Chapter 7 - The Number That Should Have Stayed Silent
Mark called the number right there in the booth.
Four rings. Then a woman's voice — not Eileen's, younger, careful. "I wondered how long that would take."
"Who is this?"
"My name is Sandra Kessler. I was Eileen's younger sister." A pause. "I've been waiting a long time for you to find your birth family, Mark. I just didn't expect it to happen this way."
He set the phone flat on the table and switched it to speaker without asking me first. I took that as its own kind of statement about where the two of us already stood.
"What do you know about the adoption?" he said.
"More than Eileen ever told you." Sandra's voice was even. Rehearsed, almost. "Your adoption wasn't clean, Mark. The agency your mother used wasn't a licensed agency. It was a private arrangement. The woman who ran it took money from both sides — from the birth family to make the baby disappear quietly, and from adoptive parents who wanted a child without sitting on a waiting list."
The diner kept going around us. Somebody laughed at the counter. A kid knocked a glass off a table.
"What do you mean, make the baby disappear quietly?" Mark said.
"I mean the birth grandmother paid a fee to guarantee that her daughter was told the child had died. That was written into the arrangement. Silence on both ends."
I felt the tabletop under my hands. Solid. Real.
"My mother paid somebody," I said. Not to Sandra. To myself. But Sandra heard it.
"Yes. I'm sorry. I know that's a terrible thing to hear."
"How do you know all this?" Mark asked.
"Because Eileen found out. About six months before she died. She was sorting through old paperwork and she came across the original contract — the real document from the agency. It had line items. One of them was a 'birth family notification fee.' Eileen knew exactly what that meant." A pause. "It broke her heart. She felt like she'd been part of something she never agreed to. She wanted to tell you, but she was already sick, and she was afraid of what it would do to you."
"So she died without telling me."
"She asked me to keep the document. She said if you ever found your birth family, you deserved the whole picture." Another pause. "I've had it four years. I wasn't sure I'd ever have to use it."
Mark looked at me. "Do you still have it?"
"Yes."
"Can we see it?"
"That's why I texted. I'm in Worcester. I can drive to you, or you can come here. Whatever's easier."
Mark and I looked at each other across the table.
"Worcester," he said. "We'll come to you."
He ended the call. The coffee between us had gone cold. Neither of us had touched it in a while.
"You don't have to come," he said. "It's a lot to ask."
"She was my mother," I said. "If there's a piece of paper that shows what she did, I want to see it with my own eyes."
He nodded slowly.
"There's something else," I said. "Harriet. She was up there that summer. She was at Aunt Nadine's with me for part of it. If my mother paid people to arrange all of this, Harriet knows more than she's said."
"You think so?"
I thought about her at the pool. Her hand over her mouth. The way she'd said something I should have told you forty years ago — not something I just found out, but something she'd been carrying the whole time.
"Yes," I said. "I do."
Mark pulled his keys out of his pocket and set them on the table.
"Then we've got two stops," he said. "Which one first?"
"Harriet," I said. "She's eighty-two, she's been carrying this by herself for decades, and I think she needs to say it out loud before she runs out of time to."
He stood and dropped a twenty on the table without checking the bill. At the door he held it open for me.
Such a small thing. An old habit. But I walked through the door my son held for me and felt, for the first time in three weeks, like the floor under me might actually hold my weight.
My phone rang in the parking lot. Kayla.
I looked at Mark. He looked at the phone.
"Answer it," he said.
I did.
"Mom." Her voice was strange. Tight. "Where are you right now?"
"I'm with Mark. We just—"
May you like
"I figured. I need you to come home. Both of you. I found something in the attic. In Grandma's boxes." Her voice frayed at the edges. "Mom, she kept letters. Letters from the agency. Letters from Aunt Nadine. There's a—" She stopped. "Just come. Please. You need to see this."
---
