Foundling
by
K. Curran Mayer
The doorbell rang in the middle of the night while Felicia
stirred her second batch of tomato sauce. The day before,
she’d charmed her favorite vendor at the farmer’s market
into bringing her the bruised, unevenly ripened, ugly, and
unwanted tomatoes that would never sell and couldn’t keep.
So then she had bushels of cheap tomatoes, already
attracting fruit flies and more important than sleep.
Cursing the bell under her breath, Felicia turned down the
heat under the pot and swiped her palms across her apron as
she went to answer the door. None of her friends would drop
by at this hour. It occurred to her vaguely that she was a
single woman and should look through the peephole, but that
always felt paranoid and melodramatic. Usually she didn’t
mind drama, but right now she was too impatient to bother.
She yanked the door open.
In the apartment hallway stood a girl caught on the uncanny
threshold between child and adult. The ponytail binding the
curly, black hair could go for any age. The backpack could
have suggested she was still in high school, but the
out-of-fashion pink sweater wrinkling under the pack’s
straps hinted that this girl didn’t follow trends. Felicia
didn’t recognize her, though she felt perhaps she should.
The unexpected guest took a step back under Felicia’s gaze,
and tugged anxiously on her sweater hem.
That motion settled that she was still a girl. She hadn’t
yet grown into grace.
“Felicia?” Something about the voice struck a familiar
vibration in the back of Felicia’s mind, the way a violin
string will hum softly when it has been tuned to a note
that’s being played. “I don’t know if you remember - can I
come in?”
Without a word, Felicia opened the door wider. The girl
marched in with a fragile air of entitlement, her chin held
very high. Felicia wasn’t sure whether to be irritated by
the royal manner or amused by the chutzpah. Amused, on the
whole.
The strange girl assessed the house, her head tilted to one
side. Felicia watched her eyes slide over the basic wooden
furniture, the well-swept floor, the incongruously wild
note of the turquoise-and-red rag carpet under the table,
the Roman shades, the potted herbs on the windowsill, the
braid of garlic on the wall by the kitchen. It was
impossible to read a reaction in the cool teenage face.
At the end of her inspection, the girl slipped the backpack
off her shoulders and let it thud to the floor. “Could I
use your bathroom?”
Felicia raised her eyebrows, a little of her amusement
peeling away. “It’s at the end of that hall.”
The girl nodded, took a step away, but then looked back.
“Something’s burning.”
Felicia’s hand flew to her mouth in a gesture of dismay. A
Gallic gesture of dismay, one of her old lovers used to
call it, no matter how many times Felicia told him it was
an inheritance from an Italian grandmother, not a French
one. She fled to the kitchen, oversized apron flapping
around her knees, leaving the mysterious girl to find the
bathroom herself.
The tomato sauce was only just starting to stick to the
bottom of the pan, and Felicia let out a breath of relief.
As long as she kept stirring and was careful not to scrape
too much burnt muck off the bottom, it would probably be
all right. The steam was almost too hot to bear on her
hand. She slipped on an oven mitt for protection.
The toilet flushed, the water ran in the bathroom sink,
then the girl padded in to join her. Felicia glanced down,
suspicious of the quiet footsteps; sure enough, the
stranger had removed her shoes. She was evidently making
herself right at home. “So,” Felicia said, still stirring
the pot, her voice crackling. “Are you planning to stay
here long?”
The girl followed her gaze, staring down at her dirty
cotton socks against the blue-and-white linoleum. “I didn’t
mean – well, I need to stay overnight, because I haven’t
anywhere else to go.”
Felicia always had liked the sensation of riding a
conversation like a small boat pitching in a turbulent sea.
She’d tried to break the habit of steering straight for
storms over the years, but this mysterious situation was
begging for a confrontation of some kind. She let her voice
sound fierce as she demanded, “Why not?”
“I just got off
the Greyhound,” the girl said, as if she was explaining to
an old friend. She drifted over to the counter and began
re-arranging the half-dozen jars of already-canned sauce.
