Necessary Lies

  “It might be reserved for a meeting,” Gavin said.

  “They can kick us out, then,” she said. “Why don’t you guys go sit in there and I’ll bring our coffee. You want scones or muffins or…”

  “You pick something out for us, honey.” I thought getting Gavin off his feet was probably a good idea. He could walk a few blocks most days, but standing like this often bothered his knee.

  He and I went into the room and sat in a couple of chairs next to each other. The music was much quieter in here. Brenna looked at us through the glass wall and we waved.

  “She has ants in her pants this morning,” Gavin said.

  “I was thinking the same thing.”

  We watched as she walked toward the room balancing a cardboard cup carrier and pastry bags. Gavin got up and opened the door for her.

  “We really don’t need this big space,” he said.

  “I feel like stretching out.” She handed each of us our cups and pastries. “Now we’re all set.” She sat down across from us. “Do you know exactly what you’re going to say this morning?” she asked me.

  She said something else, but I didn’t hear it. Through the glass wall, I spotted a woman leaning against the back of a chair, watching the main door of Starbucks as if she were waiting for someone. She made me think of Teresa. Oh, she was close to Brenna’s age, but I thought, I bet that’s what Teresa would have looked like if she’d lived. I had trouble taking my eyes off her. Her blond hair was in a high short ponytail, an explosion of fuzzy curls on the top of her head. She wore a sleeveless blue tank top and white capris.

  “Mom?” Brenna said. “Did you hear me?”

  “What?” I turned to my daughter, but only for a moment before looking back at the woman. I didn’t want to lose the grown-up Teresa. The woman glanced at me and I looked away quickly and laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” Brenna asked.

  “I was staring at a woman out there and she caught me,” I said, pulling the scone from the pastry bag.

  “Who?” Gavin asked.

  “Don’t look,” I said. “Just someone who reminded me of my sister.” I couldn’t help myself—I had to look again, and now another woman was greeting her. They hugged and when they separated, I saw her friend’s face and gasped. “I think I’m cracking up,” I said. “First I thought I saw someone who looked like a grown-up Teresa and now I see someone who looks like a grown-up Ivy. I’m sure it’s because of today. She’s on my mind.”

  “Mom.” Brenna moved to the chair next to mine and rested her hand on my knee. “It is Ivy.”

  I stared at my daughter, her words not quite sinking in. Brenna looked away from me to wave to the two women, and I turned to see them walking toward the room. Oh my God. She had Ivy’s eyes. Ivy’s smile. I was suddenly back in the police car, unable to help the terrified girl who stood alone in my yard. I had wanted to reach her, hold her back then. And I couldn’t.

  But now I could.

  “What’s going on, Brenna?” Gavin asked, but I didn’t wait to hear her answer. I raced out of the room, my scone flying off my lap, and in a moment I had Ivy in my arms. I didn’t know which of us was crying harder.

  * * *

  We sat in the private room, which had been reserved—by Brenna. I couldn’t take my eyes off Ivy, who sat next to me, holding my hand. “I can’t believe it,” I said, over and over again. “I just can’t believe you’re here in front of me!”

  “I know,” she said. “I feel like I stepped into a time machine. Yesterday, I was fifteen and you were twenty-two, and now, suddenly, here we are—senior citizens. And you look beautiful.”

  “Oh, you too, Ivy!” I said sincerely. She did. Her highlighted short blond hair was simply styled, her skin was tan but not weathered. She wore a white and gold striped top and khaki pants. The farm girl was gone.

  The younger woman sat on Ivy’s other side. She’d introduced herself to us as “Rose,” but with her lithe build and wild hair, she reminded me so much of Mary Ella that I knew she had Hart blood in her. There was an edginess to her. A depth to her voice that made me think she smoked. Close up, I could see silver scattered through her wild blond hair. She was so sweet with Ivy, rubbing her shoulder, touching her hand. She loved her. That much was clear.

