I found her in the garage, futzing around at her makeshift workbench. Even in a relaxed state, my mother had a strength about her, a confidence more earned than ingrained. Her silver hair held back in a neat ponytail, she bent over a midcentury lamp, oblong shaped and constructed of white iron spindles, which lay in front of her, wireless and hollow. Matt and I bought it two years ago at a flea market in Iowa, during happier times. We’d planned to get our HGTV on and refurbish it, but that sad little lamp sat in the basement, gathering dust until I claimed it during the Great Property Division six months ago. My mom, after years of being the default handywoman in our house, took on the project when she realized I probably wouldn’t get to it until Kylie graduated from high school.
“I’m going to put a coat of paint on this tonight, and then I’ll rewire it in a few days,” Mom said, all signs of her early anger gone. “Let’s hang it above Kylie’s bed. It’ll look nice there. The light will refract through the whole room.”
“Mom—”
“No more,” she said softly.
“How did you know what I was going to say?”
“Because I’m a mom. And you’re a mom now. You know how much can be crammed into that one word.”
“I think we need to talk about this.”
She turned around and rested her back against the workbench, arms folded. “Why?”
“Because I think you’re taking this DNA thing all wrong.”
“I think I understand it pretty clearly. I also understand you. What I don’t think you understand is me.”
“Well, I won’t understand anything if you don’t explain yourself.”
She drew up an old stool and motioned for me to sit down. “I learned a long time ago that bringing up painful memories only brings pain, but tonight, I’ll cough it all up.”
“Gross image.”
“True, but the stuff I’m hauling up from the archives isn’t pretty.”
That chilled me for a moment, but curiosity won out over apprehension. “Bring it.”
She stared at me for a moment before saying, “I told you that I got you from an agency. That’s not exactly true.”
“You’ve barely told me anything.”
“You’ve barely asked.”
“Something told me I shouldn’t.”
“You should listen to that voice.”
I gently pushed at her arm. “Go on, Mom.”
“I was almost thirty years old when I started looking into adoption. A single woman who worked in a bar and didn’t have much of a pot to piss in. How well do you think that went over with the state?”
“Got it. You weren’t a very desirable candidate. So you married Jim.”
“I did. I always liked Jimmy, and he was willing to help me out. Still, being a married woman didn’t help nearly as much as I thought. They said I should take in a foster kid, or adopt someone already in grammar school, but I didn’t. I wanted a baby. Maybe that makes me selfish, but it’s the truth.”
Mom’s fingers twitched, and I knew she wanted a cigarette, a habit she’d given up twenty years before. It was one of the only surefire signals she was stressed. I wondered if it was because of what she’d already revealed about herself, or because of what was going to come out of her mouth next. “So, what happened?”
“You sure you want to hear it?”
“I do.”
“Well, okay. You hear things, working in a bar. All kinds of things. What did we have to talk about besides bill collectors and politics? Gossip. One day, Jimmy brought in a friend whose niece had a baby. Cissy Ricelli was her name. I didn’t know the family personally, only heard of them, and what I heard wasn’t good. There were criminals in the city and there were lowlifes, and the Ricellis belonged to the latter. The woman was wild and could barely care for herself, much less a kid. She couldn’t get out of bed in the morning, and there was no one else to watch the baby. No one knew who the father was.”
Emotion clogged my throat. “He could have been anybody.”
“Don’t do that,” Mom said. “She was looking for someone decent to adopt the kid.”
“She was looking for money,” I said.
“What does that matter? I got you, and from that first day, you were mine. I got a lawyer to make it all official. You were a Stefancyk. Jimmy was . . . Jimmy. He meant well. But you and me . . . it’s always been you and me. I know it hasn’t always been a piece of cake. I’m not an easy woman, but I’m not hard either.”
“You’re a good woman, Mom. I’ve always known it.”
My mother doesn’t know what to do with tears. She swiped awkwardly at the ones that filled her eyes. “I don’t give a crap what you do with that stupid DNA test, especially if it helps Kylie. It gets to me, to think about those other people who had you for the first year of your life. I don’t like feeling those feelings. But, I do understand why you did it, and I guess I should be thankful you held off pressing this issue until now.”
“This doesn’t have anything to do with us. I just want to know who’s in my blood. I didn’t think I did, but I do. I’m sorry.”
Mom took both of my hands and squeezed. “It has everything to do with us, but you do what you need to do, Ally. You always have. I want you to remember one thing, though. Love is stronger than blood. Don’t you ever doubt that.”
