Chapter 5: We Are Still Here
He told it all. Standing up, in a room full of strangers, with his cap twisting in his hands.
In 1999, Lorraine had worked nights on the cleaning crew at Mercy Bay Hospital, a job her sister Darlene had gotten her. She’d had four miscarriages in five years. She used to stand at the nursery window on her breaks.
On the sixth night, she put a baby in a laundry cart and walked out the service exit.
Darlene found out two days later. Lorraine paid her fifteen thousand dollars, everything they had, to write a receipt and swear to a “private adoption” if anyone ever asked. Gary drove them to Bakersfield the same week.
“I should’ve gone to the police,” he said. “Every day for twenty-six years, I should’ve gone. I was a coward. I told myself she was a good mother to you.” He shook his head. “She never was. Not one day.”
“Why now?” I asked him.
“Because she was going to let them think Kayla was Eleanor forever,” he said. “And let you keep paying our electric bill. And I couldn’t watch it anymore.”
Lorraine Dempsey was arrested at the Cadillac dealership on Rosedale Highway that afternoon. There’s no statute of limitations on kidnapping in California. Darlene Pruitt was arrested in Henderson, Nevada, two days later. Gary took a plea deal and testified against them both.
Kayla was charged with identity fraud and grand theft. The two-million-dollar trust was frozen before she’d spent a third of it. The dentist called off the wedding. She lost the Cadillac, the apartment, and fourteen thousand followers in a weekend.
The family I grew up in lost the house on Ming Avenue to lawyers’ fees by Christmas. I didn’t take anything from it. There was nothing in it that had ever been mine.
The first time Helen and I were alone, she didn’t say anything at all for a long time. We sat on a bench in her garden, and she held my hand in both of hers and turned it over and over, looking at it, like she was memorizing the lines. My hands are rough. Twelve years of carrying plates will do that.
“I’m sorry,” I said, without knowing why. “They’re not very pretty.”
“They’re perfect,” she said. “They’re yours. That’s all I ever wanted to see.”
Charles asked me, very carefully, what I wanted to do with my life. Nobody had ever asked me that. I told him I’d gotten into UC Davis once. He didn’t offer to buy me anything. He just said, “Then go,” and drove me to the admissions office himself, and waited in the parking lot for two hours like any other dad.
I visited Gary once, before his sentencing. We sat across a table and didn’t say much. He said he was sorry. I told him I believed him. I haven’t decided yet if that’s the same as forgiving him.
On June 3rd, I turned twenty-seven. Or twenty-six. I’m still figuring out which birthday is mine.
Helen Halloway made the cake herself, badly, the way she’d always planned to. Charles stood behind me in the garden with his hand on my shoulder, like he was afraid I’d evaporate if he let go. Inés lit the candles. Rosa from the diner came, in her best dress, and cried more than anyone.
The next morning, the San Diego Union-Tribune ran its full-page ad for the twenty-seventh year in a row. Same pink knit cap. One new line under the old one.
We are still here, Eleanor.
And so is she.
I kept the name Mara. It’s the only thing the Dempseys ever gave me that I chose to keep. But I signed the guest book at my own birthday party with both.
Mara Eleanor Halloway.
Nobody had to tell me I was lucky anybody wanted me. I could see it in every face around that table.
