The Other by Marilyn Peake Read online

  Unlocking a side door and flipping a switch, Maggie flooded the interior of the barn with light. This space was different than the interior of the house. There was room to walk. No piles of cardboard boxes. However, this was still a hoarder’s domain. The barn was filled with tables and the tables were piled high with stuff. There were all kinds of things hanging from the rafters: hoses and tools, blankets, deflated balloons, stained glass panels suspended from metal chains, canvas paintings on decorative ropes.

  Walking past quite a few tables, I noticed there seemed to be a theme for each. Piles of books on one, balls of yarn on another, a few tables filled with kids’ toys, others filled with machinery parts.

  Maggie took us to the far side of the barn. Several mannequins stood guard over wooden chests. The space had an eerie feel.

  Once again, pain shot through my abdomen. Sitting down on one of the chests and bending over my thighs, clutching my knees, I let out a scream. I started apologizing, but my words were swallowed up by torment. I managed to say, “I’m sorry…”

  Maggie said, “Don’t apologize. Can I do anything for you?” I felt horrified by my lack of professionalism. A client’s family member should not be tending to the Social Worker.

  As had happened in the kitchen, the pain stopped in an instant. Just like that. Taking over my mind and body like some alien creature, and then gone in the blink of an eye.

  I stood up. “I’m really sorry. I have no idea what just happened. I had another episode of stabbing pain, but it’s gone now. I’d love to see your dad’s paintings.”

  Taking the lid off a wooden box about five feet tall and two feet wide, Maggie pulled out a large canvas painting. In it, five dogs were running around playing. Maggie said, “These are the dogs we owned when I was growing up.”

  I moved closer to inspect it. I commented, “I don’t see Lucky.”

  Maggie said, “Lucky’s new. My mom and dad got him at a shelter a few years ago.”

  All the dogs in the painting looked healthy and of normal weight. I asked, “Was Lucky always so thin?”

  Returning the canvas to the box and pulling out another one, Maggie said, “No. My dad needs help. He forgets where he put the dog food. Or he thinks he’s fed the dog when he hasn’t. His mind is completely clouded by losing my mother.”

  I asked, “Maggie, do you have any idea what might have happened to your mother?” I had a feeling that things weren’t exactly as they seemed, or her mother had met with some kind of tragedy. If she wasn’t dead, someone should have noticed her by now. Unless she had run away and was hiding from family. Or she had been kidnapped. Or she’d gotten lost in the woods or had a car accident and couldn’t remember who she was. Had this family hired a detective? How hard had they looked?

  Maggie said, “I don’t.” Tears streamed down her face. “I’ve offered to hire a detective, but my dad refuses to go along with that.”

  That shocked me, considering the pain in her father’s eyes. Chills ran up my spine. Had he done something to harm his wife, maybe killed her accidentally? I had an active imagination. I tried to put a lid on it. I said, “Why don’t you hire one, anyway? It’s best to look for a missing person as soon as possible before…” I didn’t finish the statement.

  Maggie said, “Look at this.” She flipped around the canvas she was holding.

  It was a middle-aged woman with gray hair and blue eyes. She had a band of pink flowers in her hair. The painting looked like one of those portraits where the eyes twinkled, but it was hard to make out the emotion. I interpreted it as mostly joy with hints of sadness. As I walked back and forth in front of the painting, the woman’s eyes followed me. What did she want? I felt that she expected something from me.

  Maggie pulled out a few more canvases. My favorite was an oil painting with thick layers of brightly colored paint showing a carnival in full swing. People wearing masks. Red scarves being pulled through the air like children’s balloons. Laughter. Dancing.

  We looked at other types of artwork her dad had made: ceramic pots, stained glass windows. He had been quite prolific.

  When we went back inside, I realized I had to pee.

  Locking myself in the bathroom, I tried to figure out how to use the toilet without getting an infection from gunk splashing up on me.

  I carefully lined the inside of the toilet bowl with toilet paper and floated some on top of the water.

