by Cynthia Hand
Dear X,
Me again. Who else? . . . I’m just going to lean into this letter thing. . . . I’m sitting here all knocked up and there’s no Prince Charming in sight. . . . Your sperm donor is not a total asshat. . . . I was going in one direction, and then something happened to cause me to go the other way. . . . I’m so sorry about the weird feet. . . . You belong with them. . . . I want you to have THESE PARENTS, the teacher and the cake maker and the laughing. . . . I’m not ready to be a mother. . . . I guess I’m not ready to let you go. I’ll see you on the other side.
S
She writes like she’s speaking, pages and pages of her talking with me—at me, directly to me—and I feel irrationally guilty that I have no memory of her or of any of the moments she describes when I was with her. But her letters make me laugh my head off and cry my eyes out. I stare and stare at the picture of myself, the grainy black-and-white sonogram, and I try to imagine what it must have been like to hear her voice, to feel her touch, to drift off to sleep to the beating of her heart.
Then, when I’ve fallen apart a few times and put myself back together again, I get Nyla to pick me up and drop me at the hospital. My mom is officially being released in about three hours.
My parents are kissing when I come through the door to Mom’s room. Kissing. Like old times when I used to catch them kissing when they thought I wasn’t looking. In the hallway. Kissing. In the bathroom right after they brushed their teeth. Kissing. Folding laundry. Kissing. Making dinner. Kissing. Like, well, teenagers. I used to think they were excessive and gross. But now the sight of them kissing again like normal, healthy people fills me with joy.
I try for a joke. “Hey, is that good for your heart?”
“Oh, hello, sweetie,” Mom says, and she’s smiling, and she’s not wearing a cannula or an IV anymore, not hooked up to anything. It’s a sight I never thought I’d see again. “I was hoping you’d come by,” she says. “How was your day?”
“Fine,” I croak.
“No more rehearsals. You’re a free agent.” Dad grins. “Want to all go to a movie?”
“Bill.” Mom frowns. “Not a movie.”
“Well, why not?” he says. “Okay, so we had one epically bad movie experience. But does that mean we should never see a movie again?”
“I think it might mean that, Dad.”
“No,” he says. “No, we have to get back on the horse. I used to love movies. I miss movies. We should go.”
“All right,” Mom laughs. “What’s playing?”
“The new Star Wars movie,” I inform them.
Dad groans. “Okay, it’s too soon. How about dinner? What’s close to here?”
He’s joking; at least I think he is. Mom’s supposed to go home tonight, not out on the town. She’s supposed to go straight home and straight into bed, where she’s supposed to rest and rehabilitate for weeks. Months. Years, who knows? But that’s fine by me, so long as she’s home.
“Perkins,” Mom says, playing along. “Oh, I do miss pie.” She turns to me. “How was Perkins, by the way? You’ve kind of clammed up on us since Saturday. Somehow I never got the details about your date with Bastian.”
“Bastian’s gay.” I feel weird about telling them this, this thing that is so personal about Bastian, but if I don’t tell them they’ll continue to build it up.
“He is?” Mom is shocked. “But I thought you liked him.”
“I did.”
“So when did you find out he was gay?”
“Right after I kissed him, on Saturday night, after our date at Perkins.”
“Oh, Boo,” Dad says, in sympathy. “Bummer.”
I shrug. “We discussed it, Bastian and me. I’m okay, and he’s okay.”
“Obviously it wasn’t meant to be,” Mom says.
“You don’t seem too broken up about it,” Dad observes.
“I’m fine. I’m better than fine. You’re coming home.”
“Home,” Mom sighs, smiling. She turns to Dad. “Let’s go home, Bill.”
He checks his watch. “We’ve got a couple more hours. What will we do to pass the time?”
That’s my cue. “I need to tell you something,” I blurt out. Because if I’m going to shock my mother with this news, it should probably be at the hospital. Just in case.
“Uh-oh,” Dad says. “Tell us what?”
“I need you to be calm, all right? Both of you. Don’t freak out.”
