The door is like any other door on the street, on a house like all the other houses.

It is white wood, thick, double-locked.

But behind it could lie all of Darlyne Lounsbury's hopes and dreams.

Would the woman who answers have green eyes and small teeth like hers? Would there be a glint of recognition; a gasp as a long-harboured secret was pulled from the earth? Or, at the very least, would there be another clue, a marker on the emerging map of her identity?

"Do you know who my mother is?" Lounsbury asks by way of introduction.

In response, she receives the now-familiar litany of questions — "What was her name?" "Where did she live?" — and the final farewell that follows her like a theme song.

"I'm afraid I can't help you."

This door shuts too.

Lounsbury, 51, has spent the past three years searching for information about her birth mother. But where adoptees might follow the established routes of the provincial registry, parent finders or the Children's Aid Society, Lounsbury is searching along Birchmount Rd. in Scarborough. Because she was never actually adopted.

Lounsbury, the eldest daughter of John (Jack) and Georgina (Gene) Lounsbury, was born in Toronto's East General hospital in 1951. She didn't look like either of her parents and her dark hair and thin frame set her apart from her fairer, plumper siblings. But she was anchored with the family lore that she resembled her grandmother on her father's side.

On May 1, 1999, her father died of an aneurysm — and a family secret surfaced, a story with the dark twists and turns of a Dickens novel.

First, she found out her father had been adopted. So she didn't, after all, get her looks from her grandmother.

And then she learned that no one could tell her who her real mother was.

Bob Brooks, a retired firefighter in Tillsonburg, Ont., who was Gene's cousin said the family thought at the time Gene couldn't have children. "So a woman went into the hospital under Gene's name and had a baby and Gene walked out with her. That was Darlyne," says Brooks. "It was a known story to everyone but Darlyne."

Stunned, Lounsbury contacted the hospital to request her birth records. What she found, to her mind, proved the story that another woman had gone into the hospital under her mother's name. Written beside that name was the Roman numeral for six, meaning she had already given birth to six children.

She called every remaining family member and friend of her father and mother, who had died in 1983.

"They all say she had a bunch of other kids and couldn't afford you. And that dad was her milkman, and that he went to the hospital as her husband, and your mother went in as her friend. And that the woman that raised me, after a few days, walked out with me," Lounsbury says.

But then she reached Brooks, her mother's cousin.

Brooks remembered the summer of 1949. He was a 13-year-old kid tagging along on his cousin's husband's milk wagon. Each day, Lounsbury's father would stop the cart outside a run-down house on Birchmount Rd. just south of Eglinton Ave., and tell him to take off for 30 minutes.

"I knew Jack, even as a 13-year-old kid back then, was seeing this other woman. I knew she was pregnant at the time and had other kids running around," Brooks says.

It's a story Lounsbury has latched on to like an umbilical chord.

Every day now, she has worked toward filling the gaping holes.

She tried to contact the doctor who delivered her, only to find he had recently died.

She posted ads in the local newspapers. She has combed the old street directories and voters lists of the area. She has searched the local school records and baptism accounts at the local church. She has written to members of Parliament. She has enlisted help from the Scarborough Historical Society.

"I just want to know the truth," she says. "I'm looking to find something that belongs to me. Something that's attached to me. I don't know why I am the way I am, why my hands are the way they are, why I walk they way I do. It's very important."

Adoption experts say Lounsbury's case is the first of its kind they have come across. But it doesn't surprise them.

"It's not hard to believe, especially in the '40s and '50s when it was shameful for a child to be born out of wedlock, that hush-hush kinds of arrangements were made," says May Allan, supervisor of adoption disclosure for the Toronto Children's Aid Society.

"You don't hear very often of stories like this. But we suspect there were a lot of similar things, because of all the secrecy and cover-ups. We have no way of knowing," agrees Karen Lynn, president of the Canadian Council of Birth Mothers.

Milton Abrodovich, vice-president of the Toronto East General Hospital, says members of his staff have combed all the remaining records and even found a nurse who worked on the ward back in 1951. "We've provided 100 per cent of the information we have. There's nothing else we can dig up," he says.

Which brings Lounsbury back, time and time again, to Birchmount Rd., which has seen a lot of changes in a half-century. She approaches the front door of house after house, hoping someone's memory will uncloud with the image of a woman surrounded by children living nearby so many years ago.

But, time and time again, the doors close and she is left with only more questions.

"I'm holding my breath. I'm still hopeful somebody will remember something, or see something, or something will connect. There's got to be somebody somewhere," she says, peering up a home long overgrown with bush and trees. "I'll still keep trying. You can't walk away. At least, I can't."

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