Before I went to bed, I googled the heck out of Cissy Ricelli. Nothing. What was Cissy short for? Cecelia? I tried that. Then Christine and Christina. There were plenty on Facebook, but no one appropriate in the fifty-five to seventy age range.
What had happened to her? I thought about the few details I knew. She was a party girl in the late ’70s, early ’80s, from a fractured family with criminal tendencies. Great. How often did a story like that end well?
A flash of sympathy surged through me. Did she regret giving up her baby? Did she have other children?
Oh, wow. I could have a sibling. Or even more than one. I had to admit the thought was strangely exciting. The loneliness of being an only child stays familiar. It runs too deep to completely fade.
Kylie, you have 1,526 relatives!
Some of them were mine. Their DNA popped up in my Roman nose, my dark hair, the slight bend of my ears. Love might be stronger than blood, but blood was pretty tenacious—the stuff coursing through my veins had been through the wringer, and it had stories to tell.
And suddenly I needed to hear them.
I positioned my trembling hands over the keyboard. I could do this. No one needed to know. All I wanted was a phone call. Maybe a meet up for coffee. One conversation. What could it hurt to ask?
Past Is a Present Message Center
Kylie Anderson to Micki Patel:
I’m your niece, or at least this DNA test thinks I am. My name is Allison Stefancyk Anderson. I’m the biological daughter of a woman named Cissy Ricelli. My father’s name is not known. I’m not sure where you fit in, and I don’t want to cause you any stress or bring up painful memories, but if you are willing, I’d like to talk. I live in the Chicago area.
CHAPTER 4
Before Kylie got sick, I thought the world worked mostly in an orderly, organized manner. I mean, the sun rose and set, the earth turned on its axis, we had answers for questions like, why do kangaroos have pouches, and how did the Red Sea get so salty? Okay, we still weren’t sure about life after death or the true size of the cosmos, but as a species, we kind of had it going on. We had experts and trusted authorities and people-in-the-know. And the people who knew things could give me clear, easily digestible answers, often with a simple Google search. I didn’t question much, though, because I didn’t need to. I knew how to cut hair, and Matt could teach kids about things like gerrymandering and the Electoral College, and we had a daughter we were pretty good at caring for. The major stuff made sense, and when that does, how much thought do you really give anything else?
Then Kylie woke up one morning, looking like she’d gone a few rounds with Muhammad Ali in his Cassius Clay prime. Her eye
s were so swollen she couldn’t open them, her face ruddy and bruised looking, her lips puffy and cracked—a frightening caricature of how she looked when she burst out of me, when my body put the squeeze on her.
I panicked. We already knew her system really didn’t like peanuts. Had she accidentally ingested any? She could breathe with ease, and the symptoms seemed different from her previous reactions. I took her to the pediatrician instead of the emergency room.
Diagnosis? An allergic reaction.
We returned to the traditional allergist. She suffered through another round of scratch tests and blood work and endless doses of Benadryl. We discovered that, in addition to peanuts, now her body also took offense to cats, grass, dust, mold, and strawberries. The doctor prescribed a stronger antihistamine. It worked for a while. The puffy eyes returned to normal size, her face regained its natural paleness. Life made sense again.
Until the headaches started, and the dry mouth, the ugly, itchy rashes, and the aching joints. The questions became more difficult to answer.
Life started to make less sense.
But someone had to know something, right? I googled until I felt like I’d gone to medical school. I joined Facebook groups and chat rooms, and posted on Reddit as often as a millennial. I dragged Kylie to doctor after doctor, so very hopeful, until one specialist asked to speak to me alone and said, “We don’t have names for all the autoimmune disorders we’re seeing. Your daughter is inflammatory, but so is half the country. We can’t keep up with all the permutations of these illnesses, so we try to fit them into ones we’ve already identified. You can guess how effective we are at treating those cases. I’m sorry, Mrs. Anderson. We’ll try, but at this point, we might be talking trial and error.”
It was mostly error.
But still . . . I hoped someone had the answer. Optimism isn’t a choice when it’s your kid’s future at stake, it’s a strategy.
“This is just like Girl Scout camp.”
Kylie sat a respectful distance from the odd-smelling sticks burning on a metal plate on the floor of Dr. Indigo’s office. The doctor sat next to her, wearing a shapeless black dress cinched at the neck, kind of a sleeveless hemp/cotton Hefty bag. I sat across from her, cross-legged and pretending the position didn’t pull at my tight hips.
“Should we hold hands?” I joked, but the doctor shook her head once and said, “That will come later.”
