Blackbird: A Childhood Lost and Found Read online

  I knew the woman was probably rolling her eyes about the wack job on the line. How many times a day did she get this kind of call? Her voice was brisk and professional, as if we were talking about a deposit I made at my bank or a magazine subscription I submitted.

  “No, not yet,” she said.

  “Are you sure? ” I asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” she said. “I’m sure.”

  I should’ve hung up. That was the most obvious next step but I didn’t. I held the phone against my ear as if something else would happen. The lady said, “If you move, be sure to send in a change of address.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “YOU KNOW, HAVING Sex without being married is a sin too,” Jeff said.

  He was at my place, in my lovely bed, and we just had another round of his sloppy puppy sex. He was so happy and so oblivious. He had his hands behind his head.

  I was at the edge of the bed, willing him to leave.

  “My buddy at the store is Catholic and he says using birth control is a much bigger sin than living together.”

  I flushed with embarrassment and shame. He was talking about me at the RadioShack store? I considered this to be the perfect time to dump his ass. The words were at the tip of my tongue.

  Jeff looked up at the ceiling, laughing a little—heh heh heh.

  “Look, I don’t care if we get married,” he said. “I think we should. I’m just saying that before we get married, we should live together. It would save rent and I could work toward getting my own store. Being a manager at RadioShack is a great deal. You can make a ton of dough. My brother, you know, he’s a regional manager and he says he’ll help me get a step up.”

  Jeff closed the distance between us. He was muscled from lifting weights and exercising all the time. He was covered with little freckles and his hair, cut in the shape of a bowl, fell in his face.

  “I was thinking about getting a store in Montana. That’s big money. I want you with me. We could, you know, make a life.”

  “Is this supposed to be some kind of marriage proposal? ”

  “It could be,” he said, “if you play your cards right.”

  I moved away from him. Another inch and I would have tumbled from my own bed.

  “First, I have a life. I live here. I’m in school. I’m going to get an internship at the paper next year and I’m going to Eastern Washington University. Why would I change my plans and go to Montana?”

  Jeff pushed his lower lip into a pout. He looked like he was ten years old. “For me,” he said. “You know you couldn’t live without me, Baby.”

  EVERY DAY, WHEN I came home, I checked my mail in hopes that a letter might come from Nevada. Every day I found an empty mailbox. Every day, I died a little death.

  My mother was dead or she didn’t have the courage to search or she didn’t want to know how I was doing. All options—as I considered them in front of the empty mailbox—were devastating.

  After three months of waiting, I made another call to the state of Nevada and spoke to the same lady at the adoption registry. I asked her to double-check that she had the correct birth date, place of birth, and delivering doctor. She said yes, they had all the information. She explained that if someone from my birth family sent an inquiry, she would let me know. “Try to be patient,” she said.

  Patient?

  Twenty years isn’t patient?

  JEFF TOOK ME to dinner at a restaurant with linen tablecloths and candles. We sat at a table with a view of the waterfront and sunlight fell on the surface of the river, turning it into a mirror of the sky.

  Jeff slid a velvet box between us. Even before I opened it, he said, “Please be my wife. Please marry me. I’ll never love anyone more than I love you.”

  He wore a wool jacket from Sears. I helped him pick it out. It had leather patches on the elbows. He had been promoted to manager at RadioShack. He was twenty years old.

  The ring in the box was a humble little solitaire in a silver and gold setting. Patty’s engagement ring had been a glorious diamond that winked from a block away. It wasn’t like I wanted a huge, flashy diamond. The difference though, in the rings, stood as a symbol of the difference between Patty and me. She knew she wanted to be married. She had a ring that made her jump up and down. I didn’t want to be married and I had this tiny little diamond that screamed ambivalence.

  Had I known anything about myself, I would have known that my mother married my father when she was nineteen. If I had been given some sense of her path, I would have seen that I was doing exactly what she had done and perhaps would have chosen differently for myself. But I knew nothing about my mother and her choices and thus knew nothing about myself. I was without a compass—although this is not completely true. My first compass, my first sense of being in this world, had been as an abandoned child whose mother did not hold her and later, did not search for her. Unloved. Yes, I had a strong sense that I was unloved and unlovable.

  Who is closer to us than a mother but the lover? How hungry is the child who has not bonded with her mother? By nineteen, I was starving for human contact and for love. I didn’t care if the human contact was cruel or painful or confused. That is why I endured Jeff and his fumbling attempt at closeness. That is why total occupation was inevitable.

  “Okay,” I finally said.

  Jeff laughed, as if surprised, and I thought he was going to cry.

  While he got himself together, clearing his throat and looking around to order dinner, I took the ring out of the box and slipped it on my own finger.

  JUST BEFORE I married Jeff, I called the state of Nevada one last time. The lady at the registry lost patience with my questions. “Look,” she snapped, “if someone writes a letter, we will call you.”

  SIX MONTHS AFTER the wedding, I graduated from the community college and was taking classes at Eastern Washington University.

  Jeff had a store in the Spokane Valley and worked ninety hours a week. He still had ambitions to be transferred to a store in Montana. He said the profit margins were higher in remote locations and, now that we were married, he wanted to be closer to his mom and dad. Jeff also revealed that he wanted to start a family in Montana. He now wanted four boys—like his own mother had had.

