Finding Georgina Read online

  I hear the back door open. I never heard Remy’s scooter. He walks into the kitchen from the laundry room and I hurl myself at him. He catches me in his arms and holds me tightly. I can’t breathe. But the only place it seems like I can ever breathe is in his arms.

  “How you doing?” he asks me, his voice muffled by my shoulder. He’s holding on to me as tightly as I’m holding on to him. Losing a child is such an awful way to bring two people closer. But it pulls you apart, too. Sometimes I think we divorced because we could manage to deal with our own pain, but not each other’s.

  I nod, not trusting my voice yet.

  He gives me another moment. Another squeeze. Then he kisses the top of my head and lets go of me. I step back, wiping my nose with the back of my hand. When I look up at him, at my handsome, kind rock of an ex-husband, I see that his eyes are teary. I immediately tear up.

  “Yeah?” he asks me, his gaze searching mine.

  I nod again. Sniff. Turn away, reaching for a paper towel to blow my nose. “Ann’s been keeping me company.”

  He walks over and kisses Ann’s cheek. The two of them have had this weird, platonic love affair going on for years. Since Ann and I met, both of us with big bellies. They’re the best of buddies. She always says she would have married Remy instead of George if she’d met him first. The funny thing is that her George always says thank goodness he found her first.

  “Coffee?” Ann asks Remy, running her hand down his arm.

  “Please.” He walks over to the sink, takes one look at the dirty dishes piled there, and opens the dishwasher.

  I watch him begin to unload the clean dishes.

  “Did the police think the DNA testing would take place today?” he asks me, sounding very matter-of-fact. At least to someone who doesn’t know him. I know he’s as scared and excited as I am; he just doesn’t wear his heart on his sleeve like I do.

  “They’re going to try. She . . . Georgina was taken to a foster home.”

  “Twenty-four to seventy-two hours for results.” Ann pushes the button on the coffee machine and waits for his cup to fill. “You’re not going to hear anything over the weekend.”

  “I knew they wouldn’t just bring her here.” He’s stacking bowls in the glass-front antique cupboard.

  I get the idea he thinks I thought that was what was going to happen. That the police would just pick up Georgina, on our say-so, and bring her home. I never said that. I never thought it. I wished it, of course. I hold my tongue. Both of us are too brittle right now for me to be picking a fight with him over something like this. At a time like this.

  I watch Remy put away the clean dishes. I feel better with him here in my kitchen. His kitchen, technically. He grew up in this house on the edge of Audubon Park, and his father before him. These are his cupboards, his hand-painted floor tiles. When we made the decision to divorce three years ago, he was the one who insisted Jojo and I stay here. We see him almost as much as we did when he lived here. He has an apartment eight blocks away. He rides his scooter to work at Tulane University, which is nearby. People think our relationship is odd, Remy’s and mine, but it’s been a long time since I cared about what people think about me. That happens when your two-year-old is kidnapped from her stroller while your husband has walked to a friend’s house to use the bathroom and you’re watching the Krewe of Rex floats go by.

  “You going to work?” Remy asks me.

  I study him for a moment, seeing him the way others see him. He’s tall, six two. Slender, but not lanky. He wears his dark, silky hair that’s just beginning to gray at the temples in a kind of man-bob that falls to earlobe length. And he has a short-cropped beard that I’ve always loved, even in the days before it was in. Today he’s wearing army-green cargo pants and a short-sleeved white polo with the university’s crest embroidered on the breast pocket. Boat shoes. He rarely wears a suit, and then reluctantly. This casual look works well for him. Looks good on him.

  “I told her to go.” Ann sets his coffee on the counter next to the sink.

  “You should, baby.” He looks at me with that steady, dark-eyed gaze that’s my heaven. And sometimes my hell.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know if I can focus enough to diagnose an obstruction in a Chihuahua right now.” I reach for my coffee mug and then pull back my hand. “I keep thinking about her, Remy. How scared she must be. Alone.”

  “The police have social workers to deal with these kinds of situations.” With the clean dishes all put away, he starts rinsing dirty dishes and loading them in the dishwasher. “I’m sure she’s not alone.”

