Tree of Strangers Read online

  Then comes the rip tide that grabs my ankles, pulling me under, taking me out to sea. I remember a glorious moment, my eyes opened as wide as they would go. The ocean rushing in until I am immersed, unbodied in a viscous realm. And Mavis is beside me, dog-paddling, gasping as she snatches my hair and pulls me back toward the beach. Her face is a mask of fear, while Max stands on the shore, shading his eyes from the sun.

  ‘Stupid,’ he says when we come up out of the water, ‘so stupid.’ They do not speak as we ride home in the stifling heat with the windows rolled up and the smoke trapped inside.

  I grinned at my parents. Happy they were there beside me in the hospital.

  ‘We’ve called Bruce,’ Mavis said. ‘He can look after the girls for a couple more weeks. We thought they could live with us while you get better.’

  Max left to go back to the motel and Mavis sat beside me. It was our first time alone in years. I imagined I could see all the words she wanted to say in the furrow of her brow. Why don’t you grow up? A mother does not leave her children behind. Where did we go wrong? But we said nothing and I slept. They left the next day.

  I called Bruce. The girls would stay with him until I got back. ‘You can make up the time later,’ he said.

  Hampster visited a couple of times. When they discharged me, he pushed the wheelchair to the entrance and ran around to get the rental car. The harsh bright sun hit my face.

  ‘You were so lucky,’ Hampster said as he held the door and I angled myself in. I turned away from him, the gloss gone. We drove to Auckland under the covenant of high blue skies, and I thought about luck.

  Adopted people hear the L-word a lot. Mavis’s sisters reminded me at every opportunity. I was so lucky to have such great parents. A colleague once told me I was lucky I was not aborted. A teacher said I was lucky someone wanted me. Another mentioned how lucky I was not to end up in an orphanage.

  The idea that we are lucky permeates the public discourse on adoption. Lucky implies that adoption saved us from all manner of unknown forces.

  In one attempt to discuss adoption, Mavis was clear. ‘Your birth mother’s parents are to blame. You should be grateful we saved you when they did not want you.’

  Gratitude is luck’s sidekick. It’s one of the hidden tropes of adoption. You cannot be lucky or chosen and special without being grateful and thankful.

  Mirah Riben, who writes about adoption, asks if adoptees owe a higher debt of gratitude than those in natural families. Even for the basics like food, clothing and the care they receive. She details cases of adopted people speaking out and meeting online hostility for expressing their feelings. They’re scolded over and over for not being grateful for their luck.

  Riben calls it the ‘duality of adoption’. ‘You might have had a happy childhood. But every adoption begins with a tragedy of loss and separation. Adoption is a traumatic, lifelong and often unrecognised experience.’ She describes how society clings to the preconceived, romanticised notions of adoption. The problem, she says, is when adoptees do not assume their role as grateful orphans.14

  Writer Matthew Salesses talks about being in debt to someone’s love. ‘For adoptees, gratitude and luck can be trigger words. Society tells us we are lucky to be adopted. If we do not appear grateful, they tell us to know our place. We are reminded to be thankful for being taken from the mothers who bore us. We are called “angry” as a dismissal.’

  Salesses makes the connection between forced gratitude and its effects on appreciation. He describes an idyllic moment with his daughter. ‘I knew I should have enjoyed myself,’ he said, recalling the perfection of that moment. ‘But I couldn’t.’15

  I know this feeling. Somewhere deep down I am convinced I have no intrinsic right to enjoyment. Every good thing is at the mercy of the capricious, shallow whim of luck. Whatever you love today will be gone tomorrow. Every happy moment is a debt that must be repaid.

  I have learned to never trust a clear blue sky. But over the years I’ve formed an uneasy truce with luck. I overcompensate. I’m always on time and never late. Every kind deed must be repaid, any gift equalled or bettered. I carry a mental ledger in which I tally every friend and acquaintance. I mark each for repayment or no further action required. If I leave a single column unbalanced, I am stalked by the fear of my luck running out. Of being unchosen once again.