“Cass . . . ,” Dad says like a warning. “What are you doing?”
“I can be calm.” Mom grabs Dad’s hand. “We can be calm, can’t we, honey?”
I just spit it out. “I went to Boise today. Well, yesterday and today. I just got back.”
My parents look at each other. “What? Why?” Dad asks.
“They found the letters from my birth mother.” I sling my backpack off my shoulder. “They called and left me a message on Saturday, saying I had to pick them up in person. So I went to get them.”
Silence. They’re both staring at me in shock.
“Letters?” Mom asks after a minute. “As in, more than one?”
I take the bundle out of my backpack and hold them up.
“There are seventeen of them,” I report with a giddy laugh. “Some of them are really long, too, like ten pages front and back. She’s long-winded. But she’s honest and whip-smart and hilarious, Mom, and I feel like I know her, reading what she wrote.”
“What do they say?” There’s a tremor of fear in her voice.
“They’re amazing. Some of them are about my birth father, who was an actor—an actor, right?—and some of them are about her life at the school, like she’s writing in a diary. She was living in a home for pregnant girls. I don’t know if you knew that. And some are about her dad and her evil stepmother and her mom in Colorado and this guy Ted she had a crush on.” I stop myself. I can’t tell them everything right now. There’s too much.
“Did she give . . . names?” Mom asks.
“No. She made up names, like aliases, for everybody in her life. And she always signed what she wrote with the letter S. So I guess that Amber lady was right, after all.”
Dad’s expression freezes. He’s been looking kind of frozen this entire time, actually. Like my news has turned him to stone.
“What Amber lady?” Mom asks.
I’d forgotten that I never told Mom about the false alarm with the adoption registry website. My bad.
“I’ll tell you everything later,” I say quickly. “I promise. But you can read the letters yourself. When you get home. Or . . . now. If you want.”
I hold the bundle out to her.
She’s calm. But she gazes at the stack of letters like she’s not sure what to do.
“You’re my mother,” I say like it’s a disclaimer. “Nothing will ever, ever change that. Do you still want to know about her, even though you’re not dying anymore?”
She looks up at me, and her eyes are uncertain, and sad, and understanding, all at the same time. “I don’t know,” she admits softly. “Everything’s happening so fast.”
“Cat, we don’t have to—” Dad starts.
“I want to know,” I say firmly. “And I want to share this with you.”
Mom takes the letters carefully out of my hands. “Thank you, honey,” she says.
“Okay. Good.” I go out and close the door behind me. I want to give them time, alone, to read and process it all.
Then we have a lot to talk about.
Dear X,
I’ve been thinking, actually, that I don’t need to write this letter. If you’re reading this, you’ve been adopted, so it doesn’t matter, right? I should write about something else. The weather (still hot). Sports (ugh, not sports). Something. Not this. But then I got thinking about how I want you to know as much as possible about me, and about Dawson, so that by knowing about the two of us you’ll also know more about yourself; a little more, anyway. It all comes back to: if I were you, I’d want to know.
In my last letter you’ll recall that Ted brought me the form—the non-identifying information form, filled out by Dawson. I thought I’d pass it along to Melly, and she could put it in the official file along with my form (the boring version of my form, that is) and you’d have a more or less complete picture of the two of us.
But then I read Dawson’s form.
It’s messed up, X. I remember now that Ted said Dawson had a kind of crapshoot life, and you can totally read between the lines and see that crapshoot life when you read the form. It’s not great, is what I’m saying. It brings up a lot of potential problems. I worried for you when I read that form, and then I worried about your parents.
What if they see what’s in there and decide that they don’t want you after all? What if they’re turned off by his baggage? Not that any of it is his fault. I want to stress that Dawson’s smart and talented at everything he tries and funny and sexy and cool. But what if all your parents see is the word jail and the word drugs and they want a different baby, a new and improved baby?
I’m two weeks away from having you, X, if that.
