Finding You

by Jo Watson

  I felt a gentle arm come out and take my elbow as I was about to walk past the house.

  “There is a letter for you,” Kalli said softly.

  “A letter?”

  “He wrote you one in case he never got to meet you.” She tried to give me the softest, most encouraging-looking smile and my heart felt like it was going to break into a million tiny pieces.

  I held the envelope in my shaking hands and closed the door behind me. I was alone on the small balcony looking out over the port. I could see Dimitri’s boat still there swaying gently in the small swells. My fingers tightened on the envelope as the anger surged through my veins. He’d known about my father this whole time and kept it from me. He had kept from me the one thing that I had wanted to know more than anything else. The thing I had been searching for my entire life. I tried to push the feelings aside and return to the moment I was in. The moment just before I was about to meet my father for the first time—well, sort of.

  I opened the envelope carefully, savoring the idea that my father had sealed this envelope. His DNA was laced on this paper and I was running my fingertips over it. I almost wanted to raise it to my nose to see if it still contained his scent.

  My fingers were trembling as I pulled the letter out of the envelope. I opened the folded pieces of paper, and a small dried flower fell to my feet. I picked it up and twirled it between my fingers before putting it back in the envelope.

  I took a deep breath, ignored the stabbing pain in my chest… and read it.

  To my daughter,

  I am writing this letter in case my dream of meeting you one day never comes true. I hope that I can find the right words to say all the things I have always wanted to say to you and I hope this letter can answer some of the questions I’m sure you’ve had.

  Your mother and I met on the island of Santorini in a warm and beautiful summer. We were both so young, eighteen years old, and filled with a childlike excitement for life. She was on vacation with her family and I had just started working for a man who ran a tour guiding company. From the moment I saw her I was in love. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen and I knew that I had to be with her. It only took a few days before we fell in love. This all happened out of the sight of her parents, who we knew would never have approved.

  She was a young girl from an upper-class family, still at school, and I was a poor Greek boy from a small island village with nothing to offer her, other than my heart. On the last night she was in Greece, we made love. That night I asked her to stay with me. I could see my whole life with her. I wanted it all, a family, children, and grandchildren. But we knew her parents would never allow it and when they found out the next day her father and I got into a fight and they took her back home. We promised to call each other when we could, and one day soon she would come back to Greece and we would be together. That was the plan.

  I tried to call the number that she had left, but it had been disconnected. I tried to write to her, and for a whole year I never heard back. Then one day, I remember it so well, it was raining and cold when I was called to the phone. I knew immediately it was her. She was sobbing and I could feel her pain all the way across the ocean. Only then did I learn of you. She had been pregnant and her parents had forced her into giving you up for adoption. I wanted to scream at her, and ask her why she hadn’t contacted me, but the pain in her voice made me realize how scared she had been. A young girl, alone and pregnant by a poor boy living all the way across the world with no way to be with him.

  She told me all about you. How you had the same eyes as me, how she had been allowed to hold you in the hospital, and how in that moment, she wanted to keep you with every cell in her body. She told me that she whispered in your ear over and over again how much she loved you, and how much she wished you a life filled with love and joy and happiness. She had to give you up that day, and neither of us would ever know who you were given to, or where you were. You were gone. That was the last time I ever spoke to your mother. I believe she was in too much pain to ever speak to me again. I was left here alone knowing you were out there somewhere.

  Please do not ever think badly of your mother. She was a young girl on her own. She was frightened and she did the best she could. Please do not ever think that you were unwanted. Please do not ever think that you were unloved. Please do not ever think you were forgotten, either. I have loved you, with all my heart, since the day I found out that you were in this world. I have thought about you every day and wondered what you are doing and whether you are having the kind of life that you deserve.

  I have always hoped to meet you one day. More than anything. To hold you in my arms and tell you how much I love you and have always loved you. I hope that you have lived a life of joy and happiness. That you have blossomed and become the person that you want to become.

  If you are reading this letter, then it means that I am probably no longer here. It was my greatest wish to meet you, but I console myself in knowing that I can tell you how I feel with these words.

  My greatest wish for you is that one day you will find a love like I had with your mother. That you will have a child one day and love it as I have loved you. Live your life as if it is your last day. Be brave and strong, pick yourself up when you fall. Be yourself and let no one tell you who you are. Surround yourself with love and kindness and joy. But most of all, I hope that you love yourself and are proud of who you are and who you have and still can become.

  You were loved every second of every day and always remembered.

