Miss Fortune (12 page)

Diane was nothing like I'd pictured. Five foot three inches. Short brown shiny hair, sparkly green eyes, and a huge toothy grin. I watched her and my mother whisper to each other, both giddy with nerves but without any big hand gestures or fainting spells, and I realized that I'd never expected her to be so young, pretty, and happy looking. I guess I'd thought that the loss of me would have left her blind in one eye or at least a little grumpy. After Diane and my mother had their moment, Diane turned to me, smiled, and with a quick squeeze of my arm, said, “We'll have a lot of time to catch up.” Then she turned around, and I watched my butt walk to the baggage claim.

Since the big reunion, I'd visited Diane every year or so and even went so far as moving to Colorado to be closer to her for a time. Diane seemed to instinctually get who I was and how I was feeling without any words being exchanged. She always happened to be there for major life events. Well, she missed that
one
, but otherwise. We went through 9/11 together. She was in New York for the September 10 Off-Broadway premiere of
Homecoming
, the play I wrote about my mom's search for Diane after she had adopted me. “Kind of makes you want to drop acid and have sex with strangers” was the first thing she said after we found each other the afternoon of 9/11 on the Upper West Side. I saw Diane and her kids every year and sometimes more if she flew out to see me in New York or Los Angeles. In the final moment of
Homecoming
, the Lauren character hears the sound of her birth mother's voice on the phone for the first time, Aretha Franklin's “Think” fades up, and the lights go to black. Audiences would leave the theater happy that I'd found my African American mother. The reason I didn't bring Diane into the play as a character was because she was so perfect and fun it didn't
seem fair to other adopted folks whose reunions ended in tears and gunshots in front of Cinnabon. Over the years, I've seen her foibles, but ultimately she's been my Aretha Franklin fantasy birth mama.

David has just arrived at our apartment with Diane after picking her up from the airport.

Diane flops down on the couch next to me.

“Man, those C-sections are the way to go,” she says, looking at Leo's head. “He's not as ugly as some of my other grandkids were when they were first born. Don't tell the others I said that.”

Diane has decided that her grandma name is going to be Bubs. “He's a heroin addict turned police informant on
The Wire.
He's my favorite character. Full disclosure, his real name is Bubbles but that sounds like a stripper name. And since my breast reduction surgery I can't in good conscience call myself that.”

She leans over Leo's face and shouts at him like he's deaf.

“Hey, Buddy! Check it out! Bubs is here! I'm your Bubs!”

David laughs and I nod and open my mouth like I'm laughing, but no sound comes out.

I am trying to hide my tears. She's the first family member to meet Leo. She didn't have to run in slow motion with her arms outstretched and tears streaming down her face, but I would have liked the moment to have a teeny bit more emotional weight to it.

Now Diane's wandering around the apartment in a flowing paisley print dress and a cheerful pair of ankle socks covered in rainbow horses that she loves but rarely gets to wear because her judge won't let her wear them in court. She's “here to help” and is looking for any cloth surface that can be vacuumed or laundered as she tells me stories about her job.

“Well, my murderer is having a hard time because he murdered again.”

As a probation officer, Diane can't walk through a Walmart in
southern Indiana without having to nod at someone or give a little shout of encouragement. “Hey, Jeanie, you're not getting your foot caught in air-conditioner vents anymore, I hope. Watch out for those.”

I love her probation stories and I'm listening, but I'm also struggling to get Leo latched on to breastfeed.

Diane notices this, stops for a second, gives me a “You're a natural” thumbs-up, and keeps talking.

“So, his cellmate offered to help him kill his stepmother and his grandmother. Now, my murderer at least has some motivation for killing them because they were his family. But the other guy, now, he's just pure evil.”

She lets out a huge exhausted sigh. “Ahhhh! Oh man, I need a baked good.” She grabs her strawberry-shaped purse and heads out the front door.

“I'll be right back, honey. And
this
time I mean it.”

