Tree of Strangers Read online

  Had my mother died on the day I was born they would have swaddled me in sadness, a child of sorrow and loss. Comforted by shared grief. But stranger adoption denies you that grief. One set of arms is considered as good as another. To the baby, there is no such distinction. To me, my mother died on the day I was born. She came alive again for three short days — phone call to phone call. And then she died again. The opposite of Easter.

  But even at that point, grief was denied me. I was not one of those ‘poor girls’. I’d never met her, after all. I had no right to my racing heart or the black-filled sky. There was no acceptable place to take my grief. We were strangers created out of stranger adoption.

  I fed Ruth and sat her on a towel in the bathroom. The older girls stood with their backs to the wall, as if lined up for a photo, and watched as I undressed. We hold grief in our lungs. I found I could not breathe. My skin was on fire, and all I wanted was water. I stood under a cold shower. Rachel pulled aside the curtain, her face all concern, then she began to cry.

  I dressed and hugged her, and we sat on the bed. Bonnie and Rachel took Ruth’s hands and the three of them jumped. Their laughter caught me and I lay down. It was all the invitation they needed. Rachel burrowed under my arm. Bonnie tried to make the mattress bounce higher. Ruth scaled my hip, her arms aloft, before giggling and falling next to me.

  I turned on the radio but missed the news and got the weather report. Showers, briefly heavy in the morning, becoming isolated afternoon and gradually clearing. Gradually clearing. Everything gradually clears.

  ‘Let’s go out for dinner,’ I said. ‘A special treat.’

  They had never been to a restaurant and ran circles with excitement. I watched them dress themselves, fighting over a singlet and the hairbrush.

  At the reception desk, the motel woman was reading a newspaper. I asked if there was anything about a plane crash. She shook her head, then remembered. ‘On the radio. In Spain. Something about fog. Lots of survivors though.’ She looked at her watch and turned on the radio. The beeps for the news sounded.

  Two Spanish jetliners collided in heavy fog on a take-off runway here this morning, killing about 90 people and injuring more than 30 of the approximately 45 survivors.7

  Jeannie was wrong. Surely my mother would have survived. But I knew she was dead. Something had changed. The lulling of a violin string in the moments after the note dies away.

  Our bodies are echo chambers. We know things that make no sense. Today the science says we leave tiny pieces of ourselves in each other. Microchimeric cells slip across the placenta during pregnancy. In Greek mythology, a chimera is a shape-shifting creature. Fetal microchimeric cells left in the mother can migrate through her blood. In rat models, they have been seen to change shape as they rush to assist in healing a mother’s injured heart.

  None of us is as singular or autonomous as we like to think. My mother had held a filament of me within her body. And now even that tenuous thread was broken.

  Today I am comforted and wowed by the science. But back then all I felt was the weight of knowledge. I had wanted this one thing so badly, I had caused a catastrophe.

  Mavis calibrated her goodness through phrases and sayings. Uncomfortable questions always elicited the same response: ‘Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles you, for you’ll only trouble trouble and trouble others too.’

  I was always the one who troubled trouble. An actor who breaks through the fourth wall and speaks directly to the camera. I had dared to step out of my assigned role. I had sought Pamela out and now she was dead. I had taken my broken-heartedness and passed it on to others. ‘Those poor girls.’

  I stared at the motel woman. ‘Is it worse to lose all hope or never to have had it in the first place?’ I thought I saw a tear forming in her dry eyes.

  She frowned. ‘Your children are hungry,’ she replied.

  ‘I’m on the other side of hope,’ I said, but she had already turned away.

  The almost-Italian restaurant was a short walk. Red-checked cloths covered the tables and they served chips with everything. There was a high chair for Ruth and I explained to the girls how to order from a menu. My heart’s desire had grown so vast and fast, its destruction was now too much to contemplate.