  5

  Lilla

  “I want to be alone,” I say from between my gritted teeth.

  I cross my arms, turning my back to her so she doesn’t see that I’m shaking. I know it’s childish, but I can’t help it. A tear rolls down my cheek but I don’t wipe it away. I’ve cried more in the last three hours than I think I have my whole life. Mom says I was never a crier, not even when I was a baby. She said I did a lot of staring her down. Was that because she wasn’t really my mom? I feel as if I’m going to throw up for a second, but I fight it.

  It can’t be true. It can’t be true.

  Even if Mom said she kidnapped me from some lady, I know it can’t be true. Can it?

  “Lie-la,” the woman standing at the bedroom door says.

  “It’s Lilla. No long i. It’s like Lilly, only with an a instead of a y. It’s Hebrew and means oath of God. Lilla,” I repeat as if to remind myself that’s who I really am. That this is all a mistake. Because I can’t be this Georgina the police are talking about. Who would name a baby Georgina? That sounds like somebody’s toothless grandma.

  “Lilla.” She says my name again, only this time correctly. She’s like the housemother or foster mother or whatever of this place. A social worker brought me after the police took me away in a police car. After they told my mother she was under arrest. She wouldn’t look at me. Not even when I asked her to. Begged her. Another tear runs down my cheek. Why wouldn’t my mom look at me?

  “I know you’re scared,” the woman goes on.

  Someone said her name was Gina. The woman from Child Protective Services who “escorted” me here from the police station, maybe? Everything’s a little bit of a blur.

  “And this has got to be very confusing—”

  “I want to be alone,” I interrupt. I’m not usually rude to people, but manners aren’t high on my priority list right now. I’m kind of having a moment. The type that resembles a shattering universe. “Can I be alone or am I on some kind of suicide watch or something?” It comes out pretty snarky. I can be snarky with people. Well, not so much with people as with Mom. Sometimes. When she irritates me. Especially when she’s right about something and I’m wrong.

  “Do you have thoughts of suicide?” Gina asks me.

  I exhale loudly. “No, Gina, I don’t have thoughts of suicide.” I want to add but I might if you don’t leave me the hell alone, but I don’t say it. Mom wouldn’t like that, either. This isn’t Gina’s fault. I know that. It’s Mom’s fault. For telling the police she kidnapped me. It’s a lie, of course. Mom didn’t kidnap me. There’s no way I’m not her daughter. It’s not possible. We’re so much alike, two peas in a pod, compadres. We both like . . . English muffin bread and M. Night Shyamalan movies. And . . . and we look alike.

  Now I feel light-headed. Because the thing is . . . we don’t really look alike. A shard of a memory comes suddenly to me. I’m little, like third or fourth grade, and I’m looking in a mirror at Mom and me and I tell her I don’t look like her. I ask her if I’m adopted, mostly because I had a friend in school who was adopted and I thought that was cool. Mom got the weirdest look on her face and she kind of snapped at me, “No, you’re not adopted!” Then she walked away. Later she made up for her mean tone by taking me to the bookstore to get a book I’d been wanting. I still have the book. Hatchet by Gary Paulsen. I could find it right now on one of my bookshelves in
my bedroom. If I was home. If I was in my bedroom.

  What if I never see my bedroom again? What will happen to my stuff? What will happen to me?

  I take a deep breath. Oxygen to the brain. That’s what I need. “I’m sorry,” I say softly to Gina. I walk over to the window and pull back the curtain, thinking that if I can see the sky, if I can just see that I’m still on earth, that I’m alive and awake, I can . . . I can wrap my head around what’s happening here.

  When I pull back the pink curtain, and I hate the color pink, the first thing I see is bars on the window. Well . . . a black wrought-iron grate covering it. I spin around. “Am I in jail?” I demand. “Is this some kind of . . . jail foster home or something?”

  Gina smiles, but it’s a patronizing smile. She’s average height, brown hair, not skinny, not fat. She’s not someone you would remember after you met her. “You’re not in jail, sweetie. They’re there for your protection.”