  “I’m no speaker,” Ivy said. “But when Brenna told me you were going to testify on Mary Ella’s behalf, I knew I couldn’t let you do it alone.”

  “I’ve thought of you so often!” I said. “I’ve looked for you for fifty years, do you know that? What happened? You and Henry Allen must have taken off together. That much I figured out.”

  “We did,” she said. “It was terrible in a way. I didn’t want to leave Mary”—she squeezed the hand of the younger woman sitting next to her—“but we had no way of knowing where she was.”

  “Is this Mary?” I had to know.

  Ivy nodded with a smile. “The first foster home named her Rose, and she was nearly five when we finally found her, so we kept the name. We didn’t want to confuse her any more than she already was. I call her Rose Mary, but I’m the only one who does.”

  “Thank God.” Rose laughed.

  “How did you find her? Where did you go? Tell me everything!”

  “Me and Henry Allen knew we had to get out of North Carolina because everyone was looking for us. You were locked up or I knew you would have helped me find her, but we had to leave. So we hitched our way to California.”

  “That was your dream,” I remembered.

  She nodded. “Our real dream was Monterey, but we didn’t make it as far as the coast. We found an olive grove where they needed help, and—”

  “An olive grove!” I said.

  “Far cry from tobacco, huh?” She smiled. “We worked for the owners for years. They gave us a little house on their property.” Now she laughed. “That probably sounds familiar—like the Gardiner farm, right? But believe me, it was nothing like it. Indoor plumbing for one thing. Two bedrooms. We couldn’t get married till I turned eighteen, but the family that owned the grove didn’t care. They were happy to have hard workers.”

  “Who spoke English,” Rose added.

  “True,” Ivy said, “though we both picked up Spanish pretty quick. Then Henry Allen went to night school to learn more about the business, and the boys were born.”

  “Boys?” I asked.

  “Here.” Rose handed her mother a phone, and Ivy touched the screen and leaned over to show me.

  “They’re holding down the fort while me and Rose are here,” Ivy said.

  I looked at the photograph of Ivy’s three children—Rose flanked by two brown-haired men who appeared to be in their early forties. Brenna and Gavin, who’d been sitting on the other side of the room, crowded close to peer at the phone.

  “That’s Henry Allen junior on the left and Steven on the right,” Ivy said.

  “How wonderful,” I said. “We have two sons and a daughter, too.” I smiled at Brenna.

  I didn’t think Ivy heard me. She was lost in the picture of her children. She raised her gaze to mine. “I wouldn’t have the boys—and my three grandkids—if it wasn’t for you,” she said. “I think about that all the time, Jane. About what you did for me. I can’t imagine life without my boys.”

  I pressed my fist to my mouth, overwhelmed by the stark truth in her words.

  “What did you mean, ‘they’re holding down the fort’?” Gavin asked, as Brenna pulled her chair and his closer to ours so that we formed a tight little circle. “What’s the fort?”

  “The grove,” Rose said. “We all work there.”

  “And the tasting room,” Ivy added. “This is tourist season.”

  “Tasting room?” Brenna asked. “Wine?”

  “No, no. Olive oil.” Ivy smiled. “To make a long story short, we kept working on that farm and the couple who owned it treated us like their kids, since they had none of their own. When they retired, they sold the farm to us. I was about … oh, I guess forty then.” br />
  I sat back in the chair and shook my head in wonder. “I never pictured this future for you,” I said. “Ivy, I searched and searched. I looked for Ivy Hart. Ivy Gardiner. If you owned a farm … a grove … wouldn’t your name have shown up somewhere?”

  “Henry Allen died twenty years ago,” she said.

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  She nodded. “He was way too young, but we had thirty great years together,” she said. “A few years later, I got married again. A good man. I’m Ivy Lopez now. That’s why I didn’t show up in your searches.”

  I looked at my daughter. “How did you ever find her?”

  Brenna let out her breath as if she’d run a mile. “It wasn’t easy,” she said. “It took a private detective and a long conversation with a retired—and really distrustful—Wilmington cop named Eli Jordan.”