It puzzled Felicia how comfortable this conversation felt,
as if they’d known each other a long time. It could have
made her uneasy if it weren’t so interesting. The girl went
on, “I’m sorry about coming at this hour, but that’s just
when it came in, and I don’t have money left for a hotel -
I don’t know anyone else around here.”
Felicia considered this, nodded. She rode Greyhound herself
sometimes. “I don’t understand how they get away with
having buses coming in at all kinds of times,” she said,
her softened tone absolving the girl of any blame for her
tactless midnight arrival. “And anyway, I’m still awake.”
The glass bottoms of the jars grated softly on the
countertop as the girl continued to arrange and re-arrange
them. The boiling tomato sauce was almost concentrated
enough now, the bubbles gasping as they burst through its
thick red surface. Felicia’s voice grew harsher again as
she added, “But that doesn’t really answer
why
you’re here.
You say you know me. How?”
The girl finished lining the jars of sauce up in a straight
line, pushed back against the kitchen wall as if they were
facing a firing squad. Then she turned to Felicia with
wide-eyed vulnerability. The older woman wasn’t surprised
to find that lurking under the cool exterior, but it yanked
at her heart all the same. The girl whispered, “You really
don’t remember?”
Felicia paused with the spoon poised over the steaming pot,
staring into the girl’s face. Those wide eyes – they were
vibrating the strings of her memory, if only she could
recognize the notes –
The girl’s voice was very small. “I’m Iona.”
Felicia let out a long breath. So that was it. She snapped
the stove burner off with a flick of her wrist and dropped
the spoon onto the stovetop, ignoring the sauce it dribbled
onto the shiny-clean surface. Of course the girl looked
like Tristan. When Felicia was living with them both, she
had never fully realized how much Iona
was a miniature version of her father, because she had
simply been Iona. But she did have his wild hair, his
slender mouth with the expressive corners, his round eyes
with the heavy lids that occasionally reminded Felicia of a
particular portrait out of a high-school history book,
though she’d long ago forgotten the name attached to it.
She would have expected Iona to forget her.
She turned back from the sauce to the girl, controlling her
voice carefully for fear of any sudden, unnecessary tears.
“I know it’s a stupid thing to say, but you’ve grown.”
Iona smiled nervously, playing with a tendril of hair that
had escaped her ponytail, teasing it in ringlets around her
finger. It was a girlish mannerism, girlier than anything
Felicia had seen Iona do when she really was a little girl,
and she wondered when Iona had picked it up.
Felicia drew a deep breath. “Where do we begin?”
Iona shrugged, and turned away from Felicia’s gaze again to
stare at the jars on the counter. This time she reached for
the empty ones that were laid out on a clean towel by the
stove.
“Leave those alone,” Felicia ordered automatically.
“They’ve been sterilized.”
Iona’s hand dropped back to her side, as helpless as her
father’s hands used to look.
Felicia picked up a knife. “Here. If you want something to
do, cut tomatoes.”
“Are you going to make more sauce tonight?” It was hard to
tell if this teenage Iona was dismayed, amused, or
interested. When she was small, Felicia would have known
without thinking about it.
She handed Iona a couple of gallon-sized plastic bags. “No.
We’ll freeze the rest for now. I just want to be rid of the
fruit flies. Does your father know where you are?”
Iona began chopping without a reply, and Felicia turned to
ladling tomato sauce into sterile jars while she waited for
an answer. Listening to the hesitant thumps and scrapes
against the cutting board, she thought that Iona had been
more familiar with a knife when she was seven. Somehow this
forgotten expertise made the stretch of time since their
last meeting seem longer than anything else – hair
twirling, height, puberty, anything. In the old days, Iona
had always been at her elbow in the kitchen, small hands
reaching to help long before she could see over the
countertop, absorbing everything. Felicia had finally
bought a stepstool for her, a gift that had earned a wild
hug in one of Iona’s rare, spontaneous demonstrations of
affection.
