MISSING by Kirsten Madsen
I was missing my whole life. It’s a strange thing to find out about yourself. I guess not technically my whole life, as they didn’t take me until I was four, but I can’t remember before that, so it doesn’t really count.
It was a campground, where they took me, and if it hadn’t been surrounded by so many lakes, and if my mother hadn’t been so drunk and fighting so hard with my father their yells caused the family camped beside them to pull up tent stakes and move, the police would’ve spent more time erecting a road block on the highway than questioning my parents and later, dragging the lakes.
I read the articles after. The missing reports. I was even on a milk carton, though the age-adjusted sketch looks nothing like me. It’s an artifact, freighted with possible interpretations, meaningless in itself, like the Hummel figurines in our kitchen, the ones that were sent by Tina’s brother from West Germany after the war, before he was killed in a random car crash on an army base. All of my childhood, those creamy pastel figures danced over our breakfast table; they were decadent to me in that Puritan house.
Anyway, I would never have seen the milk carton: Tina was lactose intolerant; we drank soy. Soy milk was the weirdest thing about Tina – she had to frequent the dusty, ill-used health food store in our Midwestern town to buy it. We lived a blameless existence: quiet, regulated, calm. Now, though, I see things I didn’t see then. The proper names, for instance. Even early on, they insisted, and now I think, of course, the familial terms would grate on ears undeserving of honorifics. Always Don and Tina, Tina and Don – they shrugged it off and enforced it at the same time, saying only: those are our names. It might have seemed radical, were we not the most conventional family ever to grace our tiny farming community.
I went back to the park, when I found out, before my family arranged to meet me. I wanted to see it, maybe to see if I remembered anything. I drove there, alone, in Don’s old sedan. It was left to me, like the rest of their things, but now I question if I deserve this false inheritance. It’s one of many things in my life, now, that can be looked at in different ways, like my life is one of those optical illusion drawings where you’re looking at a man’s face and then a naked woman jumps out at your eyes.
It’s a mid-sized provincial park, known for a small waterfall between lakes. The waterfall is behind a chain link fence. I wandered from the parking lot to the waterfall on a short graveled path; interpretive signs pointed out the obvious. The nearby campground was small, shabby. It was late in the season and only a few sites were occupied. I wound in and out, scuffing my feet in the gravel, running my hands over the sticky picnic tables. I wanted to smell the campfire grates, sift my fingers through the half-cooled ashes for clues. I was a 34‑year-old returning to the scene of a crime I couldn’t remember. I felt strangely guilty: the pain in my strange new mother’s voice on the phone; the memory of Don’s ragged sobs. I had caused that, by being four and wandering. Other than that, nothing came to me.
I stood there, at the edge of a campsite and waited for something, anything, a wave of emotion to carry me off, a memory to ground me, finally, in place. Nothing. The air smelled dry, with a cranberry tang. Someone was cooking hotdogs, burning them, judging from the smell. My toe scuffed in the gravel and I saw a coil of dog shit in the bushes and felt irritated: not even this moment could be unsullied.
They want to meet me. My mother, my three sisters and my brother and the seven grandchildren: four nieces and three nephews for childless me, readymade. I speak to my mother – the word comes to me in quotes, blinking in and out of focus – on the phone, that first time, and her voice quavers. “Your father just died in May,” she says, and her words get wet. “Oh! Oh! He’ll never know we found you!”