  I had a horrible retching fit from the disgusting sight of the toilet and the smell of the bathroom through which I desperately tried not to throw up. I flung open the curtains to the storage shelves, grabbed the Clorox Wipes bottle, popped open the lid and took a whiff. It helped. Clutching the bottle to my chest, breathing in the antiseptic smell, I awkwardly unsnapped and unzippered my jeans with the other hand, tugged them down to my knees, then grabbed the elastic of my underpants and pulled them down an inch at a time. I yanked sheets of toilet paper off the roll and covered the seat. When I finally sat down, I couldn’t pee. I was too tense. I reached over and turned on the water. Visualizing waterfalls and me sitting next to them drinking copious amounts of coffee, I finally relaxed enough to urinate in bursts. When my bladder finally emptied, I stood up and flushed the toilet. Returning the Clorox Wipes to the shelf, I noticed something sparkling on a shelf. A woman’s wedding and engagement rings! I picked them up and inspected them. Inside the engagement ring there was an inscription: To you Mary, my eternal love. Max. I wondered: why would she have left those behind?

  I placed the rings back where I’d found them and snapped photos with my cell phone. Then I closed the curtains.

  When I reached the kitchen, pain stabbed me once again. Clutching the freezer handle on the refrigerator to steady myself, I accidentally pulled open the door.

  Maggie had entered the kitchen at exactly that moment. She covered her mouth with her hand and gasped. There in the freezer were vials of blood and yellow liquid that sure looked like urine.

  Max came in behind her. Oblivious to my pain, he shoved me aside and slammed the door shut. He shouted at me and Andy, “Get out of my house! You’ve invaded enough of my privacy!”

  Maggie asked her father, “What is that, Dad? Are those yours?”

  In a shocked voice, Max said, “No! Those are your mother’s. Those were her diabetes tests. It’s a living part of her. It’s all I have left, for God’s sake, Maggie!”

  Chapter 7

  I spent the rest of my work week in the office, writing up a report on my visit to Max Davenport’s and reading case files on clients I’d be visiting with Andy the following week.

  When Saturday rolled around, I was exhausted. I slept until 11:00 AM. When I finally woke up, I stayed in bed, staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars and planets glued to my ceiling. I’d stuck them up there the year my mom agreed to let me paint my room dark blue with a black ceiling. I was thirteen at the time.

  I thought about the stabbing pains I’d experienced during my first field visit to a client’s home. On hindsight, I think I was using the same defense mechanism of denial my mother had used when she experienced early symptoms of ovarian cancer. They weren’t anything out of the ordinary: mild cramping, bloating, decreased appetite, needing to pee more often than she usually did.

  At first, she’d joked about the frequent need to pee, saying she had “old lady’s bladder.” I laughed every time she said it. Now, I felt tremendously guilty that I’d laughed.

  I did try to help her with the bloating. I suggested energy drinks and what I thought were healthy milkshakes made in the blender by mixing fruit, ice cream and milk for when she felt too full to eat solid food. She enjoyed them until she decided that all that liquid was making her pee more often and maybe the fruit was giving her gas. Her favorite was a banana-chocolate milkshake I made for her by blending bananas, vanilla ice cream, whole milk and chocolate syrup.

  I felt more humiliation than fear over my recent episodes with pain. I hoped they’d never return in
a public place, and certainly never again at work.

  As I lay there, I explored the place where I’d felt the pain. There was definitely a lump in there! I felt the other side. It actually felt kind of the same, so I figured maybe it was a muscle. Or maybe my ovary? Could you feel your ovaries, or were they too small? I felt the problem side again. I couldn’t tell if there was a lump there or not, but I’d triggered the pain by pressing so hard.

  Owwwwww! I screamed bloody murder.

  As the pain lifted, I realized how quiet the house was and remembered that my dad was gone all day, helping a friend move into an apartment.

  I started thinking about the scene in Max Davenport’s kitchen. The vials of blood and urine in his freezer, how my pain had led me to that.

