A Mother’s Secret

by Silvia E. Hines

part 1

We spotted the woman immediately on entering the tapas bar at LaGuardia. My husband and son flanked me on either side as we walked toward her, each touching one of my arms lightly as though I needed protection. The woman had light brown hair that looked like it was difficult to hold in place, similar to mine, and a pale complexion adorned by merely a trace of makeup, also like mine. She is unmistakably Jane, I thought, not only because of the hair and coloring, but something about her posture and demeanor as well.

I stood up straight, stifled tears, and walked forward to meet my sister, not thinking for the moment about the unlikely confluence of events that had allowed this unexpected meeting to take place.

* * *

My mother was quirky. For one thing, she’d announced one day that her severe allergy to wheat products originated in a life in which she’d died in a burning wheat field. I told her the psychic could have been wrong. I told her: “Psychics don’t get everything exactly right every time.”

“This one usually gets it right,” she assured me. Besides, she said, she’d actually re-experienced that burning wheat field during an age-regression hypnosis session.

“That infernal event,” she liked to call it, laughing with merriment in that way she had. “When I crossed over the boundary from this life to that one,” she explained, “it felt hot as hell. Right there in the medium’s consultation room!” When she told the story, she glowed, and you could almost feel the heat in the room.

My son Jason had a special understanding with his grandmother, and through the years the two had developed a close relationship. He appeared to share some of her unorthodox beliefs. I liked to say there was an atavistic quality to their bond, perhaps the result of a recessive gene or two. It wasn’t a surprise, therefore, when Jason announced, one evening at dinner, that he thought the wheat field thing could actually be true.

“Who can say for sure it isn’t?” he asked.

“You’re right,” I said. “It’s not something you can corroborate, or verify... or whatever.”

My husband groaned. “Not a great idea for you to be validating this kind of thing, Sara. Her quirkiness or, uh, flakiness as I like to say.” He smiled to show he meant this in a benign way. “And Jase, you must know there are no past lives, no other worlds, just this one we have right here that we need to make the most of. Speaking of which, aren’t you supposed to be working on your college application essay?”

“I am,” he said, getting up from the table and resting his large hands on the door frame while his father finished speaking.

“And probably best,” his father added, with a sardonic grin, “that you don’t mention Grandma as your major inspiration in life. I doubt the admissions crew at Harvard would go for that in a big way.”

“Please, Dad, I know she’s a little off,” Jason said. “I just think it’s a wonderful kind of ‘off.’ You’ve never appreciated her, you know.” He walked out of the room quickly, almost in a flounce, adding: “And you know I’m not applying to Harvard.”

Then there was the diary. My mother’s diary spanned more than fifty years, ending only when she died suddenly, just a few weeks before Jason’s high school graduation. The notebooks she wrote in — those old-style composition books with marbled cardboard covers — were now available for our perusal, and we saw that this wasn’t, strictly speaking, a diary. It appeared to be a mixture of journal writing and notes for stories and essays she hadn’t completed, including what seemed to be an outline for a novel.

There was also, embedded in some of the pages, a series of unintelligible sentences. Although this incomprehensible writing involved groupings of letters that appeared to form words and sentences, there were no recognizable English words.

These puzzling writings seemed to corroborate the aura of mystery around my mother, especially regarding her young-adult years. I’d often thought, growing up, that there were secrets my mother was keeping, things she wouldn’t talk about. I believed the gaps in her stories represented events in her life that were off-limits. Although her politics seemed to be leftist, and she’d come of age in the 1960s, she’d never answered my questions about her participation in the major events of the era: the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the Vietnam War protests.

Once Jason had asked me what it was like growing up with my mother, declaring it must have been a blast. I answered with a bit of sarcasm, agreeing it had indeed been a blast and that I’d always longed for a sibling who might share that blast, perhaps absorb some of the explosion. That was the truth. I’d felt odd and embarrassed growing up with an eccentric mother and wished I weren’t an only child.

Despite his fondness for his grandmother, Jason voiced his concern one night at dinner that she might have had a mental disorder, specifically schizophrenia, and that he was worried he may have inherited a susceptibility to that unfortunate illness. He said he was sending a sample of his DNA to a genealogy lab for analysis. As long as he was going to the trouble of submitting his DNA, he added, he was going to request an ethnicity analysis, as well as a report of any genetic matches that turned up. He told us he also wanted to find out how much Neanderthal DNA he had. He’d heard having more of it made you smarter.

I laughed, though with some indignation. “My mother did not have schizophrenia,” I said. “She was quirky. And there are no genes for quirkiness.”

Ken rose to get himself another serving of stew from the large pot on the stove, sat back down at the table, and brought up the subject of safety, a frequent concern of his. “I’ve read that DNA results aren’t safe in the hands of those... outfits,” he said. “The results could be shared with the police, insurance companies, the government, and so on. And you’d never know what hit you.”

Jason said, “Honestly, Dad, it’s perfectly safe; everybody does it.”

“I’ve heard that before,” his father said. “Like that time you and your freshman-year buddies stole those street signs.”

As it turned out, the results of Jason’s genetic analysis indicated he had none of the several genes thought to increase vulnerability to schizophrenia. There were no surprises in his ethnic heritage either, and he had the amount of Neanderthal DNA typical of his ethnic group, 1%. However, something unexpected did come up regarding the short list of people in this company’s database who appeared to be close genetic matches with Jason.

We knew two of the three names: a great-uncle of Ken’s and my first cousin Gerald, but there was one especially close match whom neither I nor Ken could identify. This person’s genetic makeup, according to the company’s analysis, was similar enough to Jason’s to be typical of an aunt/uncle/niece/nephew or possibly even half-sibling relationship. That seemed impossible, since we knew everyone in the family who could be so closely related to Jason.

Jason sent an email to this mystery person, whose name was Jane, but didn’t receive a reply right away. He suggested both Ken and I send our DNA to the company so we could at least determine whether the match was on my side or Ken’s. About two weeks later, however, Jason received an apologetic email from Jane. She reported that she lived in Chicago and that she was 58, ten years older than I. She said she’d been adopted as a very young child, that it was a closed adoption, and that she hadn’t done the kind of detective work it would take to locate her birth family.

“No one told me I was adopted until I was a teenager,” she wrote, “which was unusual. When my folks finally did tell me, I got the impression they didn’t want me to find my biological parents, and I didn’t think it was because they were worried about my loyalty.”

* * *

Proceed to part 2...