No Mother's Day Card for 40 Years

When she was 15, Carolyn Carnes had a secret. When she was 56, Carolyn Hall had a confession.

The girl's abdomen erupted before midnight. God, she had to find the bathroom. Her insides flamed. They coiled up in knots at first. Then drew fists. Waves of fists. She found the toilet.

It was like she'd swallowed a claw. If she could just sit down she could flush out the pain.

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That would make it better. She could get back to bed.

It slacked off. The girl lay back down. There. She could rest. Indigestion. She could sleep. No. She couldn't.

She winced. Back to the bathroom. She could still get there on her own. But she was losing it. Losing it. Gasping. Her whole midsection was caving. Her stomach throttled to hurricane force. She thought she might rip wide open. She really didn't know what to think. She even thought she might die.

Her Uncle Bob helped her to the car sometime after midnight. She'd been doubled over his commode off and on for two solid hours. Everything would be OK now. The explosions would end.

She saw the hospital. The hurting would stop. Still, she might die. The girl was so good at holding things in. She'd been at it since she was 5. But this time the agony inside was crushing.

It took them all night and on into the morning of Feb. 9, 1956. She would never forget the day. Even after they stressed that forgetting was best. The doctor and the nurses were almost too late. The doctor and the nurses did all they could. Routine, really. The girl hardly felt a thing. She was on a stretcher, on her back, when her nerves went blank. There in a hospital with dull block walls. There in a hospital 86 miles east of Kansas City, Mo.

Then it was the social worker's turn. She told the girl to just relax. The girl had something to tell the social worker, too, a wish really.

We'll do our best, the social worker said, not at all convincingly.

The important thing, the social worker said, was that the hard part was over. Shoot, things were hunky-dory. The girl could go back to Uncle Bob and Aunt Estelle's. She could even take the train home to South Carolina.

Three days later when the girl could walk again, she took a last look at those granite hospital walls. She crept out onto a balcony. Two floors up. She was barefoot.

She was going to jump. See, she was right. The social worker was wrong. The girl knew she just might die. She hadn't gotten her miracle. Her miracle was gone. She was going to jump.

But there was snow. Her feet got cold. So she didn't. Nor would she live. She would endure.

A month or so later, still in Missouri with Uncle Bob and Aunt Estelle, she put on her black flats. That same morning she slipped on her pleated purple skirt and her matching striped blouse. That morning, Carolyn Carnes went to church.

For the past few weeks, up until her raging stomachache, and then all spring after it, she had gone to school there at the Sacred Heart Church on West 3rd Street. Kneeling that morning at Sunday Mass, she made her wish known again. She dreamed of how special, how uplifting it would be if her prayer were somehow answered, if someday her own child could be raised Catholic. Was that asking too much, Lord? So the girl kneeled. She bowed. She would never stop giving thanks for what she had.

Carolyn was 15 years old, but even then it was clear. Prayer was all there was for what she had. She had a secret. And now two other people had it. From over her shoulder in one of only two Catholic churches in Sedalia, Mo., she heard it. A new baby cried.

Easter couldn't have been too far off. Either on its way or just passed. But the purple outfit Carolyn had on in church that morning, there was no mistaking it for her Easter suit.

Her Easter dress was back home in Columbia, S.C. That dress was stuffed in a sack, smooshed up beneath her shoes, crammed way back on the floor of her bedroom closet. For nine months - nine months and then some - that dress stayed buried. Even after her mama went to the trouble of making it, that blue Easter dress never made it to church. Carolyn got pregnant in that dress.

Her mama was running the switchboard over at the state hospital the night that dress was thrust into hiding. Carolyn's daddy must have been out of town. She headed for the movies. But she never made it to the movies. She was dating this real nice young fellow, and he dropped by her place with another couple and they all headed for the show in downtown Columbia. They were in the other couple's car. They wound up out by some lake. Carolyn and her date ended up alone, in the back seat of the other couple's car. That real nice young fellow kept saying, Yes, Yes, Yes. Carolyn kept saying, No, No, No. A secret was conceived.

