What a Mother Can Do Wrong
Chapter 05 - What a Mother Can Do Wrong
Judith Kelleher lived in a brick ranch house outside Rockford, where she had planted lilacs each spring for thirty years. On the day Allison arrived, the last blooms were gone and the shrubs looked like ordinary green bushes again. The porch light was on, though it was barely noon.
Her mother opened the door before Allison could ring. At sixty-nine, Judith was still handsome in a severe way, with cropped gray hair and a habit of standing squarely in doorways. She had been a school secretary after leaving nursing. Neighbors called her reliable. She always remembered a birthday.
"I thought you'd come sooner," Judith said.
Allison had driven two hours rehearsing questions. She had planned to ask who signed the papers, whether the baby had been sick, why a nurse was involved. Instead she said, "Did she cry?"
Judith's face changed. "Who?"
"My daughter. When you carried her away."
The older woman's fingers found the edge of her cardigan. "Yes. Just once. She was a strong little thing."
Allison stepped backward. There was no grand revelation, no thunder; only the horrifying plainness of a fact her mother had held for twenty-five years. A baby had cried. She had been alive. Her grandmother had heard her.
"You told me she died."
"I know."
"You held her?"
"For a moment."
"And then you told me she was dead?"
Judith closed the door behind her and leaned against it. "I believed I was saving you. You were seventeen. Your father had stopped speaking to you. You kept saying you'd find a job, a room, that everything would work out. You had no idea how hard it would be."
"I might have found out."
"You had no money, Allison. You were a child."
"She was my child."
Allison remembered the day after the hospital, when her mother had insisted she eat toast. The crust had scratched her throat. Judith said she would feel stronger with something in her stomach, then cleared the plate before Allison finished. They had never spoken of the baby's name afterward. Allison had given her the name Emily in a notebook and concealed it under her mattress, as though a name might keep a child alive in memory when there was no grave to visit.
"Did you know what I called her?" Allison asked now.
Judith shook her head.
"Emily. The same name on the adoption papers. Did you give them that name?"
"No. Helena must have heard you say it at the hospital and passed it on. I never asked how Marta knew."
That small coincidence, at least, did not feel like a trap. It felt like one of the few things the two mothers had somehow been permitted to share.
Judith looked toward the kitchen. Allison remembered that kitchen: the cheap yellow curtains, the cracked sugar bowl, the calendar on which her mother had marked her daughter's due date with a little red star. She had not been permitted to erase it after the funeral that never took place.
They sat at the table. Judith poured tea neither drank.
"A man named Victor Bellini came to the hospital," she said. "He was on the board of the charitable program. He said there was a family waiting, that everything could be arranged quietly. He said the baby would have a wonderful life and you'd be spared the embarrassment."
"You were a nurse. You knew I had to consent."
"I did."
"And you didn't care?"
Judith's eyes filled. "I cared about the wrong things. The neighbors. Your father's temper. The talk at church. People tell themselves they're protecting their children when what they're protecting is their own idea of a decent life."
Allison thought of the nineteen-year-old girl who had stopped going to birthday parties because seeing a cake with a child's name written on it had been unbearable. She thought of the Christmases spent listening to babies cry in department stores. Her mother had watched all of that. Not once had she said the truth.
Judith stood to rinse her untouched cup. Her hands were no longer as steady as they had been when Allison was a girl. She had taught generations of children to form neat letters and had carried hot soup to neighbors after their surgeries. Allison could remember all those decent acts without mistaking them for an answer to what Judith had done.
"I can't hate every day I spent with you," Allison said. "And I can't pretend those days cancel this."
Her mother nodded. She did not ask to be absolved. For years she had imagined confession as an end point, a door behind which punishment or mercy waited. She was only now discovering it was the beginning of a long room she would have to walk through without directing anyone else.
"Marta Carter believed I signed?" Allison asked.
"Victor assured her of it. I met her twice. She was kind. I told myself you couldn't have chosen better."
"And you kept receiving birthday cards from her?"
Judith nodded. "For a few years. Then Victor said she was afraid someone might challenge the adoption. He told us to stop communicating."
"Did you accept money?"
"Yes." She spoke the word without qualification. "He called it an education fund. Ten thousand dollars. I never spent it. It's still in an account. With interest."
"Money doesn't wait in an account innocently for twenty-five years," Allison said. "It sits there while the rest of a life happens."
Her mother covered her face. Allison did not move to comfort her. She had comforted this woman after surgery, after her father's death, through winters when loneliness made her impossible to please. Today there was nothing gentle left to offer.
"I need every document," Allison said. "Every letter, every check, every name you remember. If you destroy one thing, don't ever call me again."
Judith went to a high cupboard and brought down a tin made for Christmas cookies. It contained bank statements, three photographs, an envelope with Marta's return address and a folded sheet of onion-skin paper. On the back of the last sheet, in blue ink, was a short handwritten instruction: *Transfer complete. Notify Mrs. Kelleher: infant deceased. V.B.*
"Victor Bellini?" Allison asked.
Judith nodded. "He wrote it in front of me. I told myself it was simply office language."
At the bottom of the tin lay a more recent letter, on cream stationery with an embossed red V. It had been mailed eleven months earlier, just as Emily began working at Moretti House.
*Mrs. Kelleher: Please do not contact the young woman. We are managing the situation. Any disruption will have consequences for your daughter.* It was signed, in full, *Vanessa Bellini.*
Allison folded the letter carefully and slipped it into her bag. Her mother watched her go without asking forgiveness.
On the road back to Chicago, Allison stopped at a gas station and called Emily. She told her only the confirmed facts, nothing about how she ought to feel. There was a long silence.
"I'd like to speak to your mother," Emily said at last. "Not today. Eventually."
"All right."
"And Allison?"
May you like
"Yes?"
"The woman in the blue coat wasn't the only person who knew. Marta wrote that another girl's file was kept with mine. I think somebody else is still looking."