  We arrived in Auckland. Hampster had arranged for us to house-sit. In Ponsonby. I was on crutches, one foot in plaster, the other bandaged. The small spinal fractures were healing, but every step was painful. The bruises were fading, but my teeth took months to fix. This was not the Ponsonby of my dreams.

  I spent my days alone, aching for my children and at the same time relieved for the break. Unable to walk far, I was stranded in the very place I’d wanted to be. Our host had an extensive record collection. I listened to music for hours, taking the lines of songs as my gospel. I wanted to shed my skin and get started. I wanted someone to throw their arms around me. I wanted to dance in the dark. I wanted the miracle of love, given freely.

  There were books on Buddhism on the shelf, and now I had time to read. It seemed I had a ‘universal longing’. A craving that nothing in the world could satisfy. The desire itself, the book said, was the source of my suffering. The answer was to forgo consumerism and to dump attachments.16 I looked around at the book-lined house with the velvet furniture and the polished oak table. I thought about the flat in Christchurch. With the damp concrete walls and the broken coffee table. Consumerism was not my problem.

  To the Christians, my sin was the source of my suffering. To my adopters, it was my lack of gratitude. To the Buddhists, it was my craving for attachment. The book said I would find happiness only by overcoming this grasping need. But I knew my craving was the thread that pulled me from the depths. Without it, I would die. I threw the book against the wall in frustration, and the doorbell rang.

  The woman I’d met when she was wallpapering a hallway in Wellington stood on the porch. With her blonde curls pulled back and smudged eyes, I hardly recognised her.

  ‘It’s Christine,’ she said. The brightness that so impressed me had dimmed. She looked so sad I burst into tears. We hugged each other, both of us crying. She’d had a bad experience. We sat on the velvet sofa while she told me all about it. She ran her fingers over the fresh red scar below my lip. ‘I’ll get my bag from the car,’ she said. ‘Then I’ll make some tea.’

  Within a week we’d found an abandoned office off Victoria Street in downtown Auckland. A bankrupt film company had walked out on the lease. We’ll be squatters, she said, but no one will know.

  I changed the ticket Hampster had bought and went to Christchurch to pack up our life. The girls drew on my cast and laughed at my broken teeth. David helped me pack. He arranged for movers to pick up our meagre belongings. We were moving to Auckland.

  ‘I can stop you,’ Bruce said. He could go to court, but I knew he wouldn’t. The cost and effort would be too much. I knew it was wrong to take his children away. I understood I was hurting them by separating them from their father. But those weeks on the sofa had crystallised my desire. I wanted more. So much more.

  Christine picked us up from the airport and we drove home. We had half of the top floor of a 1920s office block all to ourselves. Room to run and yell and play. We slept on mattresses on the floor and bought a hotplate for the office kitchen. We had six toilets and no shower.

  Bruce’s parents came to visit. I could see his mother through the frosted glass of the office foyer, her hands on her ample hips. His father stood natty and small beside her. When I opened the door, she ignored my plastered foot and strode in. She peered into the office spaces where sheets hung over the glass partitions. The girls had arranged their soft toys along the boardroom shelving.

  ‘This is not good enough,’ she said. She placed a stack of books on a table left behind by the bankrupt company. The Miracles of Jesus, a Jesus Lives colouring book and a Little Golden Book of Jesus.

/>   ‘The girls would love some felt-tip colouring pens, next time you come,’ I said.

  I looked at these people connected by blood to my children and began to wonder if biology mattered at all. I thought about my grandfather and all the losses he carried and the suffering he’d caused. I imagined my mother standing next to me. Smiling as she met the other grandparents of her grandchildren. She would look at me and raise her eyebrow in our shared complicity. I did not want my children’s sense of heritage formed only by these people. I knew then I needed to find my father. I would write to Jeannie again.