Felicia had almost forgotten her dutiful question by the
time Iona answered it. “I left a note. I’ll call him in the
morning and let him know I got here safely.” She added
defensively, “I have a calling card, it won’t be a
long-distance charge for you or anything.”
“That’s all right,” Felicia said. “Do you think he’ll
mind?”
Iona shrugged. “He – we haven’t – it might be a relief. At
first, anyway.”
Felicia put down the ladle and went to Iona’s side. “Little
one, please tell me why you’re here. You’re welcome, of
course, but why?” When Iona looked at her, Felicia cupped a
careful hand around the girl’s chin the way she used to do.
Her hand felt older than it should have, the skin soft and
wrinkled from tomato juice.
Iona shrank away from the touch, and Felicia frowned. She
and Tristan had their quarrels, but she had thought Iona
was safe with him. At his worst, she had considered him
only a rather stupid man. Five and a half years in his
house, five of them in his bed – surely she should have
known if there was anything wrong there.
“No, it’s not like that,” Iona blurted, interpreting the
frown correctly. “He – we’ve just been fighting. A lot. He
thinks I’m still a baby.”
Felicia’s jaw loosened. That was closer to what she would
have expected of Tristan. Harmless, yes, but thick-skulled.
How indeed could he ever cope with an intelligent,
determined teenager? An intelligent, determined toddler had
been bad enough.
“And I thought – well –” Iona poked with the tip of the
knife at some of the tomato seeds swimming over the cutting
board in their watery juice. “I haven’t seen you in a long
time. You haven’t written in ages. I was hoping you were
the right Felicia all the way here – I found the address on
Google, you know?”
Felicia drew a breath so sharp it cut at her throat at the
thought of the girl setting out across the country on the
hope that she had the right address, on the chance that
Felicia would be there when she arrived in the middle of
the night. She managed to say, “It is good to see you.”
She waited for Iona to ask why Felicia had left or maybe
why she hadn’t tried harder to visit, to call, to write;
but none of these questions seemed to occur to the girl.
After a minute, she went on cutting tomatoes, and Felicia
sighed, turning back to her canning, adding spoonfuls of
lemon juice to each jar to make sure the acidity was high
enough for safety. The Iona that Felicia used to know had
always got around to communicating faster if she was left
alone.
When the last jars were plunged in the hot-water bath and
the timer was set, Felicia focused on Iona again, demanding
with maternal concern, “Have you eaten?”
Iona smiled slightly at that, taking a second too long to
nod – too much like her father in that for Felicia to let
it pass unquestioned. “When?”
Iona waved a vague hand. “A little bit ago – no, I’m fine.”
Felicia went to the refrigerator and pulled out a carrot
from the drawer. “Here, start on this, and I’ll cook some
pasta. I’m getting hungry too – we can use the tomato sauce
that wouldn’t fit in the last jar.” She thrust the carrot
in Iona’s general direction, raw and unpeeled. Iona burst
into tears.
*
“It always used to be carrots,” she sobbed into Felicia’s
shoulder some minutes later, when she could talk again at
all. Her tomato-wet fists clutched the back of Felicia’s
shirt. “I remember – all the time –if I wanted a snack –
maybe with peanut butter –”
Felicia patted the girl’s back, rocking her ever so
slightly, murmuring soothing, indecipherable noises into
Iona’s hair as if Iona was still her child. “Little one,
it’s all right, my little dove, my dear. I’m sorry.”
“The jars,” Iona snuffled, pulling back at last as the
timer buzzed to indicate the hot water bath had been long
enough. Felicia made a sweeping gesture that almost knocked
one of the leftover sterile jars off the counter, as if to
say she did not care in the least about the tomatoes. But
Iona blew her nose on a paper towel and went back to the
last tomatoes on the cutting board.
