Tree of Strangers Read online

  I am not a ‘well-adjusted adoptee’. In some fog-bound way, I knew I was so afraid of rejection I had not called my sister ahead. It would be easier to not find her than to reach out and suffer another rejection.

  The train arrived and we started walking. I was in Madrid. The city my mother chose as her own. It was as sunny and dry as in my dreams.

  We soon found a sign in a dusty window. HabitaciÓnes una noche, semanal o mensual.

  ‘We’ll stay here,’ Christine said.

  La Dueña was large and short of breath. She sat in a small cubicle in front of a grainy television. She counted our money, grunted and pointed down a dark corridor. The bathroom was at the far end. Our room was in the middle. It looked out on a blackened brick wall. There was no phone in the room. I sat on the sagging bed we were to share and felt my chest constrict.

  ‘There’s a phone in her office,’ Christine said. ‘I’ll call.’

  I retrieved the folded scrap of paper from my bag and knew I had to do it.

  I went to the cubicle and pantomimed holding a phone, and the old woman nodded and turned away. She did not turn down her television.

  The phone rang and rang with no answer.

  Christine stood beside me. ‘Perhaps she’s at work. Let’s try later.’

  We walked along cobbled side streets and drank coffee and ate tapas at a bar. Men tried to speak to us. One put his arm around Christine’s shoulder and in halting English asked her to marry him. We laughed along with them. I felt the pull of the telephone, so we headed back to the hostel. The woman had not moved. Her cubicle was thick with cigarette smoke. She did not even look as I picked up the phone.

  The woman who answered was out of breath. ‘Sí,’ she said.

  ‘Hi,’ I said in English. ‘I’m looking for Rebecca.’

  ‘This is she.’ Her accent was hard to place. English boarding school, I thought later.

  ‘This is Barbara.’ I felt sick. She did not reply. A game show on the television filled the cubicle. I wanted to smash it to the ground. ‘Hello?’ I said. My chest hurt.

  Christine leaned against the wall. After a silent minute, she took the phone from me. ‘Hi, I’m Barbara’s best friend. She’s your sister.’

  I watched as Christine nodded and laughed. ‘Wow,’ she said. ‘Amazing.’ Within a minute she’d arranged a meeting.

  She hung up and hugged me. ‘We’ve found her,’ she said. ‘We’re meeting her at a restaurant on the top floor of a department store. Tomorrow afternoon.’

  I started to cry, and the old woman looked up and shook her head as if all tears were pointless. Christine took my arm as we went back to our room.

  ‘But here’s the weird thing,’ she said. ‘She hasn’t lived at that number for over a year. She’d gone there to pick up her mail. We caught her at the exact moment she walked in.’

  I have no memory how we filled the intervening night and day. I remember walking to the department store and taking the elevator to the top floor. There were racks of sale clothing pushed to one side and tall windows overlooking the city. There was an empty café in one corner.

  The tightness in my chest increased. I stood up and sat down and tried to focus on my breathing.

  Christine saw her first. ‘She has your walk,’ she whispered as Rebecca strode towards us. She looked so solemn and determined. She wore a blue pantsuit with a white blouse and pearls. I was wearing a light blue skirt with a cream shirt and pearls. I was trembling with anticipation. We hugged and there it was. That thing no one can explain. An instant and complete recognition. My little sister.

  She stared at me. ‘You look so like Mummy,’ she said.

  Recently I learned about quantum entanglement. Objects with no physical contact can exert a push or pull despite their separation. Einstein thought it impossible. He called it ‘spooky action at a distance’.22 But a few years ago scientists discovered that entanglement is real. Two particles, separated by light-years, can change their properties in response to each other. It is, the scientists say, as if an obscure communication channel connects them.

  Despite this, science has yet to open its mind to the mysterious ways humans connect. To acknowledge the entanglement of genes, of our souls and blood. Or the random chance of standing beside a telephone in an abandoned house at the exact moment a call comes in.