  “Bars on the windows are going to protect me from killing myself?” I ask, arching my eyebrows dramatically. The rude tone is back.

  Again, a smile. Patience of Job, that’s what my mom would say. Job’s this guy in the Old Testament. He somehow got in the middle of a pissing contest between God and Satan. All kinds of horrible things happened to Job: He lost his money, his family died, he got some kind of gross disease. But he just put up with it because he loved God and whatever.

  “We had a break-in last year,” Gina tells me. “Someone stole our TV, my laptop, and some jewelry. My sister was afraid after that. And she worried about the safety of girls who stay with us.”

  Gina and her sister live here. They’re the foster parents or whatever they’re called. It’s not a woman and her husband, which kind of makes good sense. I mean, if you’re going to have teenage girls you don’t know staying in your house, not having some potentially creepy man around is actually smart. I don’t say that, of course. I’m not really in a complimenting mood.

  I turn my back to her to look out the barred window again. I can see the sky, even through the bars. It’s a pretty day out: blue sky, fluffy white clouds. It looks like such an ordinary, nice, sunny day. But how can that be? Shouldn’t the sky be falling? Or at least a little rain?

  I don’t say anything. Gina doesn’t say anything. We both just stand there for what seems like eons; then I hear her start to back out of the room. “How about if I just leave you here to get settled?” she says. “I’ll be in the kitchen if you need anything. There’s a care package for you there on your bed: toothbrush and paste, hairbrush, stuff you might—”

  “I missed my statistics quiz,” I say, talking over her.

  “I’m sorry?”

  I turn to look at her. “School. I’m supposed to be in school right now.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to go to school today.” She says it like she just handed me some sort of door prize.

  “But . . . I want to go to school. I like school.” I say it deliberately, as if she’s a slow learner or whatever you’re supposed to call people with below-average IQs these days. It seems like the politically correct words are always changing.

  Gina presses her lips together, shaking her head. “I’m sorry, sweetie. You can’t go to school. Not until this is straightened out.”

  I turn my back to her again. This meaning my life. I close my eyes, choking on my tears.

  How could you do this, Mom? How could you do this to me?

  6

  Harper

  “I can’t miss school tomorrow,” Jojo announces from the doorway of the parlor where Remy and I are sitting.

  Remy came over after work and made dinner while I was still at work. He ate with us when I got home and helped clean up. We came into the parlor to have a glass of wine and talk. We even lit the old limestone fireplace. It’s gas now, but when Remy was little, it was wood burning. He has fond memories of sitting in this parlor, playing chess with his grandmother and listening to his father and grandfather argue politics.

  “You have to stay home tomorrow.” I reach for my wineglass. “Your sister is coming home.” The words sound dreamlike because I know this can’t really be happening. After all these years, all the prayers, all the tears, Georgina really is coming home.

  Jojo plants one hand on her hip in one of her preeminent “obstinate teenager” poses. She’s wearing pink plaid booty shorts, which she is absolutely not allowed to wear outside the house and if I catch her in them again, they’re going in the trash can. And an Ursuline Academy basketball sweatshirt that’s two sizes too big. It’s an interesting juxtaposition, the tiny skin-baring shorts and the enormous gray sweatshirt that seems to be wearing her more than she’s wearing it.

  “You said you didn’t know what time the social worker was bringing her over,” Jojo whines. “You said it could be anytime tomorrow. I have to go to school. I can’t miss English again. I have no idea what’s going on in Fahrenheit 451. It’s the stupidest book I’ve ever read. Tried to read,” she adds.

  I take a sip of my pinot noir, delaying my response. It’s a technique I’m working on, on Remy’s advice. He tells me that nothing bad can happen if I wait a beat or two before responding to Jojo, but all kinds of bad things can happen if I speak before I think.

  I don’t know what the wine is; I didn’t even look at the label when Remy showed it to me before opening the bottle to let it breathe before he poured. He’s a bit of a wine connoisseur. He has a small wine cellar downstairs. I don’t know a thing about wine and I don’t have a palate for it, not really. I just know what tastes good to me and what doesn’t and it rarely has anything to do with the price sticker. I think he said this bottle was from Argentina. Or maybe Chile. I’m not always a good listener when Remy is talking wine.