I can’t find new parents for you now. I don’t want to. I want you to have THESE PARENTS, the teacher and the cake maker and the laughing.
So this morning, I made up my mind. I decided not to turn in Dawson’s form. It wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for the birth father not to fill out the form. No one would ask me about it. No one would go to Dawson and demand that he fill it out again. I could throw it away, or keep it, put it in a drawer somewhere and forget about it. That would be the smart thing to do.
But I never have been that smart, now have I?
So I asked myself, then, why? Why would I hide Dawson’s form from you and from your parents? Why not simply let the truth be the truth? Let the chips fall. Keep it real.
And the answer was an easy one: because I’m scared, DUH.
This whole pregnancy deal is all about fear lately. When my mom was pregnant with me, they might have told her something vague about not getting drunk when you’re pregnant and maybe not smoking. I don’t know. It was the eighties. This was probably the gist of the pregnancy advice: “Don’t drink too much and/or don’t do too many drugs. Now push.”
But these days there’s this huge list of don’ts. I shouldn’t drink at all, or smoke, obviously. I shouldn’t eat a ham sandwich, because there could be listeria in the deli meat, and pregnant women are susceptible to listeriosis. I could literally die from eating a ham sandwich. You could die. Also, no sushi—although I’m not a big fan of raw fish anyway—and no soft cheese or anything unpasteurized, and no black licorice, which I happen to love. No hot baths—I could cook you inside of me if the water is hotter than 99 degrees. No roller coasters (okay, this one makes sense) and no lying on my back when I sleep—I should lie on my left side, because you get more blood flow that way or something. I shouldn’t eat too much, because then I might inadvertently imprint obesity into your DNA, but I shouldn’t eat too little, because you need to grow quality eyeballs and such. I shouldn’t eat too many peanuts, because you might develop a peanut allergy. But I shouldn’t avoid peanuts, either, because you . . . might develop a peanut allergy.
I mean, what the hell?
The point is, I’m supposed to be afraid now, very, very afraid. And sometimes I am. Sometimes you sleep inside of me for a long time, unmoving, and I feel this fear bubbling up in my brain, that maybe you got tangled up in the cord and you’re strangling in there and how would I even know? My body starts to feel like a hazardous place for you. So I drink cold water to wake you up, although I’m not sure how that’s supposed to work. And if you don’t start moving around after that, I poke you. That’s right. You’re a baby, simply trying to take a nap, and I’m out here poking you in the back because I’m scared I’m not keeping you safe enough.
Ugh, right? And it’s not really better out here. If you were born already, your parents would have a lot to be afraid of, too. SIDS. Autism. The things you’ll grab and put in your mouth. Whether vaccinations are actually safe, which they are, but there’s a bunch of people out there screaming about how they’re not, so then you have to be afraid of vaccinations or afraid of your baby getting sick and dying because someone else didn’t vaccinate their kid. Then there are kidnappings and your face on milk cartons. Kids coming to school with guns and killing people, like at Columbine last year. Date rape. Drug overdoses. STDs and teenage pregnancy—ha! And on and on it goes, a never-ending list of things to be terrified of when it comes to you.
It’s society, I guess. We’re always being told that we should be afraid.
But I’m sick of being ruled by fear. I refuse to be. Don’t you deserve to at least know both the good and the bad? Don’t your parents deserve to know? And if they do reject you because of things in Dawson’s background, they probably shouldn’t be your parents, no matter how great that woman’s cupcakes are.
So I’ve now decided to be honest with you and not hold anything back. If I were you, and this form had all this information about my biological father, I’d want to read it.
I’d still want to know.
Okay, I turned in the form at lunch break. And yeah, it’s not flattering, X. Your parents can throw it in a drawer, too, if that’s what they think is best. I’m going to leave that up to them to decide. But if you’re reading this now, like I said, it doesn’t really matter. They adopted you anyway. You’ve probably read the form by now, and maybe you’re not thrilled about it. But that’s okay.
