Tree of Strangers Page 2

  Closed adoption does this, severing you from yourself. You are a faceless bundle, as devoid of identity as dough. Even with my original name on all the adoption paperwork, my parents denied I’d ever been anyone other than Barbara. The law enabled them. My birth records closed and sealed until after their deaths. Or I turned one hundred and twenty.

  It’s not only the law that keeps us this way. It’s hidden in the words. Adoptee. The ‘-ee’ suffix turns you into an object, someone to whom an action is done. A lifelong sentence. That one word so close to amputee. You are forever an adopted child, infantilised in word and deed, with no rights to your own information. To gain back those early parts of yourself, you must seek a court order. Back when I began to search, they were never approved.

  The lathe slowed and Bruce returned, the smell of wood as pungent as aftershave. I felt magnanimous. As though in treading water all my life, my toes had found a little solid ground. But still, I did not tell him.

  Jeannie would call again and everything would change. I would take the girls and drive over the Main Divide to Christchurch airport. My mother would walk off the plane and into the terminal and my real life would begin.

  Bruce slid into the bed and I touched his shoulder. He curled away, as close to the edge as the waterbed allowed. ‘Barbara?’

  I hated the way he used my name with polite clarity. The light blond hairs covering the knuckle of his wrist caught the moonlight. The wind died away.

  ‘I saved you.’ He said this into the silence, and then he was asleep, just like that.

  Years later it occurred to me that this was his talent. His thoughts whittled into one slender, all-encompassing statement. And it was true. Bruce saved Barbara. The defining statement of our marriage. He’d been my way forward, out of the mess of teenage years. Without him, I’d be homeless. Alone in my submerged life, dislocated and abandoned by my parents for the crime of having ‘adoption issues’. But his stability was enough for me to begin to shape myself.

  How do we remain faithful to the essence of our early relationships and still recalibrate them in a new light? Now I wonder if I was the one who rescued him.

  At seventeen I’d crawled through his bedroom window. I fell onto his bed, and into his life, a shipwreck delivered to his harbour. We made our marriage on that rocky shore. I had been his way forward, too, an easy direction. His one grand statement, the perfect comment on his religious upbringing.

  I was a bad girl when he had only ever been good. But it had been a seething kind of good. A rankled, angry young man, his virtue worn like a hair shirt that did nothing but plague his skin. I was perfect for him — his salvation, the girl no one would mistake for good. He could relieve his itching without giving up the cause.

  The rooster crowed; its call amplified in the pre-dawn dark. I groaned. Every morning the harsh birdcall constricted my chest with exhaustion. I threw the pillow against the wall. As if now, with the imminent arrival of my mother, I could express my dissatisfaction. Some part of me knew this was dangerous. An upset of the unspoken balance between us.

  Bruce got up. At the back door, he knocked over the lined-up gumboots. His tread was heavy in the early morning hush. I could hear him stumbling over tree trimmings as he chased the rooster around the bottom of the section. Its crow faded to a frightened squawk, and I wondered what I would wear to meet my mother.

  Bruce returned and stood in the doorway, naked apart from his gumboots. The rooster dangled from his hand. Its feet were between his fingers, the head lolling, the bright red comb already dulled. He shook it, and the feathers sighed.

  ‘Happy now?’ he asked, and his voice was empty of everything.

  3

  God fights back

  Jeannie rang with flight details while I was making breakfast. My mother would arrive in a week. I told her I’d go to Christchurch to meet her.

  Jeannie laughed. ‘Good idea. I imagine small-town New Zealand is not her thing.’

  I gazed out at the ring of bush and knew it was no longer my thing either.

  Bruce was reading in his chair. We’d never discussed my adoption. Devoid of a past, I had always felt insubstantial, a ghost of a person, suspended in a liminal space between identities. It would be years before I understood how humans slide past each other. As if we still bristle with the hair-like villi from the womb, our connections more instinctive than we like to believe. Rabbits sniffing the air to see if it’s safe from predators.

  But then to some degree we are all predacious. I guess that’s why class matters, old school ties, the right neighbourhood, house, clothes, car or accent. We are always assessing each other. Are you one of us?

