Year of the Monsoon Read online

  She helped Mariela sound out the letters in the unknown word and Mariela continued to the end of the story.

  “Wow,” said Leisa, giving Mariela’s back a pat. “I had no idea you could read now. That was really good. And you’re learning to write, too.” Leisa scooted closer to see Mariela’s paper. “That’s very good.” Her foot bumped something and she looked down. There sat the paint can on the floor at Mariela’s feet, still decorated with the bits of colored construction paper. Before she could stop herself, Leisa was weeping.

  Mariela put her book down and turned to Leisa. “What’s wrong?” she asked worriedly.

  Leisa struggled to control her voice. “My mother died a little while ago, too.”

  Mariela reached out and laid her small hand on Leisa’s knee. “Do you miss her?”

  Leisa gave a watery smile and covered Mariela’s hand with her own. “Yes, I do.”

  Mariela frowned. “Don’t you have a can?”

  It took Leisa a moment to realize what Mariela was asking. “No,” she said, wiping her eyes. “We had a funeral for my mother… so we could say good-bye to her. She’s buried at the cemetery.”

  Mariela thought about this. “But then, she’s not with you.”

  “She’s with me here,” Leisa said as she laid her hand over her heart.

  Mariela thought some more. “Could I bury my mama?”

  Leisa looked into her earnest face. “Are you ready to do that?”

  Mariela looked down at the can. “Yes.”

  Leisa brushed Mariela’s hair back. “I’ll look into getting a nice place for your mother,” she said.

  “Thank you,” Mariela said. She looked up at Leisa again. “Are you an orphan like me now?”

  Leisa’s eyes filled again as she nodded. “I’m an orphan again.”

  “It was years and years before I understood what she meant by that,” the grown Mariela would recall when she told Maddie about that day.

  Leisa paced back and forth in her cubicle, the papers from her adoption folder spread about upon her desk. Lying on top was the handwritten note. It still floored her that she’d had a different name, a different identity. It seems that for six weeks, her birth mother – she couldn’t think of her as the incubator anymore – had kept her, held her, fed her. Maybe cared for her. Love seemed too strong a word. Leisa had always imagined that the delivery room nurses had taken her away immediately, that her birth mother had never even wanted to see her. But that obviously wasn’t what happened. What else didn’t she know?

  “If you ever want to search for her, you can tell me,” Rose had said when Leisa was sixteen. They were on their way to Deep Creek Lake for the weekend, “just mother-daughter time,” Rose said.

  “I don’t want to look for her,” Leisa said, looking over at her mother from her new position in the driver’s seat.

  “Watch the road,” Rose cautioned.

  “There’s no connection with her. She didn’t love me. Why would I want to go looking for her?” Leisa asked matter-of-factly.

  Rose was quiet for a few seconds. “It might not have been that simple. I know you feel that way now, but you may change your mind,” Rose continued. “It’s natural to be curious.”

  Leisa concentrated on a twisty section of road. “What about Dad?”

  “Well,” Rose sighed, “he feels a little more protective of you – I think it’s a father thing. He wants to keep you safe from anything that might hurt you. After all,” she laughed, “he did pick you out at the baby store.”

  “She was practically begging me to ask questions,” Leisa realized now. “Why didn’t I? Why did I just assume everything had been like some kind of fairy tale?”

  It felt now as if her unquestioning belief that she had belonged solely and completely to her parents was as naïve as her one-time belief in the story about the baby store. She knew her parents had loved her; no part of her questioned that. But she had to admit that the discovery of these papers had changed her perception of her relationship with them – it just feels different now – and she felt guilty even thinking it.

  It was like the summer between seventh and eighth grades. She and her best friend, Julie, had always been able to play make-believe, immersing themselves totally in the characters they made up. Their imaginations had seemed boundless. Then, that summer, Leisa could remember the very day they tried to play and couldn’t. Leisa also remembered that that was the day she became aware of wanting to kiss Julie, and not in play. She could still feel the sadness, the awareness that something beautiful and innocent had gone forever.