  Just as he had worn me down to the idea of sharing a home and being married, he was now trying to foist motherhood on my back. He was pressing me, unwittingly, to the edge of what would be possible. I wouldn’t have one child with Jeff—let alone four. I wasn’t becoming a mother and I certainly wasn’t going to become a mother with Jeff. My best friend was the birth control pill—which I took like religion—every single day.

  I WAS HOME when the long-distance call came from Nevada. As the line crackled with that familiar sound of the far away, I thought: This is it. My mother.

  But the voice belonged to a cousin named Tracy who lived in Carson City. She was one of Auntie Carol’s kids.

  “I haven’t talked to you for years,” I said. “How are you doing?”

  Tracy’s voice was high and full of emotion. She got right to the point. Bryan had disappeared three days earlier. The Lauck family had been frantic trying to figure out where he went and she wanted to know if I had seen him.

  “Me? No. Why?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, “just a wild guess. We’ve called everyone else and I thought maybe you’d know.”

  “You’ve called everyone else before me? You mean the whole family knows Bryan is missing? How long? How long have you known?”

  “A couple days, I guess. Look, it’s not personal.”

  I sat down at the dining table and the cord of the phone pulled tight.

  Bryan had been at my wedding. He came from Oklahoma and we had a couple of conversations, brief and jagged. He said he had been at a seminary in Missouri, studying to be a priest but that didn’t work out. He planned to go to the University of Oklahoma to finish a degree in philosophy. I asked what he’d do with a degree in philosophy. He laughed for a long time. He sa
id I made a good point.

  I had no point. I just wanted to know.

  BRYAN AND I were strangers. With all the years of being separated, we had no common ground except the losses in our past and to Bryan’s mind, they weren’t my losses. They were his. And he was suffering. He said he felt depressed and sad. “You’re lucky you were adopted,” he said. “In a way, you are exempt.”

  When Bryan and I parted, a dark thought entered my mind. That’s the kind of guy who could end up killing himself. I even said this to Jeff, as we left for our honeymoon. Jeff just shrugged as if he didn’t know and didn’t care. He didn’t know Bryan. He wasn’t interested in more than his plan to get to Montana and to begin that big family of boys.

  WHILE TRACY AND I talked, the dark thought of suicide returned and grew into a knowing. I knew. Bryan was dead. My brother had killed himself.

  THERE WERE TWO tracks of experience. On one, I searched for my first mother. On another, my brother did, in fact, kill himself.

  On the first track, my mother was not looking for me. Even though the Nevada registry had been open for reunions for many years, she hadn’t written a letter. My father hadn’t either.

  On the second track, Bryan was dead. He had been the last living relative from my immediate family, the last link to the chain.

  I FLEW TO an impoverished and remote town in Oklahoma—where Bryan grew up with Uncle Larry and Aunt Ruth—and attended the funeral. Jeff didn’t come. “Why?” he had asked. “I didn’t know the guy.”

  The soil of Oklahoma was red clay and the air was humid and thick enough to scoop in my hands. Uncle Larry (Bud’s younger brother) and his wife Ruth were both wrapped tight in a resigned state of poverty. Larry had been released from his military commission during cutbacks. The government had betrayed them. I saw, with vivid clarity, that Bryan did not have a happy life.

  AT THE FUNERAL, Uncle Larry introduced me as Bryan’s adopted sister. I was placed in a pew a few rows back from the Lauck family. Aunt Peggy had, no doubt, told Larry that I had been insubordinate and needed to be distanced from the Lauck clan.

  I held my hands in my lap and stared holes into my brother’s casket. It was a wood box that had been sealed. Bryan had apparently been outside for many days after he shot himself. His body was not fit to view.

  In my head, madness played a little film where I stomped to the front of the church, threw open the casket, and yelled, “My brother is not dead.”

  The desire to jump up and set the record straight was overpowering. I had to hug myself to stay put. I talked myself down. I told myself to knock it off and lay low.

  IN FACT, I did have a living brother. My brother, the son of my birth mother and birth father, lived in Reno and was growing up healthy and happy. He was just two years younger than me.

  The moment of madness that had overtaken me in the church that day stayed with me like an unsolved puzzle for years. I had a knowing at a cellular level, and this knowing created distinct tension and anxiety. I felt the way you feel when you are being lied to but the liar won’t admit it. It was a dissonant knowing.

  For years—hauling this memory of Bryan’s funeral around—I thought I had been a madwoman going through some extraordinary grieving process. When I returned from the funeral, I went to bed. I didn’t eat. I dropped out of school. I didn’t speak. All I could do was weep until I passed out. When I woke up, I started the cycle over again.

  Infants are unable to regulate their own emotions; they need their mother’s response to their cries to teach them mood normalization. And the infant doesn’t wait for any mother, she waits for her birth mother—the one with which she shared a hormonal connection while in utero. Any other caregiver is rejected.

  It’s a terrible plight. A baby must endure biological and mental torture. She experiences terror, goes into shock (due to the abandonment), and loses consciousness—again and again.

