By the time the girl reached adolescence her adoptive parents, who were both white, could see that their daughter was likely what some would call a child of mixed race, but they pretended not to notice. Wasn’t race an outdated concept, anyway? But it was true that their daughter looked very different from them. Darker, taller, thickset. They told her she resembled one of her grandfather’s people. They told themselves that she had always been theirs. They told themselves that she was their baby girl and that nothing and no one would ever change that.
Height
It was only when Mabel Martin’s body had fully bloomed into adolescence that she had begun to worry about the fact that she did not resemble her parents. It was sometime after that gamey-smelling American boy at school had groped her and called her brown sugar but before her growing discomfort with her bust and height had evolved into a more specific agitation over the fact that she was taller than the Randall boy, who lived two houses down and with whom she had fallen, suddenly and desperately, in love.
By age seventeen, Mabel was also taller and softer than both of her parents. Her mother pointed out that she had gotten her heft and nose from her maternal grandfather, whom she had never known and who could only be seen in a pockmarked, browned portrait on her mother’s dresser drawer. See? Mabel’s mother said, smiling. No, Mabel did not see, but she, too, smiled and nodded.
Nearly thirty-five years later, Mabel, now Marble, would feel her phone buzz as she sat under the helmet dryer at a beauty shop in Rome. She would see the words Estate of pop up on her screen and understand, instantly, that the email from an American legal firm, whose name she had never seen before, had something to do with the fact that she was six feet tall and had none of the pinkish tone about her face that both of her parents did. Marble would realize then that she had been waiting for this message for most of her life.
By then, she would be old enough to understand that if her mum and dad had lied to her about her origins all these years, it was out of either love or fear, or both, because, in that moment, these were the very feelings that washed over Marble and drenched the soft folds of her waist. A love of her parents, a fear of what she might learn, a fear of what she might feel. Yes, mostly fear.
Because no matter how much her parents had loved her and coddled her and invested in the dreams of her youth, their presence in her life could not extricate the tiny burr that had lodged itself somewhere under her rib cage and, bit by bit, had expanded over the years, poking at her from the inside. A feeling that someone else, a long time ago, may have decided that Baby Mabel hadn’t been worth loving and coddling and investing in.
Her doubts about her family tree had ballooned when her son was born and his doughy, newborn face began to take shape. His ruddy, veiny skin gradually took on a more even, deep-olive tone, and his hair grew into a soft, brushy silhouette.
“Your grandson doesn’t look a thing like you, does he, Mum?” Marble blurted out one day, when she was feeling catty.
“No, he doesn’t, dear,” her mother said. “You’ve got a little Italian boy on your hands there, is what you have.” Which might have been a reasonable argument had Marble’s husband not been a blond man born to pale-skinned parents. As her son Giò blossomed into adolescence, all he had to show for his father’s side of the family was his freckled nose.
After Marble sent Giò to boarding school back in the UK, she continued to live most of the year abroad. She suspected that if she were to spend too much time around her mother and father, they would pick up on the growing doubt in her eyes. She had hinted around the subject enough times to see that her parents were not going to let her discuss the possibility that she might have been born to anyone but them.
On some days, Marble felt deeply resentful. On others, she looked at her mum and dad, thinning around the shoulders with age, and felt guilty. Her own son was the most beautiful thing in her life. Did her parents feel the same way about her? They might worry that they could lose her. As if such a thing were even possible.
Or was it?
B and B, after fifty years, you’d think it was time for me to accept that I would never find my firstborn child, but I couldn’t do it. Or, what I mean is, I couldn’t live with that, not on top of the sense of isolation that had come over me after your father’s death. As you know, I was feeling so low about it that I took that surfboard out to the peninsula and nearly broke my neck. A foolish thing, I realize that, but I can’t say that I am completely sorry I went out there because, strangely, that is what led me to your sister.