*
By unspoken agreement, neither of them questioned the other
further that night. Felicia reflected that their supper was
more awkward than many a first date. Iona volunteered to
wash the dishes and wipe down the counters while Felicia
made up a bed on the couch for her. Felicia accepted
gratefully, thankful that it occurred to Iona to make the
offer. Tristan never would have volunteered. Though she
could not regret that Tristan himself did not wash dishes;
if he had, then Iona would not be in her apartment now.
*
After Iona was settled for the night, Felicia lay awake for
a long time, thinking back to that first sink of dirty
dishes and all that had followed on from it.
She had just broken up with an exasperating man when she
met Tristan, and had been joking that if she didn’t find a
good challenge she would consider a convent. Her lack of
commitment felt like decay eating out the heartwood of a
tree. She wanted someone or something that would demand all
her ingenuity and loyalty. But she could never lead a life
that was out of her control, either, and so far her sense
of self-preservation had shielded her from any heedless,
storybook devotion.
The ex-boyfriend’s most notable features had been
persistence and money. For two entire years she had sat
across from him at expensive restaurants, insisting to him
that it would never work out. He had always smiled his
white, orthodontist-approved smile and said they would see.
Felicia had enjoyed the food. Finally the day came when
they were sitting together and watching a chef cooking
hibachi for them, and she realized she was bored despite
all the flashing knives and flames. That ended it.
She hadn’t been interested when Tristan asked her out on a
date. Tristan was too well-ironed. He had only transferred
to her department recently, but she’d noticed his bitter
complaints about schedule changes and the way he seemed to
throw his entire soul into spreadsheets. Still, she had no
other plans and decided that one dinner would do no harm.
The interest came when he called to say his babysitter had
canceled, he couldn’t make it. On a whim, she offered to
just come to his house and have dinner there, knowing he’d
never agree. Her ex-boyfriend had been upset if she merely
passed his house when the yard hadn’t been raked. But
Tristan said, “That might be great, actually.” She wondered
if she was imagining the faint note of desperation.
When she arrived, he swept her off her feet with his chaos
of dirty dishes and diapers, with toddler toys crunching
underfoot in the living room and a faint stench of vomit on
the carpet outside the bathroom. She had known he was a
widower with a child. She had not known that his wife had
died in a car crash only a year ago or that the child was
barely two or that he was spectacularly failing to cope.
Nor had she known that the child would be precious Iona,
busy sizing up the world with wide eyes like a baby seal.
The little girl sat under the kitchen table with a stuffed
toy cat for most of the evening, and Felicia felt that she
was assessing the adults with uncanny perception. “She’s
shy,” Tristan explained several times as he wandered
vaguely around the kitchen attempting to convince Felicia
to sit down, to relax, to enjoy herself, to stop scrubbing
his dishes.
It only took an hour for Felicia to decide that “shy” was
the wrong word. Iona seemed merely reserved, distancing
herself politely from the big people. Not a comfortable
child for a grieving man to try to rear alone, Felicia
thought as she cooked dinner for the three of them out of
what she could find in the cupboards. (Tristan, she
concluded after some prying, mostly lived on Ramen noodles,
cans of soup, and frozen pizza. She wondered if he even
bothered to heat the soup – his dirty-dish collection
didn’t seem to suggest it.)
A week later, Felicia moved in. They didn’t start sleeping
together immediately, of course, though it was the scandal
of the office for about a month until finally an unknown
party spilled coffee all over the copy machine and gave
them something else to talk about. Tristan was uneasy about
his brief notoriety, but Felicia just laughed. “They’ve
gossiped about me being a gold-digger for years,” she told
him over the kitchen table one evening. “This is just an
entertaining new spin.”
“I have no
gold,” Tristan had told her as he smiled crookedly down at
the lasagna she’d just plunked on the table. “So what do
you want from me?”
“This baby,” Felicia had told him as she tucked Iona into
her high chair and fastened a bib firmly around the chubby
neck. “She’s gorgeous, you know.”
