‘You knew she slept with your husband?’ Her calm amazed me.
Jeannie nodded. ‘He was always hopeless at hiding his affairs.’
‘But you cared for her after?’ The words ‘after I was born’ stuck in my throat. That empty time, ten days alone, when I was no one’s cherished newborn, threatened to swamp me. I fought back the tears. Jeannie didn’t seem to notice. It occurred to me that those days alone in a nursery had caused me to avoid a stranger’s touch.
‘I did care for her,’ Jeannie said. ‘I met the train from Napier and took her home with me. She helped with my kids and she modelled for my brother who was trying to be a photographer. My husband was under quarantine. Well, they both were really.’ Her laugh was as I remembered it from our first phone conversation.
We sat on a park bench in the heat. The girls chased a flock of seagulls that rose and drifted back down just out of reach. I understood then that I really had escaped from Runanga. That other life was over.
‘She got a job. Air hostess with NAC,’ Jeannie continued. ‘She took the Invercargill shifts. No one else wanted to stay overnight down there. She told me she walked all around the town looking into prams, always looking for you.’
We followed the girls toward the swings.
‘It was a terrible time in her life,’ Jeannie said. ‘In the end, it was a good thing she gave you up. You seem very well adjusted.’
I smiled and reassured her I’d had a happy life.
Jeannie lifted Ruth onto a swing. Bonnie and Rachel grabbed the others, and we stood behind, pushing to get them started.
‘If only she’d survived,’ Jeannie said. ‘She would have loved this. Her granddaughters.’
‘Do you know who my father is?’ The words leapt from my mouth.
Jeannie became evasive. ‘I can’t tell you for sure.’
I did not want to beg. It felt shameful even asking. ‘So, she never mentioned him?’
Jeannie ran her hand through her hair. ‘A little. She was distraught at his rejection, but she played those cards very close. And he was married, of course. But she hinted, and when you told me your daughter’s name …’ She nodded towards Bonnie. ‘I’ll tell you if you promise never to seek out his family.’
I agreed without hesitation, knowing, even then, I would not keep my promise.
‘He was Swedish,’ she said.
I had assumed he would be British, like my mother. It had never occurred to me that I could be half Swedish.
‘His name was Jo Bonnier.’
The name made me shiver. Bonnie with an R. When my eldest daughter was born, there was no doubt her name would be Bonnie. And yet it did not relate to anything or anyone I knew.
‘There’s lots about him in the library.’ Jeannie pushed Ruth higher on the swing. ‘He was a Formula One driver. He died in 1972.’
Found and lost in one sentence. I would have been twelve.
‘How did he die?’ I asked.
‘Racing at Le Mans,’ she said. ‘His car went into the trees and burst into flame.’
Bonnie and Rachel squealed as they lifted their legs, forcing their swings higher, closer to that moment of weightlessness. I tried to follow Jeannie’s words, but all I could think was both my parents burned to death. Eleven years apart. He was forty-two when he died. My mother and her mother were forty-two when they died. I looked up into the canopy of plane trees and considered the possibility that I had sixteen years left.
‘They called him the gentleman racer,’ Jeannie continued. ‘He was very handsome. I’ll send you a photocopy I took from a library book. He’s on a podium with a wreath of leaves around his neck. There were two sons. One of them is the same age as you.’
We pushed the swings in silence. I should have asked her more questions, but all I felt was a void where emotion should be.
The girls were hungry and Jeannie had to leave. She kissed them goodbye and hugged me. ‘Remember,’ she said. ‘You promised. It would be too hard for those boys to have you turn up, out of the blue.’
As we walked home, the girls argued about who flew highest into the sky. I wondered if Jeannie had any idea how hurtful her comments were. Everyone was entitled to their heritage, except the ‘well-adjusted’ adopted person.
I did not feel well adjusted. It was a lot to take in. Swedish. Racing driver, dead before I had a chance to know him. Legitimate sons.
A few weeks before I’d seen the movie Blade Runner. Daryl Hannah plays the replicant Pris with a cold fragility. When she said the words, ‘I’m sort of an orphan,’ I was struck by their stark reality. Then Rick Deckard, whose job it is to exterminate replicants, administers the Voight-Kampff test on Rachael, played by Sean Young. When Rachael leaves the room, Tyrell, her maker, admits she does not know she’s an android. He has implanted her with false memories. ‘We gift them the past,’ he says. ‘Right down to a snapshot of a mother she never had, a daughter she never was.’
I put my hand to my chest to still the pain radiating from beneath my ribs. After, in the foyer, I listened to filmgoers enthralled by the special effects, by Harrison Ford’s body and the futuristic sets. But all I could think of was Rachael’s shock as she learns all her memories are not hers. She was staring into the abyss of her emptiness, so crushed by the realisation, she couldn’t even speak.
Tyrell created Rachael to serve a need. Just as adopted people are often acquired to resolve infertility. Rachael was so like her creators; she thought she was one of them. In science fiction, this sense of being virtually identical to a human is called the uncanny valley. Someone or something real but not entirely authentic. And that’s me. That feeling
