Chapter Twelve
Chapter Twelve
Sally
The hyacinths were starting to turn. This was the time of year when Terry would start to cut them back, but Sally wished he would leave them alone for longer.
The regal flowers seemed to transform overnight, and she always found herself in mourning for their lost beauty.
But she could also see that the aging hyacinths were equally beautiful in their decay, if not more so.
Their ethereal, papery, fine petals became transparent, like a fairy’s wing.
This year she wanted to see the whole garden covered in these elderly blooms, in all their quiet glory. We’re still here , they said.
Sally Herzog thought of her daughter, Kit, at almost every moment.
She had not known this type of obsessive distraction since she was a teenager in the throes of first love.
The irony that it was probably over Rick Buchanan back when she was younger, Kit’s host in Tokyo.
They had all been a little bit in love with him in those days.
The last moment she’d seen Kit was as she passed through security at Philadelphia International Airport to board her flight to Newark, on her way to Tokyo.
Her daughter never looked back.
Sally hoped Kit had been struck by the sudden sadness of parting from her. Any other explanation might break her heart completely.
She had read a few months ago that one of the telltale signs of anxiety was asking “what if.” What if the plane crashes? What if she is kidnapped? What if someone drugs her? What if a car hits her in Tokyo and I never find out? What if she is so happy she never returns?
There was a permanent fear that lived in the back of Sally’s mind and heart that one day Kit would discover her true heritage, seek out her birth mother, find her place in the world, and never return to her.
Or that Kit’s abandonment by her birth mother would cause so much pain that Sally would not be able to soothe her child, to make it better.
Sally also worried that Kit’s growing sense of displacement wasn’t just regular teenage turmoil but permanent damage caused by Sally.
What if it was her anxiety and the parental rules she felt she had to impose on a child that she sometimes couldn’t make sense of?
She looked at the clock; it was 5:32. Terry was away for the week in Delaware.
She poured herself a gin and tonic, more gin than tonic, and then wandered up the stairs, where she could hear the silence of the rooms, the absence of Kit, no tip-tap of Tripper’s feet.
She felt a cavernous hole in her heart left by her beautiful, magnificently stupid vizsla, and by her absent daughter.
How lonely she felt as she walked around the empty rooms of her house.
She looked at the photographs of Kit on the gallery wall she had painstakingly put up six months ago when she was redecorating the reception room.
Kit was five years old in one picture—a family portrait taken out in the Wissahickon Valley Park.
Kit had been difficult that day. Weekends were hard back then.
Kit came home exhausted from stepping in line at school all week and needed to shuck the day off like a dog shaking away river water.
Whenever she had the chance she wanted to rush into the wilderness, freely, but Sally shouted for her to return.
Terry had no patience at the time and only changed gears to become a better father much later.
But all the early years, the toddler’s irrational tantrums, the boundary testing, this all fell to Sally.
I’m just not a small kid kind of dad , he explained at dinner parties.
Instead, his theory was, if it’s difficult, throw money at it, which most of the time she appreciated.
It was easier that way. She could hire a sitter when she needed a break, she could always go for a hair appointment or to the gym.
They enrolled Kit in every extracurricular activity so it didn’t constantly fall to Sally to entertain her.
Since Terry didn’t want to do the heavy lifting, she never had to justify the choices she made when it came to outsourcing.
Terry was tall and slim in the photograph hanging in their reception room. He was thirty-seven years old back then, still bearing a resemblance to the man she first met, a playful gentleness lingering around his smile and eyes.
She had been pretty when they’d met in the mid-1990s.
She was in her twenties, slim, with sun-kissed shoulders, her freckles scattered over her nose.
People would call her “doe-eyed.” The world seemed much larger to Sally back then.
Terry had pursued her with patience, and after they were married, they bought the house on Gravers Lane.
It was while doing yard work, during their second month there, that she met Mrs. Reynolds.
The lady had lived on their street all her life, her children and her grandchildren too.