  Adopted people grow up knowing the answer. You come from nowhere. You are strange fruit of obscure origin. The lack of a bloodline marks you. Just ask a mother-inlaw. I’ve had three. For years I wondered why two of them, women from different worlds, treated me with an instinctual distrust. No matter how hard I tried to please them. Now I understand. I was without pedigree, something even a lap dog has. Deep down, they did not want grandchildren without lineage or origin.

  Rain-bloated clouds hung over our house. I put down the phone.

  ‘My mother is coming. My real mother.’ The words left me breathless.

  Bruce looked up. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I’m not stupid.’

  Bounce the goat was tethered outside the living-room window. She started to wail for her kid. We’d weaned it a few days before and sent it away in the boot of a friend’s car.

  Bruce gazed out the window. ‘The rain’s stopped.’

  I mixed the batter for muffins. We spent the day in retreat. Perhaps that was the moment the chill overtook us. Later, when the girls were in bed, I ran a bath, locked the door and turned out the lights. The dark was important. Only under its cover could I take off my clothes and uncoil into the hot water.

  I undressed in front of the girls. Bruce had observed my body through six years and three children. There had even been a time long ago when we would get naked on the local shingle beach at the height of summer. Or along a tributary to the Māwheranui that once sparkled with gold flakes. It was only alone that I could not endure my body.

  Bruce pounded on the door. The sound vibrated through the bath. I guessed he’d been knocking for a while. I let him in and slipped back under the water. He squatted down, curling his fingers over the edge of the enamel.

  I could hear the sea in the distance. The first time Bruce found me under the water, he’d grabbed my arm and pulled me out. In fear, I struck him across the face. He’d let go and I hit the side of the bath, blood spouting from my nose.

  Now he sat on the floor with his back to the wall. ‘It’s like you want to drown yourself.’

  I tried to explain growing up in a house where they mistrusted privacy. Bedroom doors were always open. Sleeping was in full view with hands above the sheets.

  ‘It’s about being whole,’ I said. ‘For the length of my breath, I’m whole.’

  ‘But you’re a mother, doesn’t that make you a whole person?’ The light from the hallway cast his face in shadow. ‘You need help,’ he said. ‘I’ve called Jim.’

  Jim Doak was the local preacher who believed in the power of demons. Bruce had begun to attend his meetings.

  ‘Jim will fix you.’ His voice was low and soothing, calming a skittish animal.

  In the morning, I packed the girls’ clothes and placed their bags by the door. I wanted to leave right away, but Bruce shadowed my every move.

  Jim arrived after lunch. I’d been expecting a doctor’s bag, a box, anything that might contain his magic. But he strode into the living room swinging his well-thumbed Bible. I’d always detested him. The way he parted his hair, slick and precise. And the way he washed dishes after our shared meals, scrubbing at them in a brisk and joyless way as though they were our souls.

  Bruce took the girls to their bedroom and set them up with pens and paper. I watched Jim in the reflection from the kitchen window. He nod
ded toward the couch with the orange-crayoned flower pattern. Bruce returned and we sat together, our knees touching.

  Jim positioned himself on the edge of the old armchair. He cleared his throat. ‘Thank you, Bruce and Barbara, for taking this step. It can’t have been easy.’ His smile revealed uneven teeth.

  ‘Barb’s a little nervous,’ Bruce said.

  Jim cleared his throat. ‘Could you tell me why you feel the need for spiritual deliverance?’

  I remember blushing. ‘I don’t.’ I felt embarrassed and violated at the same time.

  ‘She tries to drown herself.’ Bruce grabbed my hand as if it was he who was going under.

  Jim leaned forward. ‘Drown? How?’

  ‘In the bath. She holds her breath under the water. Like she’s unconscious. Like she wants to die.’

  ‘Did you have a bad birth experience?’ Jim asked. ‘Your own, I mean, not your kids’.’

  It was this one question that seared Jim into my memory. It struck me that I had no clue. Growing up, I knew not to mention birth in any way.

