Tree of Strangers Page 4

In the absence of those ancestors she must pour herself into that void. She must grow her love based on need alone — hers to be a mother and the child’s need for care. And she must believe, above all else, in the power of nurture over nature.

  In a moment of weakness, Mavis once confessed that she felt everyone knew she was not a real mother. She feared the opinion of other women and the censure of her fecund sisters. She had to be above reproach in all the ways we judge mothers. She over-compensated, orchestrating every detail of our lives. From perfect homemade clothes to perfect hair and the expectation of exemplary behaviour. I was always under scrutiny. Any hint that nature might claim me back was crushed.

  But then I became a teenager, a true changeling. There were cultural and emotional differences that nothing in my upbringing could explain. It was in that failure of nurture to create a likeness that our adoption myth began to unravel.

  My wrongness was like a mine shaft that swallowed up all my self-esteem. And then there was my other wrong. The one that set me apart.

  My spine first gave out at thirteen. For almost two years no one believed I was in pain. I finally collapsed that night in the bedroom, unable to move even a finger without unbearable spasms. A genetic defect, they said over and again until those words came to define me. The damage was such that surgery was urgent and expensive. There was a chance of permanent disability. I was in bed for months as Mavis cared for me as a good mother does.

  But such was the power of those two words ‘genetic defect’ that no one thought to enquire further. Spondylolisthesis was, after all, an inherited lumbar weakness. The perfect explanation for all that was wrong with me. I was forty-nine when a doctor administered a shockingly painful inter-muscular injection and the memory returned.

  A warm summer afternoon in Whanganui the year I turned twelve. I climbed out of my bedroom window and walked around the new subdivision that had sprung up nearby. The pine forest they’d toppled in a week had been my solace. Now I scrambled through half-built houses. I climbed on the wheel of a resting bulldozer to look at the picture of a naked woman taped to the ceiling. I returned home an hour later, walking through the back door as if I belonged there. Mavis did not look up. The set of her shoulder was enough to tell me a cold front was passing through our kitchen. I had to wait in my bedroom with the lemon striped wallpaper. Max arrived already angry, the leather strap in his hand. But I was thirteen and beginning to feel my boundaries. I must have argued with him, and he picked me up and shoved me against the wall. The exact moment my back gave out, the genetic weakness activated by blunt-force trauma.

  For all those years I’d hidden that memory. My defect the perfect example of essential wrongness. Years later, even my four-year-old knew it. I had angered Daddy. It was all my fault.

  We drove past the general shop and the petrol station. ‘When will Daddy fix your plate?’ Bonnie asked.

  I kept my voice soft as I explained that some things were unfixable.

  I’d taken to using a placating singsong voice with them when they asked the difficult questions. I caught myself doing it again. From then on I determined always to speak clearly. To be a different kind of parent. The kind who did not paper over everything uncomfortable.

  ‘My mother is coming,’ I said in my new serious tone. ‘We’re going to meet your grandmother. We are on our way.’ And I knew then I was going home. A metaphorical home. And I imagined us leaving with my mother, flying to Spain to start again. The idea felt as unreal as footprints after the tide.

  We drove over Arthur’s Pass. Bonnie and Rachel argued over the colour of a horse. Or whether it had been a cat or a dog sitting in front of a house. We stopped for lunch at a roadside table. I unpacked the sandwiches while the girls explored the edges of the clearing. Ruth staggered after them on her baby legs. They looked under bushes and chased each other. I watched them from the picnic table as they huddled over a dead bird. Bonnie pushed it with her toe. Rachel jumped and squealed while Ruth sat down to touch it. Bonnie waved, pointing to the dead bird. Would she remember this moment? Or would it become part of the blur of childhood? As normalised as the everyday violence of the leather strap and the cold shoulder.

  The girls fell asleep as soon as we left, their heads lolling over the sides of their seats. I rolled the car wide around the corners so as not to disturb them. Anything to prolong the quiet. We drove through a tunnel and I thought about ghosts. The spectral image of my mother leaning over her lost baby. And the ghost I had become. I’d been living between two worlds. In a couple of days, I would take my mother’s hand and we would step out of the fog and into the sunlight.