•   •   •

True to her word, Diane's been putting her special helping skill to use and doing a lot of laundry. I have to grip on to my pants when she passes by me: “I'm still wearing these . . . they're not dirty.”

David has confessed that he thinks that Diane is more worried about her baked goods and getting to bed early than helping us. Maybe after three babies and four grandkids, babies can't compete with turtle brownies. No, she's had four babies. I'm always forgetting to include myself.

Diane's three little “ones she kept” from another marriage didn't know anything about me. They were six, nine, and eleven. To break it to them, Diane took them out to Chuck E. Cheese's and told them they were celebrating and that she had a big surprise for them. At the end of the night, she had a cake and balloons brought out. “Okay, guess what we're celebrating!” Before they could start throwing out
ideas, she made the big announcement: “You have an older sister! And she's coming to visit! On Wednesday at four
P.M.
!” They had no idea how this was possible; they just thought, “Cake . . . balloons . . .
good
,” and they celebrated.

On the day we met, they ran up the driveway after their bus dropped them off like they were being chased. They were pushing each other out of the way, dropping their school papers as they ran. And then, when they got to the door, they all just stopped and stared at me. Saying nothing. They surrounded me and looked at my toes for an hour. They marveled at the skills I'd picked up during my nineteen-year adventure away from them—“She's going to brush her teeth! Mom, get in here. You got to see this.”

My birth father, Rob, had a harder time with my adoption and felt a lot more shame around the whole thing. After Diane got pregnant, he was kicked off his high school baseball team and sent back to the hills of West Virginia, where he could get away with that sort of thing. When Rob broke the news to his kids, who, like Diane's, were little and had no idea about me, he sat them down in their bedroom and shut the door. “A long time ago, I made a mistake,” he said. “Well, that mistake is back. She'll be here next Thursday.” For years after we first met, I'd sit on the couch and wave to them. “Hi, I'm the mistake.”

Diane's positive PR campaign has played a large part in why I've felt a part of her family from the very beginning. They are the only humans I've been around where I don't feel a separate “me,” just a clump of “us.”

Having Diane around gets me thinking about family. I realize that I've been telling this dreary little story to myself for all these years about how I've never really had my own family. I've been a visitor in all sorts of families but never felt like I had my own. Now that Leo is born, I see how untrue that is. All of those families are
his families. And they were mine, too. Are mine. How amazing to go from “I have no family” to “Wake the fuck up—you have five! Six if you count the gay boys.” I don't care if she never vacuums another napkin; I'm so grateful she's here.

•   •   •

It's four
A.M.
Leo and I are the only ones awake. Oh my god, there's a baby in my arms. How do any babies survive for more than a week? They're so frail and helpless. Look at him. I need to shove him back in so he's safe in my belly again. Or buy him a shell. Leo's squirms are familiar to me; he moves the same way in my arms as he did in my stomach. How on earth did my mother jump right into taking care of an eight-day-old newborn she'd just met? I can't imagine. I've asked her what those first few days were like and she told me, “Oh, fine. You ate and slept and went to the bathroom. Like a baby.” This was the same sort of midwestern pragmatic answer she used when I asked her why after having two daughters of her own already she'd chosen to adopt me: “Well, I had so many girl clothes . . .” Apparently Goodwill didn't do home pickups at that time and it was just as easy for her to adopt a baby.

I'm sure my mom wasn't up in the middle of the night, like I am, feeling terrible that she'd invited a sweet tiny baby to an awkward party with shitty parking where everyone's parting gift is some form of cancer.

The next morning, Diane goes to pick up twelve-dollar scones for everybody at our local coffee shop, which, after two days in town, she refers to as
her
coffee shop. She shows up three hours later with a bag of dried-out scones and a giant green leaf that she claims to have found on the sidewalk but later confesses to ripping off a tree in our neighbor's yard. She says it looks like the kind of leaf you could put a baby on and float him down a river.
“Not that I ever thought of that before,” she cracks, and then says she wants to take a picture of Leo lying on the leaf.