  New images formed in my head, things I’d ignored at the time. I was pretty sure there had been a mason jar filled with blood and another filled with urine in the freezer, in the back where the light wasn’t so good. Now that I thought about it, I felt I’d need to tell Andy about it. Would this need to be reported to the police?

  Also, there had been a door on the floor of the barn. I hadn’t thought about it much at the time. I’d thought of it as a door to the basement. But did barns have basements? I wanted to go back and ask Maggie to show me what her dad kept down there.

  Something lived in my abdomen, something that triggered pain as it tried to communicate important things to me. It had told me about the things in Max’s freezer. It had tried to tell me about the door in his barn.

  I had that bizarre thought, then worried I was going insane. I felt it more important than ever to locate my birth mom. I needed to know my genetics, in regard to both physical health and mental health. What risk factors did I carry inside me like ticking time bombs waiting to go off?

  Hopping out of bed, I pulled on a pair of purple socks with unicorns sewn into the cuffs and went out to the kitchen to find something to eat. Dumping Shredded Wheat into a bowl, I hunted around in the fridge for fruit. In the back of the crisper drawer behind a head of lettuce and a shrink-wrapped package of mushrooms, I found a couple of peaches. I washed and peeled one, then sliced it into slivers. Placing those in a pinwheel shape on top of the cereal, I drowned everything in milk. Grabbing the bowl and a spoon, I carried breakfast back to my desk and turned on my computer.

  Today was the day I’d begin searching for my mom in earnest.

  I Googled “adoption finding birth mom.”

  My eyes quickly scanned the page. I felt overwhelmed. The Internet offered many different ways to go about this, with all kinds of services and people willing to help for a fee. Partway down the page, there was an article by someone who wished they’d never found their biological mom. I refused to read that, tried to pretend it wasn’t there.

  I got up and brushed my hair. Looking in the mirror, I felt disappointed by the image staring back at me. My long brown hair had more broken ends than shine. My eyes were dull brown with streaks of red in the white part. My stomach pain had been taking a toll.

  Grabbing the bowl of cereal and peaches, I took it over to eat on my bed, trying to calm my heart and slow my pulse a safe distance away from my computer and the Internet.

  After eating the last bite, I returned the bowl and spoon to the kitchen, plopped them into the sink with the dirty dishes, and went back to my desk. Conjuring up courage, I forced myself to read one of the articles. It had a whole bunch of suggestions.

  Ask your adoptive parents. My mother was deceased. I couldn’t possibly ask my dad. I think after the loss of my mom, my dad would have been too threatened if I told him I wanted to meet my birth mom. I would have been able to talk this over with my mom. She was open and would have worked through all her emotions with me. I’m sure we both would have cried, but she would have given her blessing for me to find out where I came from.

  Get your birth certificate from the state where you were born. I had no idea where I was born. Damn.

  Go to your local adoption agency and see if they can help. I guess I could do that.

  Then I found something that looked promising: Adoption Search Angels. I had no idea such a thing existed. Reading further, I discovered they work for free. Free is good, considering my limited finances. They’re volunteers who are emotionally invested in uniting adopted children with their birth parents, often because they went through the same thing at one time.

  I got up and paced around the house. I watched a couple of TV shows. I made myself a club sandwich for lunch, which took quite a bit of time. I ate it watching a couple more shows. I had a bowl of ice cream for dessert. Finally, taking a can of Diet Coke back to my desk, I Googled “adoption search angels list.” Wow, it turned out there were a lot of them!

  My eyes filled with tears. Curling up in a fetal position on the bed, I started sobbing. I missed my mom so badly, it ached.

  I had to do this. I needed answers about myself.

  Wiping the tears from my face with a sleeve, I got back on the computer.

  There were all kinds of Search Angel sites. One had glittery animated angels flapping their wings along the top of the page that had links to the volunteers. Another had pictures of angels watching over babies in baskets. There were also plain pages and lots of forums.