Tristan’s crooked smile had widened, and Felicia wondered
if he was smiling because he believed her or because he
didn’t. She never did know that. She supposed it was the
sort of thing most men wouldn’t want to believe, if they
could help it. And Tristan really was gorgeous himself, in
an everyday sort of way - not like a movie star in the
least, but still, quite good-looking. She confessed to
herself that she thought his crowded, uneven teeth were a
refreshing change.
True to her pattern, Felicia thought the relationship was
pleasant enough for the first couple of years. After that,
she would have been willing to move on as usual, as her old
restlessness stirred like a frost-laden wind biting at the
heels of summer. She stayed several years longer for the
child.
Felicia theoretically preferred friendly separations, but
never achieved them. She had especially wanted to keep on
good terms with Tristan – at least good enough to keep
visiting Iona. But by the end, Felicia decided a clean
break was the best she could do.
It would take a few more years before she decided she was
finished with this kind of emotional ring-around-the-rosy –
both for her own sake and other people’s – and arranged for
solitude. Close relationships were something that worked
out for other people. She had expected to settle for
solitude for the rest of her life by the time Iona rang her
doorbell.
Sixteen years old. If Tristan wanted his daughter back, he
could presumably insist on it.
*
Despite the late night, Felicia woke before her alarm clock
as usual. She came out to start the coffee and found Iona
already in the kitchen. She was standing barefoot in front
of the refrigerator, her hair hanging over her shoulders in
a tangled mess. Felicia itched to comb it out and bind it
into the same old pigtails. Instead she said, “You’re up
early.”
“My schedule’s wacky as ever.” Iona’s cool had returned
overnight. Felicia was glad she hadn’t said anything about
the hair. She watched as Iona shifted some magnets from the
comics on the refrigerator and started putting up a handful
of photographs between them. Felicia considered what this
environment-modification implied – that Iona expected to be
here a while – before she recognized the pictures. “Oh!”
Iona nodded calmly. “I took them when I came away.”
Felicia came and looked over her shoulder at the old
photographs of Iona’s birth mother. Despite much fading,
they were still more familiar than this unexpected
daughter. “Were they still on the refrigerator at your
house? After all these years?”
Iona grinned. “I don’t think he dared take them down after
you yelled at him.”
Felicia remembered that; it had been one of their early
quarrels. She was surprised it remained in Iona’s memory,
unless Tristan talked of it. Felicia had insisted the
photos should be visible to remind Iona of her mother.
“She’s forgotten her already,” Tristan protested, but
Felicia kept shaking her head. Of course Iona had forgotten
for now, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t stare at the
pictures someday as if they were warped mirrors.
Sometimes Felicia also used to gaze into the pictures when
she was alone. She was sure there must be a trace of Iona’s
mother somewhere in the girl, if you knew where to look.
But the photos were so blurry that Iona would have been
able to see what she wanted in them, whatever that was.
“Shall I start the coffee?” Iona offered.
Felicia nodded slowly. “I have to leave for work soon. But
we need to talk. To your father, too.”
Iona nodded. Felicia glimpsed the woman starting to emerge,
like a dragonfly nymph splitting the skin on its back and
crawling out with crumpled wings, spreading them to dry,
already planning its flight. “Of course. I’ll call him this
morning, and then you and I can talk tonight.”
Felicia didn’t intervene as Iona poked through her
cupboards, letting her discover the coffeepot and beans and
grinder and filters on her own. She pretended to be
absorbed in tapping the tomato sauce lids to test the
seals. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched Iona’s
hands flowing through the motions of grinding coffee and
measuring water, even in a strange kitchen. That confidence
was familiar. Not from Tristan. Not from vague photographs.
Not even from the reserved, retiring child she remembered.
If anyone had ever asked her if she wanted Iona to take
after her, she probably would have shrugged and said not
really. Still, she caught the eye of one of the images on
the refrigerator and returned the dead woman’s smile.
Whatever happened next, her daughter had come home.
Copyright
2009 by K. Curran Mayer