  Love, your bampas (dad)

  My heart pounded. Tears streamed down my face. The stabbing pain in my rib cage was almost too much to bear. I turned the note over in my hands. Something else fell out, and I reached down to pick it up. It was a photo of my dad and my mother holding on to each other and smiling. I looked at it through blurry eyes… they looked so happy. They looked so in love. My dad was so handsome, too. I smiled slightly and ran my fingertips over his face. I looked at my mother and started to cry. She looked so young. Just a girl. I thought back to myself at eighteen and I remembered how I was; there was no way I would have been able to care for a baby; I could barely care for myself. My heart broke for her and an outpouring of empathy followed.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered. I’d always judged her so harshly. Always hated her for the choices she had made that had affected my whole life. I’d carried around the consequences of her decision with me from the moment I had been born—and I had not asked for that to be put on my shoulders, but it had. But looking into her eyes now, I felt the start of forgiveness. She must have been so frightened and heartbroken when she couldn’t be with the man she loved. I could not let my past, her past, dictate who I was any longer, and forgiving her was the key to letting it all go. I heard a small knock on the door and turned to see Kalli standing in the doorway holding a bottle of wine in one hand and two glasses in the other.

  “May I?” she asked.

  I nodded and opened the door for her. She stepped onto the patio and placed the wine down on the table.

  “Did you find what you’ve been looking for?” She gave the letter in my hands the briefest look. I nodded. I had gotten what I wanted. His words were exactly what I had been longing to hear. She pulled another letter from her pocket and passed it to me. The word Phoebe was written on the envelope.

  “He always wanted you to give her this.”

  “Me?” I took the letter in my hands and looked at it. Holding her name in my hands was such a bizarre feeling. “No. I don’t think so.”

  “He hoped you would have a relationship with her,” she said as I put the letter on the table. “He hoped that you would forgive her for letting you go.”

  “Why have you all been so nice to me?” I asked.

  “Dimitri…” She paused. “Your father used to speak of you so often that we feel like you’ve been a part of our lives this whole time. Every Christmas around the table he would make a toast to you. Wishing you health
and happiness and love, wherever you were. On his birthday I know that when he closed his eyes and blew out his candles, he only had one wish.”

  The tears started falling again. The idea that I had had a family all the way across the world, and hadn’t even known it, touched me.

  “The day Alexandra was born, he wouldn’t hold her.” Kalli’s voice stuck in her throat. “He felt so overwhelmed with guilt that he had never gotten to hold you. He said that he felt like he was betraying the memory of you if he loved another daughter.”

  A whimper escaped my mouth, and Kalli reached out and rubbed my back. “I’m so sorry to hear that, I would never want to be the cause of—”

  She cut me off quickly. “No. Don’t worry, soon he couldn’t put her down. He loved Alexandra with all his heart. I just wanted you to know how much he loved you, too.”

  Kalli opened the bottle of wine and poured us two glasses. “He’d been saving this for a special occasion.”

  I glanced at the bottle and was shocked to see that it came from the exact same winery that Dimitri and I had visited only days before.

  “You know what he would have regretted most about not meeting you?” she turned to me and asked.

  “What?”

  “He was so passionate about his country. You could say it was his other great love, and he always hoped he could share that with you one day.”

  “Really?” I sipped the wine slowly and started remembering what Dimitri had done for me these past few days. How he had taken me to all the places my father had loved and visited… he’d tried to show me my father.

  “He really loved this place and its people… and he really loved your mother, too.”

  To hear her speak of my mother like that caught me off guard. Kalli walked over to the railing and looked out over the town and the sea below. “We had a great life together, it was filled with so much love and laughter. Every day that we were together was a gift. And he did love me very much, but… In Greek, we have almost ten ways to describe love. What your father had for your mother was the most powerful love of all. Eros. He loved me, to be sure, but he never quite loved me with the passion that he had for your mother.”

  She turned and smiled at me. “But I knew that the day we got married. He never kept his love for her a secret; besides, it was a story that everyone knew. After Phoebe told him about you, he was so brokenhearted that he just took a boat out one day and didn’t return for years. He told me he’d just sailed around, from island to island, as if he was searching for something he knew he couldn’t find.” There was such sadness in this woman’s voice.

  No one had been left untouched by my parents’ relationship. It had certainly changed my life forever, altering and shaping it just as it had Kalli’s and Alexandra’s.

  “To Dimitri,” she turned and said with a feeble smile, raising her glass for me to clink. “The funniest, most adventurous, biggest-hearted man I ever had the privilege of loving.”

  “To Dimitri,” I said.

  After that, we stayed up talking about him. Alexandra joined us and they both told me stories of my father into the early hours of the morning. Each story brought me closer and closer to knowing him, and closer to knowing them, too. They answered all my questions, even the silly ones: Did he also hate pickles? Was he also allergic to cats? All those things might seem banal and pointless to someone who wasn’t adopted, but to me the tiny details were everything. We laughed together and cried together over the loss of him and they invited me to stay the night with them. When we finally stopped talking it was three o’clock in the morning. I glanced over at the port, and Dimitri’s boat was still there, waiting for me.

