SAVANNAH
The women spent six days in Breckenridge. At the end of the week, they all flew home. Two months later, Bess graduated from the University of Minnesota with a bachelor’s degree in marketing, moved out of her campus apartment and back into her parents’ house in Minneapolis where she’d grown up. That’s when she found out she was pregnant.
THOMAS
Bess’s father had died of a heart attack the year before. So it was just Bess and her mother, Maggie, in the big house the afternoon she told her mom the news. She said it happened on spring break. She said he was a nice guy, but there was no relationship. No reason to involve him. She didn’t tell her mother his name. But she did say, “I want to keep it.”
SAVANNAH
There’s one other thing we know about Bess from that day: she wasn’t pregnant with just one baby. She was carrying twins. And we are those kids. Our mother passed away before we could ever find out who our father is.
[pause]
My name is Savannah McClair.
THOMAS
And my name is Thomas McClair.
SAVANNAH
And this is the story of our search for our biological father.
[pause]
Over the next several episodes, we’ll do our best to interview anyone and everyone who can tell us more about our origin story. The friends who traveled together, the people they encountered, those who heard the stories of their time in Colorado. We’ll also ask you, our listeners, to help us in our search. One of you out there may know something—no matter how small—that helps us put the pieces of our history together.
THOMAS
Why do we want to do this? The reasons are both huge and obvious. We want to understand the other half of our DNA. We want to learn more about ourselves. We want to learn more about our mother, Bess. We may even get to meet the man who helped make us.
SAVANNAH
There’s also the question, “Just what do we expect from this adventure?” Do we expect a relationship with our biological father? Do we expect him to even want to be found?
THOMAS
And do we expect to like what we find?
SAVANNAH
To be honest, we don’t know. We don’t know what we’ll find. We don’t know what to expect.
THOMAS
But we do know we want to try.
SAVANNAH
We know one more thing, too. We know our mother, Bess, isn’t here to help us. She can’t answer any of our questions.
THOMAS
Our mother died in a car accident four years ago. We spent enough of our lives with her to know how much we loved her. And we believe she’d support our efforts to solve this mystery.
SAVANNAH
But she’s not here. And that means, this journey is ours to start.
THOMAS
We don’t have any idea how long it will take us to find our dad. To be honest, we don’t know if we even will find him.
SAVANNAH
That’s why we’re going to need all the help we can get. From the people we know. And from people we’ve never even met.
THOMAS
So to those of you listening right now, thanks. We’re glad you’re here.
SAVANNAH
Really. So glad you’re here.
THOMAS
And, we’re hoping you’ll stick with us. All the way to the end.
<
Nine
Thomas
The day after their first episode aired, Savannah, Maggie and Thomas sat in the basement studio sporting headphones and surrounded by blankets on the walls as temporary soundproofing. They agreed to interview Maggie before any of their other potential guests because she was the most readily available.
“Bess figured she was about eight weeks along by the time she graduated.”
Thomas monitored the soundboard. Savannah asked the questions.
“Two months is far enough along to believe a pregnancy test, but too far along to not have seen a doctor, so I scrambled to find a good ob-gyn for her. I didn’t have one of my own, of course. I was in my late fifties by that point and my lady parts were well beyond their use by date—”
“Ew, Maggie,” Savannah interrupted. “Boundaries.”
Thomas shook the image of—whatever—from his mind.
“Apologies—” Maggie held up her hands in surrender. “My point is, Dr. Maher’s mother and I went to high school together, and she was the only woman in our class to go all the way through to a PhD. So, I knew her daughter came from smarts.”
Savannah jotted notes on her script. “All right, so you’ve got this appointment for Mom. What happens at the doctor’s office?”
“That’s when we learned there were two heartbeats, not just one.”
“Right,” Savannah prompted. “But paint the picture for us. How did you find out? What did you experience?”
Maggie nodded. “All right. Well, your mom—”
Savannah interrupted again. “Remember, you’re telling this story to the audience, not us. Call her Bess.”
“Of course. Bess—” she paused briefly and gave them an accommodating smile “—wanted me to go into the appointment with her. So I did. And it had been over twenty years since I’d been pregnant, so I didn’t realize until the procedure was already underway that, in the early stages of a woman’s pregnancy, ultrasounds aren’t done by scanning the top of the belly. They’re performed with a vaginal wand that looks like an electronic penis with its own special condom and everything.”
“Maggie!” Thomas swatted the headphones from his ears.
“You told me to paint a picture.”
“Can you at least leave Mom’s veejay out of it, please?” Savannah didn’t look like she was ever going to be able to peel the disgust off her face. “It’s not like Thomas and I want to picture that.”
“You do know how babies are born, yes?”
Thomas decided to step in before he got nauseous. “Maybe just stick to the basics. Okay?”
“Good grief, you two.” Maggie scowled. “All right. So the doctor is there with Bess and me, and we can see a grainy black-and-white image on the ultrasound. We have no idea what we’re looking at until Dr. Maher says, ‘Do you see what I see?’”