  She stopped pacing.

  That was how this felt, she realized. The innocence with which she had always viewed her family, the simplicity of “we chose you” was gone forever. There had been hard choices and hurt and sacrifice. Only now there was no one to ask.

  Almost no one.

  She gathered up the folder and grabbed her jacket. She ran up the steps two at a time to Sadie’s office.

  “Sadie, I’m leaving for the day,” she said.

  Just then Maddie came in. “Everything okay?” she asked as she handed Sadie a file.

  “Fine.” Leisa pulled her jacket on. “Just something I have to take care of,” she said vaguely.

  It was almost four. She hoped Bruce would still be at the office. She needed to talk to her aunt alone. Pulling her cell phone out as she walked to her car, she called Jo’s number.

  “Please be there,” she whispered. When her aunt picked up, she said, “Jo? I need to talk to you. Are you going to be home for a while? I’m on my way now.”

  She got there as quickly as traffic would allow. Remembering to bring the folder, she ran up the steps to her aunt and uncle’s front porch. Jo Ann was waiting for her.

  “Leisa, what’s wrong, honey?” Jo asked as she closed the door. Leisa hung her jacket on the hall tree, not answering immediately.

  “I need to ask you about these,” she said, holding out the folder.

  Jo led the way to the dining room where she sat down and opened the folder. Her face blanched as she leafed through the papers. She stopped when she got to the handwritten note.

  “Your mother and father planned to talk to you about this,” she said, looking over at Leisa. “Rose kept waiting for you to ask about her, but you never did.”

  “Can you tell me about this?” Leisa asked, tapping the note in her aunt’s hand.

  “She changed her mind,” Rose had sobbed over the telephone. “All these months, we thought the baby would be ours…”

  Rose and Daniel were living in Albany. They were devastated when they learned they couldn’t have children. It turned out that both Rose and Jo Ann had such severe endometriosis that doctors felt successful pregnancies were impossible. Both sisters had had multiple miscarriages. When Rose and Daniel decided to adopt, the administrator of Catholic Charities gently warned them that the process would be lengthy and frustrating. They had been ecstatic when they got a call after just a couple of months telling them a young woman had decided early in her pregnancy to give the baby up.

  “Why did she change her mind?” Jo Ann asked, feeling her sister’s anguish.

  “They said she asked to hold the baby, a little girl, and she just couldn’t give her up,” Rose explained, still crying. “I understand. Of course I understand. I know I couldn’t do it. We’re just so disappointed.”

  A couple of months later, they drove down to Baltimore with the tiny bundle in their arms.

  “They said she kept praying, talking to her priest, trying to decide the right thing to do,” Rose said, watching Leisa’s perfect, miniature hand curled around Bruce’s finger as he held her. “She finally decided this was best for the baby,” she said, still not quite believing the baby was really theirs.

  “They never meant to keep this from you,” Jo Ann said to Leisa, reading her thoughts. “This was all part of what they wanted you to know.”

  “It just caught me off-guard to find it,” Leisa said, slu
mping back against her chair and shaking her head. “And then when I did, they weren’t here to ask.” She looked up at Jo. “Were they really okay with me and Nan?”

  Jo smiled knowingly. “With you and Nan? Yes. With you and what’s her name from college? No.”

  Leisa blushed and laughed. “I can’t blame them there.” She tilted her head. “Did they always know I was gay?”

  It was Jo Ann’s turn to laugh. “I think they figured it out when you wrote a love poem for your sixth grade teacher and cut all your mother’s roses so you could bring her flowers.”

  Leisa’s face burned a deeper crimson. “Miss Davison,” she said dreamily. “That was a serious crush. I felt really bad about the roses,” she admitted sheepishly.

  They were silent for a moment, then, “What are you going to do about this?” Jo Ann asked, tapping the note from Leisa’s birth mother.

  “I don’t know,” Leisa answered honestly.

