He didn’t say anything for a while, just stared at the couple in front of them who now had their hands in one another’s back pockets. Then, in a quiet voice, he said, “We’re getting our marriage license and you’re thinking about breaking up?”
“I’m not. The waiting in line is making me nervous,” she’d said.
What she didn’t say: though we did break up once before.
THE ORPHANS’ COURT was housed in a stately historic building, full of deep rich woods, marble, and brass, all of it looking freshly polished. Two bronze lions stood sentry over the entrance and a giant stained-glass window of a woman floated over the lobby. It was apparently from a famous artist. “The name of that one is Fortune at Her Wheel,” Janice said, as they waited for the elevators. “Which is fitting to our endeavors, no?”
Maribeth didn’t answer. She felt sick with nervousness, as if the elevators would open onto the fifth floor and her birth mother would be there waiting.
But there was just another lobby, pretty if a little shabbier than the one down below. Janice announced herself and Maribeth, and after a short wait, a woman came out to collect their paperwork and have Maribeth sign a form.
“That’s all?” Maribeth asked after the woman returned to her office, saying she’d be in touch.
“For now,” Janice replied.
A bleakness had fallen over Maribeth. This whole process was just dispiriting. Half of her wanted to get far away from Janice, from all of this, and the other half didn’t want to be alone.
They found a deserted café and Maribeth ordered a coffee for herself and a decaf pumpkin spiced latte for Janice. Then they huddled into a corner table.
“Are you okay, dear?” Janice asked, patting Maribeth on the hand.
Maribeth nodded.
“I imagine this stirs up a lot of feelings, thinking about your birth mother. And everything is worse around the holidays.” She paused and slurped her drink. “You might think about starting your letter.”
“My letter?”
“The one you’ll write to your mother when you locate her, explaining who you are, why you’re looking for her. It might help you process.”
“Did it help you?”
Janice stirred her drink with the wooden stick. She had not been forthcoming with her own story but it was obvious to Maribeth that she too had searched for her birth mother.
“Yes, it did,” she said at last.
“I don’t know what to say,” Maribeth said.
“Just speak from the heart. Tell her about yourself, your family. Whatever feels true to you.”
Maribeth tried to imagine writing the letter. She knew she was supposed to be the tearful abandoned daughter, full of questions, but really, all she wanted to know was if anyone else had had heart disease. It was as much for her children now as for her.
“You know,” she told Janice. “I think I conceived my children on Thanksgiving.”
“You did?”
Well, she couldn’t say for sure it was on Thanksgiving. And the procedure by which Dr. Simon had implanted the fertilized embryos into her uterus could only be called conception in the most science fiction of contexts. It was their fourth, and last, IVF try. They were out of patience, time, money. They’d had to ask Jason’s mother for a few thousand dollars to cover this last one. Nora had given them the money, but in return, had reallocated a diamond tennis bracelet that she’d apparently willed to Maribeth to go to Lauren instead.
The implantation had taken place the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. When it was over, Dr. Simon had patted Maribeth on the belly. “Third time’s a charm.”
“It’s the fourth,” Maribeth had said glumly.
She didn’t think it would work. She’d been abstaining from drinking but that year she got rip-roaring drunk on Thanksgiving. She woke up the next morning, puking. “I think it took,” Jason said. “It’s too soon. I just drank too much,” she’d replied. But a few weeks later, she tested positive. Even then, she didn’t believe it would stick. She’d been pregnant before and had always miscarried before the sixth week. When the ultrasound showed two beating hearts—they’d never had heartbeats before—Jason had joked that it was the getting drunk that did it. “Maybe we should’ve been doing that all along,” Maribeth had said, laughing. “Getting wasted and humping in the backseat of our parents’ car.”
Telling Janice now about the false starts, the misses, put a lump in her throat. She swallowed it down with her lukewarm coffee. “The thing is, when my kids were born, when I saw them, I thought, Yes. This was why. It was like all those other zygotes that didn’t implant had been impostors. These had been my children all along.”
She looked up, surprised to find tears glistening in Janice Pickering’s eyes.
What a fraud Maribeth was, peddling a story of loving motherhood. Look at her now. Her strength was back. And she was still here.
“I wonder if that’s even true or if I just needed to believe it was,” she said.
“Are those two things really so different?” Janice asked.
31
She tried. She tried to write her birth mother a letter. But it felt like writing to Santa Claus, as an adult, and a Jew. What was she supposed to say?
She had no idea. So she put the letter aside and instead wrote to the twins.
Dear Liv and Oscar,
The Thanksgiving decorations are up here. Across the street, there’s a turkey made of balloons, not like Macy’s balloons but actual balloons. Do you remember last year when, Oscar, you asked why there were no presents on Thanksgiving? I think Daddy said it was the one holiday the corporations hadn’t co-opted and I think I’d said Hanukkah and Christmas were right there so we didn’t need to have presents on Thanksgiving, too.