Даниэла Стил - Finding Ashley [calibre]

“The only reason I got your name is because I came across a woman who was a nun and a midwife there. She left the Church since then, but she remembered that your mother adopted a baby the year that my sister’s baby was born. It was a wild long shot, but I decided to come here to try and find you, and hope we got lucky. It’s a miracle if you’re really my niece. My sister doesn’t know I’m here, she doesn’t know I went to Dublin to go to Saint Blaise’s in person. She told me details recently that she’d never told me before, and I realized that the greatest gift I could give her was to find her daughter. You, hopefully. So here I am. You look remarkably like my mother, and I hope you’re the baby we’ve been looking for.” There were tears in Hattie’s eyes when she said it, and in Michaela’s as she listened to the story. It didn’t come as a shock to her, it came as a relief, and she suddenly had the feeling that she was complete. “And by the way,” Hattie added with a wry grin, “as a further surprise, I’m not a reporter, I’m a nun.”

“You’re a nun?” Michaela looked shocked at first and then she laughed. “You don’t look like a nun, or act like one.”

“But I am. I left my habit at the hotel. My order doesn’t require me to wear it in daily life. And I couldn’t pose as a journalist, and show up in the habit.”

“I guess not.” Michaela grinned.

“Would you be willing to take a DNA test?” Hattie asked her and she nodded, thinking.

“My mother is very open-minded and always encouraged me to find my birth mother if I wanted to. But I don’t want to tell her about this though until we’re sure. I think in some way, it will be a shock to her if what she calls my ‘real’ mother turns up. She’s my real mother and has been all my life. But there’s room in my life for the woman who gave birth to me. I can only imagine the trauma it must have been for a sixteen-year-old girl to have a baby and give it up.”

“I don’t think she ever recovered from it. There’s a sharp side to her. And losing her son nearly finished her off.”

“Where does she live? In New York?” Hattie had said that she lived in New York, so Michaela thought her birth mother might too. “She lives in the Berkshires, in Massachusetts. She has become a recluse since she moved there four years ago, two years after her son’s death. And she’s divorced.”

“What does she do?”

“She’s a very talented writer, she wrote under the name Melissa Stevens. She gave it up when her son got sick, and hasn’t written since, and says she won’t.”

Michaela looked shocked again. “I’ve read her books. They’re brilliant, but very dark and depressing.”

“She’s been through a lot. I’m not going to tell her until we’re sure. I can help provide a sample for the DNA test, if that’s helpful. I think we should keep it between us, until we know. I don’t want to get her hopes up and disappoint her.”

“I want to meet her,” Michaela said, looking earnestly at Hattie, “and for my kids to meet her. I gave up on finding her years ago. It seemed hopeless after they told me about the fire. Why did they want to hide the records? Just to protect everyone’s privacy? My mother never made a secret of adopting me.”

“Others did.” Hattie thought of Heather Jones. She took a deep breath then. “The Church made a lot of money on the adoptions, which they don’t want people to know. They had a booming business with it for a long time. The girls who had their babies there came from families who could afford to send them away, and all of the adopting parents were rich and could pay anything for the babies they adopted. There are plenty of convents who took care of poor girls having babies out of wedlock. But there were a handful of convents in Ireland that turned it into a high-priced, very lucrative business, which some people frown on. It was for the benefit of the Church. My sister and parents, and your adoptive parents, were part of it, and others like them. The nuns were particularly proud of the movie stars who came to them for babies, which is how I learned about your mother, and about you. If she wasn’t a movie star, the ex-nun I talked to wouldn’t have remembered her and I would never have found you, so I guess we’re both lucky. Do you think she’ll be upset?”

“Probably more than she’d expect, at first, but she’ll be gracious about it. She gave me everything I needed, an education at the best schools, nannies to take care of me when she was on location, beautiful homes to live in, vacations in terrific places. I never lacked for anything. She just wasn’t around a lot of the time, but I wasn’t unhappy. It was part of the territory of having a famous movie star mother. I was never mistreated or neglected,” she reassured Hattie, who believed her, and she seemed very forgiving of her adopted mother’s faults. “She never remarried after my father died, so I didn’t have to compete for her attention.”

“She sounds like a wonderful person,” Hattie said admiringly.

“She is. And she’ll be happy for me once she gets used to the idea. How soon can we do the DNA test?” she said, looking excited. Hattie already knew it was a simple mouth swab and they needed a DNA kit from the doctor.

“How about tomorrow?”

“Fine. I’ll call my doctor.”

“I can do it too if that will speed up the process.”

“I’d like you to come and meet my kids and my husband tomorrow,” Michaela said warmly. “How long will you be here?”

“As long as I need to be,” Hattie said quietly, basking in the warm glow of the hope that she had actually found Ashley. It seemed too good to be true. The needle in the haystack had shimmered in the sunlight of truth, and she had found it, with Fiona Eckles’s help. It really was a miracle, for them all. She had Fiona to thank for putting her on the right track.

After promising to come for dinner the following night, Hattie called Fiona from her hotel. It was late in Dublin, but Fiona had said that she worked late at night, so she called her and told her what had happened.

“And where does that leave you now?” Fiona asked her, as Hattie wondered what she meant.

“An aunt, I guess, if the DNA test shows that she’s my sister’s child.”

“And how are you feeling about the Church?” Fiona asked her pointedly.

“I’m not sure. I have no respect for the nuns who were involved in it, particularly those who burned the records, and ruined countless lives when they did. Others won’t be as lucky as we were, thanks to you, and a famous adoptive mother, which made it easier to track her down.”

“Don’t forget, those nuns had the blessing of the Church for what they did. They weren’t protecting anyone’s privacy, they were covering their tracks and the money they raked in for the Church, so no one could criticize them for it. And they forced the girls to give their babies up, with their parents’ blessings.”

“What are you saying?” Hattie asked her, looking worried.

“I’m saying that a vocation is a delicate thing. It’s made of spun glass. Mine was shattered forever by what I saw and what I learned at Saint Blaise’s.”

“I think mine is still intact,” Hattie said quietly. “This was only about my sister for me, nothing else.” She wasn’t on a witch hunt to condemn the Church, like Fiona had been with her book.

“It’s about all of us, Hattie. It’s about integrity and honesty, and pure motives. Even the Church has feet of clay sometimes. In the end, I couldn’t accept that. I felt as though I had committed myself to a life of hypocrisy that was all about money, not about helping those childless couples and poor girls who were too young to know what they were doing and the price they would pay later on. Look at your sister, and what you say it did to her.”