After that, Carolyn wanted to go home. The other couple came back. Home, Carolyn demanded. Her blue Easter dress was ruined. The boy driving didn't do it any favors when he tried to soil it some more, right there in front of his own girl. Carolyn finally had her way. Before long she was home in a bathtub crying, alone with her secret. She stashed the dress. And yet her secret grew. But no one noticed. Just her. Along about New Year's in 1956, along about the time she couldn't have fit into that Easter dress if she had to, that's when her homeroom teacher in Columbia called her folks. Something wasn't right with Carolyn, Sister Janette told them. So they took Carolyn to the doctor. And pretty soon they knew what wasn't right. They knew they weren't about to be grandparents.

Soon her daddy was on the phone to his sister Estelle. He couldn't have Carolyn having any baby at home. Why, the family name. How could she have a baby? How could nobody have known for eight whole months? So her daddy was on the phone with Estelle. His Carolyn would be turning 15 in Missouri. He would drive her there and she would sleep most of the way.

After she got there she would pass the time watching "Mickey Mouse Club" on TV. She would finish the ninth grade. She would get letters from a girlfriend. Her girlfriend wanted to know what she was up to in Missouri. Carolyn would write her back and tell her what she was doing was going to school and living at Aunt Estelle's, and that she'd be home for summer. And she was. She kept her hair short, in kind of an Elvis do. She didn't want the boys getting too interested again. But one did anyway.

When she was 16, he asked her to marry him. She'd been asked that before. That real nice young fellow asked her when she was still 14, before that night at the lake, before she told that real nice young fellow to get lost. But he didn't listen.

Her new boyfriend did. He wrote her letters. He liked to hold her hand. Carolyn thought that was sweet. She liked to hold his hand, too. She was holding it the night the phone rang at her parents' house. It was that real nice young fellow again. The father of her child. He just had to know something.

"Whatcha doing?"

"I'm standing here," Carolyn told him. "I'm holding my fiance's hand, fixing to get married."

Carolyn's daddy tried to pay Jimmy Hall $1,000 not to marry her. Carolyn's daddy didn't want his little girl getting hitched. He tried everything. He tried things she wouldn't find out about until after he was dead. But Carolyn Rebecca Carnes went and, like her mama before her, married a week before her 17th birthday.

Carolyn never told Jimmy Hall about her baby girl. She never even told the baby's father. She did what the social worker drilled into her again and again at the hospital. She kept her mouth shut. She followed orders that giving a baby up for adoption at 15 wasn't something you talk about. Ever.

She met Jimmy Hall through the mail. The 19-year-old Air Force mechanic was stationed in Texas. While he was there, Carolyn saw his picture at a friend's house. Her friend's mother said the young man needed a pen pal. Carolyn needed more than that. Carolyn needed someone to share things with, someone to care about more than anything else in the world, even if she had no intentions of sharing everything in her world with him.

They were engaged eight months and were married in a Columbia courthouse on the second day of 1958. They honeymooned at his mama's house. Fourteen days later, Jimmy was transferred to Newfoundland. For two years. Carolyn moved back to her home state, to Georgia, to a town called Warner Robins, and she settled into Air Force life. She settled in with her secret.

She ended up finding work at the Sacred Heart Church on South Davis Drive, at its school, in its library. It was perfect. She kept quiet. Four years into marriage, she still couldn't tell. Jimmy might leave. That terrified her, losing the life she had established. Then the wives of men in Jimmy's squadron started getting pregnant. Every one of them, seemed like. But not Carolyn. She'd already had her baby. She wasn't getting the girl back, either. She didn't even know how much the girl weighed when she was born. She never held her. That made getting over her even harder.

Then Jimmy got hurt. He was fixing a '56 Chevy for Carolyn's sister. He was up under it and, then, he was really up under it. It fell on his back. He was paralyzed from the waist down. Now she couldn't get pregnant. Now she wouldn't have to lie her way through pregnancy telling some doctor that, no, she'd never had a baby before.

They called the girl Kitty. Eight years into marriage, Carolyn and Jimmy adopted. Sure, Carolyn was a mother already. But it had taken until 1966 for her to become a mom. Even then, even after she herself had adopted and been given something she herself had given up before, she couldn't give up her secret. Even with her darling Kitty a part of her life.