I want to remember. I’m scared that when I see them, I will feel nothing. I’ve been working with a counselor. She’s been trying it all: hypnosis, which leaves me blank and sleepy; then EMDR, trying to pull something up through the holes in my history. I sit in her dingy office and scroll my eyes back and forth while she talks me back: back through leaving home at eighteen for college, the anger in the household that I’d even applied, the shocking admission to a place of “higher learning” (Don and Tina said the “higher” with a shocked little sneer each time, like it was unseemly to raise oneself, even on tiptoe, to those heights); back through my sullen early teen years, where I stayed, angry like a razor, in my chair all through dinner (it was Tina’s rule, enforced by Don’s stern brow) but arranged my plate in patterns of escape – the peas far, so far from the suffocating potatoes; back through myself at age eight, learning to dive at the cottage they’d rented, one of the few times we left that small house at the end of that dead-end road, and one of the few happy weeks we spent together, perhaps the change in scenery giving Tina a break from the incessant looking out the window, the straightening in her chair each time the whirr of a vehicle approached our end of the street, an alertness that I never understood; back through age five, the short attempt at kindergarten rescinded for home-schooling barely a week in (too many forms, too many questions) when I’d cried and cried, clutching the new backpack I’d no longer need, and Don and Tina stared at me: their sorrow, then as ever, somehow deadpan.
When I was a teenager I was lonely. “I wish I’d never been born,” was a thought barreling out of all of us teenagers in a small, sober town but I never raged, I never fought. I felt, in fact, disdain for schoolmates who egged their own houses on Halloween. Never, not even once, did I think: I must be adopted. These can’t be my real parents. No. We felt obligated to each other in a way that couldn’t be questioned.
I don’t feel found, yet, either.
Tina had a heart attack – though it was Don who liked bacon with his daily eggs, sopped up the grease with a slice of bread. We were shopping together when she slumped to the side of the aisle, dislodging cans of beans; I took her to the hospital in a cab. When I checked her in, the receptionist asked for my I.D. as well as hers. I don’t have any, I said. “No driver’s license?” No; I didn’t drive yet, had never been encouraged to learn; it would take me away. I dug through Tina’s purse, presented her faded driver’s license.
“She’s my mother,” I told the woman at intake. I brushed off the usual you-look-nothing-alikes I’d been hearing my whole life and went to sit by Tina’s bed. Her blond-gone‑to‑grey hair was so thin now, the difference between it and my thick muddy curls was even more striking. Don, too, was blond, though he’d been close to bald for as long as I could remember. It was Don who fought to brush my tangled snarls, sat on the edge of the bath and worked the comb through while I shivered and yelped. He was gentle, mostly, in all things, more so than Tina.
When she died it got weird. There was no will, or there was one and I wasn’t in it. Anyway, it all went to Don, but he was falling apart. He cried whenever he saw me, which was something I’d never seen before – Tina wouldn’t have abided it, I realize. But once he started it seemed he couldn’t stop. I’d walk in the room and he’d look up and say sorry and cry some more, strange dry sobs that robbed him of further words. In a way, his grief came as a surprise to me: he and Tina had always seemed more like bookends on a shelf of life instructions they intended to follow to the letter, than anything resembling a love poem. Granted, I guess it took two of them to hold all those volumes, and once Tina was gone the whole shelf tilted and slipped, starting from the moment we walked into the lawyer’s office and he said, “There’s no birth record for Penelope.”
I’ve dredged up a memory: pink cupcakes. I can see them, arranged on a plastic tablecloth, in little paper skirts I have to ask an adult to peel for me. I see a tongue-dent in the icing and I know I made it, and I get picked up and swatted on the bum for it. I remember the sting, and the sweet taste of the cupcake I eventually got, mingling with tears and snot on my face. I can see, in this memory, the hands of my mother as she neatly peels the zigzag paper from the cupcake. Her hands are chubby, with lots of colourful rings on the fingers. They aren’t Tina’s austere, knuckled digits. But I can’t see my mother’s face.
My doctor’s got me in a support group. It’s for adult adoptees, kids that were given away. Some of them hate the families who raised them; some hate the ones that gave them up. Single mothers, teenagers, rape victims, the poor. Catholics. Born-again virgins. A skinny woman with a cough says her parents gave her up because they had a sailing trip planned. They’d saved and saved to go around the world and the unexpected pregnancy threatened to ruin the whole plan. The woman had searched for her birth parents for twenty years after a childhood of abuse and deprivation; when she met them they offered her a gin and tonic and twenty thousand dollars to leave them alone. They still sailed, on weekends.