  “Oh!” I looked at Ivy. “Eli!” I said.

  Ivy nodded. “We stayed in touch with him,” she said. “Him and Lita looked after Nonnie until she died.”

  The Jordan family came back to me in a rush. “How are the Jordans?” I asked. “I guess Lita is…” I let my voice trail off.

  “She’s still alive,” Ivy said. “She lives with Eli and his family.”

  “She was such an interesting woman, wasn’t she?” I asked. “And how about the boys? Devil and Avery and—”

  “Devil lived up to his name,” Ivy said with a shake of her head. “He’s been in prison a long time, I don’t even remember what for. All I know is it broke Lita’s heart.”

  “Oh dear,” I said. “And Avery?” I remembered our drives to the Braille teacher, filled with his nonstop chatter.

  “He taught at a school for the blind in Raleigh,” Ivy said. “He’s retired now.”

  “Really!” I loved that he’d become a teacher. “Did he ever have the surgery?” I almost whispered the question, as though I weren’t sure I wanted the answer.

  “He has kids,” Ivy said, “and I believe they’re his.”

  “Oh, that’s wonderful to hear!” I said.

  Ivy nodded. “Sheena was a teacher, too, but she died a couple of years ago.”

  “I remember you wanted to teach,” I said.

  “The closest I got to that was volunteering in my kids’ classrooms,” she said.

  Rose groaned. “My friends loved her, but my brothers and I hated having her there,” she said. “We couldn’t get away with anything.”

  “That was my plan.” Ivy smiled. “Little Rodney … do you remember him?” she asked me.

  I nodded, picturing the little boy the first time I saw him, running through the Jordans’ house wearing a cardboard carton decked out as a car.

  “He’s a cop, too,” Ivy said.

  “Probation officer,” Rose corrected.

  “Close enough.” Ivy shrugged.

  My mind had shifted to the other little boy on the Gardiners’ farm. “Do you know whatever became of William?” I asked. “He was so darling, and I never stopped feeling terrible about that night in the emergency room when I—”

  “You did what you had to do,” Ivy said firmly. She touched my knee. “Jane, I never blamed you for anything. Maybe a little back then, but the more I grew up, the more I could see why you had to do it. It turns out William got adopted out of the residential school he was in.”

  “Adopted!”

  “They couldn’t tell me who adopted him. It’s not like today, when all that’s so open and everything, so we never were able to track him down.”

  “That’s a goal of mine,” Rose said. “He’s my cousin. Maybe he’d like to know who his family is.”

  “It’s good he was adopted, though,” I said. “I’d pictured the worst for him.” I turned to Brenna. “Why didn’t you tell me you found her?” I asked.

  “I thought I was going to fail,” she said. “We only connected a few days ago, so I didn’t want to get your hopes up.”

  I looked at Rose. “How did Ivy and Henry Allen … your parents … find you?” I asked.

  “They just never gave up,” Rose said.

  “We always talked about finding Mary,” Ivy said. “She was our daughter. How could we not look for her? But we knew we didn’t stand a chance of getting her until we got married. Then we told Dan—the owner of the olive grove—everything. He hired a lawyer who tracked down Rose and helped us to get her. He’s the one who found out about William, too. Rose had been shuffled from foster home to foster home.”

  “I don’t remember much about that time at all,” Rose said. “I’ve blocked it, I guess. My earliest memory is running around in the grove with my little brothers. They were annoying, but all in all, it was a pretty cool childhood.”

  I smiled. Watching this mother and daughter who both seemed so content with their lives, I thought of how you could look at people and never know what had come before. What trials. What horrors. You couldn’t see Ivy’s impoverished roots, or how close she’d come to having no family at all. You couldn’t see the loss of her sister—a loss that would haunt both of us forever. The wounds were deep, and yet they didn’t show. It was hard to imagine that in a few minutes, we’d be reopening those wounds, revisiting one of the worst times in either of our lives. I felt like saying, “Forget the hearing! Let’s all go out for a nice brunch instead.” But we needed to do this, if not for ourselves, then for Mary Ella and thousands of others like her.

