Later they said I was delirious, repeating a nonsensical sentence: The runway was mine, the runway was mine. I remember waking in the car, amazed at the beauty of the bush dense with green. And the water below sparkling in the sunlight, calling me in.
16
Oh so lucky
In the dream, I am sprawled across a sun-warmed boulder in the middle of a hidden river. The water is languid and deep. Birds swoop low as if checking on me. I slip into the water and drift in the lazy current as my body grows heavy. For a moment there is panic, a breathless struggle, and then a buoyant peace.
I woke to the weight of plaster on one foot, a thick bandage on the other. There were transverse spinal fractures, broken teeth and facial wounds. I felt a rush of exhilaration. I was alive. I wanted to be alive.
Mavis and Max stood beside the bed like two small sentries. They mirrored each other’s body language, except she was pulling at her fingers.
‘We couldn’t find you,’ Mavis said.
‘You changed your name,’ Max added.
I want to remember them well. I want to bright-side myself with an image of Max standing in the water at Waipātiki Beach. He wears loose blue togs and wire-framed sunglasses. His shirtless skin is pale and freckled and he cups his palms and holds them out. I swim over, and he dips his hands and grasps my foot. ‘Keep your leg straight,’ he instructs as he hoists me up and catapults me, weightless, into the air. Or of Mavis under a canvas shade rigged from the door of the Vauxhall Victor. She wears white cat-eye sunglasses and a white swimsuit. She is pouring tea from a Thermos and arranging sandwiches. She brushes the sand from the blanket and looks up and smiles. A real smile.
Then comes the rip tide that grabs my ankles, pulling me under, taking me out to sea. I remember a glorious moment, my eyes opened as wide as they would go. The ocean rushing in until I am immersed, unbodied in a viscous realm. And Mavis is beside me, dog-paddling, gasping as she snatches my hair and pulls me back toward the beach. Her face is a mask of fear, while Max stands on the shore, shading his eyes from the sun.
‘Stupid,’ he says when we come up out of the water, ‘so stupid.’ They do not speak as we ride home in the stifling heat with the windows rolled up and the smoke trapped inside.
I grinned at my parents. Happy they were there beside me in the hospital.
‘We’ve called Bruce,’ Mavis said. ‘He can look after the girls for a couple more weeks. We thought they could live with us while you get better.’
Max left to go back to the motel and Mavis sat beside me. It was our first time alone in years. I imagined I could see all the words she wanted to say in the furrow of her brow. Why don’t you grow up? A mother does not leave her children behind. Where did we go wrong? But we said nothing and I slept. They left the next day.
I called Bruce. The girls would stay with him until I got back. ‘You can make up the time later,’ he said.
Hampster visited a couple of times. When they discharged me, he pushed the wheelchair to the entrance and ran around to get the rental car. The harsh bright sun hit my face.
‘You were so lucky,’ Hampster said as he held the door and I angled myself in. I turned away from him, the gloss gone. We drove to Auckland under the covenant of high blue skies, and I thought about luck.
Adopted people hear the L-word a lot. Mavis’s sisters reminded me at every opportunity. I was so lucky to have such great parents. A colleague once told me I was lucky I was not aborted. A teacher said I was lucky someone wanted me. Another mentioned how lucky I was not to end up in an orphanage.
The idea that we are lucky permeates the public discourse on adoption. Lucky implies that adoption saved us from all manner of unknown forces.
In one attempt to discuss adoption, Mavis was clear. ‘Your birth mother’s parents are to blame. You should be grateful we saved you when they did not want you.’
Gratitude is luck’s sidekick. It’s one of the hidden tropes of adoption. You cannot be lucky or chosen and special without being grateful and thankful.
Mirah Riben, who writes about adoption, asks if adoptees owe a higher debt of gratitude than those in natural families. Even for the basics like food, clothing and the care they receive. She details cases of adopted people speaking out and meeting online hostility for expressing their feelings. They’re scolded over and over for not being grateful for their luck.
Riben calls it the ‘duality of adoption’. ‘You might have had a happy childhood. But every adoption begins with a tragedy of loss and separation. Adoption is a traumatic, lifelong and often unrecognised experience.’ She describes how society clings to the preconceived, romanticised notions of adoption. The problem, she says, is when adoptees do not assume their role as grateful orphans.14
Writer Matthew Salesses talks about being in debt to someone’s love. ‘For adoptees, gratitude and luck can be trigger words. Society tells us we are lucky to be adopted. If we do not appear grateful, they tell us to know our place. We are reminded to be thankful for being taken from the mothers who bore us. We are called “angry” as a
