‘You look like my daughter Bonnie,’ I said.
‘You look like Mummy,’ she replied.
The house was expansive, with a swimming pool and a marbled terrace overhung with grapevines. There was art on the walls and rugs over the tiled floors and shutters to keep out the heat.
We sat on the terrace with a carafe of local wine. In all my imaginings, I had not considered the purple wash of evening light. Or the smell of the wild lavender. And the sound of voices drifting from the valley below, the high notes caught in the sagebrush. We talked about my children and life in New Zealand, circling away from the core of our shared loss.
I was a different person in my mother’s home. The place she dreamed up from almost nothing. The grainy images I watched on my grandfather’s VHS in New Zealand did not begin to capture the allure.
The next day I woke with a queasy stomach and lay on my back in the pool, floating above the world. In this place of heat, I thought of calving icebergs. The crash of separation, the giant waves fanning out until they were no more than ripples. And the ablated ice mass dissolving in a new ocean, far from its origin.
Later, as we walked along the goat trails high above the house, I was overcome with a sense of being whole. Of being there and nowhere else. We walked on through the ruins of long-abandoned villages tucked into the clefts of hills. Their communal wells had run dry, their broken homes overrun with cacti and weeds.
We paused to throw stones into the shaft of a disused marble mine that dropped miles into the earth.
‘Halfway to New Zealand,’ Dana said as the stones echoed on for minutes after.
We stopped to rest under a twisted olive tree and marvelled at our similarities. She told me stories from their childhoods. The ponies, the hotels and the travel. Their father’s wild life. As she recounted a car accident that injured Pamela’s back, I realised it had happened at the same time I’d had spinal surgery.
I took her hand. For a moment it felt as though I was coming home to this fragmented family. To memories that did not belong to me. Everything connected by fragile strings. I wanted to slip into the middle of their lives, as though I’d always been there. I wanted to belong to this place. To be from here, my girls running through the house, learning a new language, growing up on paella and grapes.
We talked about our cousin. Her father is our mother’s brother, Ian, the one who stayed behind. It was the first I’d heard of her. ‘She’s one day older than you,’ Dana said.
When I suggested I might go to Manchester to meet her, Dana shook her head. ‘I don’t think she’ll want to meet you.’
Dana grimaced when I asked her why not. ‘She came to look after us when Mummy died. But she ended up with Daddy.’ Dana put a finger to her lips. ‘We don’t speak about it. We pretend that it was normal.’
The family stories that followed our mother’s death washed over me in a spreading pool of sadness. I felt a kinship. But no matter my warm reception, I understood that this was their family home. It was their family tragedy and I did not belong here. While we shared the loss of our mother, we’d lost very different things. But, still, that loss was strung like laundry on a line that covered the hills and valleys of all our lives, from New Zealand to Spain and back again.
I also do not belong to my adopting family. But I am bound to them for all my life and the lifetimes of my descendants. A stepchild can inherit from both step and birth families. Such double-dipping is illegal for adopted people. If our adopting families cut us loose, we have no legal recourse to our natural parents. No rights to photos, heirlooms, keepsakes or heritage. Our parents’ death certificates will never list us as their next of kin. Our children and their children cannot trace their family trees, except through DNA. We do not exist in the record books. We do not exist at all, except as misshapen fruit grafted onto the tree of strangers.
That evening we lingered over a meal of fresh pasta and wine at the local cantina and tried to make up for the gaps between us. A butter moon was slung low over the Spanish hills high above the sea. I looked but could not see my guiding stars, the three sisters Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka. And then I remembered — we were under a different sky. Instead, I saw only olive trees, grey against my mother’s memory.
Later, in the room where Rebecca had spent her teenage years, I opened a drawer. Inside were notebooks and pads with scrawled writing. My mother’s handwriting, the long loops of her pen striding across the pages. Business notes, reminders to pick up the girls or book a dentist or a flight. She’d been dead almost ten years.
I held a sheet of paper to my cheek. It always starts with paper. We crave the provenance of words on a page. Of an artwork, an organic apple, a thoroughbred racehorse. A birth certificate. A family tree. Without traceability, the artwork loses its value. The apple stays on the shelf, the racehorse becomes a nag. Provenance is woven so deep within us, we hardly stop to think what it must be like to exist without it.
As adopted people we live with the unconscious bias of biological and cultural otherness. And often when we find our natural families we discover the feeling is the same.
I lay in my sister’s childhood bed and could not sleep. The reunions had opened arteries of longing. My heartstrings frayed in both worlds. Later, I woke from a dream, from under a blanket on the back seat of Max’s car. It was dark and