Normally, I love her abandonment jokes, but I'm still queasy from last night. I don't want to tell David about it because I don't want him to lose his mind in the nothingness and the terror since he still gets so much joy from online Scrabble. Diane, on the other hand, has been through a lot in her life. Divorce, death, and murdering murderers—she can handle it.

As Diane rummages through our toxic cleaning agents to find something to clean the leaf off, I share with her all the graphic images of reality that I, thanks to being a new mother, now understand—the cycle of suffering, John F. Kennedy Jr.'s plane going down, and the end of time as we know it.

Diane thinks she remembers that Danza, my half sister, had something like this happen to her after her first baby was born. “You should ask her. I'm just not as deep as you guys. Parenting wasn't that heavy for me. Maybe because I had no idea what the hell I was doing.”

I reminded Diane about the reunion story as evidence of how untrue that is.

Diane smiles and gives me a little loving squirt with the Windex she's holding in her hand. “That's sweet, honey, but I don't know what you're talking about.”

“It's really my favorite story.”

“What is?”

“How you took Danza, Justin, and Kenneth to Chuck E. Cheese's. There were balloons tied to all their chairs and a big cake comes out. You were like, ‘Okay, guess what we're celebrating! You have a big sister and she's back! She'll be here on Wednesday!' If you had done things any differently it would have changed everything. It's all about the spin you put on things.”

Diane is scowling. It's the scowl she has on her face when she's thinking. Or hungry.

“I hate to tell you this, but that never happened. I'm not sure where you got that from. Listen, what's going to stress you out more: if I lay him on a dirty leaf or one covered in Windex?”

I've told that story since the day I met Diane. It's how I describe the essence of who she is to people. She's just forgotten.

“No way have I made up that entire story. Where would I have gotten that from?”

“I don't know, sweetie, but it's a wonderful story, so I think you should keep telling it.”

“Is any of it true?”

“I don't think so. I think what I did was just tell the kids that I'd gotten pregnant in high school and that I'd given up the baby for adoption and now that baby was nineteen and she found us and was coming to visit. See, your story is better.” Diane walks over and takes Leo out of my arms. “Okay, race fans; let's go put this baby on a leaf.”

•   •   •

Two years later, Leo and I are in Bloomington, Indiana, visiting family while David is away working for the summer, trying to make big money as a salmon fisherman in Alaska. We're staying with my half sister, Danza, who was named for the great Tony Danza, not because Diane was particularly fond of his
Who's the Boss?
work, but because she just liked how it sounded. “Or maybe I was a big fan of his. I can't remember. Who cares? Just be glad you don't have a brother named Fonzie.”

All of Diane's kids live in the Bloomington area, and when there's a big event, like our visit, Diane shoves her third husband into their little sports car and drives the hour from their house to see the family.

Since (one of the twelve of my avid followers) Diane's trip right after Leo was born, she's been an avid follower of my baby blog,
Wigs on a Baby.
Once in a while we'll talk on the phone for a quick check-in. I still had this feeling that I'd been blinded by who I needed her to be and had no idea who she really was.

All the things that I'd loved about her suddenly seemed suspect. For instance, over the years I've watched Diane chat up people who most of society would run from. You could wheel up a headless torso on a gurney and Diane would chat away with it like they were old school buddies. Adults with severe cerebral palsy who can communicate only by blinking can chat for hours with Diane simply because she isn't scared of humanity in all its forms. I've always loved this about her, but it leaves me with a “well, she likes everybody” insecurity. In fact, if she was due for a coffee and a baked good, she might not have been able to determine who was standing in front of her, much less cared. We were making plans for my upcoming visit over the phone and I tried to share this fear with her. Her response was “What are you, adopted or something?” That was it.

People talk about genetics versus nurturing, but within six weeks of being Leo's mother I realized that what makes a mother is being there. The hours alone with him in the middle of the night. Feeding him. Loving him. Feeling that old “you and me against the world” Helen Reddy bond. The hell of knowing I will worry about his safety for the rest of his life. That is a mother.