Thomas felt his face flush with preemptive panic about the image Maggie was about to conjure.
“And the doctor must have seen the confusion on our faces because she smiled and pointed at a tiny flutter along the curved outline of what she told us was the uterine wall. ‘This is Baby A.’ And your mother—” Maggie caught herself. “Sorry. Bess sat nearly upright on the table. ‘That’s my baby?’ she said. I couldn’t tell if she was amazed or dumbfounded or happy or all three.”
Maggie stopped and sat back in her chair. She smiled, and Thomas could see that her eyes were set on memories made eighteen years ago.
“The doctor replied, ‘That’s one of your babies, yes.’ Then she pointed at a nearly identical flutter on the opposite side of Bess’s uterus and said, ‘This is Baby B.’”
Holy cow. Thomas had never thought about the two of them like...that. Before they had names. Before he was the boy and Savannah was the girl. Before he was big and she was little. Before she was the artist and he was the scientist. Back when they were blank screens, just waiting to be switched on and start running their code.
Where had his code originated? That was what he had always wondered. He knew only half of himself, at best. Half of his data set, of his inputs, his variables. His bugs. The rest of it—of what made him—came from a whole group of people he couldn’t even picture. Ghosts in the machine.
And Thomas had never liked ghosts.
* * *
Maggie’s interview was interesting, but if they were going to get anywhere, they needed to interview
the three friends who were there in the very beginning—the women on their mom’s fateful spring break trip to Colorado.
“Don’t call it fateful,” Savannah argued. “That implies something bad happened.”
They’d moved all their work from the dining room down to the desk in the basement studio.
“Decisive?” Thomas said.
“Oh, because Mom purposefully went hunting for a sperm daddy?”
She’d promised to quit using that term. “Fine. Momentous. That better?”
“Pivotal,” said Savannah. “In fact, that’s got to be our focus for this whole search. Focus on the pivotal moments. That’s where we’ll find the most important stuff.”
Her logic actually seemed to make sense. “Okay, but what’s another example of a pivotal moment? Besides the one that made us?”
Savannah looked at him like she’d just caught him counting to ten on his fingers. “For starters, her decision to keep us?”
Oh, that.
“And who knows what else,” she went on. “Maybe Mom had conversations with Maggie or her friends that we don’t know about. Like, what if she asked one of them whether she should tell us about our dad? Or—” She slapped her hand on the desk. “What if he tried to get in touch? What if he actually knows one of Mom’s friends?”
No way. Thomas didn’t have any more proof than the sick feeling in his stomach, but he knew what Savannah was implying couldn’t be true. “She wouldn’t have hidden him from us, Van.”
She wagged a finger. “But we don’t know that for sure.”
An icy feeling swept him from top to bottom, fast and chilling. Their mom would never have done that.
Maggie opened the door to the basement and clomped downstairs. She appeared around the corner holding a wicker basket overflowing with mail. “I have the addresses for your mom’s friends in here somewhere. I thought you might need them.” She dropped the basket onto the desk and began to rummage. “I don’t know why I keep all this, but I guess it’s coming in handy now.” She flipped through the pile of torn envelopes and holiday cards. “You know the names of the three women who were in Colorado with her, right? Kristen, Elise and Brynn. They still send us Christmas cards every year.”
“There’s one of them.” Thomas grabbed a picture from the basket of a young family, all smiles and L.L. Bean sweaters. He looked at the mother’s face, where the soft crinkles formed around her eyes—his mom would have had those now. She would have been just old enough.
“Ta-da!” Maggie pulled a second card from the pile. “You have Elise there, and I found Kristen. Now, where is Brynn?”
When they’d found all three addresses, Thomas and Savannah wrote to the women, asking if they’d be willing to be interviewed. Kristen and Elise agreed within a few days.
Then, there was Brynn. Thomas and Savannah were shocked to listen to her terse voice mail on the McClairs’ home phone later the next week.
This is Brynn Reynolds. I’m calling in regard to the letter I received from Thomas and Savannah regarding their search for their biological father. In regard to your request to interview me, I am calling to say that I’m certain I have nothing of value to add in regard to what happened during that spring break trip. Thank you.
So many regards for zero cooperation.
That night, Maggie requested Chef Bart’s miso noodle soup for dinner, and the three of them sat down to discuss the Brynn dilemma over brimming bowls.
Thomas didn’t feel like eating. His former 4x200 team had dropped a whopping nine-tenths of a second in that day’s meet. He’d stood in the bleachers watching while they’d celebrated the victory he’d wanted so badly.
“That’s good news for Lincoln, folks,” the announcer had said over the loudspeaker. “Our four-by-two-hundred relay team of Bratakos, Biehl, Rostenkowski and Soltis have qualified for conference finals.”
The implication could not have been clearer: he had been the team’s problem all along. The realization sat in his stomach like a rock.