  My new parents picked me up at ten days old. From where? No one remembers. My legal birth certificate shows my adopters as my birth parents. All other details are blank. My original birth certificate disappeared when I was nine months old and the adoption finalised. I received a copy in 1985 after the Adult Adoption Information Act came into being. But even that supposed original was stamped with the names of my adopting parents. As if I had always belonged to them, even before they trundled my mother into their lawyer’s office.

  Mavis’s memory loss went further. The doctor’s name eluded her, even though her sister worked for him for years. She could not remember my mother’s name. Years later, when I showed her the papers she’d signed, her signature next to my mother’s, she declared them fake.

  It was more than memory loss. It was the eradication of my past. As if Mavis and Max alone called me into being at ten days old. There appeared to be no curiosity. No nagging interest about where I came from, who my mother was, my father, my grandparents? I was a warm package delivered by the State, with feeding instructions pinned to a blanket.

  Jim turned to Bruce. ‘If her birth was traumatic, the water might feel like a safe place.’

  I hated that he spoke to Bruce as though I was not there. And that he was right. The bath was my sanctuary, the place of wholeness.

  Jim lowered his eyelids. It was a habit that made you think he was deep in thought or prayer. I remember wondering if he was mentally undressing me. Or worse.

  ‘She’s never really here,’ Bruce said. ‘Not when she’s caring for the girls.’ He paused. ‘Or in bed.’

  The energy in the room shifted. We were getting down to the main agenda now. Jim explained that Bruce had shared certain things. He inclined his head to signify a touch of embarrassment, and there was a glint in his eye. I stood up, ready to leave, and saw my reflection, devoid of expression, in the mirror above the mantel.

  Jim stood in front of me. ‘Your past is a little unsavoury.’ He seemed pleased with his choice of word.

  ‘Unsavoury how, Jim?’ I knew I was not meant to question him. My role was to agree, to be reassuring and give myself up to his wisdom.

  ‘The spirit of harlotry has possessed you, Barbara.’ He swallowed as he said it.

  I laughed out loud. Jim lowered his voice and told me God had shown him this was the core of my problem.

  Bonnie and Rachel stood by the door, holding hands. They had changed themselves into pyjamas, the buttons mismatched. They ran to me and I took them into the kitchen. We would not leave today. I made an early dinner and breastfed Ruth and read them bedtime stories while the men waited in the living room.

  ‘We’d like to pray over you,’ Jim said when I returned. ‘Our faith in Jesus can deliver you from the demon that is destroying your life.’

  When I asked Bruce if he agreed with this diagnosis, he nodded and tried to put his arm around me. Jim flicked through his Bible. I remember saying, Fuck it, deliver me. I wanted it over so I could be on my way.

  The men stood each side of me. Jim placed one hand on my forehead, the other in the small of my back. Bruce copied him. I closed my eyes. My head hurt. I wondered for a moment about the feel of thorns. Jim began to pray, imploring God to look favourably upon us.

  A laugh rose up from my stomach, like the fits of giggling that could overtake the girls. The more I laughed, the harder they prayed. Then Jim shoved me, and I fell into his cold-handed embrace. It was like falling under the water. I went with it, sliding into a place where even breathing was unnecessary.

  4

  The Australia?

  Invercargill, 1974.

  Sunlight through late summer leaves, a dried-out lawn and a brick fence. We’d moved to Invercargill the year before, and our back yard was bare apart from one tree. Inside the square-fronted stucco house Mavis was ironing. She’d cranked the stereo up to nine as Glen Campbell crooned ‘Dreams of the Everyday Housewife’.

  I would soon be fourteen. I lay on a blanket and thought: I’m not from this place. Not Invercargill or Whanganui before it. And I wondered if I was even from New Zealand. My life felt as empty as the back yard. I remember all this because I wrote it down in a little notebook I took everywhere. I was beginning to think about adoption, what it might mean and why it made a difference.

  I felt it should make me different, like an answer to a question I was yet to verbalise. In the facsimile of a family made by adoption, parents work hard to believe you are as if born to them. The law tells you there is no difference. Government-level gaslighting. The Adoption Act 1955 says you are deemed to be the adoptive parents’ child as if you had been born to them.

