Kristin Ashe: A Safe Place To Sleep Part 4

He must have seen me flinch at the word "settle."

"I know what I just said sounds a bit callous, but it's how I felt.

Having a child of our own was my first choice. Adopting an infant was my second choice. However, we can't always have our first choices in life, and rightly so. My third choice, Destiny, has given me more joy than any other person in my life," he said and I knew he meant it.

"Do you have any regrets about not having children of your own or not adopting an infant?"

"Not in the least. I've adored Destiny from the moment I set eyes on her," he said with more love than I'd ever felt from either of my own parents.

"How did you come to adopt her, specifically?"

"Six months after we put our names on the waiting list, we got a call. A four-year-old girl was available. Her parents, who lived in a parish across town, had died in a car crash. At the time, that parish, St. Peter's, was comprised of mostly elderly people. Their first choice a" you see, Kristin, first choices rarely come to fruition, even for the church a" had been to place Destiny in a family in their own parish. Fortunately for us, no qualified families came forward to claim her."

He paused again.

"I remember the nun telling me on the phone that she had blonde hair. That did it for me. I always wanted to marry a girl with golden locks."

"What color is Mrs. Greaves' hair?" I asked, curious to see if he'd gotten his first choice.

"Dark brown. At any rate, it was the last time I saw her, but she's been known to color her hair."

"Has she ever been a blonde?" I asked playfully.

"No, d.a.m.n it!" We both laughed.

"What did Destiny look like when she first came to you?"

"Oh, she was beautiful. Like an angel."

"Was she scared?"

"If she was, she didn't show it. I think Liz and I and the nuns who brought h er were more nervous than she was," he chuckled.

"Was she aware of her parents' death?"

"Oh yes." He nodded vehemently. "She was extremely sad. She would never cry in front of us but she was sad. You could see it in her eyes. She fully understood her loss, I'm convinced of it. The nun who brought her told us she was too young to comprehend what had happened to her, but I always thought she knew. She was grieving. Not like we adults grieve. That's why most people couldn't see it in her. But she grieved. No doubt about it."

"How did she grieve?"

"You could see the sadness in her. She went through all the stages of grief, like a four-year-old adult: anger, denial, finally, acceptance. When she first came to us, she cried herself to sleep every night. Countless times, I'd hear her sobbing, grief wracking her tiny body, and I'd go to her room to comfort her. Except she couldn't accept my comfort a" or Liz's either. The minute she saw us, she'd stop crying. Just like that, her tears would dry up." He snapped his fingers to accent his point.

"Most children cry for attention. Destiny cried only for herself. I tried to talk to her, to tell her it was appropriate for her to cry, appropriate for her to share her sadness with us, but she never responded. Liz called her 'the little warrior,' in anger I suppose, because this tiny human being wouldn't a" couldn't a" accept her as a replacement for her mother. To this day, I'm not sure Destiny accepts Liz as her mother. It's uncanny a" they even look a bit alike, but they're as different as night and day. Liz tried to be the perfect mother for Destiny. No one can fault her for trying, but I don't think Liz ever was able to give Destiny what she needed. Nor was I, for that matter."

"Those first months must have been hard for you."

He stopped for a moment to consider my sympathy.

"It was rather tense," he said. The nuns told us there would be a period of adjustment. It was awkward for all of us. For Liz and myself as instant parents and for Destiny who had lost a family and gained one a" in less than a month."

"How long did it take you to adjust to each other?"

"Oh, it was a good year, maybe more. I can't point to a moment in time when things changed, but eventually they did."

He paused.

"Come to think of it, I do remember one Sunday in particular. Destiny and I went to the playground a" this must have been almost a year and a half after we got her a" and from a distance, I watched Destiny play with the other children. She and two other girls were swinging, and for the first time I saw her true s.p.u.n.k. She was pumping her little legs so hard, I thought she'd touch the sky. I saw a spark in her then, that same spark she has today that drives me crazy, and I knew she'd come back to life. It was frightening really, because I also realized how dead she must have been. Contrasting her two personalities, she'd come to us not much caring whether she lived or died. That day, on the playground, I saw how much she wanted to live."

He gave me a half-smile.

"When the people from the church first told us about Destiny, they all told us how resilient children are. I think they were afraid to acknowledge how much pain there could be in one so young."

"Why didn't someone in her own family, someone related to the Kenwoods, adopt her?"

"I'm not sure, but I don't think there was anyone. The nuns told us there was a grandmother she was close to a" the father's mother, I believe a"but she was in her fifties and a bit sick, if I remember correctly. There was no other family from what I was led to believe, but we weren't told much. Destiny came to us with the clothes on her back, nothing more."

"Nothing?" I was incredulous. "Not even toys or photographs or anything?"

"Nothing. The nuns thought it was better that waya"that she leave her old life behind and start a completely new one."

"My G.o.d!"

"It was sad," he said. "A very difficult time."

"Is the grandmother still alive?"

"I would presume so."

"What's her name?"

He hesitated before answering me.

"I'm not sure Destiny should contact her."

"Why not?"

"It might be difficult for her, coming face-to-face with someone she hasn't seen in twenty-five years. It might bring back her grief."

"And it might help heal her."

"Perhaps," he said without conviction. "Are you a parent?"

"No," I said, startled by his question.

"Then you can't know what it's like to try to protect a child. I don't want Destiny to grieve anymore. I saw her grieve once. Once was enough, don't you think?"

I didn't see any point in debating, but I answered his question in my mind. Once was enough if Destiny said it was enough. If she had more grieving to do, she'd do it. I could see the toll her grief had already taken on Benjamin Greaves, but I couldn't let that stop me. I had a job to do, for Destiny and for myself, and I would do it.