“Brynn clearly doesn’t want to participate,” Savannah said. Thomas snapped back to attention. “Maybe we should draft a list of questions for Brynn and drop them in the mail. If she doesn’t want to talk to us in person, she might answer in written form. Might be better, anyway. She sounded uptight.”
“Did you hear her say no?” Thomas said. “All I heard was lots of blah-blah-blah about whether or not she has anything to add to our search. How does she know? Why does she get to decide what we do?”
“Thomas?” It was Maggie’s something’s wrong but I’m not going to push voice.
“What’s with you, all of a sudden?” Savannah never had a problem pushing. “All I’m saying is that Brynn reminded me of Mrs. Borstrup.” She’d been their third grade teacher and was so mean that, on the days Savannah didn’t come home crying, Thomas did.
Maggie looked up at the mention of her name. “Awful woman.”
Savannah nodded. “Dead inside.” She looked back at Thomas. “Maybe we should steer clear.”
Thomas again fought the urge to escape another conversation with no answers.
“Or—” Maggie paused to consider. “Brynn already received one letter, and that didn’t work. But a phone call could help. She might find it reassuring to speak with you personally. And how harmful could a call possibly be?”
<
The Kids Are Gonna Ask
A Guava Media Podcast
Season01—Episode02
Tuesday, June 02
SAVANNAH
What questions did you ask Mom about our father? I mean, you had to be curious about him, right?
MAGGIE
Sure I was curious. But, when the two of you came along I didn’t have time to wonder. Let’s be honest, you don’t get many quiet moments to think when you’re raising twins. And when Bess first came home and told me she was pregnant and she wanted to keep you, I mean...it was enough to just try and take that in. You have to remember, I’d just lost my husband. My best friend. I was still in shock, trying to find my bearings. Some days it was still hard to get out of bed. But I was looking forward to Bess’s graduation. I had it circled on the calendar with hearts and stars. It was the first happy thing to happen in a year, ever since we lost George.
[pause]
So when she said, “Mom, there’s something else, too,” I admit, maybe it was selfish, but I was overjoyed! It was all I could think about. A baby! And I mean, I threw myself into Bess’s pregnancy. Making sure she was healthy and eating right and happy. And that her baby—the two of you, come to find out—were healthy and safe and happy, too.
THOMAS
Did you ask anything about him? Can you remember anything specific?
MAGGIE
Well, I know I said something like, “What about the father?” And she said, “He’s not in the picture” or “There’s no reason to involve him.” I don’t remember, loves. I’m so sorry. I really wish I had more I could tell you.
THOMAS
But it was for sure on the trip to Colorado? It wasn’t someone she went to school with or anyone like that?
MAGGIE
No, she was clear about Colorado. She said something like, “I met him on spring break when we went skiing.” No question.
SAVANNAH
You and Mom were close, though, right? She would’ve told you more about him if you’d asked, wouldn’t she?
MAGGIE
[pause]
Bess and I were close. Always. As a little girl, she’d make me sit by the side of her bed and she’d yammer about her day until she fell asleep. Even when she was in college, we talked two, three times a week. So, when she came home and said she wanted to keep her baby, I didn’t have to ask more. Because we were so close. After all, being close to someone means, I guess, that you don’t always need the words. You
don’t need to explain to the other one because they just know. They understand.
[pause]
[sigh]
All that, and do you know what the last thing I ever said to her was? She called me. From her office, as she was leaving for her friend’s funeral. You know there was a funeral for one of her colleagues that afternoon, right?
BOTH
We know.
MAGGIE
She called to say she wasn’t sure how late she’d be home, that she might not be back in time for dinner and not to wait if the two of you got hungry.
[pause]
[sniff]
[pause]
And I said, “Just be home to give the kids their bedtime kisses.”
[pause]
Which, of course, she wasn’t. As it turned out.
<
Ten
Thomas
Thomas stepped through the back doors of the school and headed for the student parking lot. There was only a week of school left and between now and then he had two papers to write and finals to study for. He’d intentionally gone straight outside after the last bell, ducking any chance of running into Nico or Pete or Ro on their way to the locker room.
“Yo, T!”
Only, he’d forgotten that the bus taking the track team to Conference Finals would be parked right outside.
“Hey, Nico,” he called back. The revised 4x200 team each had a window seat. “Hey guys. Leave ’em in the dust today, all right?” The enthusiasm in his voice sounded fake, even to him.
“You should come.” Nico had his window open and was hanging halfway out. “Coach’ll let you on the bus. Right, Coach?”
Thomas heard Coach holler at Nico to get his head back inside.
“Text me! Send me results,” Thomas hollered. He fingered his phone in his back pocket. Maybe, with any luck, the battery had died while he was in class.
Summer vacation couldn’t come soon enough. He didn’t have time for track, anyway. Not really. Except if that was true, why did watching the bus pull away suck the breath out of his chest?
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