  7

  And the dolphins walked on water

  The sun came out as the countryside gave up its green. When the girls woke I put in a tape and we sang along to Joni Mitchell’s song about paving paradise. Christchurch still made me nervous. Another life before marriage and children and rural bliss. A world of damp squats and the Jesus movement.

  We stopped at the lights near the motel, and I realised this was the very corner they caught me, a few weeks before I turned seventeen. A group of people had gathered around a short man who, dressed in homespun clothes and with shaggy hair, looked as though he’d escaped a hippy commune. An older woman smiled, and that was enough to pull me in. His name was Marcus Arden. He waved his arms as he told a story about driving across the Desert Road on his way to an important meeting. A snowstorm came out of nowhere and the road became impassable. Marcus prayed, and God parted the snow as easily as water and he drove on.

  Now I understand it as an acid trip, repackaged for a new audience of broken people. But then it sounded like a miracle. He was part of a group of men, including Jim, who proclaimed themselves saviours of the true faith. And especially the saviours of women like me. Except I was a child pretending to be an adult. Living on the streets some of the time, or staying with a cousin. Those were dangerous days. Filled with street drugs and the kind of iniquity the Jesus movement flourished on.

  Marcus led us through the Square in the middle of old Christchurch. The beautiful city before the earthquakes swallowed it all. He stopped in front of the Cathedral and preached about the evils of organised religion. Nearby his friend Ray Comfort perched on a small ladder and yelled at the pigeons and the passersby. Ray was natty and sharp-edged, convinced of his rightness. He was the opposite of Marcus, who tended to bumble and mix his words. Except when preaching. The men acknowledged each other, and Ray winked. We followed Marcus along the street and down the stairs to the Love Shop.

  I’d heard about the drop-in centre on the streets. Free tea and a change of clothes. There were piles of tracts written by Ray, with stick figures illustrating the effects of sin. Marcus took me aside. He’d seen the same evil spirits that would so excite Jim a few years later. The month before, three men I didn’t know had hustled me into a car. They drove around with the doors locked and took me to a house near New Brighton beach. The details of the weekend they held me are fuzzy and razor sharp at the same time.

  Marcus and then Ray were keen for all the details. They rebuked me for allowing such sin into my life. They believed that we must each take responsibility for the hell that happens to us. I’d strayed from God’s path and into the clutches of evil. I was a rich seam of transgression that only prayer could fix. Even as I confessed my sins, it seemed strange that it was up to God to bring the perpetrators to justice. But then, it was 1976 and the end times were upon us.

  ‘Are you ready to die for Jesus?’ Ray Comfort asked. I said I was, but not in a sacrificial way. No one thought to ask what I meant. To them, I was a new convert and that was enough.

  But at that very point I was ready to die. It never once occurred to me that wanting this might be related to adoption. An article published by the American Adoption Congress says it best: ‘Adoption is created through loss; without loss, there would be no adoption.’4 The authors describe how young people struggle to grieve for their losses. And how adults can block or di
vert expressions of pain. Delayed grief, they say, may lead to depression, substance abuse or aggressive behaviours. If you strung adoption loss on a washing line it would cover the hills and valleys of your life. It is no wonder adopted people are four times more likely to attempt suicide.5

  Now I know. Now it makes sense. I was an adolescent, too young and too old for my age. Those teen years are the time when you test the beliefs and goals acquired from your parents. An organic process. A natural progression. But somehow I’d missed each step. I had no idea what my adopting parents believed. They’d shared so little of themselves. The few stories that escaped the silence felt unreal. Someone else’s stories. And you did not ask questions. Most of all you did not talk about adoption. The few times I tried, the answer was always the same. We know nothing. They did not tell us your name or her name. They struggled to articulate the idea that I had come from another woman’s body. A phantom child from a phantom mother. Your mother’s name. The void created by their secrecy was big enough to hide a body.

  Six months after the spinal surgery I left home. They let me go without fuss or question. A small boat untethered on a high tide. No wonder I followed those arrogant men with their vocal passions and beliefs. Later I understood their preaching was more dangerous than the streets.