“My mother had two kids pretty much right away after I was adopted,” a man says during the circle, his face flushed red with the effort of speaking. “Why’d she give me up if she was just going to keep the next ones?”
No one has an answer for this. The man says he finally met his brothers and it was astounding: they both owned Chevys, just like him. I try not to let my expression change.
I don’t share at the meetings; my situation seems to me so different it would be unrelatable for others. Besides, what would I say to these grown, given‑up children: My parents want me? My mother always wanted me, and she calls me now and sometimes she forgets to use my name, the one I know, and she calls me Sarabeth and then she cries? And then, to tell them the other thing, heaping salt in the wound: My other parents wanted me even more?
It all happens rapidly once the lawyer fills in the blanks. After Don hangs his head in the office and says, “She’s not ours,” I wonder, I swear for at least twenty seconds, who “she” is.
On the way home in the car, I don’t know what to say. It feels weird going home with him, like I’m being kidnapped again – especially after the lawyer requests to speak to me alone, tells me he’ll be speaking to the police, asks me if I have somewhere to go – somewhere, he implies, besides the only home I’ve ever known. And maybe I should fling myself from the car and run. But where would I go? I don’t even drive. I dropped out of university just before I graduated; I came home. I didn’t know what to do with freedom when I had it. I fixed up the basement; I worked down the street at a coffee shop, the early morning shift. I ate dinner, each night, with these strangers, the only people I knew.
“Why?” I say, finally.
“She couldn’t,” Don says, stammering. “We couldn’t.”
Their inability to procreate is, now, no surprise. “But how? How on earth could you plan this? How could you – actually – take me?”
“We didn’t. You just – came to us.” He’s starting to wheeze again.
I piece it together between bouts of his weeping. They were having a picnic at the falls, just a day trip; they never camped. I wandered over. A toddler, turning to child, just finding my legs. I picture Tina’s pursed lips, tsking, tsking. How a parent could keep such poor care over something so valuable. Unearned. It would offend her, this carelessness, in the face of such abundance. She would have seen the family, the five children already muddy, the parents into their second six-pack, their voices at that level that precedes emotions, ready to tumble into arguments, recriminations, lovemaking. The baby, eating sand, the older children running to the lake and back, daring each other to jump.
They fed me a tuna sandwich. Then, without even discussing it, they started to pack up, though they hadn’t even eaten the pineapple cake Tina’d brought, meticulously wrapped in wax paper for a special dessert. Instead, they returned the untouched cake to its cardboard box. Then, uncharacteristically, they began to throw things in the car. They bundled the plastic tablecloth into an untidy ball with some plastic cutlery inside and at the same time they bundled me into the backseat, and then they drove away.
I never had cupcakes in Don and Tina’s house, so I know the memory’s real. Tina abhorred white sugar, white flour. We ate whole grains: buckwheat pancakes so heavy one would fill my stomach; whole wheat bread that Tina made; brown rice and bulgur and barley, slippery in every soup. We were upright, poor but not cheap.
Later, the police come to the house. They tell me they will lay charges. They don’t need my permission – they tell me this as though it’s a kindness.
“He would go to jail?” I ask, keeping my voice low. Don has gone to lie down. I can’t rouse him. He only mumbles, keeps his eyes closed when I tell him the police are here.
“He’s ill,” I say. “I don’t think he even knows what’s going on.”
The police shake their heads, whether in relation to Don’s sickness or my question about jail, I don’t know. They hand me their cards. I think they are going to leave then but they stand there, shuffling their feet. Then one says, “We found your family. They have been looking for you.” They shake their heads, I guess, at the unlikeliness of someone looking for so long. I feel unbearably old, standing there, like maybe it’s my fault I’ve evaded being found for so many years, so far beyond childhood. Then they hand me a piece of paper with a name I don’t recognize, a phone number. “Your mother would like you to call, as soon as you are ready,” the one who hands me the card says. Like I’ve been out playing, past dinnertime, and it’s time to come home. The most normal words in the world.
