you and that boy any more than she already does if you were?”

I shake my head, letting loose a couple of tears. “No, but . . .”

“But nothing.” Sister Martine clucks her tongue. “If you want to find your birth parents, I will help you. Mattie will help you. She and I found her own daughter a few years back. She’s happily settled in Buffalo with a family of her own. She’s never looked for her birth mother. She doesn’t need me, Mattie said when I asked if she wanted to make contact. But you do. And if you ask me, you’re the daughter Mattie needs. Just as Oren needs you to be his mother.”

I nod and dry my eyes. Sister Martine gives me a tissue and a glass of water. Then she reminds me that our friends are gathering on the hill to go into town for the Cookie Walk. I get up to go and find myself embraced in Sister Martine’s strong, bony grip. “Go on,” she says. “I’ll be right behind you.”

It occurs to me that Sister Martine needs a few minutes alone to collect herself. What must it feel like to watch a baby she handed over to the world sit in front of her all grown up? Does she wonder what she could have done differently to make my life easier? Will Mattie?

When I get outside I see it’s almost dark, the sky a lovely clear violet, like Mattie’s eyes. I see her standing on the hill with Oren and Wayne and Doreen. They’re all holding lanterns; as I watch, Mattie starts lighting them. Atefeh, the woman from Stewart’s, is there too, with her two kids. When all the lanterns are lit they make a pattern, like a constellation, against the sky. But it feels incomplete.

A few nights ago, when I was putting Oren to bed, he told me something he had read about in a book that Wayne gave him. He said that hundreds of years ago an astronomer had thought there might be stars we couldn’t see. He’d been watching the way stars moved and thought there was an unseen force pulling them into one orbit or another. The astronomer called that force dark stars.

Watching the group, I picture the people who have made them the way they are: Mattie’s parents, Frank, Davis, Wayne’s dumbass brother-in-law, Doreen’s son, Atefeh’s brother and husband. I picture the people who have shaped my life: my birth parents, my adoptive parents, Travis and Lisa, Davis, Mattie, Sister Martine. All the dark stars have brought us to this particular moment and this particular pattern. We may not see them, but they’re always here with us, pulling us out of orbit and bringing us back in.

Oren and Mattie lift their heads at the same moment and, seeing me, grin and wave as if pulled by the same force. I feel its tug too, and move forward to join them.





Acknowledgments


I thought a lot about family and community during the writing of this book. I’m grateful for the community of support I’ve found at William Morrow, starting with the amazing Katherine Nintzel, the best editor I could have wished for, and Vedika Khanna, Camille Collins, Molly Waxman, Shailyn Tavella, Rachel Meyers, and everyone else who has made William Morrow such a welcoming home. I wouldn’t have found that home without the faith and hard work of my agent, Robin Rue, and her assistant, Beth Miller. Writers House has been a true sanctuary.

As always, I’m grateful for my family for their love and support: my husband, Lee Slonimsky; my daughter, Maggie Vicknair; my stepdaughter, Nora Slonimsky; and her partner, Jeremy Levine. I am thankful to count so many friends as family. Thank you to Wendy Rossi Gold for reading everything from the beginning and Ethel Wesdorp for thinking up the title.

And lastly, I couldn’t have written this book without the good people of Family of Woodstock, most especially Tamara Cooper, Susan Carroll, Ron Van Warmer, Deanne-Harriet Hoffman, Alan Rovitzky, Gayle Jamison, Nancy Meyer, Micheil Cannistra, and Sharon DeVries. Thank you for showing me that there’s no limit to how far we can extend the circle of family.