  I woke up the next morning in the small pretty room that had been made up especially for me. It was a surreal experience waking up in my father’s house, even more so because he wasn’t there. Breakfast that morning was a massive affair, almost as if everyone had come just to meet me. I met my grandparents, aunts, uncles, nieces, and nephews. They were all so unlike my family. They were loud, and a constant laughter filled the air. They filled me in on my father even more, telling me all the details that Alexandra and Kalli couldn’t. How he’d been a quiet, thoughtful, and serious child sometimes. (He sounded a lot like me.) How he’d been bright at school, but bad at sports. How he’d broken his arm in three places when he’d fallen from a tree… all the little things that helped me shade him in. Helped me turn the idea of my father into a real living, breathing person that now existed in my head.

  I spent the rest of the morning getting to know my half sister. She was the one person who was probably my strongest link to him. I could see a lot of myself in her—and it wasn’t just the eyes. I instantly liked her, and talking to her made me realize that this is what I had been missing: having a sister to talk to and share things with. And when she’d told me about a boy at school that she had a crush on, and then asked my advice on how to tell him she liked him, my heart swelled and drew her in. I loved her. It was big and unconditional and sisterly, and it felt amazing.

  Later that day I took a stroll up to my father’s grave again. I wanted to be there alone this time. I walked through the beautiful, quaint town and noted how totally different this was from my life back home. The people here were loud and friendly and so warm and welcoming. As I reached the top of the hill, my phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out and the word MOM illuminated my screen. I also saw a voice message, which I listened to.

  “Dahling. Is everything okay? You haven’t called. Anyway… I bought you a lovely blue dress—you can finally throw away that horrible yellow one. Your sisters and I want to make an appointment for the spa when you get back—I’m sure you didn’t have that pedi—they also do fantastic brow shaping there. So I just wanted to know when you are coming home—” beep

  Trust my mother to have too much to say to fit it all into one voice message.

  “Why do they make the time so short? It’s annoying. Anyway, I’ve been feeding your fish, but one day he looked a little pale so I took him to the vet. Did you know that vets don’t treat goldfish by the way? And he’s not very friendly, either, can’t I buy you a kitten or a puppy? And please don’t hate me but I did repaint that wall in your bathroom where the paint was peeling—” beep

  A massive smile swept over my face. She cared enough to take my goldfish to the vet? I listened to the last message.

  “I can’t leave you messages like this! Call me. I have so much to tell you. We haven’t spoken in days.”

  There was a long pause on the phone and I stopped walking and held the phone to my ear tightly.

  “Jane, I hope you haven’t decided to stay in Greece. I’d miss you too much. Please call me so I know you’re okay. I hope you find what you’re looking for and come home soon. Bye. We are all waiting for you.”

  Tears welled in my eyes. God, I was crying a lot these days. My family might not be as demonstrative as everyone here was, or as warm and welcoming, but in my mother’s own special way she did care. She wasn’t very good at talking about emotions but then again neither was I. I’d never really told her how I felt growing up. Somewhere along the way we had agreed upon this unspoken law that we would never speak about our real emotions. And I guess her only real way of expressing them now was by redecorating my life. (I actually appreciated the new paint in my bathroom—it had been that awful rust color. I could do without the dating profile and sequined bikini, though.)

  I heard a noise behind me and turned. A father and his young daughter were crossing the road talking and smiling. I stopped to watch them, but instead of thinking about Dimitri, I started thinking about my dad, my real dad. He’d fetched me from school every day, no matter how busy he was, and I’d go back to his practice and do my homework and read. I had been so lonely there by myself while my sisters were off having fun together.

  I turned around and continued walking, but a thought stopped me dead in my tracks. It was more than a thought; it was a kind of epiphany about my whole life le
ading up to this point… and Dimitri had been right about a lot of it.

  A sudden memory of my sisters trying to get me to join in their games and playing rushed in. They’d been so upset when I continued to refuse, and our relationship had started going downhill from there. A profound thought rocked me: They hadn’t excluded me, I had excluded myself. I was the one who hadn’t wanted to participate. I hadn’t been excluded by anyone; I had always put myself on the outside.

  I suddenly tried to imagine what my life would actually be like without them all. Or what it would have been like growing up here. I continued to walk up the hill; the only sound was the gravel crunching under my feet.

  I reached my father’s grave and looked down at it again. I felt like I should say something, but what does one say? I stood there for ages looking out over the endless sea in front of me, wondering if this journey had all been for nothing. A tear rolled down my cheek and splashed onto my father’s gravestone and Dimitri’s words ran through my mind.

  “You didn’t really come here looking for your father; you came here looking for yourself.”

  I bent down and rearranged the flowers around the gravestone—it was the only thing I had ever done for him as a daughter. I laid my hand on the cold stone and said a soft, quiet good-bye before turning around and walking back down the hill. I was suddenly overcome by a desire to go back home. To my real home. As great as it felt being with this family, I didn’t really belong here with them.

  After a series of very long good-byes, and promises of returning to visit for Christmas and Easter and bringing my family, too, I left my father’s home. I was sad to say good-bye to my new family, but I was also excited to go back and see mine.