  Around that time, Mavis said, ‘We love you as if you were ours.’ The reply that jumped into my mouth was as dangerous as a bomb: How would you know? Years later I understood the cruelty of my response. A clueless child picking at her scab of infertility. It caused a week of glacial silence, presaging the silences to come whenever I questioned adoption.

  When we are young, most of us think our childhoods are normal. Adopting families are as diverse as any other. Conditional and unconditional. How was I to know that in this one my behaviour was the arbiter of love? When I was good, it was down to their parenting, and the warmth flowed. When I misbehaved, it was all in my genes, as if I’d inherited nothing from my mother except her immorality.

  To paraphrase Tolstoy, every family is miserable in its own way. But with many adoptions, conditional love plays into an understory of abandonment and rejection. Today they would say I had Adopted Child Syndrome. A kind of psychopathology leading to all manner of negative social behaviour. Back then all I wanted was to escape.

  The longing under that tree in the back yard was so intense I thought I had called him to me. Leon. The love god of James Hargest High School. I opened my eyes and he was there, blocking the sun, the boy every girl at school wanted. He knelt down. So far, our courtship consisted of him once taking my hand at the bus stop and walking to band practice. I’d sat on an upturned beer crate in a filthy garage while the boys tried to play in time.

  ‘Nice music,’ Leon said as Glen Campbell moved on to ‘If You Go Away’. ‘Do you want to go away?’ he asked.

  I’m sure I nodded and he suggested Australia. He said it fast, as if that would reduce the immensity of the idea.

  ‘The Australia?’ My cousin had run away there the year before. It became the latest family secret, spoken in hushed tones.

  Leon said he had tickets for the next day. His bandmates were sure I’d refuse. I tried to stand up but my back hurt and he held out his hand. I told him I had $20 from babysitting, and he asked what I was saving it for. ‘This trip,’ I said. ‘When do we leave?’

  He smiled with the sun behind him and told me he knew I was different. The plan was to meet at the school gates, walk to the depot and catch a bus to the airport. Back then Kiwis could go to Australia without a passport. But we needed more mo
ney.

  That night I dreamed I was wearing every piece of clothing I owned, limbs stiff as scarecrows’. In the morning Mavis’s handbag was on the kitchen bench. Her purse bulged with the weekly housekeeping, enough to feed a family of four. We were going shopping after school to buy the shoes I’d been saving for. The fold of notes seemed to jump into my pocket.

  Leon was waiting at the school gate. A friend punched him on the arm. I had pins and needles down my leg, and the fingers that stole the money were numb. Leon’s hair needed washing. I thought about going home. I could pretend to be sick, then slip the money back in her purse and lie down on the floor to relieve my sore back.

  But Leon held my hand. It felt as if the whole school watched us leave.

  My family had moved every two or three years. From Napier to Invercargill to Upper Hutt to Westport, back to Upper Hutt and to Whanganui. I was always the new girl, always the outsider, always moving on. We’d been back in Invercargill a few months and I had no friends. I knew going with Leon would mark me and not in a good way. We walked to the bus depot and changed out of our uniforms. I looked in the toilet mirror and mouthed hello as if I was someone I’d just met.

  Outside I took his hand, wet from slicking back his hair. ‘I’m adopted, you know,’ I said as the bus arrived. We slung our school bags over our shoulders and stood at the end of the line.

  ‘What does that mean?’ Leon asked.

  ‘They chose me.’ I saw babies lined up like fruit and Mavis squeezing their chubby thighs. Our turn came to board and Leon let go of my hand.

  ‘Let’s get a milkshake,’ he said. ‘My favourite is strawberry.’

  We walked to the dairy as though we were foreigners, tourists from afar. Leon told me things. About being in the band and how inside himself he could play anything. But in the garage it came out wrong. About his parents and his younger sister who got all the attention. And the operation that meant he could not play cricket.

  We walked around a park near the school. When I went to drink from a tap, he cupped his hands and I sucked the water from his palm. We found a hidden recess of branches behind a gardener’s shed. I remember the lacey foliage and how weightless I felt, the grass beneath like a Lilo floating over a pool.