Even when her mother-in-law refused to make her darling Kitty a part of hers. The little girl, after all, was not Hall blood. Carolyn knew better. She knew love ran deeper. She knew the heart was above the womb.

While Jimmy was recovering, the people at the V.A. hospital gave Jimmy and Carolyn a booklet. It showed how he could still get her pregnant. They tried.

Carolyn tried. Honest she did. She begged herself to get pregnant. She wanted to give birth again so bad. She always had. But tension took over. She and Jimmy did everything right, just like the booklet showed. Then she'd beg herself not to get pregnant, scared to death she was.

After Jimmy's accident she'd started letting herself go. She grew her hair long and wore it in a bun. She wore a lot of brown. Slacks. Wide-leg slacks. Knit shirts. Knit anything. Brown anything. Lots of polyester. No dresses. Absolutely no dresses. She didn't want some man noticing her. Not with Jimmy in the hospital. She said to herself, I'll wear my ugly clothes and nobody will pay attention to me.

They named the boy James. Like his daddy.

Carolyn Hall had him in 1973. She lived in fear the doctor might find out her secret. He probably did, but it stayed safe with him. She was scared up to the end. The nine months passed. Just like before. Except this time everybody knew. She just didn't want it getting out that she'd been in that position before.

She was 32. She was even better at holding things in. She had a C-section. Carolyn finally got to feel what it felt like to hold a baby for nine months and then get to hold him forever. Hers. All hers. No going to Mass and hearing him crying somewhere in the pews behind her. No going to Mass and being afraid to turn around to see for sure if he really was hers. No social worker. No Easter dress. No social worker standing over her with a blue ink pen. Carolyn had asked that social worker at the hospital 17 years ago if she could have that ink pen.
Of course, that social worker said. So Carolyn took it from her. She took it and she snapped it in two. Then snapped it in four. Ink shot everywhere. All over the sheets. All over her hospital gown.

"What on earth?" the social worker said. The 15-year-old looked up and told her what. "Nobody else will use this pen to sign away their baby."

There had been another dress before the Easter one. Carolyn was 5. She somehow got red paint on that pretty white Cinderella dress. She had to get the paint off. She lived in College Park, Ga. There was a store in the neighborhood. She went to get some cleaning stuff. Before she got there, careful on her way not to take the shortcut across a neighbor lady's manicured lawn, a man pulled her aside. Kerosene'll get that out, he told her. Here. He would get that old red paint off. And he did. He rubbed the red paint right out of that pretty white Cinderella dress. He rubbed his hands all up under that pretty white Cinderella dress. He kept rubbing. Even after that dress was long gone. For five more years.

After that first day on the way to the store, she knew she had to tell somebody. And she did tell. Herself. She told herself she could not tell. The man with the kerosene had a knife.

"I cut up kids that don't do what I say," he told her. She said nothing. She just went when he called. He actually sent a little boy to get her. She went every single time. Her first secret was born.

Ten years later she would keep a life a secret, but there she was, 5, cloaking death. The threat of it anyway. Her mama found the pretty white Cinderella dress. Carolyn was still 5. Carolyn had balled up the dress and stuck it in her bedroom drawer. Her mama unearthed it, unballed it, smelled it. Kids.

Carolyn had no idea. Until one day her mama told her to go to her room. "Go put your white dress on."

Carolyn's heart sank. She would have to tell. She went into her room. She saw it and cried. There that dress was. Her pretty white Cinderella dress. Clean. Brand new. With the Rich's tag still on it.

Years later, Carolyn tried to clean the blue Easter dress. She used bleach. That didn't work. That just turned it white. When her mama told her to put it on for church, Carolyn told her she wasn't up to going. Carolyn eventually threw the dress away. But she couldn't wring out the fabric of her past.

Motherhood helped fill the void. Work helped. Her children grew up. She got to see them do it. But through all that she slept with the TV on. That was the only way she could sleep, snuggled up to her Radio Shack in-pillow speaker, dozing off to the English sitcoms she taped on PBS.

