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When she reached the last one, she looked at me with her tear-stained face. I had begun to cry as well when I saw fresh tears in her eyes, and her face conveyed every feeling inside her from pain, hurt, and sorrow until her jaw clenched in anger and she finally looked up at me, disappointed.
“This last one was right before my mom became really ill. I think she was moved to the hospice for her care around the same time. I had no idea she was ill until she called to tell me she was there. Her cancer was so advanced, but she lingered on. It was when she was at the hospice, I found out about you, the adoption … the lies …”
I squeezed her hand and sat quietly, while she recovered from her own personal hell and considered how devastating and confusing it must have felt for her to find out her life had been fabricated, and she’d had no idea I’d existed until her mother was dying.
“Erin, each of us can only view this experience from our own perspective. I always knew you were out there, but it must have been horrendous for you. Knowing your adopted mom wrote to my mom, and kept her updated on your progress…” I choked, “I can’t begin to express the level of betrayal I’m carrying in regard to my mom. All those years she kept tabs on your progress and I was never allowed to mention you existed…” My breath hitched, and I couldn’t continue for a moment when my tears fell, despite me trying to stay strong.
Erin squeezed my hand. “It’s obvious to me, those two women, my mom and yours … my grandmother, I suppose, came to some agreement to which they both kept. They were both cruel in their own ways. From my mom’s perspective, I guess she only told me to rid herself of guilt … about lying about who my father was and then the adoption. I guess it was her deathbed confession, otherwise I may never have been any the wiser.”
I nodded, turned, and hugged her tight. “Erin, I can never make up for all—”
“Stop. I don’t want you to think like that. What happened was tragic, but I have a whole new family now, when I was an only child. My mom had a cousin, who had a husband and daughter, but I don’t remember much about them, I was very small when they came to the house. Mom told me she’d died around the time she got sick. I tried to trace the husband and daughter without any luck. My dad was an only child; so on my end there’s no one else. To know I have you and James… Marnie and her husband… a granddad, who has no idea…” she trailed off.
“He will know about you, Erin—if he doesn’t know already,” I replied, nodding at the laptop where she’d read the letters. “It’s just with Mom passing … he needs a little time, honey. But we must tell him. Like I’ve said before, I will never deny you again.”
The beaming smile she gave me said it all, and I figured my guardian angel had perhaps turned up, albeit thirty years too late. Part of me wondered if the universe had decided I’d paid my dues for the horrible thing I had done.
The innocent baby I’d given up had come back into my life and had found it in her heart to forgive me. By doing that, she in turn had helped put another piece in the puzzle to helping me heal myself.
“All right, my turn. I’ve got pictures of the house I grew up in and from a few other key moments as I grew up. I figured it may help you to know I had quite a privileged upbringing. I’ve also included pictures of some of my friends, my first love, and my senior prom dress pictures. However, I’d put them together before I knew anything about the letters, so if you think it’s too much we don’t have to—”
“No, I want to see them … I want you to fill in as much as is humanly possible from our time apart. Nothing can make up for me not being there, but at least I’ll have images in my head for some of those key times in your life I’ve always imagined in my mind.”
Smiling warmly, she leaned down and lifted her purse. Taking a small case from inside it she pulled out a flash drive. “Would James mind if we use his laptop?”
“Not at all, he doesn’t use this one for work.”
Erin grinned nervously as she inserted the flash drive and pulled up the files. My heart raced and my body buzzed in anticipation, but when she began to narrate each picture for me, I laughed more than I cried. She had obviously chosen the pictures carefully because they had been mainly just her and her friends doing weird and wacky things.
There were times when I’d asked her to wait while I absorbed the image on screen and committed it to my memory. The images filled in so many blanks from those times when I had wondered what she’d been doing.
The home she had lived in was beautiful with a homey vibe, and it was clear from pictures of her bedroom over the years, she had wanted for nothing.
There were many more photographs where Erin beamed happily during big days out. Summer camp images of groups of smiling kids on idyllic lakeside settings, pretty much like the gorgeous place James had brought us to relive the time we’d missed.
Thoughts turned to my own upbringing, and it warmed me to know she had been in a far better place than if she’d been with me around my mother. At least Erin had been given a good grounding and a lovingly blissful existence until her father had fallen ill.
“So that’s all the ones I put together of me. There are a few of my parents and their families, if you want to see those.”
I had, the empty faces of the people who had been her protectors instead of me were suddenly all important. Not knowing what they had looked like had been something else which had tortured me.
“All right, this was me about six weeks old, I think, when I was christened. That’s Mom, Dad, and my godparents, Maureen and Colin McLean. They were our next-door neighbors, and their daughter, Kelsie, is still my closest friend.”
I stared past the godparents and studied the other two strangers in the picture, Erin’s parents, and felt disappointed by their appearance.
They looked like ordinary, familiar-looking, nondescript regular people of average height, both with mousy brown hair. Yet there was something extraordinary about them, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. I decided I had thought that way because they had given my daughter a home.
An unsettled feeling washed over me, and I wondered if the dissatisfaction I felt was because they weren’t a shiny beautiful couple, who would have stood out in the picture like my daughter had done in every one of hers.
Several photos included them with their growing adopted daughter through her early years, but one stopped my heart. Hearing my breath hitch, Erin turned, looking confused toward me before looking back at the screen.
“Wow, I’ve never looked at this closely before, but my mom’s cousin’s daughter really looks like me.”
Blood swished in my ears and my heart stuttered erratically, making my lips and fingertips tingle from shock, which had overtaken my whole body.
“Mom, are you all right? Mom?”
* * *
