I’ve been sworn out of the house. We are in Seven Devils, North Carolina, and my mother says, Go now, drive down the mountain, go fishing, go. She is baking a cake for my ninth birthday party—I know this much—but she and my father are also planning a surprise for me: a mini-horse named Tulip.
My aunts and uncles drive me down the mountain to the trout farm. My hair is still cut short, and I’m wearing my new denim overalls with a floppy, silk sunflower on the pocket. I pierce the kernels of corn, bob clumsily with my rod, while my cousins play with the worms, pretend to eat them.
My mother has always cast a line for me, and I’m unsure how to do it alone. I jiggle the release back and forth, jerk the pole up and down like I’m trying to rouse a rabbit from a hat. I fling the pole above my head, spin it in circles, swipe it like a baseball bat toward the lake, the hook flying in a tiny spark.
I don’t feel the snag. I don’t see it. But I hear the swarm of bees descend around my body. Wings zoom, breaking the air. My vision splits. My face vibrates all over. I swat my arms, screaming, hoping the bees don’t fly into my mouth. I kick, swing, fall, cry. It seems to last forever, this buzzing, though it couldn’t have been very long at all.
There are arms. My aunt’s, lifting me. The hump of her steps as she is running, running, bringing me to the Trout Hut. She might need an ambulance, I hear her say.
Everything is burning. I don’t understand what has happened.
Are you allergic to bees? she asks me, but she is already speaking to someone else.
This girl, she’s allergic to everything.
My aunt is hysterical. I am playing dead. Moving hurts. My eyes don’t want to open.
And then this moment. A memory that doesn’t change, that needs no revision, no matter how many times I summon it: the sound of gravel rumbling under tires, the speed of Big Beau. My mother. My mother running to me, yanking me from my aunt’s soft arms.
What happened? she says. I knew something was wrong. When I open my eyes, my mother’s face is there. She’s kissing my cheeks, saying, I came fast as I could.
According to my Grandma Rose, my mother was frosting the cake when it happened. She was smoothing the chocolate with a spoon when she felt it, that thing, dropped silver to the floor. Something’s wrong, she said. I have to go. She started driving before the car door was even shut. No seat belt, no shoes.
That mother-daughter power, she’d say, for years, it’s bigger than logic.
The bees stung my face, my eyelids, my hands, even my scalp. In the car, I stared at my thumbs swelling like dough, and I said my good-byes. I will die at my own birthday party. How unfair. What I knew about bees sprung from Macaulay Culkin’s body in a casket. Turns out, I was not allergic to them.
But that mother-daughter thing—I believe in it now. It’s something that can spool out forever like a string between two cups. A thread that will hum when you need it.
SUMMER, 1976
PLANTATION, FLORIDA
The Attorney wants my mother to sign the papers. She’s back home now, an empty bedroom. There is no evidence of what the past nine months had meant—no baby clothes, no bassinet, no embroidered name, no pictures.
I won’t sign them, she says. I didn’t even want to do this.
But you did do this, says The Attorney. We had a deal.
My grandfather and grandmother look at my mother. They motion for her to go on, pick up the pen. They have already received the checks, signed their own papers.
Not unless you tell me what I had, says my mother. A boy or a girl?
I can’t tell you, child, says The Attorney. But I still need you to sign.
Fifteen minutes later, my mother walks The Attorney back out to his car. She is barefoot. Her face is swollen, pale. I imagine she uses the same voice she uses now when she wants something. Please, she says. The mosquitos are out.
I can’t tell you that, says The Attorney. Legally, I can’t.
Please, says my mother. She holds her stomach. Flat. According to the hospital paperwork I read now, my mother is sixteen years old and ninety-eight pounds.
The Attorney opens his car door. He bends to get in, but pauses. He looks back at my mother.
When your child gets married one day, he says, they will probably change their name.
1976
HOLLYWOOD, FLORIDA
My baby, she’s mine—Sharon Gelbwaks must get used to saying this, saying it aloud to anyone who will ask, repeating it until it goes true.
She’s heard the horror stories—birth mothers changing their minds. Sometimes in the hospital, sure, but also, sometimes, later. She’s heard about mothers refusing to sign the papers, refusing to let go. She’s heard of mothers getting clean, realizing what they had done in that black haze of greed, coming back, Mine. Mothers were always coming back—what mother wouldn’t? As Sharon looks at the newborn in her room, sleeping, she can’t imagine it. Not coming back for her. Perfect, this baby, her baby, the way her head feels like velvet, the way her skin smells like paper. Oh, the noises! A real, human girl, my baby, it doesn’t matter where she came from, what the birth mother ate during her pregnancy, what she looked like, no, the baby is Sharon’s, whomever she and Peter would mold her to be, and they would protect this child for the rest of her life. This baby would grow up different, not looking like anyone else, the hair, she thinks, look at this hair, but Sharon feels prepared for these lessons. She feels prepared to learn.
One day, in J. C. Penney, Sharon pushes the baby, her baby, around in a stroller. She is looking for towels, home goods, when she sees the woman.
This woman is too old to be the mother, not a teenager—she’s sure. Could it be the grandmother? An aunt? The Asian woman pauses, looks into her stroller.
An Asian baby, she says. So cute, this baby.
The Asian woman has two sons with her. They have dark skin—island boys. The boys tug on the leg of her jeans. These could be the brothers, Sharon thinks. They must be.
Thank you, says Sharon. She’s mine.
Doesn’t look like you.
She’s mine.
How old’s the baby?
Couple of months, says Sharon, before pushing the stroller through the aisle, hooking a right, and exiting the mall.
1976
HOLLYWOOD, FLORIDA
She sees them everywhere—Asian babies, hapa babies—in her dreams, in the grocery store, at the mall. All babies look the same to my mother—like old white men, indistinguishable, really—but this baby, her baby, would look different. Her baby would look like an island girl, she was sure, a warm tone to her skin, tiny eyes, the hair.
Would her baby recognize its own mother? She is taking pills to keep her breasts from lactating, but would they drip at the sound of her baby’s cry? There must be something, she thinks, between mother and child, a magnetic jolt between the two that cannot be eased apart. But how long would it take to find her? Where would she be—in which town? How would it ever happen?
What is my daughter’s name? she wonders. She thinks about this all the time.
The babies are everywhere. At least, she thinks she sees them. The crescent cheek in a stroller, the black silky swirl at the top of a head. Her body will recover the connection, she thinks, the recognition of her baby, some residuum of those blurry hours in the hospital. The eyes may forget but the body—it remembers.
When my mother graduates high school, she takes a job as a hostess at a posh Japanese restaurant. The managers dress her in a kimono; they don’t care that she’s not Japanese—She looks close enough. She scans the room each night, wondering if the new parents of her daughter might take her here. An Asian experience, she imagines them saying, but she never does find them. Instead, she watches as the hibachi chefs learn to throw knives, and she is there to bandage their fingers after each miss. She returns home to shower off the stink of burned onions. She falls asleep curled in a towel each night, her hair still wet.