Chapter Thirty-Six #2
As February rolled into March that year, Kit did not bring up her period again.
Or much of anything else to Sally. In fact, the stubborn snow stayed on the ground despite the first shoots of spring emerging through the ground, and the winter felt like it would never end.
To Sally, the frost was like Kit’s newfound silence toward her.
Meanwhile, Sally fell deeper and deeper into a spiral of research about adopted children, their unexpected health issues and birth mothers reappearing in their lives.
Her Google search history was a battlefield of her imagined worst-case scenarios: Does a hereditary condition give an adopted minor rights to connect with her birth mother without adult consent?
Can an adopted minor choose to leave her adoptive parents?
“What are you up to in here, hon?” Terry said as he put a coffee on the coaster beside her computer monitor. She had already heard his scuffling footsteps in the kitchen. She knew her husband’s tone. This was a greeting, and he wasn’t expecting a response.
“Does Kit seem a little, I don’t know, off to you lately?”
“What do you mean, hon?”
At some point, and Sally couldn’t remember exactly when, Terry had taken to calling her “hon.” She hated it.
“I just worry she’s not developing fully, physically, I mean.”
Terry shifted his weight uncomfortably. Sally knew her husband well enough by now to see she’d launched him outside the protective sphere of his comfort zone.
“Aww, Sal, she seems to be doing all right to me. She’s taller than I thought she’d be.”
He was always so literal. She fought the urge to sigh heavily. Instead she ignored his response and continued.
“I’m talking about her development as a young woman. She mentioned to me that some of the girls in her class, actually, she said all of them were starting to menstruate. And…”
“Whoa, Sal…” Terry said, standing back as though Sally had punched him.
Sally stared at her husband and blinked.
“Anyway, I am worried that she hasn’t started to menstruate. And if she’s developing at the rate she should be. Do her breasts seem a normal size to you?”
“Sal, I’m very uncomfortable right now. This seems like your territory to me.
I’m the build-the-treehouse guy. The take-her-to-soccer-practice guy, put-some-burgers-on-the-grill guy.
I’m not the talk-about-all-the-girl-stuff dad.
You know this.” He laughed, but she could see a shine of sweat form on his forehead.
Sally had always taken Kit to soccer practice, in fact she wondered whether Terry even knew that Kit was no longer on the soccer team, and now trying out for the basketball team instead.
“Terry, this isn’t an optional activity.
You’re her father. I’m her mother. We are both here , no matter the topic.
If we had a son, and I thought he was masturbating too often, yes, I would feel uncomfortable to talk about it but I would still talk about it.
I wouldn’t just say ‘Oh no, honey, I’m in the pot-roast department, you have to take this on’!
” Her voice rose higher and higher, after the words she hadn’t planned tumbled out of her mouth.
“We have a young woman who is developing in our house. She is going to have her period soon, she is going to grow breasts. At some point, she will start having intercourse….”
“All right,” he shouted suddenly. “That’s enough for one day. I don’t know what’s got into you today.”
Sally’s face flushed to a shade that felt close to crimson red. She was furious as she stared at her husband. Had he become shorter when she wasn’t looking?
Sally took a deep breath and closed her eyes. She half suspected him to have left, taking the first opportunity to run away, but he stood there, a pained expression on his face.
“Terry. I worry about her. We don’t have the luxury of knowing her family medical history. We are totally in the dark. We don’t know if she has some genetic susceptibility to something. We don’t know if things run in the family, we don’t know anything.”
“We know enough. We know the mother was young. We know she was healthy. Kit came to us healthy. We go to our annual doctor visits. She runs, she sleeps, she eats. I don’t know what’s got into your head about this not developing properly thing, but she is developing, Sal.
We just don’t see it all the time because she’s right in front of us.
One day we’re going to blink and she’s going to be a full-grown adult.
I think you might be blowing this out of proportion a bit. ”
Sally stopped listening as her mind started to walk through the conversation she planned to have with the adoption agency. Three weeks had passed since she had emailed them.
···
A week later, Sally didn’t know yet that Kit’s period had arrived, in just the same fashion she had heard the other girls describe it.
An inconvenient moment between classes when she went to the bathroom and had to whisper in Sabrina’s ear in the hallway to ask for a sanitary towel.
That same day, Sally was sitting in the waiting room of the True Hearts Adoption Agency, after receiving a response to her email.
She had prepared her questions, doctor’s notes, and her need to know more.
She felt confident that she might be able to get more information from them.
It was just an office in a building, a high-rise in Center City, nestled among accountants, finance brokers, and recruitment agents.
Finally, she heard her name called out and a woman in her fifties, perhaps, stood in front of her.
Her ash-blond hair was swept back into a loose bun that sat at the back of her neck.
Sally noticed a smudge of brown eyeliner gathered under her eye and a fleck of coffee stain on her blouse.
Helena Driscoll had worked on Kit’s case twelve years ago, she told Sally on the phone, and she remembered it clearly.
She had met Terry but not Sally at the time of Kit’s adoption.
The case worker who had visited them in Gravers Lane was retired now.
Helena offered Sally a seat and placed a tray with stacked water tumblers on the small coffee table.
Yes, Kit’s adoption was still closed with no status change. Helena explained that Sally’s health concerns were absolutely understandable and wanted to offer some reassurance of the state of health of Kit’s biological mother, at least at the time of adoption.
Sally wanted more.
“I want to put your mind at ease, Mrs. Herzog, I can absolutely understand you want all the knowledge you can get in order to prepare yourself for Kit and the life she has ahead of her. Sounds like you’re a wonderful parent.”
“Well, we do our best. Do you have children?”
“I do, yes.”
The silence spread between them again. Sally wanted her to speak up, to tell her everything she knew about Kit. Everything she could remember. But she had to press gently.
“I’m sure you already know the basic information. The age of the mother, the ethnicity,” Helena said.
“Perhaps you can give me everything you can again, something might feel helpful, I guess.”
···
When Sally got home that afternoon, she was surprised to find Kit had skipped her after-school club and sat under a blanket in front of the TV.
“Hey, what are you doing here, kiddo? I thought you had an extra study period on Wednesdays.”
Kit shrugged and muted the TV.
“Is Dad here?” she asked.
“I think he’s out salting the stairs for tomorrow’s snow.”
“I got my period today,” she said quickly and bit her lip.
“Oh wow, honey.” Sally felt an enormous sigh escape her as she spoke, “Big day for you.”
“Yeah, it was like, right between my math class and phys ed. I got a pass from the nurse. Because I didn’t have anything, you know, to take care of it.”
“I have a bunch of things I prepared for you. Just in case it arrived.”
“You do?” Kit’s eyes widened.
“Sure, just in case. Let me go and get them while Dad’s out. He’ll be awhile,” Sally said and smiled with relief as she took the staircase two steps a time.
Helena Driscoll had told her nothing new earlier that day.
She knew that Kit’s father had likely been American.
She knew that her mother had willingly given Kit up, she knew that the ethnicity was likely to be East Asian, but when Sally had pressed her about specific parts of Asia, she detected a momentary doubt in Mrs. Driscoll’s tone.
Maybe it wasn’t completely certain that the mother had been Korean or Japanese.
She had learned that Kit had been a very small baby, smaller than they had expected.
She didn’t know what the mother’s legal status was, nor whether she was even legally allowed to put her child up for adoption if she was struggling with her immigration status.
Helena Driscoll wouldn’t answer any of those questions.
Sally would look that up later. She told herself it would be another question she’d fire into Google later. But she never did.