  17

  Your limbic brain on relinquishment

  Jeannie phoned a few weeks after we moved into the office. She would be in Auckland for business. Could she come to visit?

  She was early. I heard the knocking as I was getting dressed. Bonnie raced to let her in and came running back. Two women in straight skirts and ill-fitting jackets stood in the foyer. They were from the Department of Social Welfare.

  ‘We’re following up on a complaint of child neglect,’ the smaller one said.

  ‘We’d like you to invite us in,’ the other said. ‘We need to see your children.’ They glanced in unison towards a white van in the parking area. It could have been for dog control or police work.

  I swept my arm wide and worked to keep my voice neutral, careful not to spook them. They refused to say who’d complained, but I knew it was Bruce’s parents.

  I carried Ruth on my hip. The older girls were drawing at the boardroom table. The women hardly noticed them. Instead, they opened kitchen cupboards and peered into each room. They studied my shoes. Had they found men’s sizes, they could have stopped my benefit. They noted the makeshift shower Christine had rigged after removing a toilet bowl. One of them handed me a card. ‘You’ll need to find somewhere else to live,’ she said.

  My fear leaked out. ‘You can’t take my kids.’

  ‘Yeah, we can,’ the other said, and she snapped her fingers. ‘Just like that.’

  It was raining when the social workers left. They were scurrying towards their van as Jeannie passed by. She walked with such confidence, oblivious to the rain, the two women turned to watch.

  After sharing so much, this was our first meeting. Jeannie was taller than I expected. She wore trousers and a wide-shouldered jacket, and her dark brown hair was piled up. Her voice was even more arresting in person.

  She held my arms and scanned my face and body. ‘Pam’s daughter. You could be no other.’

  We sat on plastic chairs at one end of the boardroom table. She watched the children. ‘Oh my heart, she looks so like your mother,’ she said as Bonnie looked up and smiled.

  Each time Jeannie said ‘your mother’ my chest constricted. I wanted to inhale every fragment of her. I wanted to know everything. And yet I was fearful she might say my mother left without a backward glance.

  ‘It was all Fred’s fault,’ Jeannie said.

  I thought of the frail and broken old man who’d died in a locked ward. Jeannie leaned over and twisted a strand of my hair around her finger in the same way I touched my children. An instinctual mother’s touch. In those days, I slipped in and out of other worlds with surprising ease, never fully anywhere. Our psyche longs for narrative consistency. As Jeannie told me what she knew of the story, my imagination rushed to fill the gaps.

  I see Jessie, my grandmother, patting the soft waves of her home perm. She and Pamela are sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for Fred to return. As if they know this will be the day. Pamela hears him whistling down the road. She had not heard her father whistle until they moved from Manchester to Tawa. The sound gives her comfort.

  Fred’s face is ruddy from the walk. He has tied the top of his painting overalls around his waist and his work shirt is damp under the arms. He removes his shoes and smiles at his family. ‘Ahh, my pretty ponies,’ he says, and ruffles his daughter’s hair.

  And then he sees it. The swell of her stomach that she can no longer hide. Pamela holds her breath, the possibility of his redemption like a haze around them.

  Jessie slides two fried eggs in front of him. He looks up, his eyes wide as though someone has switched on the porch light while he was admiring the stars.

  Jessie turns away. ‘Eat your eggs,’ she says.

  He holds his knife, studying the perfect yellow globes. ‘Tell her. Tell your daughter to leave my house.’ His voice is shard sharp. ‘She’ll be gone when I get home.’

  Pamela has not heard this voice before, and it stills all hope. He sections the toast in precise strips and pierces the yolks. The midday sun forces its way through the nets. He gulps the food, then unties his overalls, slides his arms into the sleeves and leaves without a goodbye.

  As soon as he is gone, Jessie goes to the hall. She makes a phone call, pushing the kitchen door closed with her foot. Pamela gazes at the yellow streaks covering her father’s plate.

  ‘They made her leave that day,’ Jeannie said. ‘Jessie had already organised it through her doctor. The one she saw in secret, for breast cancer.’

