cry, don’t cry, a voice inside me chanted. Within moments, I managed to swallow back whatever emotions threatened. But it was too late.
Shelley Longford had seen it all. And I knew exactly where she was going to go with it.
As it turned out, I only had to endure another ten minutes of therapy. Ten minutes of avoiding the truth Shelley tried to gently guide me to, but which I strictly avoided at all costs. I even hated the words: fear of rejection. Her next maneuver was to try and—gently but persistently—tie it all back to my mother. Not my mother, really. My mother was a perfectly nice, perfectly respectable music teacher, now retired and living with my perfectly respectable father in New Mexico. What Shelley wanted to talk about was the woman who gave birth to me. Kristina Morova, who, as I learned three years ago after months of digging through public records, resided a train ride away from me in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. And refused to acknowledge my existence. The only response I had gotten to the certified letter I had finally gotten up the courage to send to her seven months ago was the return receipt with her signature on it. A hastily scrawled “K. Morova” that I had run my fingers over at least a dozen times since I had found it in my mailbox. No note inviting me to meet her at some mutually acceptable location, so that I might get answers to all those questions that had plagued me for most of my life and, for some reason, even more so after I turned thirty. No tearful phone call to express her joy at the possibility of meeting the child she’d given up, for reasons as yet unknown to me, at the age of seventeen.
Nothing.
I had been told ahead of time by the search agency that this was one possible outcome. In fact, this was the reasoning behind sending a certified letter in the first place, so that I could be assured that the letter had been received and that I would, at least, be saved from any emotional trauma caused by a random postal error. Yes, now I knew that whatever emotional trauma I was allegedly dealing with, according to Shelley, had to do with the simple fact that my mother knew I was alive but didn’t want to know me.
I had accepted this realization with the same type of angry calm with which I had tossed Ethan out of my apartment a week earlier. Fuck him, I had thought as I watched him angrily pull on his clothes and make tracks out my front door.
Fuck her, I had thought after enduring the two weeks of complete silence that followed the sending of my letter. Yes, I had been disappointed, but even more, I had been mad. Mad at her for not caring. So mad, in fact, that I had taken a car service out to her modest two-family house in Sheepshead Bay, only to stand outside filled with a desire to take the pretty little planter at the center of her neatly edged lawn and toss it through her front window.
I didn’t, of course.
Instead, I had gotten back into the car, sinking into comfortable anonymity behind the tinted windows, and had gone to see Barbara, the social worker who assisted me with my search. And after listening to me rail for half an hour over everything from Kristina Morova’s impossibly well-kept flower bed to her frailty as a human being, Barbara had finally managed to convince me to do what she had been trying to get me to do since I had taken up my search. Seek counseling.
Not that the sixteen weeks I had been seeing Ms. Shelley Longford, C.S.W., with a specialization in psychotherapy, had made a bit of difference.
Even now as I carefully let myself out of her office after assuring her that yes, I would be there the following Wednesday at six-thirty, I wondered why I bothered.
I was fine really. I had all the information I really needed to know about Kristina Morova. That she was one of two daughters. That there was no real history of disease in her family, other than a few diabetics and some spotty cancer.
I mean, strictly speaking, I really didn’t need to know anything else, right?
“How are you really, Grace?” Angie said as we sat over drinks the following evening at Bar Six, a little bistro in the West Village.
“I’m fine,” I assured her for the third time since we’d sat down, martinis before us. I didn’t want to get into an analysis of the demise of my recent relationship, knowing full well that Ethan had likely not even given it a second thought himself. That was the annoying little difference between men and women. When a man exited a relationship, no matter who ended it, it was as if the woman was erased from his mind. Women, on the other hand, could be borderline obsessive, measuring every perceived slight, every phone call or lack thereof, and coming up with a complex analysis of his emotional makeup.
I decided to take the male tack, effectively erasing Ethan from my own mind and turning the conversation to what I hoped would be a more fruitful subject. Angie. “So what’s going on with the show?”
Angie was an actor and had, a year earlier, gotten her first big break when she’d landed a primetime drama on Lifetime, playing Lisa Petrelli, single mom and NYPD cop. Though the show hadn’t garnered huge ratings, Angie had gotten a nice bit of critical notice for what Entertainment Weekly had called her “endearingly anxious” portrayal of a woman struggling to raise two kids and save the world, or at least the New York City precinct that was her beat, from crime. The funny thing was that all of that endearing anxiety came from the fact that Angie herself had never encountered child-rearing first hand and was mostly struggling to keep from being railroaded by the two child actors who played her kids.
“The network is reviewing its programming as we speak. But it’s looking like a second season might be too much to hope for,” she said, fresh anxiety washing over her features. With her large, dark eyes, heart-shaped face and deep brown shoulder-length locks, my friend Angie is almost a dead ringer for Marisa Tomei. Not that I ever would say that to her—she’s heard it often enough over the years. But she made her peace with it once she earned some critical acclaim of her own as Angie DiFranco, obsessive-compulsive-yet-utterly-charming actor. That boost to her career has resulted in a subsequent boost to her self-esteem. I have known Angie since we shared secrets and sorrows at Marine Park, where I lived until my parents decided that Brooklyn was turning me into too much of a bad-ass teen and dragged me off to Long Island at age sixteen. Angie and I stayed friends, spending our summers together on the beach, then once I got my driver’s license, weekends filled with shopping, club-hopping and, when we both managed to have boyfriends at the same time, double-dating. In all the years I have known her, I have never seen Angie look so radiant. It was as if her life were finally coming together, though the nervous frown now marring her pretty features suggested otherwise. Sometimes my friend Angie, who had an acting career on the rise, an amazing boyfriend and a rent-stabilized two bedroom in the East Village, needed to be reminded of just how magnificent her life was.
“Maybe that’s for the best,” I said. “Aren’t you supposed to start working on Justin’s film in the spring?” Her boyfriend was a screenwriter who had received much critical acclaim himself for the feature-length film he’d made as a film student years ago. Now he had a brand-new screenplay and a leading lady, as he’d written a part especially for Angie.
“Yeah, we’re starting in April….” she said, beginning to gnaw at her lower lip at the very thought.
It wasn’t that Angie didn’t believe in her talented boyfriend. It was just that, despite the steadying assurance his love gave her, she was given to panic over anything that she didn’t know the outcome of beforehand. Which was just about everything, I supposed.
“Well, then, there you go,” I said. “Your future’s so bright, you’re gonna have to go out and purchase a pair of Ray•Bans.”
“I guess,” she said, unconvinced. I had known Angie so long, I could practically read her mind. See the little hamsters of anxiety on the wheel of her thoughts, running frantically on those “what ifs” that plagued her. What if I can’t
