Marilyn Peake - The Other

I placed the rings back where I’d found them and snapped photos with my cell phone. Then I closed the curtains.

When I reached the kitchen, pain stabbed me once again. Clutching the freezer handle on the refrigerator to steady myself, I accidentally pulled open the door.

Maggie had entered the kitchen at exactly that moment. She covered her mouth with her hand and gasped. There in the freezer were vials of blood and yellow liquid that sure looked like urine.

Max came in behind her. Oblivious to my pain, he shoved me aside and slammed the door shut. He shouted at me and Andy, “Get out of my house! You’ve invaded enough of my privacy!”

Maggie asked her father, “What is that, Dad? Are those yours?”

In a shocked voice, Max said, “No! Those are your mother’s. Those were her diabetes tests. It’s a living part of her. It’s all I have left, for God’s sake, Maggie!”

I spent the rest of my work week in the office, writing up a report on my visit to Max Davenport’s and reading case files on clients I’d be visiting with Andy the following week.

When Saturday rolled around, I was exhausted. I slept until 11:00 AM. When I finally woke up, I stayed in bed, staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars and planets glued to my ceiling. I’d stuck them up there the year my mom agreed to let me paint my room dark blue with a black ceiling. I was thirteen at the time.

I thought about the stabbing pains I’d experienced during my first field visit to a client’s home. On hindsight, I think I was using the same defense mechanism of denial my mother had used when she experienced early symptoms of ovarian cancer. They weren’t anything out of the ordinary: mild cramping, bloating, decreased appetite, needing to pee more often than she usually did.

At first, she’d joked about the frequent need to pee, saying she had “old lady’s bladder.” I laughed every time she said it. Now, I felt tremendously guilty that I’d laughed.

I did try to help her with the bloating. I suggested energy drinks and what I thought were healthy milkshakes made in the blender by mixing fruit, ice cream and milk for when she felt too full to eat solid food. She enjoyed them until she decided that all that liquid was making her pee more often and maybe the fruit was giving her gas. Her favorite was a banana-chocolate milkshake I made for her by blending bananas, vanilla ice cream, whole milk and chocolate syrup.

I felt more humiliation than fear over my recent episodes with pain. I hoped they’d never return in a public place, and certainly never again at work.

As I lay there, I explored the place where I’d felt the pain. There was definitely a lump in there! I felt the other side. It actually felt kind of the same, so I figured maybe it was a muscle. Or maybe my ovary? Could you feel your ovaries, or were they too small? I felt the problem side again. I couldn’t tell if there was a lump there or not, but I’d triggered the pain by pressing so hard.

Owwwwww! I screamed bloody murder.

As the pain lifted, I realized how quiet the house was and remembered that my dad was gone all day, helping a friend move into an apartment.

I started thinking about the scene in Max Davenport’s kitchen. The vials of blood and urine in his freezer, how my pain had led me to that.

New images formed in my head, things I’d ignored at the time. I was pretty sure there had been a mason jar filled with blood and another filled with urine in the freezer, in the back where the light wasn’t so good. Now that I thought about it, I felt I’d need to tell Andy about it. Would this need to be reported to the police?

Also, there had been a door on the floor of the barn. I hadn’t thought about it much at the time. I’d thought of it as a door to the basement. But did barns have basements? I wanted to go back and ask Maggie to show me what her dad kept down there.

Something lived in my abdomen, something that triggered pain as it tried to communicate important things to me. It had told me about the things in Max’s freezer. It had tried to tell me about the door in his barn.

I had that bizarre thought, then worried I was going insane. I felt it more important than ever to locate my birth mom. I needed to know my genetics, in regard to both physical health and mental health. What risk factors did I carry inside me like ticking time bombs waiting to go off?

Hopping out of bed, I pulled on a pair of purple socks with unicorns sewn into the cuffs and went out to the kitchen to find something to eat. Dumping Shredded Wheat into a bowl, I hunted around in the fridge for fruit. In the back of the crisper drawer behind a head of lettuce and a shrink-wrapped package of mushrooms, I found a couple of peaches. I washed and peeled one, then sliced it into slivers. Placing those in a pinwheel shape on top of the cereal, I drowned everything in milk. Grabbing the bowl and a spoon, I carried breakfast back to my desk and turned on my computer.

Today was the day I’d begin searching for my mom in earnest.

I Googled “adoption finding birth mom.”

My eyes quickly scanned the page. I felt overwhelmed. The Internet offered many different ways to go about this, with all kinds of services and people willing to help for a fee. Partway down the page, there was an article by someone who wished they’d never found their biological mom. I refused to read that, tried to pretend it wasn’t there.

I got up and brushed my hair. Looking in the mirror, I felt disappointed by the image staring back at me. My long brown hair had more broken ends than shine. My eyes were dull brown with streaks of red in the white part. My stomach pain had been taking a toll.

Grabbing the bowl of cereal and peaches, I took it over to eat on my bed, trying to calm my heart and slow my pulse a safe distance away from my computer and the Internet.

After eating the last bite, I returned the bowl and spoon to the kitchen, plopped them into the sink with the dirty dishes, and went back to my desk. Conjuring up courage, I forced myself to read one of the articles. It had a whole bunch of suggestions.

Ask your adoptive parents. My mother was deceased. I couldn’t possibly ask my dad. I think after the loss of my mom, my dad would have been too threatened if I told him I wanted to meet my birth mom. I would have been able to talk this over with my mom. She was open and would have worked through all her emotions with me. I’m sure we both would have cried, but she would have given her blessing for me to find out where I came from.

Get your birth certificate from the state where you were born. I had no idea where I was born. Damn.

Go to your local adoption agency and see if they can help. I guess I could do that.

Then I found something that looked promising: Adoption Search Angels. I had no idea such a thing existed. Reading further, I discovered they work for free. Free is good, considering my limited finances. They’re volunteers who are emotionally invested in uniting adopted children with their birth parents, often because they went through the same thing at one time.

I got up and paced around the house. I watched a couple of TV shows. I made myself a club sandwich for lunch, which took quite a bit of time. I ate it watching a couple more shows. I had a bowl of ice cream for dessert. Finally, taking a can of Diet Coke back to my desk, I Googled “adoption search angels list.” Wow, it turned out there were a lot of them!

My eyes filled with tears. Curling up in a fetal position on the bed, I started sobbing. I missed my mom so badly, it ached.

I had to do this. I needed answers about myself.

Wiping the tears from my face with a sleeve, I got back on the computer.