  I imagine their house. The plain decoration, the net curtains, and the new suburb growing up around them.

  Pamela places her suitcase on the single bed. She can’t think what to pack. Through all the months since her mother found out, they have not spoken about it. She stands outside her parents’ room and knocks as though she is a visitor. Jessie has left an envelope pinned to the door. The name of the doctor, his address and a train timetable. She has underlined the destination and departure time in red ink. Pamela realises she will have to hurry to catch the last train to Napier.

  ‘Bye, Mum. I’ll be off then,’ Pamela calls.

  She takes her case through the silent house and along the path. At the corner, she looks back. Jessie is on the front step. She lifts her hand from the folds of her apron. Pamela wants to skip home, but her mother turns and goes inside. The baby shudders, and she wonders if the tremor comes from the earth itself.

  The train is full, but no one sits next to Pamela. ‘Nothing,’ she says out loud, ‘will ever be the same again.’ Opposite, a woman in wrinkled stockings looks up from a book, her face expressionless. Pamela watches out the window. She has never seen the New Zealand countryside. The emptiness chills her. Eyeblink towns rush by, blemishes on the endless green landscape.

  The baby seems to be growing by the minute. Its limbs extending beyond the oblivious knot below her ribs. She has carried it in the smallest part of herself, ignoring the flutters and kicks. But now, on the train, it fills her with its presence. She has been living in a fog, denying the evidence of her own body. She curls her arms around the bulge and imagines the child already born. It lies calm against the curve of her empty belly, its skin smooth, eyes open and knowing.

  She sways as the train lurches into a station. When she stands her skirt is so tight she can hardly walk. An old woman seated nearby clucks her disapproval. They serve tea in thick cups and scones with jam and cream. Pamela extracts some of the money Jessie had saved from her housekeeping. She sits on her own with the tepid tea and the dry scone, the cream turning sour in her mouth.

  How much did Jeannie tell me and how much did I invent? I remember crying and my girls rushing to comfort me. Jeannie was telling my story, the one I’d had no right to, the one they’d written me out of.

  Psychologist Paul Sunderland says knowing and understanding your relinquishment story is essential.17 It’s how you make sense of your later life. He calls adoption a denial. A happy-ever-after hope that buries the real story of relinquishment. ‘The cover-up is that these children are chosen and saved. That they are fortunate.’ The horrors of war, he says, pale next to the loss of a mother at the beginning of life. He says the idea that if you can’t remember something it can’t affect you is an ‘old lie’.

  None of us can remember those long floating months or even our first years. That’s because the prefrontal cortex, the rational part of the brain, is the last to develop. But the
limbic system is active before birth. Implicit memory, instinct, emotional life and flight or fight reside there.

  Sunderland’s description of the science of brain development makes sense. Experience is the architect of the brain. And it makes me wonder about those first ten days I spent alone in a nursery, far from my mother.

  When relinquishment is your first experience, your brain wiring changes to accommodate it. This alters how you might handle stress. How you might process the world. It changes you. Many adopted people have catastrophic thinking. But we are so accustomed to living on red alert we do not recognise the formless dread as a condition. We fear abandonment above all else. Many of us have a heightened sensitivity to criticism. We suffer from depression, hypervigilance and addiction to adrenaline.

  I am woven together and defined by all these conditions. Sunderland says many of us are expert at hiding it all. Often from ourselves. This, Sunderland explains, is because we have no pre-trauma personality. No experience of being any other way, of even being okay.

  My personality and character as a fractured post-trauma construct? The idea fills me with grief. In adoption we talk about the triad of loss. The mother loses her child. The child loses her mother, and the adopters lose the child they might have had.

  But there is a fourth loss, a different kind that no one speaks of. It is the loss of who I might have been. As a daughter, a mother, a wife, a friend, a writer. As a woman. As myself. A whole life spent attempting and mostly failing to create a coherent self.