  Leisa’s office phone rang. “Hello,” she said absently as she flipped through a folder on a new child referred to them that day.

  “Hi,” came Nan’s voice. “Is anything going to keep you late tonight?”

  “No,” replied Leisa in surprise. “I should be done by five. What’s up?”

  “Nothing. I just feel like I’ve hardly seen you lately. I was thinking about cancelling my last two sessions so we could have dinner and a quiet evening together.”

  Leisa blinked. “That… that sounds really nice.”

  “Great.” Nan sounded nervous. “Great. See you at home about five-thirty then. Love you.”

  “Love you, too. Bye.” Leisa frowned in puzzlement as she hung up.

  She glanced at a framed photo on her desk, taken last December at an anniversary party Lyn and Maddie had hosted to celebrate Nan and Leisa’s ten years together. After Lyn and Maddie, who had been together for fourteen years, Leisa and Nan were the next in longevity among their group of friends. During the dinner, one of their friends had toasted them as “the perfect couple.”

  Leisa had thought of that evening several times over the past couple of months, as the distance between her and Nan had seemed to grow greater and greater. She wasn’t sure why or even how the chasm between them had developed. “I can see it, I can feel it, but I don’t know how to bridge it,” she longed to say – to whom? Maddie? That would go over great if and when Nan found out about it. Plus it felt weird to bring personal problems to work. Lyn? Maybe. Sometimes Lyn was easier to talk to since she didn’t have a history with Nan like Maddie did.

  The night of the anniversary party, Nan had been more affectionate than she had been in a long time. When they got home, while Nan was taking Bronwyn out, Leisa lit candles in the bedroom, hoping to continue the romantic mood. When she emerged from the bathroom, Nan wasn’t upstairs. Leisa went to the hallway where she could hear the television downstairs. She closed her eyes, listening for a moment, then went to blow the candles out before climbing into bed.

  “What’s going on?” Leisa whispered now, touching the photo.

  When Leisa got home from work that evening, she was surprised to see the Mini already on the curb.

  “Wow,” she murmured in surprise as she came in and smelled the aroma of pork chops cooking on the stove. Bronwyn raced to greet her, waggling her tailless rump and barking happily.

  “It smells wonderful,” Leisa said appreciatively as she entered the kitchen and Nan turned to her for a kiss.

  “Hungry?” Nan grinned.

  “I’m starving,” Leisa answered. “What do you want me to do?”

  “I’ve got all the food taken care of,” Nan said, turning back to the stove. “Why don’t you set the table and pour us some wine?”

  Leisa’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Wine, too? What’s up? You haven’t fed me like this since you were trying to get me into bed.”

  Nan laughed, and Leisa realized with a shock how long it had been since she’d heard that sound. She retrieved the corkscrew from a drawer and, with a small pang of guilt, realized that she had been so preoccupied with her grief for her mom and angst over the whole adoption thing that she hadn’t even wondered if Nan’s isolation was prompted by her own unhappiness.

  “Well,” Nan was saying suggestively, “maybe my motives haven’t changed.”

  “I can only wish,” Leisa shot back as she wriggled the cork out of the bottle. She closed her eyes. Please mean it.

  While she poured the wine, Nan dished out pork chops, rice and green beans onto their plates. At the table, Leisa reached for Nan’s hand before they started to eat and said, “Thank you. This is really nice.”

  Nan leaned over for a kiss. “You’re welcome.”

  “How have you been?” Nan asked as they began eating. “I haven’t really been available to you much these past few weeks.”

  “I know you’ve been busy at work,” Leisa said. “I’m doing okay.” She cut into her pork chop. “How about you? Difficult cases? Anything particularly troubling?”

  “Oh, you know,” Nan replied vaguely, but Leisa was used to this. Nan could never discuss specifics. “I’m grateful for all the referrals, but I think I’m working too much.”

  Leisa looked up at her. “Really? I haven’t heard you say that since we first got together.”

  “I know. It’s easy to slide into the habit of thinking work is more important than it is.” Nan lowered her eyes to her plate. “There is something else I’ve been needing to talk to you about.”