Don never did articulate beyond fragments. He disappeared further into weakness and incoherency. I sat by his bedside, refusing to call my new parents, then refusing their calls when they couldn’t hold out any longer. I was waiting for something that never came. Finally, just weeks later, he followed Tina. Gone. They left me, just like I left my own parents.
It turns out they stayed together, my mother and father, even with all the drinking and the drama. It’s Deborah who fills me in. Deborah is my sister, three years older. Deborah has called me the most, since the police put us in touch. She’s the first one to get me on the phone, one night in the empty house when I’m so lonely even the mystery at the other end is no deterrent. Deborah tells me she was supposed to be watching me and she got distracted, playing with Barbies. Then she starts to cry. She felt guilty for years, even started a website to try to find me: www.savesarabeth.com, she says, and there’s just a touch of pride in her voice, maybe in her web design skills. I listen to her and wish I could answer her many emotions; instead I stammer for words, for feelings I don’t have. Still she keeps calling. “We missed you,” she says. “We never, ever, gave up.” She is vindicated; I, well, I am found.
When I left the park where my life changed, I drove aimlessly down the highway. I imagined myself frantic, searching for my own child, but couldn’t muster the necessary panic. What do I know of children, having been raised without siblings, without cousins, mostly without friends? Sometimes, as a special treat, Tina would let me take down a Hummel figurine and hold it for a while. “Don’t fumble with it,” she’d admonish before handing me the cold porcelain figure of my choice. My favourite was a sculpture of two sunshine-headed children, a girl and a boy; brother and sister, I imagined. The boy was taller than his sister and held aloft a red-striped ball, and the girl’s arms were raised in expectation, poised to make the connection.
It’s a picnic area, where they’ve chosen to meet me, in a municipal park with a gazebo and a baseball diamond and a children’s playground with swings and slides and one of those roundabouts that make you dizzy. I know this, though I don’t think I ever got on. I watched from my place beside Don and Tina – perhaps we were on a rare picnic, the pineapple cake sliced neatly on our plates – as the other children yelled and swung. I didn’t even want to join them; their play seemed to me, already, beneath me.
I can smell the barbeque before I’m even out of the parking lot. They’ve pulled two picnic tables together and tied balloons at the corners. They are many, they are scattered and real and they wear colourful sweatsuits and they are my family, my real family. Suddenly, I want to turn around, hide in the car for a while. This is too much.
But it’s too late: I’m spotted and a pudgy woman in a flowered blouse and curls, glossy dark, just like my own, is rushing over. She enfolds me in a hug that smells like cigarette smoke and hand sanitizer.
“It’s me! Deborah!” she says. “Your sister.”
I can’t say anything but it doesn’t matter because she’s pulling me toward the group and they’re all gathering around. Deborah, my sister, pulls me over to where an older woman is seated in a striped plastic lawn chair. The woman has a toddler on her lap but someone rushes to take the child as we approach.
The older woman looks up and her face, which is my own, crumples.
I wonder now, between weekend visits, between the unbearably tender suggestion of a Christmas gathering, between the discovery that two of my siblings also love olives, hate chocolate, who wanted me more, and my mind usually, surprisingly, alights on Don. Tina worked harder, kept things together. Tina worried for both of them: her lips pursed, her eyes always on the window. But it was Don who I sometimes caught, mid-stare, as I looked up from my lessons at the dining room table to intercept a look so deep I had to turn away.
In the innocent and sunny picnic ground I bend toward the woman in the lawn chair. She doesn’t know me, I think, and I know it’s a lie. I smile hard and then harder and, for just a moment, before the woman reaches out and pulls me down into her arms, into a smell that stops my heart, for just that moment I wish myself back amongst the silent porcelain at our kitchen table.
Kirsten Madsen’s stories have appeared in The Walrus, The Northern Review, The New Quarterly, and Prairie Fire.