Mystery Beads

The daughter I gave up for adoption sent me a small package last year. It arrived with the regular mail, in a soft rectangular manilla envelope secured with too much tape and stuffed with bubble wrap. My son, then 10, collected the package and assorted bills and grocery store circulars and carried them into the house.

"Hey mom! You have a package! Who's this from?" He handed me the parcel, covered in hand-drawn geometric designs, my name in bold purple block letters, my birth daughter's name in a yellow flourish on the back. I told her in my first email that my favorite colors were purple and yellow.

10 didn't recognize the name, even thought I told him the name of his secret sister, even though I referred to her from time to time when we were driving alone by the beach winding road, through the city to the art house theatre where they watch films, not movies. It's not real to him yet, I thought, just a name like a person on page two of a new book, not enough action details and smells and purple yellow letters to make her real. Not yet.

I took the package into my bedroom and locked the door, and what fell out of the envelope was such a jangle of memory and familiar story and kinship and mystery that I couldn't move, could barely breathe, for a long time. She wrote a short note on torn yellow legal pad paper, a one-sentence yelp, calling me by first name in left-slanted print, signed with a heart near the frayed bottom edge.

I picked up the contents, one by one, tried to make them into a completed puzzle. She enclosed a hand-made friendship bracelet in red, yellow, and purple, a ripped corner of an envelop with a cascade of starburst design, all in colored pencil, signed with her last name and '04 on the back, three photographs from ages two and five and eighteen, and a cassette tape of mixed music with the words "I hope you enjoy this" written in jagged letters like a heart beat along the edge. A care package built by a color-drenched wildfire artist much too young to know anything but all the things you forget when you get old and sturdy and smart.

I got married at nineteen years old, in a blue denim maternity jumper with sneakers and a flower in my hair, on the steps of a rainy county courthouse with a scruffy boyfriend an hour late for the ceremony and a stranger I grabbed from the soaking courtyard and paid five dollars to be a witness. We ate canned shrimp with spaghetti for our wedding dinner and my new husband fell asleep soon after, tired from a long day digging wet ditches for the road department, already tired of being married. I rubbed my nine-month belly and promised my baby a happy life, and then I did the only thing I knew that might give me help and guidance and money for rent, the piece of my childhood I still carried in my pocket. I prayed, holding a strand of tiny glass beads, working through the sorrowful mysteries, holding out for redemption.

I don't know why daughter's package reminded me of those rosary beads. I carried them for years, in pockets, in purses, always close at hand, from my first communion to now. They belonged to my great-paternal-grandmother, the woman I never met whose name I own. I learned that she ruled the family with harsh words and an evil stare. I learned that she handed out blessings and curses from under a short black head veil in her favorite pew during Latin Mass. She died when I was a couple months old, and when I turned eight and ate the bread they called Jesus for the first time, I learned my name wasn't unique, and inherited her crystal beads connected by silver wire, with a cross so rubbed that the body of the crucifix no longer held features.

I pulled out those beads every day since I got the package, since six months later when we met in the cool New England mist on the steps of her adopted home. They sat in a leather zippered pouch at the bottom of my purse for years, since I left my husband and decided I didn't want to follow the spiritual rules of a group of old men. I hold them to the light, watch the sun make patterns through them, remember the nights I spent praying and crying when I dreamed my nightmare would end and my secret pregnancy would spontaneously abort. But it didn't. Mary and Joseph and Jesus and St. Jude, the Saint of The Lost whose name I took at confirmation, didn't hear one lonely girl. Maybe they hear others. I don't know.

I kept praying the rosary for a few years after I gave that baby away, through a bout of rape therapy, through a marriage with a controlling man, through so many heartaches that I felt stuck in the sorrowful mysteries. I never made it to the glorious mysteries, never resurrected like Christ. I quit my marriage and quit my church and dropped the beads into the bottomless pit of my purse and let them sit and think about how they failed me.

But now I look at them and see a story at each bead, see my own stories instead of the Jesus mysteries, see my own life mysteries, all connected by silver wire, all joined in an unending circle of joyful, sorrowful, and glorious days. My pregnancy didn't abort, I gave up a healthy baby girl, and now that circle has closed with a package of joyful color beads, with a hug on strange steps, and who am I to think strange old saints don't know what they're doing? Who am I, anyway? I'm just a blue bead, just another face of the goddess, another face of Jesus, another face of a secret daughter, another face like you, like anyone, another sparkle ancient mystery bead.