Year of Mistaken Discoveries (20 page)

As I locked my car, two school buses pulled into the lot, and a throng of small kids piled out. A field trip to kill time before vacation. The students all clutched bagged lunches and apparently had been consuming nonstop Red Bull shooters on
the drive over; they were practically bouncing off one another. A couple of harried teachers did their best to get them into a line and marched them toward the door. They had a few high school students helping them, who were likely doing it for the volunteer hours. I picked up my pace so that I followed in behind them. I paid my fee and caught up to them in the lobby. There was a line of old Buicks along the wall with plaques telling the history of Flint. The teachers seemed too concerned with making sure the kids didn’t touch or crawl into the cars to notice I had tacked myself onto their group.

“Okay, everybody! Who wants to see some dinosaurs?” The entire group of students spun around. It was Lisa, my birth mom. My breath caught. It seemed like I couldn’t get enough air all of a sudden. I recognized her instantly from the photos. She was wearing khaki pants and a sweater that had a forest of pine trees around the hem. She had on dinosaur earrings and carried a giant bone in her hand. Now that she had our attention, she lowered her voice and it worked—the kids leaned in closer to hear her.

“My name is Lisa, and I’m going to show you around. We’re going to travel back to what is known as the age of the reptiles, the Mesozoic era. There were three time periods in that era. Can anyone name one of them? I can give you a hint: There’s a movie named after it.”

“Jurassic!” a boy yelled out. He puffed up with pride when she smiled.

“That’s right. The other two are the Triassic and the Cretaceous.”
There was the sound of a dinosaur roar behind the closed doors, and the excitement level in the room ratcheted up a notch. Lisa clapped her hands to get their attention. “Let’s go over the rules, and then we can get started.”

I only half listened to her directions. She seemed natural with kids. You could tell that she actually liked them, that this wasn’t a part of her job that she disliked. Our group trooped into the main part of the museum behind her. The exhibit had giant animatronic dinosaurs that would move, blink an eye, lift a foot, or toss their heads back with a giant roar. Lisa walked around the room, giving details about the various dinosaurs without ever looking at notes. My birth mom was apparently a dinosaur savant.

“Now, this one is a Brachiosaurus. He’s my husband William’s favorite, so I call this guy Billy.” The kids snickered at the idea of giving such a huge creature such a ridiculous name. “Now, unlike my William, this guy likes eating his veggies. He’s what’s called an herbivore, which means he ate only plant materials. He was one of the largest dinosaurs. He would have been the size of a four-story building and weighed around fifty tons. That’s the same size as six elephants!”

The triceratops was displayed so that it appeared to be captured in a pen. Lisa ducked under the wood railing and waved us closer.

“Who would like to feel this one?”

A forest of hands shot up in the air. One girl with pink and
red beads strung at the end of each braid leaped into the air as if she were at a rock concert. Lisa motioned for her to come closer and let the girl rest her hand alongside the creature’s chest. It heaved a breath and the girl squealed in joy.

“Okay, who else?” A line formed and each kid took their turn while Lisa explained how the mechanics of the dinosaurs worked. She looked up and met my eyes. I waited to see if there would be a flicker of recognition. I imagined that she might gasp and clutch her chest, but nothing. She didn’t have any idea who I was. She beckoned me forward. “You can do it too. You’re never too old.”

She took my hand and pressed it to the dinosaur’s hide. When she touched me, an electric shock ran up my arm, but she didn’t seem to notice. The dinosaur itself was almost warm, and the skin felt like leather that had been left out in the rain and then allowed to dry. The breath felt natural, but I suppose they programmed it to feel that way. I had to remind myself that it was a fake.

“Okay, we’re going to go into the other room, and then you’ll have a chance to be archaeologists. We have three group workstations set up. You can either dig for bones, or do a fossil rubbing, or mix and match dinosaur parts to make your own unique dinosaur. Everyone will get a chance to try each one, so no pushing or shoving.” She opened the door to the next section of the museum and the kids rushed in, jockeying for position at one of the giant interactive displays.

