I stepped into the kitchen and Bernice looked at me like she had seen a ghost. She ended the phone call and asked why I had come, and I told her I had finally written down everything I had never been able to say. Then she looked at the banana bread in my hands and started crying. I asked her what she meant about the adoption papers, and she said, “You weren’t supposed to know about those.” I told her I didn’t know anything about adoption papers, but I knew enough to understand that she had been keeping something from me. Then she sat down and said, “Your son wasn’t supposed to leave with you.”
She told me that after I gave birth, I was so sick and frightened that I couldn’t understand what was happening around me. Bernice said a couple had offered to take the baby temporarily because I had nowhere stable to live, and she had agreed without telling me the whole arrangement. She said the papers were never finalized, but the couple had taken my son home and raised him for nearly a year before I came back for him. I asked why she had never told me, and she said she was afraid I would hate her for the rest of her life. Then she admitted she had kept copies of every document because she wanted to make sure I could find him if I ever decided I was ready. I looked at her and asked, “Where is he now?”
She gave me an address in another state and told me she had found it six months earlier. My son was thirty-one now, married, and had two children of his own, and he had never been told that his mother had tried to find him. I couldn’t decide whether I was angry at Bernice or grateful that she had kept the papers all these years. Then she handed me an envelope with my son’s name on it and said, “I never sent it because I didn’t know if he wanted the truth.” I held that envelope for almost a minute before putting it in my bag. Before I left, Bernice took my hand and said, “I didn’t save you from knowing—I only delayed the day you would have to decide what to do with it.” I walked to my car, sat behind the wheel, and realized that after thirty-one years, I finally had a choice I hadn’t been given the first time: whether to knock on my son’s door.
