wanted to ask for a long time. I just didn’t know how you’d react,” Raven admitted.
Lorraine rose from her perch on the top of the stepladder she’d been sitting on. Raven, who was seated on the hardwood floor, looked up at last as her mother came to rest beside her.
“After all these years…I just thought that you would never ask. I guess I just hoped you wouldn’t.”
Lorraine’s voice was strained, as was her facial expression. Raven looked at her mother, noticing the fine lines that had creased themselves into the corners of her eyes and around her mouth. At fifty-nine, Lorraine had aged well. Like her husband, she was healthy and in very good shape. In fact, it was only during moments of stress that she looked a day over forty-five. Raven hated being the cause of any strain or anxiety, but she could not help her desire to know about her past.
“I’m sorry, Mom. Lately, I’ve just been filled with so many questions. I feel like…like I’m missing something…like I’m incomplete. I just want to get some answers, so that I can move on with my life.”
Lorraine sighed heavily. She reached out and picked up Raven’s hand, holding it in both of hers.
“You have beautiful hands,” she said. “Graceful, dainty hands. When you were a very little girl, you always wanted me to paint your fingernails. You’d come into my bedroom, stick both of your fat little hands in my face, wiggling those chubby fingers and say, ‘May I have some colors, Mama?’ And you would sit there, still as a statue while I painted your nails. Then you would blow on them until your puffy little cheeks ached.”
Raven held her breath now, waiting, anticipating what she was about to hear. She didn’t say anything, understanding that her mother needed to tell things in her own way and at her own pace.
“I don’t want to see you get hurt, Raven.”
“Mom, I’m a big girl. You don’t have to worry about me,” Raven said.
“I know you’re a big girl now. Shoot, I’ve been watching you grow for the past twenty years,” Lorraine said, sighing again.
“By the time you came into our lives, I’d begun to think that I’d never get to be somebody’s Mama. I was quickly approaching forty and we had been trying for so long…”
Lorraine patted Raven’s thigh.
“All right, I’ll tell you everything I know,” she said at last. “It’s not much…but I guess you have a right to know.”
Lorraine paused again. She had been backed into a corner, blindsided by a day that she should have known would come eventually. She and Allen had talked about this early on, when Raven was younger. As the years went by, they convinced themselves that she was satisfied with the little bit they had told her as a child. She was their child, plain and simple, and nothing before that mattered. They’d believed that and up until this moment, Lorraine had had no reason to think that would ever change.
“Your father and I didn’t come to the decision to adopt very easily. I mean, we both loved children, and when it didn’t happen for us, well…let’s just say that adoption is a scary undertaking.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, in life, there are no guarantees. You can be blessed with children or not. You can lose your children in a heartbeat to illness, accidents…crazy people. But with adoption, there’s an even greater risk. The big B—birth parents. We were afraid that we’d grow to love our child and then poof, one day…”
“Mom, I’m not going anywhere. You and Daddy are everything to me…No one could ever get in the way of that. I just—” Raven sighed.
There was an uncomfortable silence that hung in the air like a cloud waiting to burst. She hated causing her mother any uneasiness, but at the same time she needed to do something to quiet her own anxiety.
“Your mother’s name is Monica Calloway. You lived with her somewhere in the Bronx until you were two years old. Along with a few sheets from the adoption center and your birth certificate, that’s all the information on your mother that we have. She terminated her rights, and we never had any contact with her.”
“And that’s all you know?”
“That’s it, Raven. I never needed to know anything more. You were a healthy, happy little baby, and from the moment your father and I met you, you were ours. That’s it,” Lorraine said, her voice trembling beneath her words.
“Thank you, Mom. Thanks,” Raven said.
She squeezed her mother’s hands.
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