SHE AND ERIC were walking along the narrow Chelsea street, hand in hand, defiant, silly, imagining themselves very daring indeed, immortal. They had consumed two bottles of red wine at lunch, they had devoured the contents of a little wicker bread basket and had had the Yankee temerity to request more. Eric was telling Marya one of his hilarious family anecdotes—something about an alleged ghost, a great-great-great-grandmother, from Sweden—who was famous for haunting the Nicholses’ cottage on Lake Superior. The telling was all, inimitable. It was sheerly Eric. It could never be told again.

Eleven

ELEVEN

What commonly happens, Marya was told by an acquaintance who had been an adopted child (“we’re never not ‘adopted children’ no matter our age”), is that the lost child, grown, locates the lost mother; and the mother pretends not to know who he or she is. Usually the first direct approach is by telephone—“they’re not good at answering letters,” Marya’s acquaintance said. Sometimes the mother will say you’ve called the wrong number: there isn’t any woman by that name at that address. Or she isn’t home right now. Or she isn’t living any longer.

You have to persist, Marya was told. Because any woman who has abandoned her children is a guilty woman and probably a very sick woman—or at least she was, at one time. You have to have faith that it’s worth pursuing—the “lost” mother, any mother at all—because it will change your life more than you can calculate.

“Yes,” said Marya. “That’s the point.”

MARYA HAD NOT thought of her mother for years, or so she believed. Now, for no reason, for no logical reason, she thought of her constantly.

The woman would be fifty-three or fifty-four years old now. If she was still living.

They would not have seen each other for twenty-eight years.

Was it possible?—and each of them still alive?

Marya forgot, for long periods of time, that she had two younger brothers; she did have blood relations whom she knew, though they were hardly intimate friends. (Davy, long known as Dave, was thirty-one years old now, with three children, an informal partnership in Everard’s thriving service station; Joey, or Joe, was twenty-nine, engaged to be married, a worker at the new Innisfail division of Allis-Chalmers. Marya and her brothers kept in touch, in a manner of speaking. Sometimes Marya felt a pang of childish envy, that Dave and Joe had remained so close while she had been excluded; she recalled only vaguely that she had been the one to edge away, to declare her superiority.)