  And then Bruce came along. He was on the run from his Baptist parents. From a father who berated tardy parishioners in the street and a mother who gave up dancing to meet her husband’s needs.

  Bruce bought an old bus and we drove away from Christchurch. The red scar that ran fresh down my spine and across my hip fascinated him. He did not care that my identity was so fragmented or that I had no history beyond the last few months. Neither of us had a coherent sense of self or any idea of a future.

  We decided to drive to Kaitāia in the far north, using only the back roads. We were quiet with each other. Incurious and unquestioning. Safe. On the way we stopped in Napier. We parked on Marine Parade and I could hear the dolphins calling.

  When I was a child, Mavis and Max took me to Marineland. I wore a yellow sunhat and watched the dolphins swim in circles. They jumped through flaming hoops and sang on command. They flapped their tails and ‘walked’ on water. When the show was over, they sank beneath the surface and returned to swimming in circles. Their trainers laughed and bowed. We clapped and cheered their ability to make the animals perform. The more unnatural the better.

  I would lie awake at night and think of ways to rescue the dolphins. A helicopter with a net, a truck with a tank. The helplessness of their situation flooded into my dreams. Did I make the connection between their truncated lives and my own? The loss of their natural habitat, behaviours, families and culture? Not in any conscious way. And yet every night I swam in those same circles, the cement walls closing in.

  The girls were impatient. We were lost and I had to drive around looking for our motel.

  ‘Are we going to see our new grandmother today?’ Bonnie asked.

  I checked the time. My mother would be on her way. Every part of me longed to call her Mummy. I had never called Mavis that. A therapist would call it a trigger word.

  ‘Not today, my love. Two more sleeps.’ I tried not to cry. ‘Two more sleeps and my mummy will be here.’

  ‘My mummy,’ Bonnie and Rachel chimed together. Ruth started to whine. ‘Her nappy is wet,’ Rachel said.

  We parked outside the motel. I carried Ruth on my hip and the older girls acted as if they travelled and stayed in motels all the time. The place looked nothing like the brochure I’d picked up at the library. Instead of tall pines, over-pruned shrubs surrounded the dried-out lawn. The pool was a misshapen dent. I had built up an image of staying somewhere flash. A movie motel with palm trees and cocktails around the pool. I had enough money from our savings for three nights in a dump.

  A thin woman with a shaved head answered the buzzer. I wondered if she was the shrub pruner. She glanced at the girls with distaste.

  ‘It’ll be extra for the children,’ she said. I was about to argue, but the plastic plant and faded posters of the Riviera stopped me. I imagined the woman in plumper days. Flushed with enthusiasm for her little business as she balanced on a stool to hang the posters.

  I smiled at her and thought how proud my mother would be of a daughter who was kind to people in distress. I counted out the money. ‘It’s a nice pool, isn’t it girls,’ I said to seal the deal.

  ‘Can we swim right now?’ Bonnie asked in her most grown-up voice, and her sister echoed her.

  ‘Room’s other side of the pool,’ the woman said, and handed over the key.

  Standing in front of the motel door, assailed by the smell of chlorine, I looked around. It was a beginning.

  The woman called out across the courtyard. ‘Mrs.’ She flapped a scrap of paper. I winced. I was too young to be a Mrs. I let the girls into the room and dashed around the pool.

  ‘He said it was important.’ She handed over the note. ‘I didn’t catch what he was saying.’

  She’d written Bruce’s name in lower case as if a capital letter was more than a man deserved.

  I had no intention of calling him. ‘Too little too late,’ I said and smiled and the woman’s face softened in our complicity.

  In the room, the girls were fighting over the beds. I thought about calling home, to let him know we were safe. But I didn’t want to hear the accusation in his voice, the blame in the gaps between his words. I would call him later. After a swim, after I’d unpacked the car and made dinner with the food from home. He could wait.

  The promise of a swim sent Bonnie and Rachel careening around the room. But Ruth pulled her legs to her chest, refusing to let me change her. I loved how determined she was, so resolute, even at fourteen months old.