She sought therapy in 1980. It was soothing. So were the five nieces and two nephews who, at different times, moved in with her and Jimmy. But old times came to be too much. Times she could have had with her first child. Times she had with that man and his hands.

Therapy was all there was then. Once a week. Therapy and prayer. For 17 straight years. At the end of those years, Carolyn was in her 50s. She could hold her secrets no longer. She told Miss Lilly, her therapist. Carolyn did one of those face-blacked-out, not-her-real-name interviews with a TV reporter. She revealed she'd been molested. Of course, nobody knew it was Carolyn.

Her feelings started coming back, back from the night her nerves froze over in the Missouri hospital. Miss Lilly was helping. Carolyn had long since started wearing dresses again. She had good days and bad days, and worries on both. Was her little girl still alive? What if someday little James needed a kidney or something? Was that man in College Park dead? Would Jimmy ever find out?

She went to an antique store in Warner Robins. She pulled up front. A chill hit. The doors. The screen doors with the Merita bread sign painted on the screen. They looked just like the ones at the store in College Park. For all she knew, they were the doors, the ones she was bound for that day she crossed paths with the dirty old man.

She told Miss Lilly. The doors, it seemed, could be Carolyn's way out. She needed to go back to that store, to go to College Park and see it again, to take pictures.

Jimmy parked the car along East Mercer Avenue and Carolyn got out. She stood and took pictures of her old house. She headed down the street, past a pal's house where she learned to play solitaire. She took the shortcut. She stepped all over that neighbor lady's pretty green grass.

She turned a corner. Pecan trees swayed in the breeze. Sunlight beamed through their branches. She found the lot where the store sat. She stood and stared and soaked it in. The store was gone. Something else had moved in. She took pictures of the field of wildflowers.

The voice on the phone almost knocked her down. He was going to do what? He couldn't. He was never supposed to know.

Carolyn's father died in March of 1997. Heart failure. He was 82. She was taking care of him. The redhead of Irish descent was living under the same roof with her and Jimmy Hall. Right after her father died, there was some dispute over his estate, over whether certain kin stood to profit. The voice on the phone was at the center of it. The voice wanted its cut. The voice said that if it didn't get its share, deserved or not, that it would go to blabbing.

Carolyn had a bay-bee! How the voice on the phone knew, Carolyn had no clue. But the voice was that certain kin, immediate family even. So Carolyn started negotiating. She hung up. She dealt with herself. Her daddy had gone to therapy with her before he died. He and the field of wildflowers helped unloose the molestation secret. That set the stage for what she did after she hung up.

She called her son into her bedroom. Carolyn faced him. He was 24 now. "I had a baby when I was 15." And it was out.

"Really?"

"Really!"

Her son grinned.

Then she told Kitty. Kitty was 31.

"Oh, mom," Kitty cried. "We've got more in common now!"

They were a family.

But what about Jimmy? Oh, she told him first. He listened. He spoke. "We gotta find our baby."

See, Jimmy knew all along. Carolyn didn't know he knew. But he'd known since the night her daddy offered him $1,000 not to marry her. Her daddy tried everything. Jimmy passed the test. Jimmy was the man for Carolyn. Carolyn's daddy didn't live to find out exactly how right he was. "We gotta find our baby," Jimmy said.

He said this after the woman he loved told him he wasn't the father. But he'd known that full well. They went back 40 years. And here he was offering to take her back one more year. To her baby. Their baby. He got on the Internet. He got a phone number. He found a girl. She was in California. Before long, she was on the phone. She liked calling Carolyn her mom. Carolyn loved hearing it. But for some reason it didn't sound right. They talked a lot. Not enough to get on the 10-cents-a-minute plan or anything. They never would be. They weren't related.

Jimmy kept searching. Jimmy got warm. He found a judge in Sedalia, Mo. So happened the judge did know of an adopted girl, a woman now. She lived in town. As a matter of fact, the woman's adoptive parents had died within the decade.
The woman in Sedalia was into geography. She didn't know someone was suddenly into hers.