  24

  Game of statues

  On that trip to Spain, I read surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel’s autobiography. My Last Sigh is frank and fascinating and includes his recipe for an excellent dry martini. And the best place to drink it — most often with his friend Hemingway, at El Chicote, a cocktail bar in Madrid, which Buñuel describes in burnished detail. The revolving doors and the polished mirrors, the mahogany bar as the altar and the cocktails as gods.

  Rebecca knew the way. We entered the revolving doors as an elderly white-coated gentleman greeted us. Through Rebecca, I told him I’d come from New Zealand and held up the book. He stepped back and bowed.

  ‘I am Don Luis,’ he said. ‘I am the boy in the book.’ He’d served Hemingway and Buñuel, running errands, lighting cigarettes. He told us the great men were very particular, and showed us to the booth they always sat in. We ordered the exact same vodka martinis. And then we ordered again.

  I caught glimpses of Rebecca in the mirrors that surrounded us. Snippets of me, particles of my daughters, a note in her laugh — it all felt so familiar. It seemed I’d always known her, my sister the total stranger. The distance between us dissolved with the vodka. My children were my first blood relatives. But now I was a person with a sister, another human connected by something beyond the imposition of adoption.

  I drank too much and for a second, before the room began to spin, the world stopped. No one moved. As if in a game of statues, my old life was frozen in place as I crept up on my new. And for that moment Rebecca and I were the only people alive in the world, our faces reflected in the glowing room.

  At midnight, Rebecca’s boyfriend arrived to take us to the station. He’d removed the back seats of his Deux Chevaux, and Christine and I sat on the metal floor with our bags between us. We were catching the overnight train to the south of Spain. We had planned to hire a car and drive from Almería up to Barcelona. On the way, we would find my mother’s home. We would peek through the windows of Cortijo Grande. But Rebecca had called ahead. Dana, her younger sister, my sister, would be there.

  ‘She wants you to stay,’ Rebecca said as she hugged us goodbye.

  On the train, we lay on opposite top bunks in a crowded sleeper car. In the early morning light, and with the clarity of a hangover, I realised the weather house I’d given J was a bad omen. The little wooden couple would never be in the same place at the same time. They could not wrench themselves free from their sun or their rain.

  ‘I’ve made a huge mistake,’ I whispered across to Christine, and started to tell her how I felt about the marriage.

  ‘I wish I’d said something at the beginning,’ Christine said. ‘It was fast and seemingly perfect, I did wonder if it was a courtship con.’

  The old woman in the bunk below rapped on the railing with her walking stick. The sleeper car smelled of stale alcohol and ageing bodies, and we arrived dishevelled and sleep-deprived. We hired a car and Christine drove the winding way along the coast up from Almería.

  We stopped outside the ancient whitewashed town of Mojácar. The cobbled lanes woven with history were wide enough for horses or handcarts. Four thousand years of families had lived in that town, generation on top of generation. On the walls and doors I noticed the Indalo Man, a prehistoric, magical god with a rainbow strung between his uplifted arms. As if hope was always at our fingertips.

  We ate fried fish at a café on a small square and the locals ignored us, as though we were ghosts in their world. We stopped to watch a butcher with eleven fingers chop meat with a cleaver. The extra finger, we heard, was a family trait, passed down for generations, along with the butchery.

&nbs
p; The sense of history, of belonging to such a place, of coming from somewhere, squeezed my heart. We’re tribal, I thought, individual but communal, somatic but part of a spiritual whole. Such belonging is understood only by its absence.

  El Cortijo Grande, my mother’s house, was in the hills above the village. Dana opened the door. We hugged and looked at each other.

  ‘You look like my daughter Bonnie,’ I said.

  ‘You look like Mummy,’ she replied.

  The house was expansive, with a swimming pool and a marbled terrace overhung with grapevines. There was art on the walls and rugs over the tiled floors and shutters to keep out the heat.