  I decided to start out gradually by asking questions anonymously in one of the forums. I picked a forum to join and signed up with the username BallerinaGirl. I chose that as a pledge of loyalty to my mom who raised me, a username based on the tiny dancing girl in her jewelry box. I found an image of a ballerina online that was free to use and made that my avatar.

  Then I took the plunge.

  I entered the main forum and posted this: I just found out about adoption search angels. How do I go about finding one? I’m adopted and want to find my birth mom. I titled the post: In Need of an Adoption Search Angel.

  I fought the urge to delete it. I hopped on Netflix and watched an hour-long show to try to forget what I’d done. I didn’t expect an answer, but I felt naked after sending that request out into the world. It was ridiculous because no one knew who BallerinaGirl was or where she was from. I hadn’t posted any identifying information. Truth be told, BallerinaGirl was actually a little metal girl with a pink tutu glued onto her forever and ever. She lived in a box and whenever anyone lifted the lid, she was forced to twirl round and round. Ugh. That sounded terrible. It made my real life seem pretty spectacular.

  When the show was over, I went back out into the kitchen to throw my soda can into the recycle bin. Noticing the dishes in the sink, I decided to empty the dishwasher and load it up with dirty dishes. Clearly trying to avoid my computer, I went on an obsessive-compulsive streak, scrubbing the sink out and wiping down the counters.

  Finally, curiosity got the better of me and I knew I had to peek at the forum. I grabbed another can of Diet Coke and returned to my desk.

  Before I had a chance to get online, I received a text message from my dad: Won’t be home until late. Eating dinner here. Money in the kitchen drawer for pizza. That OK?

  I typed back: sounds good. no problem.

  A pang of guilt went through me. I felt like I was about to betray my dad.

  Getting back into the forum, I searched for my post. Running my finger down the list of new ones, I finally found In Need of an Adoption Search Angel. It had 100 comments already! WTF. I clicked on the post. My head started to swim. There really were a tremendous number of comments.

  Taking a swig of soda and reminding myself to breathe and stop hyperventilating, I started reading. Many of the comments were people simply wishing me good luck and telling me they’d been through the same thing. There were many statements of having never regretted it. A few saying it was the best thing they’d ever done. A few writing long diatribes about how horrible their birth mothers turned out to be and how they wished they’d never met them. Sprinkled in the conversation were ten actual search angels. Ten already! How many were there in the world, I won
dered, helping people find their way back to their biological parents?

  My hands shook as I clicked on messages. Over and over, I had to remind myself to slow down, concentrate and breathe.

  I read all ten messages from the search angels as carefully as I possibly could with all the adrenalin and fear racing through my body. What if these people weren’t who they said they were? What if I bared my soul to some creep pretending to be an angel?

  After reading through all the posts by the search angels twice, I picked one. Her name was Hannah Chandler. She had her own website. It looked professional. Plain white background. Fancy black lettering edged in gold along the top that simply stated: Hannah Chandler, Adoption Search Angel…Underneath in smaller letters: Let me be your guide. A separate section labeled Family Photos showed both her birth family and her adoptive family. An About My Own Journey section talked about how difficult it had been to reconcile her origins with where she grew up. She was Romanian. She had been given up by her parents and placed in an orphanage in Romania. She wrote about how a couple of workers took a shine to her and doted on her and saved her from the neglect that so many of the other orphans experienced. She was adopted when she only eighteen months old and doesn’t remember anything before the age of three. Her first memory was a happy one: going to a water park with her family, her adoptive parents catching her as she slid down a waterslide in the kids’ pool.

  I replied to her comment in my forum thread: I’ll PM you. Then I sent her a brief private message: I’m interested in the services you provide. I’d like to find my birth mom. How does this work?

  She answered within seconds: Hello! I’m happy to help you. As with all reputable search angels, I don’t charge any money. If you find my services helpful and want to pay something, you can donate to any of the charities listed on my website, or another of your choosing. All the charities on my website help orphans. Now, what is your real name? I’ll need that to begin the search. Also, do you know where you were born? The hospital? If not, maybe the city or state, or country if you were born outside the United States?