  “I’ve had something I want to talk to you about, too,” Leisa said.

  “Why don’t you go ahead,” Nan suggested.

  Leisa took a sip of wine before saying, “When we were cleaning out Mom’s house, I found –”

  She was interrupted by the telephone.

  “How different might things have been,” Leisa would wonder much later, “if we hadn’t answered that phone?”

  “Your grandmother died this morning,” Nan’s mother said as soon as Nan picked up. No preamble. No greeting. “You’ll need to come home for the funeral.”

  Chapter 7

  NAN SAT TENSE AND white-knuckled as the plane began its descent toward Portland.

  “Are you nervous about landing?” Leisa asked, reaching over for her hand.

  Nan gave her a quick smile that was more like a grimace. “Not about landing,” she said darkly.

  “I would really like to be there with you,” Leisa had argued to Nan as she made preparations for the trip to Oregon. “You were there for me with both Dad and Mom.”

  Nan turned to her. “I know, but my family is not like your family.”

  “Your parents were perfectly nice to me when I met them,” Leisa pointed out.

  “I know,” said Nan again distractedly as she held up two different pairs of black pants, trying to decide which to pack. “But they were meeting you for the first time, on our turf. They could fool themselves that you’re just a friend. My mother would never violate the law of polite first impressions, at least not to your face. It won’t be like that if they have to figure out what to do with you for what’s supposed to be family time.” She folded both pairs into her suitcase.

  “Family time,” Leisa repeated quietly, sitting in the club chair in the corner.

  Nan recognized something in her tone and looked over. “Hey,” she said, kneeling next to the chair. “Their definition, not mine.”

  Leisa just stared at her questioningly.

  “Look,” Nan said, taking Leisa’s hand in both of hers. “We’ve never really talked about this but, I’m… I’m not actually out to my family.” At Leisa’s astounded expression, Nan hastened to explain, “You don’t understand what it was like in my family.”

  “Then explain it to me,” Leisa implored. “For as long as I’ve known you, there’s been this wall when it comes to your family.”

  Nan pushed to her feet and went back to the bed where she fiddled nervously with a pair of socks. “There are some things you need to understand, things I�
�ve never talked about… to anyone.”

  “I can’t understand if you won’t tell me.”

  When she was sixteen, Nan began playing the piano accompaniment for the church choir. Her mother insisted on their going to church each week – not from any sense of piety, but because it was the thing to do – “if you don’t want people talking about you,” though Nan noticed it never stopped her mother talking about others. When Nan was offered the invitation to play for the choir, she jumped at it. If she had to be at church, at least this way she had an excuse for not sitting with her family.

  The church had hired a new choir director, Marcus Oakley. He brought new energy, “and new music,” Nan said enthusiastically. One evening, she was in the chapel practicing some of the new music before the choir’s next rehearsal, repeating the phrases until they felt comfortable. She began singing along.

  “Wow, you have a beautiful voice,” said Marcus, startling her.

  “I thought I was alone,” Nan mumbled, burning a deep red.

  “I mean it,” Marcus said with a dazzling smile. He was young, just twenty-three, fresh out of college with his music degree, making the most of his first job. He was tall, handsome and black.

  There had been a sudden surge in female choir applicants since he arrived, but Marcus showed no interest in any of them. “He must have a girlfriend back home,” they whispered.

  He sat down next to her on the piano bench. “Let’s try something else,” he said, picking another piece of music. He played so she could concentrate on singing. “Wow,” he said again. “I’d like you to be a soloist.”

  “You’re crazy,” she protested. “Don’t you know what they would say?”

  The choir at Water Street Presbyterian Church was an elite – and elitist – group of mostly older church members, and Marcus had indeed been approached by several of them already, all telling him how the choir was to be run.

  “Yes, I’m crazy,” he agreed with a grin. “But I know good when I hear it.” He became serious. “It would mean extra practice time during the week, though. Would it interfere with school?”