Uncertain of what to do now, I paused in the doorway. I noticed one of the other teen volunteers looking at me strangely. She knew I didn’t belong. She crossed the room to talk to one of the teachers. I acted like I was going to go to the bathroom, but at the last moment I turned left and bolted out the door. I dashed past the startled reception clerk and out into the parking lot. I slid on a patch of black ice and fell hard onto my hands and knees. I popped up; my hands were bleeding slightly where they’d grazed the cement. My pants and sweatshirt cuffs were soaked through with the gritty slush. I looked behind me, expecting that my birth mom, or maybe the entire staff of the museum, would be racing out the door after me, but there was no one there. I stumbled into the car and peeled out.

chapter twenty-seven

I
drove around. No particular destination, just up and down different streets. I’d jump on the highway, go a few exits, and then get off and drive around again. I barely noticed what I was even passing until I realized I was hungry. When I glanced at the clock, it was already late afternoon. I’d lost more time than I’d imagined. I pulled into a diner.

The inside of the restaurant looked like it was stuck in a time warp. There was a glass case at the front with pieces of pie inside that spun slowly past in a circle. The countertops were chipped laminate and the booths covered in patched teal vinyl. First I went to the bathroom and washed my hands, wincing when I patted them off with the paper towels. Once I was presentable, I slid into one of the booths and skimmed the menu. This place was not at any risk of being called a health food
restaurant. A waitress went by carrying a salad. It looked like washed-out lettuce gasping its last breath with a clot of dressing squatting on top.

“You should get a Coney dog. We’re known for them,” my waitress said, noticing my expression as she sidled up to the table.

“Do you know how many calories are in them?” I asked.

She licked a smear of lipstick off her teeth. “Why do you think they taste so good?” She tapped her pencil on her pad. “Get the onion rings too, trust me.”

I nodded and passed the menu back over to her. I looked out the window. It was starting to snow again. Sort of half sleet, half snow. The sky was a flat gray, like dull tinfoil. The waitress returned after a few minutes with a platter heaped with onion rings and a hot dog smothered in spicy Coney sauce. It tasted amazing, every greasy bite. I flipped through Nora’s guide, looking for some new advice. Everything was about how to find your birth parents, but there wasn’t a thing about what to do
if
you found them. I wondered what Nora thought it would be like. Was she picturing a scene where she and her birth mom ran toward each other across a giant field in slow motion? What do you do once you find her? Just tap her on the shoulder and say,
Hey, when you have a coffee break, maybe we should talk. I’m the daughter you gave up.

I ate as slowly as I could. I didn’t know what I should do next. There was a part of me that wanted to drive home and
clean out the front hall closet like my mom wanted me to, but I hadn’t come all this way to just look at Lisa. Saying I spotted my birth mom wasn’t going to make a great presentation. I traced the Duke logo on my sweatshirt and waited for genius to strike. I wished I could call Brody and ask him for advice.

The waitress put down a refill of my soda. “Don’t worry, you can stay as long as you want. They won’t kick you outta here until the dinner rush. See those two over there?” She yanked her head to the side to indicate two guys playing cards at another booth. “They spend so much time here the booth is permanently molded in the shape of their asses. If the manager lets their homely bodies stick around, no way he’s going to give a cute girl like you the boot. Why do you look so blue? You have a fight with your boyfriend?”

I thought about what I’d said to Brody and swallowed hard. “He’s not really my boyfriend. It’s not his fault. My whole life is sort of complicated these days. I’m not even upset about him. I mean, I am, but that’s not all.” I sighed. “Ever feel like you’ve screwed up everything and you’re not sure what will make it better or what will make it worse?”

She nodded wisely. I suspected she saw more problems than a full-time therapist. She held up a finger and came back with a piece of pie.

“I didn’t order—”

“It’s on me, my favorite—strawberry. There are few things pie don’t make better.” She winked.

“I don’t know if pie can help me,” I said.

“Well, it won’t make it worse.” She placed the check facedown on the table next to the plate and left me alone. I closed my eyes and pictured Lisa walking around the museum. I sat straight up, banging my knees on the underside of the table. I whipped out my phone. She’d said her husband’s name was William. I scrolled through the list of people with her married name in the phone book. There was only one William. I chewed on my lower lip. It wouldn’t hurt to look. I checked Google Maps. Her house wasn’t that far away. She might be home from work soon. The museum closed at four thirty. My heart started beating faster. Going to the museum had been a mistake. I realized this now. It wasn’t fair for me to expect her to recognize me, and even if she had, what did I think she could do about it in the middle of her workday?