  “Mom,” Brenna asked, “can I show them the picture?” She held up the manila folder.

  I hesitated, feeling protective of Ivy. I didn’t want to introduce more pain into her life when she’d worked hard to put that pain behind her. And yet she was here, wasn’t she, facing the past head-on. “If she wants to see it,” I said.

  “A picture of what?” Ivy asked.

  “I went to Mom’s old house today,” Brenna said. “I took a picture of the bedroom closet where you hid when the police came.”

  Ivy’s hand rushed to her throat and her eyes widened. “That closet! Why would you take a picture of—”

  “The names are still there,” I said. “The names you carved into the wall.”

  “They are?” she whispered.

  “What names?” Rose asked.

  Brenna handed Ivy the folder. She hesitated a moment before opening it, and I watched as tears filled her eyes.

  “You wrote that?” Rose leaned close, touching the corner of the photograph.

  Ivy nodded. “I carved it with a fork while the police were coming for us. I wanted to write our names so deep in the wall they’d never be erased.” A look of anger flashed across her face, but only for a second. “I never dreamed … all these years later…” She looked at me, one tear falling over her lower lashes. “I wish I could talk to that girl in the closet right now,” she said. “I wish I could tell her everything would work out all right. She was so scared.”

  “She made everything work out all right.” I put my hand on hers. “You were so strong, Ivy,” I said. “That day the police drove me away while you stood all alone in my front yard … that image of you will be in my mind forever and I—” My voice broke and Ivy turned her hand to link tightly with mine.

  “I survived it,” she reassured me quietly, and I nodded, unable to trust my voice.

  “Ladies,” Gavin said, ever so gently, “I think we’d better get going.”

  I looked at Ivy as she let go of my hand to brush a tear from her cheek. “Are you certain you want to do this?” I asked. I thought I’d be able to get through my testimony today dry-eyed; now I wasn’t so sure. I could only imagine what this would be like for her.

  Ivy looked at the picture in her lap once more, then closed the folder. “More sure than ever,” she said.

  “All right then.” I got to my feet with a sense of determination, then held my hand out to her. “Let’s go tell our story.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Although the characters in Necessary Lies are fictional (as is Grace County), the Eugenics Sterilization Program was n
ot. From 1929 until 1975, North Carolina sterilized over seven thousand of its citizens. The program targeted the “mentally defective,” the “feebleminded,” inmates in mental institutions and training schools, those suffering with epilepsy, and others whose sterilization was considered “for the public good.”

  While other states had similar programs, most of them stopped performing state-mandated sterilizations after World War II, uncomfortable over comparisons to the eugenics experiments in Nazi Germany. North Carolina, however, actually increased its rate of sterilizations after the war.

  In the early years of the program, the focus was on institutionalized individuals, but in the fifties, it shifted to women on welfare. Around the same time, the Human Betterment League, an organization founded by hosiery magnate James Hanes and Clarence Gamble of the Procter and Gamble dynasty, spread sterilization propaganda to the public through pamphlets and articles, such as the ones Jane discovers in her office. Sterilization of “morons” was touted as both a way to improve the population, prevent the conception of children who would live “wasted lives,” and make life easier for the “mental defectives” who would have to raise those children.

  North Carolina was the only state to give social workers the power to petition for the sterilization of individuals—in all other states, eugenic sterilization was limited to institutional populations. As a former social worker myself (although I was never a welfare worker), I can’t imagine having that much control over my clients’ lives. I believe the vast majority of social workers had their clients’ best interests at heart, and in a time when there were very few choices in contraception, many women—like Lita Jordan—were desperate for help. I’m sure many social workers viewed their ability to recommend sterilization for their clients as something of a blessing, yet that power could easily be abused. A misunderstanding of genetics, moral judgments about sexual behavior, and concern about the burgeoning welfare rolls led to many unnecessary and unwanted sterilizations.