  I focused on my breathing, on the girls’ chatter, on the drawings they did on the paper the waiter provided. The meal arrived — chips and fish for the girls and a plate of pasta for me. I wondered if they ate pasta in Spain. Who would cook for those poor girls? For them, it was the worst thing that could happen. But for me, it was nothing more than the opening and closing of desire. I cut the girls’ fish into tiny bits and let them use their fingers.

  I’d been living on hope for all my life. Consuming it like air. Brittle, shallow, stupid hope. Now we would have to go back. To the cold cottage and the insatiable chickens. To the peeling paint, the rusted bath, the curling lino and the boggy lawn. And the bush that grew back, reclaiming its true nature the minute I turned away.

  I would start again. Because how you start is the most important thing.

  Ruth knocked over the dish of tomato sauce, the red spraying like blood across the table. I wiped up the mess and smiled at my girls and we settled into silence, devouring our food as if we’d always been hungry.

  9

  You are an electromagnetic field

  The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of … We know the truth not only by the reason but by the heart. — Blaise Pascal8

  We drove home the next day, through Arthur’s Pass, over the mountain and into a storm. Gale-force winds whipped at the car. I felt my mother’s presence. As if she were sitting beside me, holding the wheel steady, ensuring I would not veer left to plunge over the gorge. I imagined the vehicle sailing high for a moment, silent in the rain. The children too surprised to scream. The long tumble as the car disappeared, curtained from the road and devoured by the bush. And there we would remain, nestled in trees too dense to give up their secret.

  When we came out onto the grassy flats, the sun appeared. You cannot underestimate the miracle of sun in a place that rains all the time. We were safe, and my mother’s spirit disappeared.

  Bruce was not home. The chickens were loose and came running toward us. The goat was gone. It was almost Christmas but the house was damp and cold. The fire in the wood burner had gone out. Apart from a few weeks during mid-summer, we kept it ticking over. Warming the bones of the house, Bruce had said as the wind whistled through the window frames.

  He came home a few hours later, a little drunk, which was unusual for him. Jeannie had called him first. He’d known about my mother’s death before I did.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and held me for a moment. ‘We should pray about it.’

  I stood stiffly while he intoned the magic words. Tomorrow I would go to the welfare office and find out what benefits a single mother of three could expect.

  In my rational mind, I am agnostic. But imagination escapes such limits. The visions began that evening as I slid into the bath. Although her face was a smudge, I was sure the woman in the car was my mother. They arrived at an airport. She applied red lipstick without a mirror. As she strode across the car park, the idle luggage boys blew into their chilled hands. Their pushcarts were no more than disembodied shapes in the fog.

  I was in a trance in Runanga, topping up the bath with the last of the hot water. At the same time, I was shadowing the misty woman in Madrid.

  I followed her into the terminal and waited beside her in line at the check-in counter. When it was her turn, the attendant spoke to a supervisor. There was no sound, but it was clear there was confusion over her seat. My mother took a fax from her bag, pointing to her reservation. The attendant inclined her head towards a group of Japanese couples. My mother smiled and they waved at her. Later I learned they were honeymooners on the first leg of their long flights home.

  She stood in a queue at the glass doors to the tarmac. The fog blotted out the view. She wa
s nervous, radiating a tension I could feel in my bathwater.

  An overweight man in front dropped his tickets. He wore a camel-hair coat, the remnant of an elegance long since consumed. My mother helped him as the passengers behind shuffled in frustration. When the doors opened, they pushed through, out onto the milky tarmac to the plane. She pulled her jacket tight against the damp. Her clothes were too light. She had dressed for a New Zealand summer. She followed the large man up the stairs. He shuffled sideways down the aisle, the strap of his bag hidden in a furrow across his shoulder. The fog seemed to have followed them on board, glazing the cabin with apprehension.

  She glanced at her ticket, unused to sitting in the middle of the plane. The man lowered himself into the embrace of his seat with a knowing smile. They were sitting together. The doors closed and the plane began to taxi.