“This is as close to Eden as you’ll get,” she said.
Terry had beamed with pride, but Sally nodded and smiled at the neighbor, her eyes widening behind her sunglasses.
A chill ran through her. She pressed it down, so deep it rarely bubbled back up.
This was her life now. This was all her life would ever be.
Sally had once had lofty hopes for her future; she had wanted to be a professional volleyball player, she had wanted to work in advertising, she had wanted to move to Europe.
But Terry started up his law practice in Flourtown, just three miles northwest, and once they bought the house, they were bedded in.
Then suddenly, like the hyacinths, she saw herself in the mirror . This is my face now.
When they finally decided they wanted children, the trappings of suburban life in Pennsylvania became less of a burden.
Her thoughts, her will, her emotions, everything was channeled into getting pregnant.
Their friends turned up to parties with rosy flushed faces, gently cradling their flat stomachs, declaring in hushed voices that they were just seven weeks along, that they weren’t going to find out what they were having.
It’s one of life’s last real mysteries, don’t you think?
Elizabeth McKay, married to Terry’s best friend from high school, stood proudly beside Sally at a Fourth of July barbecue.
Her thick middle jutted out to announce that she was pregnant and that everyone could relax, Jim wasn’t shooting blanks.
With every announcement, Sally felt a little smaller, she felt the crooks at the edge of her face sinking down.
Every month, when she felt herself bloating and mood swings descending, there would be a small spark of hope.
The years of trying, countless doctors, and carefully scheduled nights of sex with Terry meant that something between them died.
She read every book, marked calendars, ate pineapples in winter, took folic acid supplements the size of grapes, lay with her legs raised up against the wall while Terry snored beside her.
Sometimes she was exhausted and longed to shower away the semen and sweat that stayed there between her legs, but she waited patiently.
Twenty minutes, the doctor had said. Eventually, they gave up after nine years of trying.
The McKay baby was now a surly eight-year-old boy, and their other friends were on baby two, three, four, even five.
The adoption pamphlets lay on the dining-room table. She left them there until, finally, Terry took them away. The snow had fallen heavily across the gardens that winter. The white blankets over the lawn and driveway muffled the sound of passing cars.
Terry poured himself a coffee as she sat at the breakfast bar reading the Chestnut Hill Reporter . He stood in front of the refrigerator, searching for milk. She saw the carton right there from where she sat. He could never see what was right in front of him.
“I sent the papers in. So let’s see.” He didn’t look at her as he said it.
Her eyes began to fill with tears, but she sat still. “Terry,” she said.
“Let’s see, love. Let’s see.”
Two years and twenty-four days passed, and Kit came into their lives.
She was fourteen months old, and they had to adjust to telling age by months instead of years.
Sally had known moments of fear in her life: when she almost crashed her car in high school during a snowstorm; when she had been in a bar in the city late one night and a man started to follow her down the street; when she had lost her virginity; when her father had been diagnosed with colon cancer and died two years later.
The first day Kit wandered into her house, with an unsteady step padding from room to room, Sally was paralyzed with a terrifying fear she’d never known.
It seeped into the deepest well inside her, tainting the water forever. There was so much to lose now.
Images of what her daughter could be doing on the other side of the world played through Sally’s mind.
She wanted to be the type of mother who was free and trusting.
This had always been her intention, and she knew that by the time Kit reached adolescence, her daughter would want to know more about her biological mother.
Or not. Because Kit always surprised her.
Sally was still teaching herself to avoid expectations.
The gin and tonic she drank while wandering around her empty house had kicked in now, and she barely startled when the shrill phone rang in her pocket. It was her daughter.
“How was the flight, honey?” She wondered if she was slurring her words.
“It was so long, Mom. But it was fine. I slept when it was nighttime in Tokyo like you said to.”
“How are things there? Did Rick and Yuriko meet you at the airport okay?” Her words felt like they were coming out in slow motion.