  Since the brain is built on experience, synapses making permanent connections, these first feelings are foundational patterns that are nearly impossible to eradicate. The brain seeks out what it knows and deepens the patterns with repetition.

  After Bryan’s funeral, I was repeating that first trauma. This is how I know I was not grieving for Bryan. I was grieving for my birth mother, all over again.

  If we are talking about cause and effect—karma—what is the energetic power of the traumatized brain? Is it a force of its own, like a magnet that drags terrorizing circumstances, people, and events into its path in order to reexperience traumatic responses that have become familiar and even comforting? If terror is what the mind knows, is terror then sought out? Is this how predators identify victims? Is this power what attracts cruel people into the lives of trauma victims and has them stick around year after brutal year? Had my brain—with its unique wiring and built-in responses—been drawing me into situations that resulted in rape, abuse, neglect, and cruelty?

  JEFF WAS PROMOTED to a store in Montana and before he left, he came to the bed where I continued my decline and told me to snap out of it.

  “Enough already,” he said. “You didn’t even like your brother.”

  He was right, I didn’t like Bryan—the guy had been cruel to me but I told myself that Bryan was all I had left of my first family and now he was gone. I told myself I was just grieving.

  I couldn’t possibly factor in deep, prememory feelings that pointed toward that infant trauma. No one spoke of adoptees and their silent sorrows. We were acquired, assimilated, and adapted. Our histories were hidden from us and our memories were a muddled mess—like our lives—like my own life. All I knew at the age of twenty was that I was in pain and no one could help me. I considered suicide as an escape.

  WHAT PULLED ME out of the terrible loop was a small dog—a puppy.

  I had gone to a U-Haul store to get boxes and heard the sound of barking coming from a nearby store.

  Spokane Pet Center had a new batch of cocker spaniel pups and there she was: a tiny runt who cowered in the corner of pine chips. I scooped the pup in my hand—this little warm ball of fluff—and the name Carmel popped into my head.

  “Come home with me,” I said to the little creature with the huge brown eyes and the gentle manner. “Let me take care of you.”

  SIXTEEN

  THREE YEARS LATER

  I MOVED BACK to Spokane, Washington, and my roommate was a full-grown Carmel.

  Jeff stayed at his RadioShack store, adding up the profits and making new plans. Not more than a year after I left, he was married and on his way to making those four boys.

  What ended it?

  I did.

  He was mean. He punched Carmel in a fit of rage and I was pretty sure I would have been next.

  There were three gifts in knowing Jeff. One was that I didn’t conceive a child with him.

  Two was that, thanks to a divorce procedure that allowed a name change, I became Jennifer Caste Lauck again.

  Three, I used my short time in Montana to become an investigative reporter.

  As soon as I arrived in Billings, at the far eastern edge of that Big Sky State, I mothered Carmel to full doghood and also worked toward my degree in journalism at Eastern Montana College. In less than two years, I had elbowed my way into an internship at a TV station and then became a reporter for the Montana Television Network.

  While Jeff worked at his RadioShack store in the Rim Rock Mall, I was the one who reported about grasshopper infestations and bank robberies on the evening news. You would have seen me at the snowy sight of a plane crash—a mail plane—where the pilot died. Fires, abductions, marijuana busts—yes, I was there. I was the one with the microphone and the snazzy short hair cut.

  Jeff wanted his woman to stay home and make babies. My success infuriated him.

  After the marriage vaporized, I accepted a promotion at a television station in Spokane. I couldn’t leave him or Montana fast enough.

  AS A SINGLE woman, my ambitions became like a detonation within my imagination. I pla
nned to stay in Spokane for a year or so, get a promotion to a station in Seattle or maybe Portland, Oregon, and then I’d be off to Los Angeles or perhaps New York. I could see myself working for the network or maybe becoming a foreign correspondent. I envisioned bullets whizzing overhead as I reported, live, from some trench in the desert. I’d be the first one to tell you how it was on the battle lines. I’d bring you the news you needed to know. I’d tell you the truth.

  But then I met Steve.

  SEVENTEEN

  THE BIG FIGHT

  THERE ARE SOME STORIES you can tell and others that you have no business telling, and that’s how it is with Steve.

  In the end, he’s the father of Spencer and Jo and that’s the best part of the story. He walked with me into parenthood. He convinced me I could be a better mother than how I had been mothered. Steve had faith in me when I didn’t have faith in myself. That was the gift. The worst part of the story is that Steve and I couldn’t make it. We divorced when Spencer was seven and Jo was two.

  The part I don’t know if I can tell is why we ended. I want to say it was the fighting. Steve and I argued all the time, over stupid things like paint chips, what movie to watch, and where to eat dinner. But I don’t know.

  What are the details that add up to divorce? How can we map such a complex topography as that of the interior of two souls who make vows, intermingle, and create life from one another? In the end, isn’t marriage this puzzlement of staring at each other over cups of coffee while wondering, Who the hell are you? Isn’t it true that to be married to another is to know you look at a stranger everyday? Can’t we all say that no matter how much we think we know another person, we don’t; we can’t? Isn’t a human being simply too vast and too deep to define and to know?