I parked three or four houses away from hers and hunched down in my seat far enough to look casual, but not so far down I’d look like some weirdo. The neighborhood was full of well-kept older houses. You could tell it was made up mostly of families. There were a lot of minivans with their “my kid is on the honor roll” bumper stickers, and swing sets in the yards. Her house had a half-melted snowman on the front lawn. There hadn’t been enough snow to make a proper one, so he looked almost more mud and grass than snow, but someone hadn’t been able to wait. This was stupid. I had no idea what she might get up to after work. There was no reason to assume she
would come straight home, and even if she did, I wasn’t sure what I would say. It was then that she pulled into the drive, the garage door opening before her like magic.

I gave her a few moments to get settled and then walked up to the front door. She had her Christmas lights strung around the windows. I wondered if she was the kind of person who got all excited about the holidays, or if these were still up from the year before. I rang the bell. Inside I could hear the bark of a dog and a voice telling someone to turn the TV down.

Lisa flung open the door and looked at me. I could tell she was trying to process what I was doing there. “Aren’t you the volunteer from the school visit today?”

I nodded.

“What are you doing here?” She looked past me to see if I was alone. Maybe she expected a school bus full of kids wanting to know more about dinosaurs to be parked in the driveway.

“I’m Avery,” I said.

She scrunched up her face in confusion for a moment. Then it clicked into place for her. She understood. She took a step back as if she thought I might lunge at her. Or maybe she was simply shocked that I didn’t have the cone head from my baby picture.

“I wanted to find you—” I got out before she grabbed my hand.

“We can’t talk here.” She pulled me behind her into the yard and then into the open garage. She kept glancing around
as if snipers might be sneaking up on us, or more likely that the neighbors might have noticed. “What do you want?”

“I wanted to meet you,” I said.

“So you just show up at my house?” She pinched the bridge of her nose. “My kids are inside.”

“I didn’t plan this very well,” I admitted. “There’s been so much going on lately, I thought meeting you would help me . . . I don’t know, sort it out. Make sense of things.”

“How did you find me?”

“I guess I channeled my inner Nancy Drew.” I gave a nervous laugh, but she didn’t join me. So much for impressing her right off the bat. “I had some information about you from the adoption. That led me to your old high school.” I decided not to mention lying to get her current information from the school; we already weren’t off to a great start. “Plus, there’s a lot of stuff online these days.” I shrugged. “It wasn’t that hard.”

She barked out a laugh. “Here I tell the kids to watch what they put on the Internet. Guess I should take my own advice.”

My guts felt hollowed out. I hadn’t expected her to weep and fling her arms around me, but I didn’t think it would go like this. “I thought maybe you kept your profile open because you were hoping that I was looking for you.”

“Hang on.” She went over to a metal shelving unit against the wall and pushed aside some bulk containers of granola bars and juice boxes, then pulled out a crumpled pack of cigarettes. “I quit a few years ago, but I keep some around for emergencies.
I’m thinking this counts.” She flicked the lighter and took a deep drag, then blew the smoke up into the rafters. “You don’t smoke, do you?”

“No.”

“Good. Bad habit.” She took another deep drag. “I know I’m probably doing this all wrong. I thought if I ever heard from you it would be a letter or something. I didn’t really imagine you showing up here. You’re not in trouble, are you? Things with your family are okay?”

I crossed my arms over my chest. “Things with them are fine. It’s nothing like that.”

She looked relieved. “You’re seventeen now. A year older than me when I had you. Can you imagine that? Having a baby?”

I shook my head.

“When I realized I was pregnant, it seemed like my entire world was crashing in. My parents were crushed. Every time my mom looked at me, she’d start crying. I could tell my dad was sick about the whole thing. Mentally, I was still his little girl. The idea that I was having sex freaked him out. I thought I was so old, mature. Now that I have my kids, I realize just how young I really was.”