  The phone rang as we went out the door. The girls were already near the gate, dragging their towels over the hot concrete. It will just be him, I thought, and remembered how he’d saved my life. He’d given me children who kept me afloat. He had given me reason and purpose. And now I was leaving him. I picked up Ruth and let the phone ring on in the empty room.

  8

  The opposite of Easter

  The girls finished their swim and we went to Piko Wholefoods for fresh fruit. The weather report played on the radio behind the counter. ‘A foehn wind, warm and dry, has formed to the west in the Zone of Calms.’ I smiled. The Zone of Calms was perfect for this day. It felt like the weather reporter was speaking only to me. ‘But don’t forget,’ he added, ‘all winds are liars: they never blow from the exact quarter whence they come.’6

  ‘Did you hear that?’ I asked the man waiting behind me. He was large and round with sparse hair. ‘I did.’ He had the kindest smile. ‘Typical National Radio. Even the announcers think they’re actors. That part about the wind is Greek philosophy, I think.’

  He had a lovely voice. ‘You sound like an actor. Or you could be on the radio,’ I said.

  He inclined his head, and his eyes crinkled with warmth as he helped put the fruit on the counter. ‘Nice girls,’ he said and patted their heads.

  They clamoured for lollipops. I planned to break that habit now we were away from the postmistress. But I gave in and we drove back to the motel in peace.

  I could hear the phone as we walked past the pool. The girls wanted to swim again. Anger at Bruce’s persistence welled up.

  But it was Jeannie. ‘I found you. Bruce gave me the name of the motel.’ She sounded as though she had been running.

  I laughed. ‘We decided to come a couple of days early, to be on the safe side, in case the car broke down.’ I could hear an echo in my voice. Something was wrong. I wanted to keep talking, to fill up all the gaps so she could not speak. The girls were in the next room, fighting over the towels, and I could hardly hear over their screams.

  ‘Hold on.’ I closed the door to the bedroom and lay down on the couch and cradled the phone against my ear.

  ‘Let’s start again. Hi, Jeannie.’

  ‘
Bad news.’

  I remember my fingers spread over my chest. The yelling from the bedroom intensified and then fell silent. My mother had changed her mind. She did not want me after all. I had no right to expect anything else.

  Jeannie began to cry. Breathless sobs that drenched the gravel in her voice. I could not understand why she was crying. This was my loss, not hers. My brain switched to organisation mode. The curse of resilience, of glossing over emotion to ensure survival. I was never sure if it was flight or fight. Or perhaps it was freeze mode. The stagnation of all emotion.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Maybe next year. Or the year after. It was probably too quick for her.’

  ‘No,’ Jeannie whispered. ‘That’s not it. Her plane. It was on the news. On the radio. There was fog. On the runway. Her plane was taking off.’

  All winds are liars. ‘There’s been a mistake. It must be a mistake,’ I said. But the weather report I’d read at the Greymouth Library had mentioned unseasonal fog over Madrid. A kata cold front favouring the development of low stratus clouds. Persisting until dawn.

  ‘Her poor girls,’ Jeannie said.

  ‘What girls?’

  I could hear Jeannie’s footsteps as she walked away. She blew her nose and came back.

  ‘I’m here,’ she gulped. ‘Her daughters. I was going to tell you. They’re eleven and fourteen. Oh god, and her husband. That poor man. Those poor girls.’

  I put down the phone. I had two sisters. My mother’s plane had crashed on take-off.

  People talk about shock as mind numbing. But an image of a burning aircraft came to me. The smoke that filled the sky was indistinguishable from the fog, as acrid as burning coal.

  I think of loss like the weight of a soul. When you dissolve loss into loss, nothing changes. Colour, texture, smell, everything remains the same. There is nothing to feel. No sadness, no grief. Everything is a mirage.

  At Bethany, the maternity home where I was born, they took the babies from their single mothers right away. Before their mothers laid eyes on them. Before they understood they could see love made flesh in their child’s eyes. Before they could make a fuss. Or scream down the ward. Although I’m told they often did both as they tried to find their missing babies.