  We sat on the terrace with a carafe of local wine. In all my imaginings, I had not considered the purple wash of evening light. Or the smell of the wild lavender. And the sound of voices drifting from the valley below, the high notes caught in the sagebrush. We talked about my children and life in New Zealand, circling away from the core of our shared loss.

  I was a different person in my mother’s home. The place she dreamed up from almost nothing. The grainy images I watched on my grandfather’s VHS in New Zealand did not begin to capture the allure.

  The next day I woke with a queasy stomach and lay on my back in the pool, floating above the world. In this place of heat, I thought of calving icebergs. The crash of separation, the giant waves fanning out until they were no more than ripples. And the ablated ice mass dissolving in a new ocean, far from its origin.

  Later, as we walked along the goat trails high above the house, I was overcome with a sense of being whole. Of being there and nowhere else. We walked on through the ruins of long-abandoned villages tucked into the clefts of hills. Their communal wells had run dry, their broken homes overrun with cacti and weeds.

  We paused to throw stones into the shaft of a disused marble mine that dropped miles into the earth.

  ‘Halfway to New Zealand,’ Dana said as the stones echoed on for minutes after.

  We stopped to rest under a twisted olive tree and marvelled at our similarities. She told me stories from their childhoods. The ponies, the hotels and the travel. Their father’s wild life. As she recounted a car accident that injured Pamela’s back, I realised it had happened at the same time I’d had spinal surgery.

  I took her hand. For a moment it felt as though I was coming home to this fragmented family. To memories that did not belong to me. Everything connected by fragile strings. I wanted to slip into the middle of their lives, as though I’d always been there. I wanted to belong to this place. To be from here, my girls running through the house, learning a new language, growing up on paella and grapes.

  We talked about our cousin. Her father is our mother’s brother, Ian, the one who stayed behind. It was the first I’d heard of her. ‘She’s one day older than you,’ Dana said.

  When I suggested I might go to Manchester to meet her, Dana shook her head. ‘I don’t think she’ll want to meet you.’

  Dana grimaced when I asked her why not. ‘She came to look after us when Mummy died. But she ended up with Daddy.’ Dana put a finger to her lips. ‘We don’t speak about it. We pretend that it was normal.’

  The family stories that followed our mother’s death washed over me in a spreading pool of sadness. I felt a kinship. But no matter my warm reception, I understood that this was their family home. It was their family tragedy and I did not belong here. While we shared the loss of our mother, we’d lost very different things. But, still, that loss was strung like laundry on a line that covered the hills and valleys of all our lives, from New Zealand to Spain and back again.

  I also do not belong to my adopting family. But I am bound to them for all my life and the lifetimes of my descendants. A stepchild can inherit from both step and birth families. Such double-dipping is illegal for adopted people. If our adopting families cut us loose, we have no legal recourse to our natural parents. No rights to photos, heirlooms, keepsakes or heritage. Our parents’ death certificates will never list us as their next of kin. Our children and their children cannot trace their family trees, except through DNA. We do not exist in the record books. We do not exist at all, except as misshapen fruit grafted onto the tree of strangers.

  That evening we lingered over a meal of fresh pasta and wine at the local cantina and tried to make up for the gaps between us. A butter moon was slung low over the Spanish hills high above the sea. I looked but could not see my guiding stars, the three sisters Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka. And then I remembered — we were under a different sky. Instead, I saw only olive trees, grey against my mother’s memory.

  Later, in the room where Rebecca had spent her teenage years, I opened a drawer. Inside were notebooks and pads with scrawled writing. My mother’s handwriting, the long loops of her pen striding across the pages. Business notes, reminders to pick up the girls or book a dentist or a flight. She’d been dead almost ten years.

  I held a sheet of paper to my cheek. It always starts with paper. We crave the provenance of words on a page. Of an artwork, an organic apple, a thoroughbred racehorse. A birth certificate. A family tree. Without traceability, the artwork loses its value. The apple stays on the shelf, the racehorse becomes a nag. Provenance is woven so deep within us, we hardly stop to think what it must be like to exist without it.