  ‘Mind if I lift the armrest?’ The sound barrier had disappeared. His voice was syrupy and oddly fragrant, and it occurred to me that he was God. Or perhaps an angel, an oversize cherubim sent to escort her.

  I was afraid to move, to even ripple the water in case the gap in time closed up. Desperate to know and terrified at the same time.

  My mother lifted the armrest and looked out to the shrouded runway. The man leaned across, his arm doughy against her.

  ‘Dense fog,’ he said, and I could smell chocolate.

  I heard the thunder of engines. Another aeroplane with its flashing lights split the fog. The fuselage was close enough to touch. The mist surrounded them, billowing like smoke, as it dissolved the edges of the man’s coat.

  The hot water ran out and the bath was cold. I got out, my head pounding. Bruce was asleep on the couch. I gazed out the window at the trees thick with new summer leaves and saw a child waving her arms. She stood on an observation deck and pointed to a patch of blue above the hulk of the dismembered plane.

  Two weeks later I found a copy of Time magazine open on a table at our local pizzeria. Someone had turned the pages back to an article on a plane crash in Madrid. One photograph showed the ribs of the fuselage flat on its belly. In another four men carried the corners of a plaid blanket. They leaned away from the sagging weight of their cargo and there was no rush in their step.

  I had seen it all from my bath and now here it was, my dream made real in a random magazine on a café table.

  Does adoption cause a vivid imagination? Filling the gap between the known and unknown with fantasy?

  When you grow up in a vacuum without transparency or truth, fabrication is your only refuge. As a child, I invented stories about my mother. She was famous, of course. A musician, a painter, a scientist. She was every passing thing I ever wanted to be.

  But then I’d found her and made a terrible mistake by writing to her. My letter had caused her death.

  So instead I began to write about the life I imagined she had. I invented her lovers and friends. I described her elegant home with crown mouldings and tall windows and deep carpets. I gave her a golden Labrador called Otto and a troubled teenage daughter who planned to run away. Her dissatisfied husband slept on the sofa, dreaming of lingerie and a secret life he kept from her. There was even a declawed kitten that lived behind her curtains.

  Over the years, the stories changed. When I had a relationship with a disingenuous writer, I processed the fallout as if it had happened to my mother. When it was over, he sent me a file of letters he’d written, one or more a day for all the months. They began with pleasure. I was the shiny new thing in his life. I was better than his wife. I was all the mysteries rolled into one. Soon enough my contradictions were my downfall. By the end, he had transformed me into his own shadow self and I became every love who had failed him.

  As I read his wounding words, I pretended he was my mother’s lover, not mine. Because this is one of the things a mother does. She absorbs the blows for her child. Not all of them, and not forever. But she is there for her child of any age. When your children are small, protecting them is your overriding obsession. As mine grew up, I understood that this natural response does not change. Their danger is always my danger. Any threat to them is a threat to me.

  It took a long time to realise that Mavis appeared to have no such capacity. Her parenting was competent and practical. Food, water, clothing, shelter. The mysterious and strange works of the heart were missing in our relationship. Were they unknown to her? Or was it inappropriate to share them with a stranger child?

  But what if all Mavis wanted was the child she could not have, the one her heart could recognise? Perhaps she was undone by the failure of language to encompass the complexities of her inner world.

  The Welsh understand. They call it hiraeth, a concept of deep homesickness. Hiraeth is more profound than just missing something. It is the unrequited hope that produces ever more unanswered longing. Welsh writer Val Bethell describes hiraeth as the language of the soul, the call from the inner self. ‘Half-forgotten — fraction remembered.’9

  There is a painting that has long fascinated me. By José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior (1850–1899), Saudade shows a dark-haired woman leaning against a window. There is a tear on the side of her nose, and she is reading a letter while holding her shawl over her mouth. The painting conveys dejection and longing in every molecule of her being. I had always thought the title was the woman’s name. But then I discovered saudade is the Portuguese word for something beyond longing. There is no other word quite like it. They say it is the seventh most difficult word to translate. It describes a melancholic feeling of incompleteness, a desire for something absent that is being missed; a mysterious, transcendent and intimate mood caused by deep longing.