Regardless the price. Regardless the pain.

Out loud, I asked again, "I would appreciate it if you would give me her name.

"Kenwood, Marie Kenwood," he said, looking tired. "Last I knew, she lived somewhere in southeast Denver."

"Thank you."

We finished up then. I turned off the tape recorder. I asked if I could return for more information if I needed it at a later date. He said I could. We shook hands, as if we'd just conducted a satisfying piece of business. As I was walking out of his office, I wondered if he'd sleep well that night.

I know now that there's no way he would have gotten a wink of sleep if he'd had any idea what he'd started. It didn't seem like much at the time, but the information he'd given me, sometimes willingly, sometimes not, was to lead to drastic discoveries in his daughter's life... and in his own.

Chapter 5.

When I got back to my office, I called Destiny and summarized my meeting with her father. I left out all the emotion, all the description of her life as a four-year-old, and got straight to the point.

"You may have a grandmother living in Denver, Peter Kenwood's mother. Do you want me to find her?"

"My father told you that?" Her voice registered both shock and fear.

"Yes."

"How does he know about her. What does he know about her? Why haven't I heard about her before now?" she cried.

"He doesn't know much about her, just what little the nuns told him at the time, which believe me, wasn't very much. It seems the church was very concerned with there being as little connection as possible between your old life and your new life. For your sake, they said."

"Right," she said angrily.

"Nothing about this is fair, Destiny. Or easy. That much I got, very clearly, in my meeting with your dad. What happened to you is incredibly sad. I know you know that in your head. But now, Destiny, if we follow through with this, you'll know it in your heart. It's not the same thing. What you're doing a" what we're doing a" is hard."

I waited for her to say something. Silence.

"Are you still there?"

"I'm here," she said, sounding as if she were fighting back tears.

"Do you want me to keep going? Do you want me to try to find this woman?"

"Yes," she said with simple determination.

Her resolve frightened me.

"Okay, then, I'll let you know when I find her. But don't hold your breath, Destiny. There's a good chance she's dead. Or senile. If she's alive, she'd have to be well into her eighties. Don't get your hopes up, okay?"

"I never do."

"All right," I let out a sigh, "so I'll look for Marie Kenwood?"

"Yes."

When she agreed, I knew then that she really trusted me. And I was flattered, because the more I found out about her, the more I knew trust couldn't possibly have come easily to this "little warrior."

G.o.d help us all, I thought as I opened up the phone book and started to call the Denver-area Kenwoods. G.o.d help us all.

Finding Destiny's grandmother was so easy it startled me. On the third try, I located her. Marie Kenwood was very alive, very lucid, and very suspicious of me. It took every ounce of charm I had to get her to reluctantly agree to meet with me the following week.

I left work that evening feeling like I'd accomplished quite a lot for one day. Not even the forecast of snow for the following day could dampen my spirits. I felt better than I'd felt in months.

It didn't last long.

Alone, I went to a mindless movie, ate more popcorn and chocolate-covered raisins than I should have, and inched my car home in the driving sleet.

When I got home, I cleared the debris from my bed, and tried to fall asleep.

But I couldn't sleep. I couldn't stop thinking about what Benjamin Greaves had told me.

I thought about what he'd said about Destiny not wanting to cry in front of them. I never cried in front of my parents either. I didn't have a single recollection of my mom comforting me when I cried. Just the opposite, in fact. In my teens, when I fought with her, I would will myself not to cry in front of her. I would focus on something in the room, stare at it and try to keep control of myself because I never wanted to show emotion to her. If she saw me cry, she won. If I held back the tears, I won.

By then, obviously, I didn't trust her with my feelings, but I wondered when that mistrust had started.

I remembered hiding myself from her. When I started menstruating, I threw away my soiled underwear and used Kleenex as Kotex because I didn't know what else to do and was too afraid to talk to her or to my older sisters. When one day after I stood up in front of my entire eighth-grade French cla.s.s, and a girl I barely knew pulled me aside to tell me blood had soaked through my orange bell-bottoms, I had to call my mom to come get me. On the way home, she told me how surprising it was that my flow was so heavy with my first menstrual cycle. I never bothered to tell her it was actually my sixth one.

When did my own mother become my enemy, so much so that I was afraid to tell her anything?

And where was my father when I was growing up? The memories of him were almost completely blocked. It was as if he didn't exist. Why?

These questions, the questions to which there were no acceptable answers, depressed me until eventually I fell asleep.

I woke up long before morning came, sweating and shaking from a terrifying dream.

Ann and I are walking through the woods at night. In line, Ann is in front, then me. As we go to cross a bridge, I step aside. I won't cross it. I am going to walk parallel to it.

Ann goes on ahead, then disappears, as if into a hole. I scream and scream for her. I am terrified. I keep trying to wake up. In my dream, I remind myself I am in my apartment and safe. I'm calm, then the terror again. I scream louder and louder but never make a sound.

As I remembered pieces of the dream, thoughts flashed through my mind: Camping trips. We'd taken several family camping trips. My mother never went along because she hated camping. Who slept in the tent with Dad? Who slept in the car? My incomplete thoughts terrified me more than the dream itself.

I started crying from a place I could not touch.

Total amnesia. It could no longer protect me. What would?

Finally, when I could no longer stand the noise inside my head, I put on my stereo headphones, turned up the music as loud as I could, and read People magazine.

For hours, I kept the external noise going to override the internal noise. I was exhausted, yet couldn't chance sleep. Just before dawn, I returned to my bed, lit a candle on the nightstand, and prayed for peace.

Mercifully, the morning finally came, but not soon enough, and not nearly easily enough.