  As adopted people we live with the unconscious bias of biological and cultural otherness. And often when we find our natural families we discover the feeling is the same.

  I lay in my sister’s childhood bed and could not sleep. The reunions had opened arteries of longing. My heartstrings frayed in both worlds. Later, I woke from a dream, from under a blanket on the back seat of Max’s car. It was dark and I pretended to be asleep. We drove in silence, with the smell of Mavis’s hairspray and their spent cigarettes. I opened my eyes to the glow of the cigarette lighter as the sun broke through the shutters. I felt familiar nausea and a tightening in my breasts, and knew I was pregnant again.

  25

  Land of light

  I left Spain a different person. As though my polarities had switched. I had caught the tail end of another life. One that would never be mine. But still, if I closed my eyes and pressed my fingers into the sockets, it was almost possible to imagine.

  I felt numb with the loss of my mother. And numb with sorrow for my sisters. They had lost everything. Donald, their father, had lost himself, his schemes and ideas half-formed and failing without Pamela. His heart was scooped out that day on the runway. Their wider family was mostly lost in the fallout from Donald’s affair with their cousin. And the house that held their dreams and plans was beginning to crumble under the Spanish sun.

  Christine returned to Canada and I met up with J in London. He was filming in a manor house in the country. Donald, the man my mother had loved, invited us to dinner. They’d met in Sydney after she’d left New Zealand, recovering from a breakdown after my birth.

  Donald was the kind of man who engaged with waiters. He discussed the intricacies of the wine and where the asparagus was grown. He told impossibly tall tales that may well have been true. And he spoke of his daughters in a way I’d never heard from a father. His words brimmed with love and pride.

  When J went to the bathroom, Donald put his hand on my knee. ‘Leave him,’ he said. ‘He is not the man for you. Come back to Spain with me. Bring your children.’

  ‘Is it because I look like my mother?’ I asked.

  His smile faded. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But yes. You do. And you sound like her.’ He wiped at his eyes as though he might be crying.

  I could feel Donald’s emptiness. And I wondered how old Pamela was in his mind. Does the person you’ve loved and lost keep pace with you? When you mark their birthdays, have they aged? Or are they forever caught in the weeks and days and moments before dying?

  That night I told J about the baby. He seemed pleased. ‘We’ll make it work,’ he said, acknowledging the rift that had grown between us.

  I wanted to believe him. ‘I can’t
parent alone again,’ I said.

  Something about the apartment he was staying in felt off. I was on high alert, like a cat with whisker fatigue, sensing air currents as if a predator lurked nearby. The next day he drove me to Heathrow and dropped me off at the curb.

  Through the long hours of flying, I quashed my suspicions. We were having a baby. I thought about names and knew that if this child were a girl I would call her Lilian. The name I’d always wanted. An offering or a vow. A name wrapped up in flowers, purity and beauty. The name my mother had given me.

  I lifted the window shade onto absolute blackness. The man I thought of as my father was still a mystery, existing through articles in magazines and books. My mother’s footprints were all private, the echo of her life held by those who had loved her. I still knew so little about her. She was born in Stockport in the United Kingdom and grew up around Manchester. Her mother was taciturn, a woman who soldiered on, no matter what. Her father had come home from World War Two unable to speak of its horrors. I imagine that Ian, her older brother, had taken good care of his little sister. She’d had grandparents and cousins, too. And then they’d emigrated to New Zealand.

  I took out the photograph Donald had given me. She is sitting on a stone wall in front of a country church. She is wearing slim pants. Her long legs are crossed at the ankle. She is stylish and young, gazing past the camera, just out of focus, past the unknown person taking the photo. Perhaps she is looking towards a graveyard or a wide-open field. According to Donald, she was newly pregnant with me. Maybe it was taken the day she boarded the ship for New Zealand.

  After they took me, she tried to live in Australia and then back in London. Then she tried Spain. She found herself at home on the hill above the Mediterranean. In an ancient place once occupied by the Phoenicians and Carthaginians.