I just want to say: your genes don’t define you. Dawson actually wrote that on the form himself, or something similar to it, and he would know. Your genetic makeup is only a small part of the person you’ll become. I’m counting on that, X. I’m taking the side of nurture over nature here.
You’re going to be fine, X. You’re going to be great.
S
37
I return to the hospital. It’s been two hours since I dropped the letter bomb on my parents. It feels too soon, and I’m not sure what I expect to find when I go back into that room, but Mom’s about to be discharged. We’re out of time. I should have waited until she was home, I chide myself as I shuffle down the hallway toward her wing. I should have waited like a week or two. Maybe more. But it felt . . . impossible not to tell them. It had to come out.
My parents are both sitting on the bed when I slip back into the room. The letters are scattered between them, and they’re talking earnestly, but when they see me they stop and both kind of open their arms, and I go over, and we all hold each other for a while. And then they let me go, and I stand back and look at them. Assessing for damage.
Mom’s eyes and nose are red.
Dad clears his throat. “Before we talk about this, before we go any further, we—I—need to tell you something.”
“This is about Dawson’s form, right?” I swallow, hard. That letter did make me stop and wonder what I might be getting myself into. Do I really want to know this stuff? “It’s bad, isn’t it?”
“It’s not bad.” Mom shakes her head like she’s baffled at the idea. “I don’t remember it being so bad. It was a long time ago when we received that form. Of course we had to wait until you were older before we could share it with you. Honestly, I’d forgotten about it.”
I put a hand on my hip and give her a “Yeah, right. Nice try” kind of look, which is an expression, by the way, that I picked up from her. “But it was bad enough that you didn’t give it to me when you gave me the one from my birth mother this year. Right? You kind of edited that part out.”
“That was my choice,” Dad sighs through his lips. He shakes his head sorrowfully. “It was the wrong call. I should have given them both to you. I see that now very clearly.”
“Yeah, well, what do they say about hindsight?”
He meets my eyes steadily. “I’m sorry.”
I’m not mad at him, even though I probably should be. The thing is, I trust my dad. He’s always done his best to lo
ok out for me, to keep me safe, to do what he thinks is best, so it must be bad if he thought that what was best was for me not to know about it. Dad’s always been an all-cards-on-the-table sort of father.
“It’s okay,” I say. “I hid some things from you, too.”
“I didn’t want you to get hurt,” Dad says. “That’s all.”
“I know.”
“But then your mother had to go and remind me of how totally capable you are at handling everything that’s thrown at you.”
“No,” I protest. “I am not.”
“Yes, you are,” Mom says. “You’re our little rock.”
“You see, we know. We were there, Boo,” Dad continues. “I was right there next to you for the worst moments of my life and your life, too. And I think we must have done a bang-up job raising you, and I’m trying not to get a big head about it,” he adds. “Because you’re the strongest person I know.”
And . . . I’m crying. Gah.
Dad stands up and hugs me that way he does where he puts his arms around me tight and rocks me from side to side. Then he pulls away. “Anyway. I’ll give you the form in question as soon as we get back to the house, if you want. It’s in the filing cabinet.”
“All right.” I glance at Mom. “But let’s get it all out in the open when we get back, okay? We’ll tell each other everything now. Everything we’ve been afraid to say. Everything we’ve left out.”
“After we get home,” Dad agrees. “Yes. Full disclosure.”
“Speaking of home,” Mom says, and gestures to the nurse who’s appeared in the doorway. “It’s check-out time.”
“Let’s get you out of here, Cat,” says the nurse. “I’m sick of you.”
“I’m ready,” Mom says in practically a cheer. “Let’s go, let’s go.”
We drive extra slowly all the way back to the house, with me riding shotgun and Mom in the back seat wrapped in a blanket, a strange reversal of roles. Then we walk her carefully up to the house, where Nyla has pinned up a sign across the front door that reads, “WELCOME HOME, MAMA CAT” and through the living room and down the hall and into my parents’ bedroom, where we arrange Mom on the bed and prop her up with pillows and ask her if she needs anything about a million times.