  Was this what my past lover, the errant writer, was expressing as he filled the pages with my failings? Is this what my adopting mother was unable to communicate, even in the diligence of her caring?

  The heart is the first organ that forms in the body. There is a divine symbiotic communication between the heart of the mother and that of her child. The Mexican scientist Maria Teresa Sotelo understands all this. She says the mother–child connection is far deeper than we’ve imagined. ‘The heart of the child can translate her mother’s emotions. She knows if she is loved or not.’ Sotelo describes pregnancy, birth and lactation as a process of molecular and cellular communication in the middle of an electromagnetic field. ‘The baby’s heart incorporates the heartbeat of the mother into its own heartbeat,’ she says.10

  Understanding these things, I am sad for Mavis. For me, everything is in service to that longing for connection, to saudade. It is a longing that pays no heed to mortal realities. I am almost sixty and still I ache for that one thing my agnostic mind reaches for but cannot quite grasp: the sound of my mother’s heart beating within my own.

  10

  Abraham and Isaac went up a hill

  We resumed our lives in Runanga as if I’d never been to Christchurch. I wanted Bruce to get a real job, a career. In reality, I wanted one myself but could not imagine what I could do or be.

  Mavis had taken me to a careers adviser not long before I left home. They chatted as though I was not in the room.

  ‘Well yes,’ Mavis had said, ‘she loves to write, but her spelling is atrocious.’ She lowered her voice. ‘She wants to go into radio.’

  The careers adviser ignored me. ‘It’s tough to get into radio school. You mentioned she loves horses? Farming would be a good choice. She could marry a farmer.’

  We were not radio school or university people. Ideas above your station, Max said when I dared to mention it.

  Now a job came up at the Runanga council. Dog-catcher. It came with a bicycle, a rope with the ends wrapped in tape, and bite-sized packages of mince. I collected the packages from the butcher and carried them in a saddlebag as I rode around in the pre-dawn calm, eyes peeled for strays. The dogs of Runanga were an unruly lot. They delighted in enticing me down long winding driveways or up into the bush. Payment was by the dog and I was not particularly successful. But to be alone after y
ears of babies clinging to every part of me was a relief. I loved that job and they gave me a great reference.

  ‘Why don’t you go to teachers’ training college?’ I suggested to Bruce one morning when I came in from biking all over the town. He was making porridge and the girls were still in their pyjamas. He nodded and said nothing, and I wrote away for the application form.

  Jeannie called with an address north of Wellington and a phone number. Pamela’s father Fred and Betty, his second wife. ‘They’d like to hear from you,’ she said. ‘But be gentle, he’s heartbroken at the loss of his daughter.’

  I felt the familiar tug of unfairness. Pamela was his daughter and she was the mother of ‘those poor girls’, my half-sisters, and the wife of ‘that poor man’. She did not belong to me in any way. I was an interloper. To know my mother was not a right. It was a favour.

  I was beset with nerves. Apart from my girls, I’d not met a blood relative. I called and spoke to Betty.

  ‘Come for a night,’ she said. ‘We have a spare room.’

  The following week, I caught the bus from Greymouth to Picton. Ruth was still breastfeeding, so I took her along.

  We boarded the ferry to Wellington. From the shore near Runanga, the sea smells of all the unmoored things that wash up. Dead fish, bloated seaweed, degrading plastic bottles. A rotted ham sandwich knotted inside a plastic bread bag. I held Ruth at the ferry railing, happy for the simple smells of salt and sun. A pod of dolphins joined us. They swam in mesmerising formation, the babies in the centre, surrounded by the adults.

  In Wellington, we caught the train up the coast. The carriage was full of business types. There were women my age in smart skirts and jackets. I wore a cardigan I’d knitted myself. The pride I’d had in my tidy stitches disappeared.