  “Fahrenheit 451 is a great book.” Remy’s input to the conversation. He’s also delaying responding to the subject at hand. “I love that book. It cautions us as individuals and a nation against suppressing dissenting ideas. That’s why they burn all the books in the story. So no one can express an opinion beyond the ruling opinion.”

  We get an eye roll from our beautiful daughter.

  I squint. I wear contacts, but by the end of the day, my distance vision isn’t great. Of course my up-close vision isn’t, either. I’ve been known to put on a pair of readers while wearing another pair around my neck and a third on my head. “Are you wearing eyeliner, Josephine?”

  She makes a face and takes a step back. “No.” She says it as if I’ve mortally wounded her, making such a foul accusation. I know she wears it to school sometimes, but usually she’s smart enough to take it off before arriving home. Georgina’s return has us all off our game.

  Jojo crosses her arms over her chest. “I’m going to school tomorrow. It’s taco day.”

  “You’re not going.” I take another sip of wine. It’s my second glass and I’m finally starting to unwind a little. All day, since I got the call this morning saying that someone from the state would be bringing Georgina home tomorrow, I’ve been wound tighter than one of the springs in the Broussard family heirloom clock on the mantel. I begged the social worker to let me see Georgina today; I even called Remy’s little sister, our attorney, but everyone seemed to think that if I had waited fourteen years, I could wait one more day. They wouldn’t even tell me where they were holding her. As if I’d try to somehow sneak in and see her. Which I probably would have.

  The whole last week has been a blur. It really is a wonder I’m not on that psychiatric ward. Tuesday the maternity test came back positive. I was angry they didn’t bring her home immediately. A judge had to approve Georgina’s release to us. The same woman who took Georgina from her stroller, apparently had her right here in New Orleans all this time. How did I never see her? How could my baby have been right here all this time and I didn’t know it? I can’t even begin to process that information.

  I’m relieved, of course; a woman kidnapped her, not a man. The social worker said there seemed to be no evidence of sexual abus
e or any abuse, based on interviews with the woman and Georgina. She said Georgina was well cared for. I hope it’s true. I pray it is, but right now I can’t begin to think about that woman who stole my baby. I just can’t.

  I shift my gaze to Remy, who’s sitting on the leather couch beside me. The old piece of furniture should have been replaced years ago, but neither Remy nor I could bear to send it to the dump. Or even have it reupholstered. It belonged to Remy’s father and his father before him and sat in their Carondelet Street law offices Remy’s whole childhood. The leather is creased and faded but it still smells so good. Some of my best memories of Georgina are of us sitting on this couch. I have an adorable photo in the hall upstairs of one-year-old Georgina on this couch.

  I stare into my wineglass. “Tell her she’s staying home,” I say to Remy.

  “Dad, tell her I’m not.”

  Remy gets up, raising his hands, palms out, as if he’s being held up at gunpoint. Which he is, in a way. “Ladies, I’m not doing this. You know I don’t do this. I’m neither judge nor referee with you two.” He turns his attention to our daughter. “Don’t you want to be here when Georgina arrives?”

  “Why?” she deadpans. “Isn’t she staying?”

  Jojo’s tone plucks a nerve in me and I start to come off the couch, but Remy catches my eye—a warning—and I ease back down. I take another sip of wine. He’s so good with Jojo. So much better than I am. I’m too controlling, too . . . too wrapped up in every aspect of her life.

  Remy tells me all the time that I need to take a step back and a deep breath. He says we’ve raised an amazing girl who will become an amazing woman, if we’ll just give her the chance. But I worry so much about her. I only want what’s best for her, and the world is such a terrible place. No one cares about Jojo like I do. No one wants to protect her the way I do. Not even Remy. It pisses him off when I say that, but I know it’s true. I think it’s true of all women. I carried Jojo in my womb. Her body was an extension of mine, like my leg or my arm, before she was born. And she’ll always be an extension of me. Just as I knew Georgina always would be, even if she never came home.