“She’s beautiful anyway,” most of them agreed, and she was. Angie was lovely, and so was the baby boy that was born to her several years later.
When Justin Jones-Williams was six months old, Angie called Jean and Lyle to say, “We’re going home! Zach’s taking time off! We want to go back to Wellington to see my family and show off Justin! Will you come, too?”
“Us? Go, too?” At seventy-five and seventy-four, Lyle and Jean were still quite healthy and active, but Jean was startled and a little frightened by this invitation. Could they possibly manage such a trip? “Oh,” she said, stalling as she smiled into the phone, “you just want us to come along as babysitters.”
“Of course we do!” Angie’s laugh was so light and happy that it flooded Jean with memories of the first time she’d ever heard it making music with her own son’s laughter. “Please, Jean?”
And so she went along, too, but without Lyle this time.
“I hated New Zealand,” he said at the airport.
“No kidding,” Jean murmured, and kissed him good-bye.
Through the endless flights, from Chicago to San Francisco, from Honolulu to Auckland, and then on down to Wellington, Jean took turns holding Justin, feeding him, playing with him, walking him in the aisles, cuddling him when he slept. And all the while she was filled with a terrible terror: What if Angie longed to remain with her family, what if Zachary decided to look for a medical post in New Zealand, what if the other grandparents wanted their share of the baby, what if she had to go home without them? Once, having those awful thoughts somewhere in the air between Honolulu and Auckland, when she was half-nutty with fatigue, Jean felt hysterical giggles bubble in her throat! And wouldn’t that just confirm Lyle’s worst opinions of New Zealand. She buried her lips in the baby’s neck to hide her trembling mouth.
The house where Angie grew up and where her parents still lived was only a front yard away from the taxi stop where Jean and little Zach had been dropped off at the Botanic Gardens.
Well, of course, Jean thought, when she saw that. It was fate, it was always fate.
Rather than amusing her, however, the thought tired her. After two days on airplanes, Jean felt as if fate was wearing her out.
The Joneses’ home was a two-story cottage built on a precipitous slope. It had a garage at street level but required walking a long flight of stairs down to reach the front door. The woman who answered their knock was the same short, stout, dark-haired woman of Jean’s age who had accompanied Angie to the playground all those years ago. She turned out to be Miriam Jones, Angie’s adoptive mother; her father was Malcolm Jones, a tall, blond, bandy-legged man who was a retired government worker. Jean was weary enough to be nonplussed at the sight of the lines around Miriam’s mouth and the age freckles on Miriam’s hands; it was one of those moments when Jean was caught off guard by the shock of the passing of her own years.
“What a lovely boy,” Miriam and Malcolm said of their grandson. But neither of them took him-or Angie-into their arms to welcome them home. At her first glimpse of her daughter’s mended cheek, Miriam Jones murmured, “Well, I see they didn’t get it all, did they?” And Malcolm looked at his son-in-law and then said to his wife, “Thought she was fine as she was, didn’t we?”
Tears sprang to Jean’s eyes in defense of her son and out of hurt for Angie, but she also felt a rush of joy of which she was mightily ashamed. These were not warm, affectionate parents to whom a daughter might long to return.
Fools, Jean thought, and smiled happily at them.
That evening after Miriam served lamb stew, cooked carrots, and mashed potatoes, she offered coffee to the Americans, along with a meringue and fruit dessert called a pavlova. Jean accepted a glass of sweet sherry, instead, and proceeded nearly to drop off to sleep in a rocking chair, cradling Justin. She could barely hold her jet-lagged eyes open; it was all she could do to pick up snatches of the conversation, and even they seemed only dialogue in a funny kind of surrealistic dream…
“… While I’m here, don’t want to hurt you or Father… find my birth parents…”
“… Can’t imagine why you…”
“… Never knew, did we, Malcolm? Except what the social welfare people said…”
“… What’s the good, really…”
“In the U.S., you’d write to the…”
“Now that we have Justin, I think we ought to know…”
“… Not always good to know…”
“Why? Why not?”
Jean’s eyes flew open at the uncharacteristically sharp sound of her daughter-in-law’s voice. She was disturbed to see that Angie’s face was flushed, making her scar more pinkly visible. Jean tried to shift a bit, to ease her stiffness without waking the baby, but when the rocking chair creaked loudly, drawing the others’ attention, she settled back quietly, if uncomfortably. What was going on here? What had she missed by dozing off? Why was Zachary looking at Angie with such a worried expression?
“Tell me what you remember,” Angie half pleaded, half demanded of her parents. “If you don’t, I shall have to make inquiries that will take such time and trouble, and…”
“All right!” Miriam Jones raised both of her hands in an exasperated gesture of surrender. “But there’s so little we can tell you! The names of your biological parents were kept secret, but I do think the social worker told us you were born in Te Kapura,”
Angie touched her cheek. “Did they tell you about this?”
“No.” The mother looked straightforwardly at her daughter. “Except to say that you had not received any medical care at the time it happened, so it had never even been stitched by a doctor. When we got you, the wound was still raw, but healing.” Jean wondered if she only imagined that Miriam’s glance slid away from her daughter for a moment as she added, “They didn’t tell us anything else about you. And we didn’t ask. We were older than most adoptive parents, and you were hard to place.” Jean flinched inwardly, for Angie’s sake. But then her heart warmed to Miriam when the other woman looked up at her adopted daughter and said with a formal but moving simplicity, “We wanted you so. We have never regretted our decision to take you. We hope you don’t regret it either.”
“Mother.” Angie looked as if she longed to rush to Miriam’s side, but her mother’s reserve kept the daughter pinned to her chair. “Of course I don’t. I’m so grateful.” Angie, who was so easily and openly demonstrative with her American family, cleared her throat and said awkwardly, “I love you both.”
Malcolm shifted his weight on the sofa.
“Well, now you’d best forget all about it,” he advised.
“Yes, it’s done now, isn’t it?” his wife agreed.
But if they thought they would deflect their daughter and son-in-law with a taste of the truth, they misjudged the young couple. Jean thought they should have known better than to underestimate Angle’s and Zach’s tenacity when those two became obsessed about something!
“What town did you say?” Angie asked.
Her mother sighed. “Te Kapura.”
“Do you want to go tomorrow?” Zach asked Angie.
“Yes.” She turned to her mother-in-law. “You, too, Jean?”
“No,” Jean said, feeling they needed time alone. “I’ll stay here and baby-sit with Justin.” Jean smiled at her son. “Maybe I’ll take him to the playground, and he’ll meet his future wife.”
“I think we ought to take him with us,” Zach said.
“Yes, let’s,” his wife said.
Jean saw Miriam and Malcolm exchange glances. They noticed her observing them and for a moment all three grandparents were united in a strange bond that felt to Jean like complicity. Was she voicing a shared fear, Jean wondered, when she said, attempting a light tone: