by Cynthia Hand
“It was no big deal,” I say, and actually I’m glad this time that she wasn’t at my party, so she didn’t get to hear my embarrassing announcement regarding boys. Which I’m pretty sure no one else is ever going to let me live down.
She reaches over to the bedside table, where there is a small package wrapped in blue paper. “Here.”
I unwrap it. It’s a ring box. Inside is a silver ring with a circle of stars around the circumference.
“It’s a copy of a sixteenth-century English ring in the British Museum,” Mom explains. “It’s called a poesy ring.”
I get an instant lump in my throat. Do not, I think, under any circumstances, cry in front of your sick mother.
Mom takes the ring and reads the inscription on the inside: “Many are the starrs I see, but in my eye no starr like thee.”
“It’s perfect.” I slide the ring onto the middle finger of my right hand, where it fits, well, perfectly.
“You’ve always been my star.” Mom opens her arms for a hug. “Happy birthday, darling girl.”
“I’ll never take it off,” I promise into her bony shoulder. “Never ever.”
She lies back against the bed again, her face pale. “I can’t believe you’re eighteen,” she murmurs. “It feels like I blinked, and you went from being a baby to being all grown up. How did that happen?”
“You fed me,” I answer. “I think that’s how it works.”
Mom laughs. “You used to cry from ten o’clock at night to a little past two in the morning, every single night until you were almost six months old. No matter what we tried.”
“It’s amazing you didn’t send me back and ask for a refund. I was clearly a faulty baby.”
Mom shakes her head. “We were thrilled to have you. We didn’t care about the crying.”
This is a familiar scene between us. Mom always says, “You were the most gorgeous baby. I couldn’t believe it, the first time I saw you.”
Then I say, “You were the most gorgeous mom.”
And then Mom says something like: “I would have been happy with a boring, regular baby. That’s all I was thinking about—that I wanted a baby. Any baby would do. But you’ve always been extraordinary. So smart. So funny. So beautiful. I could never have imagined in a million years that I’d be so lucky to end up with a daughter like you.”
And I say, “Okay, Mom, stop. You’re making me blush.”
I wait for it, but this time Mom doesn’t go into any of that. She’s quiet.
“Are you okay?” I ask. Mom’s always been a talker. Silence is usually a bad sign.
“I’m so tired of being here,” she says.
My breath catches. It’s been more than a year since that night in the movie theater when she had the heart attack. One minute she was munching popcorn and laughing at Chewbacca, and the next she said it felt like an elephant was sitting on her chest. We called an ambulance immediately and rushed her straight to the hospital. She spent hours in surgery and months in a state of touch and go. For a while she got to come home, hooked up to a machine that pumps her blood for her, but a few months ago she had to go back to the hospital full-time.
She needs a transplant. I’m choosing to believe that she’s going to get a new heart. Soon. I hope.
But here’s the thing: through all the ups and the downs of this past year, my mother has never complained. It’s an unspoken rule we have. For my sake, Mom tries not to show me how painful and exhausting it is now just to make it from one day to the next. And I, in return, try not to show her how terrified I am of losing her. And so we go on pretending that life is basically normal. I act like a standard-issue teenager—I keep my grades up and keep performing in plays for the high school theater and keep talking about boys and the drama club and how gross the cafeteria food is, and my parents act like Mom’s stay at the hospital is a minor inconvenience, a temporary thing.
Normalcy. That’s our goal. We’ve gotten really good at acting like everything’s fine.
But now Mom said she’s tired of being here, and I don’t know if she’s being literal or figurative. And I don’t know what to say.
“I’m sorry,” I go with finally. “I know this sucks.”
She closes her eyes and smiles faintly. “The universe unfolds as it should,” she murmurs. This, too, is what she always says. She’s not religious, but she believes in this greater force: the universe. Which somehow, in her mind, anyway, makes her heart problems part of some bigger picture. She has faith in that.
Her leg jerks slightly, her hand relaxing in mine. Her breath becomes even and deep. She’s fallen asleep. She does that a lot—conks out mid-conversation. I tuck her in, being careful not to tangle the covers in the hand with her IV. Then I sit watching the rise and fall of her chest, trying to commit every part of her face to memory. The gentle curve of her eyebrows. Her nose. The shape of her ears.
People who don’t know I’m adopted always tell me I look like her. I choose to take it as a compliment. Mom has long blond hair and gorgeous hazel eyes that are this perfect mix of green and brown. I don’t resemble her at all, really. But everyone keeps saying I’m the spitting image of my mother, unless they don’t know her, in which case they tell me I look like my redheaded, green-eyed, freckle-faced dad. Whom I resemble even less.
I turn her words over in my head: the universe unfolds as it should. If that’s true, then I have issues with the universe, because it’s not fair. My mom has the best heart, and it’s failing her.
Screw you, universe, I think. But I also kind of think: Please help?
I stand up and turn off the light, waiting in the dark, listening as the vitals monitor beeps and beeps, a steady, comforting sound, because it means she’s still here.
“Good night, Mom,” I whisper, and then I sneak out and close the door.
3
Dad’s up grading papers when I get home. He’s a fifth-grade teacher, the cool kind that all the kids wish was their dad. He works ridiculously hard, long hours for terrible pay, but he loves it.
“How is she?” he asks when I pop my head into the spare room he uses as an office.
“She seemed kind of low,” I report.
He nods. “She hates missing out on special occasions.”
“I know.”
“Speaking of special occasions, I’ve got something extra special for you.” He puts down his pencil and goes to the closet, where he pulls out another wrapped gift, which turns out to be a shirt for Boise State University, because it’s Dad’s lifelong dream that I attend BSU (like my father before me, he always says—a Star Wars joke) and watch football games on the famous blue “Smurf Turf.” Even though no one in my family is really into football.
“Oh, Dad, come on,” I groan.
“I know,” he agrees. “But I happen to think you look particularly good in blue and orange.” He waggles his eyebrows at me. “It’s almost time to start applying. I don’t want to pressure you, or to rush you, sweetie. But now’s the time to spread your wings, if you know what I mean.”
“I know, I know.” I hug the shirt to my chest. “Thanks, Dad.” I try to keep my expression neutral, which frankly is a big test of my acting ability. Not that there’s anything wrong with Boise State. It just feels so . . . small potatoes. So Idaho. I have dreams, bigger dreams than Boise State, wild, improbable dreams, and I’m not ready to wake up and face reality yet. Plus, it’s hard to even think about going to college right now, what with Mom in the hospital. So I change the subject. “Thanks for the party, too, by the way. It was fun.”
“It was . . . illuminating. Do we need to talk about sex?”
“Um, no. We already did that.” It was like five years ago when my parents sat me down and explained sex to me, in detail, with props like a banana and a condom. It was informative, but not something I’d ever want to hear again. Like, ever.
“Do you need me to get you a prescription for anything?” he asks now.
“There’s no boy, Dad,” I explain. �
��I don’t know why I said all that earlier. I didn’t know you were . . . I didn’t mean it.”
“It’s fine if you did mean it,” he says. “But I want you to be safe.”
And this is why Dad can be mortifying, but also kind of great. He has no shame about letting me know how things are (my parents are both prone to grand, inspirational speeches from time to time, usually about how very “special” I am—it’s embarrassing), but then Dad always steps back and lets me decide the best course of action for myself. He calls it “respecting my autonomy.” So I know Dad’s opinion, but what I do is up to me.
“I . . . I was thinking it would be nice to finally have a boyfriend,” I confess. “That’s all.”
He nods. “I can see that. You’ve had a lot going on over the last year.”
I bite my lip. “You don’t think it’s too much? That I’m just a meat bag full of hormones, and I should wait until . . . until things settle down . . . before adding boys to everything else?”
He snorts. “Aren’t we all just meat bags full of hormones?” He ruffles my bangs. “In my experience, which, yes, I understand is going to be totally different from your experience, big life events happen when they’re ready to happen, no matter what you’ve already got going on.”
“The universe unfolds as it should,” I murmur.
He nods a bit sadly, because now he’s thinking of Mom. “So be careful, sure. Try to make good choices. Be kind. Be aware that feelings are just that—feelings. Feelings can be fickle. But be open to the possibilities.”
And that’s the inspirational speech for today. “Fine,” I sigh dramatically. “Consider me open to the possibilities.”
His eyebrows come together. “But there’s no actual boy right now? You’re only talking about a theoretical boy?”
“Yes. A theoretical boy.”
“Right.” He cringes. “I would never threaten anybody with a shotgun. That was a joke, earlier.”
“I know.”
“I find the whole shotgun thing totally patronizing.”
“And you don’t own a shotgun,” I remind him.
“Good point.”
I give him a quick hug. “I’m going to bed now, Dad. Night.”
He presses a kiss to the top of my head. “Good night, Boo. I hope you had a decent birthday. There’s leftover cake in the kitchen. But it’s not the best cake, is it?”
“It’s definitely subpar,” I agree.
I get a slice anyway and go to my room and sit at my desk for a while, picking off the frosting and wasting time on my laptop. Then I get ready for bed and spend like an hour staring up at the ceiling and twisting my new ring around and around on my finger, pondering the meaning of life, birthdays, college, and the existence of theoretical boys, which seems more than silly now, considering that my life is firmly in this bubble of high school and theater and hospital, and it’s unlikely that I’m going to randomly bump into a new guy. And that gets me contemplating the overall will of the universe.
This weird unreliable universe.
Which gets me thinking about my birth mother.
I always think about her on my birthday. Probably because it’s the one thing I definitely know about my birth mother: that on September seventeenth, eighteen years ago, a sixteen-year-old girl had a baby, and that baby was me.
It was just one of the facts I grew up knowing about myself: I have blue eyes, my favorite color is purple, I like pizza, and I’m adopted. When I was little my parents told me they picked me out of a cabbage patch. As I got older my dad started to claim that I was left in the backyard by an alien spacecraft. Those were meant to be jokes, but there was a real story there, too, one they told me again and again, about a lonely couple who desperately desired a child, and a brave young woman who wanted to give a better life to her baby. It’s always felt like a fairy tale written specifically about me. One where I was the happy ending.
But that’s the thing, I think, frowning up at the ceiling. I’m the ending of the story. I don’t even know the beginning.
And I’m eighteen now. I’m an adult. Legally, anyway.
I get up and go to the doorway of my room, peering down the hall, where I can see Dad’s finally gone to bed. Then I close my door, lock it, and open my laptop again.
Like I said, I think about my birth mother. When I was six and went to vacation Bible school with my friend Alice, and they told us the story of Moses and his mother weaving a basket out of reeds and setting him afloat on the Nile, hoping to save his life. Or at dinner at another friend’s house when I was eight, when I looked around the table and noticed that every single member of her family had the same nose. Or when my mom took me to a Broadway show when I was twelve, and little orphan Annie sang this song about her parents, wondering if they were far away or close by, wondering if her mother played piano, if she collected art, if she sewed. And suddenly my chest felt tight.
“Betcha they’re good,” Annie sang out into the darkness. “Why shouldn’t they be? Their one mistake was giving up me.”
That was when it really hit me. My birth mother was out there, somewhere. Then I looked at my actual mother sitting next to me with this pained look on her face, but also like she was trying to be brave, for me, and I dashed away the tears that had filled my eyes. I smiled. Because I didn’t want her to feel like that’s how I saw her and Dad—like a place my birth parents had dumped me.
After that I thought about my birth mother more often. On birthdays. Or those times that inevitably your friends start talking about the things they inherited from their parents that they wished they hadn’t—a cleft chin or double-jointed elbows or nearsightedness. It always kind of bugs me, how much I don’t know about that kind of thing—what’s lurking in my genes—how there’s this entire set of information that I am totally clueless about. So a couple years ago curiosity finally got the better of me, and I went online and did a few internet searches, not to find my birth mother, exactly, but to discover who she was. Who she is.
And maybe, by extension, who I am.
I didn’t find anything. But I remember that there was something about being eighteen and requesting my official birth certificate—not the one they issued to my parents, with their names listed and my name as the one they gave me, but the original. The one with my birth mother’s name.
It only takes me a minute now to locate the request form for Idaho and the county I was born in. I fill it out and use my emergency credit card to pay for the processing fee. But my finger hovers over the mouse before I confirm the order. Waiting. Excited. Scared. A little guilty, maybe, because I don’t know how my parents would feel about this, and they’ve got so much to deal with right now.
But they don’t have to know.
I bite my lip. Close my eyes. Take a breath. And click confirm.
I only want to find out her name, I tell myself. Because I always think about my birth mother on my birthday. It’d be nice if I could put a name to that hazy image of her in my mind, that teenage girl, who maybe looks like me.
I wonder if she thinks about me, too.
Dear X,
Me again. Who else, right? Last night after dinner the girls in the dorm somehow got to talking about the letters. Then Brit had the idea that we should all read one another’s. I protested, but I was outvoted. So this is peer pressure, really. Take note. Peer pressure is not only about drinking beer.
Brit’s letter was the longest—she tried to write out her entire life story and every tiny detail about who she is and how she ended up here. Her baby’s a girl. If it weren’t for the unfortunate circumstances—she’s thirteen, and the father is a married volleyball coach; she’s right out of a daytime talk show, Brit—she’d keep her baby, she says. She has this idea that when the girl turns eighteen she’ll find her again, and they’ll simply pick up where they left off, mother and daughter, happily ever after.
She’s clearly not a fan of reality. But I didn’t say anything. She’s just a kid.
Teresa’s
letter was like a confession—she wrote about God and her sins and how she hopes her baby can grow up without shame. Which made us all go quiet for a while.
Out of the four of us who are currently living here at Booth, Heather’s letter was the best. She talked about the better life she wants for her baby, and she listed some things that it would be helpful to know, like that blushing runs in the family and not to be embarrassed if he/she turns out to be one of those people who blush easily, because somewhere in the world she’s out there blushing, too. She was bright red the whole time we were reading the letters. It was sweet.
My letter was the shortest, and everyone agreed that it was terrible. Impersonal. Unhelpful. In other words, I got it all wrong.
“You didn’t say anything that will help the baby get to know you,” Brit complained.
“Because I don’t want to be known,” I said. No offense, X, but I think that’s for the best. You go your way. I’ll go mine.
Brit looked at me all full of pity. Like she felt sorry for me.
“You’re a good writer,” Heather piped up, blushing, of course. “But . . .”
They all think I should rewrite my letter.
I told them to mind their own business and went to bed. I wasn’t going to write anything else. I don’t owe you my life story or any real explanations for anything. That’s not how this process works. I am giving you freedom and a chance to start fresh. A clean slate for both of us, really. I don’t want to mess that up with my baggage.
But today I had some downtime in my room, and I kept thinking about the other girls’ letters. If I were Brit’s baby, I’d read that long, detailed letter, and I’d understand so much. Maybe more than I’d want to know. But it got me thinking again that I’d want to. Know, I mean. I’d want to know more about where I came from. The how and the why. The story.
I don’t want you to feel shame, like Teresa wrote about. I don’t want to label you a mistake, but you aren’t my brightest shining moment, either. That’s not your fault. You’re a good thing. You shouldn’t have to feel ashamed of the way you ended up in this world.