The night before she did know, the night just after her 42nd birthday - in, yes, February, of 1998 - she pored over a road atlas. A hobby of hers. Her eyes landed on a state shaped like her own. Her finger drifted to the heart of that state. Hey, an Air Force base. Neat. She loved stealth bombers. They were based in the next town over, at Whiteman. She liked to stand outside her yellow house and wave at them. She wondered if they ever flew into that base in that other state. The next day the judge phoned. He knew her name wasn't Patricia Anne Domingue anymore. She'd gotten married, gone stealth herself. The judge found her anyway. He called and told Patricia Boroojerdi-Alavi he had a letter on his desk. "I believe your birth mother is looking for you," he said.

Patricia only had one question for the judge. "Um, what state does she live in?" "Georgia."

Carolyn was calling her Trisch before long. Trisch was calling her mom. Trisch had called her first. That first time, Trisch was going to call at 8 o'clock at night. On the dot. She figured that wouldn't be too late or too early. Any sooner, she reckoned, Mrs. Hall might be eating supper. Any later, Mrs. Hall might be in bed.

Trisch sat by her phone. She was so anxious she practiced dialing the number, 9-1-2 ... but then hung up before it rang. She waited and waited all afternoon. Then she called. At 5:30. She had waited 15,360 days already, days since the day she was 9 pounds and 19 inches long. There was an answer. A woman picked up.

"Hello, mom."

"Hello, daughter."

There was something wrong with the phone. It was like Trisch was talking to herself. There was an echo. It was Mrs. Hall but it was her voice, with the Midwest tugged out and 57 years worth of South poured in. No, there was nothing wrong at all. They wouldn't be needing a blood test.

They giggled and cried and boo-hooed up a two-hour phone bill. Trisch worked with disabled kids. She had a husband. They married on the first day of the '85 trout season. They had two cats and a dog. Her father used to sing in the choir at Sacred Heart on West 3rd Street She used to sit in back with her mother. Trisch used to tell a tale that she was born in the back seat of a '56 Chevy. She was so good at telling it that another little girl, one of her friends, actually wanted to go out and have herself adopted. There on the phone that evening at 5:30, it was Mrs. Hall who was adopted. Trisch took her in. Trisch was ready to meet her.

They decided on Easter. Trisch and Abbas, her husband, would fly to Atlanta. Then Trisch got to worrying that she and her mom might not hit it off in person. The phone calls were great. But what if their chemistry wasn't? What if getting along wasn't genetic? Trisch phoned her mom. She broke the news. "I can't come at Easter," Trisch said. "I can't wait that long."

Mr. and Mrs. Hall hadn't needed the "Welcome Home" sign. They held it up anyway. Trisch got off the plane and saw it. But Trisch saw her first. Her. Mrs. Hall. Carolyn. Mom. She even had the same little teeth. Trisch could see them. Her mom was smiling.

Their reunion, in a terminal, was their beginning. There was nothing to catch up on. Catching up with one another was enough. They were ready to hold on. They hugged.

And that was it. Mother and child. They would have a baby shower thrown in their honor. They would give the baby clothes to charity. Carolyn would give Trisch a baby doll dressed in white, in a christening dress. Trisch would plan a water-gun fight. Mr. Hall would tell her to wait till summer. Trisch called Mr. Hall her dad. Carolyn called him her knight.

Carolyn didn't know how to thank her Jimmy. She did know how to thank someone else, though. That voice on her telephone, that voice demanding its chunk of inheritance. She mailed it the mushiest thank-you card she could find.

There would have been 42 of them. One for every year. For every year they'd been apart. The company made 1,032 of them, but the daughter could not find 42 that fit. The daughter picked out 23 instead, one for every other year or so. Carolyn Hall got them in the mail.
The first one was beautiful. It didn't say who it was from. All it had was some scribbles on it, like somebody's baby had gotten hold of it. The next few, same thing. Chicken scratch. Then the markings graduated to squiggles and curlicues she could understand. They looked like something out of a teen-ager's love note. When Carolyn was done opening them, the last dozen of her gifts bore the distinct mark of an adult's hand.

But Carolyn Carnes Hall knew who they were from all along. From the second she opened the first one, the one that looked like somebody's baby had gotten to it. Somebody's baby had. Mother's Day cards were in her lap.

THE END

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