Kylie shot me an Is she for real? glance, and then returned her gaze to the fire. Because even though this was ridiculous, the orange-red flames were kind of mesmerizing. Still, we’d driven all the way from the burbs for a reason, and sitting around an office campfire wasn’t it.
I leaned forward, the flames warming my face. “Did you get the blood work back?”
“Shhh,” Dr. Indigo hissed. “I asked that you try to clear your mind. I don’t think you’re giving it much effort.”
“I don’t know how to stop thinking,” Kylie whispered. “I’ve tried meditation before, and it’s impossible! There are lots of ideas living in my brain, and they have idea babies all the time, and it’s too crowded for me to clear them out.”
Dr. Indigo smiled faintly. “You don’t need to get rid of them, you just need to calm them down for a while.”
“What do you do when you feel pain?” I said. “You usually deal with that really well.”
“Thoughts are different,” Kylie said. “Pain is just . . . pain. I’m used to it, so after a while it feels the same to me. Thoughts change. They go in all kinds of directions.”
I guess it was hand-holding time, because Dr. Indigo wrapped hers around Kylie’s and said, “I have a way of looking at the problem that might help. Did you have quiet hour in kindergarten? Can you remember that far back?”
“I can,” Kylie said. “And, yes. Mrs. Shipley had us lie down on mats for twenty minutes. We didn’t have to sleep, but we couldn’t talk, and we had to be still.”
“That’s what you need to do with your mind,” Dr. Indigo said softly. “Tell it to settle and quiet. The ideas have every right to be there, but they have to lie down for a while and not bother you.”
I knew what she was doing. There was value to meditation. But . . . BUT! Kylie’s current headache was going on day three. If she hadn’t already gone through a CAT scan and MRI, I would for sure think she had a brain tumor. Meditation was a bridesmaid treatment—we needed to bring in the bride!
“Doctor—”
“Shhh, Mom,” Kylie interrupted. “I’m telling my thoughts to chill out.”
My daughter’s eyes were closed, and her features relaxed and peaceful. It was as if someone had come with an anxiety eraser and smudged it all away. I shushed.
We sat there, breathing in and out, in and out. Then Dr. Indigo said to Kylie, “Now that your brain is settled, we can focus on calming some of your body’s systems. They’re upset and overreacting. They’re acting irrationally.”
Oh, for heaven’s sake! I was trying to be open-minded—really I was—but a few ideas started acting up in my brain, including one borrowed from my mom. Quack! it squawked. She’s a quack! Oh, there was no way I’d ever tell Mom about this, or Matt. Maybe I’d tell Heather. Maybe.
Dr. Indigo continued, her voice low and almost hypnotic. “Kylie, I want you to imagine that you are walking a dog.”
What?
“What kind of dog?” Kylie asked.
“A big one,” Dr. Indigo said. “Almost bigger than you.”
Kylie grinned. She was only borderline allergic to dogs, and she’d always wanted one. Matt and I always said no—why risk it? I guess an imaginary pet was better than nothing.
Dr. Indigo continued, “Can you see it in your mind?”
“Yes. I’m walking him in a park. It’s sunny, and the different color leaves look pretty. Like today.”
“Good. Okay, so you are walking along, enjoying the beauty of nature, and a squirrel runs across your path. The squirrel isn’t bothering you, but your dog becomes very agitated. He’s barking and pulling hard at the leash. You’re having difficulty controlling him. Even though the squirrel is long gone, your dog won’t calm down. You become upset as well. Your heart pounds fiercely, you start to sweat, your mind races. Your dog picks up on your distress and reacts, becoming even angrier, turning his rage on you. It’s getting really hard to handle him now. He’s dragging you, and your hold on his leash is slipping.”
Kylie made an anguished noise. “Is he getting mean?”
“He is,” Dr. Indigo said. “Very. It’s like he can’t control himself.”
“I don’t know what to do,” Kylie squeaked.
“He’s barking so loudly it hurts your ears.”
Kylie gasped. “I don’t like this.”
Neither did I.
“Your dog’s just snapped at the air,” Dr. Indigo continued, her voice growing stronger, “and then at the leash, his teeth just an inch from your hand.”
I could picture it. Skinny, exhausted Kylie hanging on for dear life as a fierce, anger-mad German shepherd tugged hard against his leash, teeth bared, drooling, ready to pounce.
“What do you do?” Dr. Indigo’s question was for Kylie, but I couldn’t help myself—I took it.
“Let it go, honey,” I whispered. “Let go of the leash and run.”
“I don’t know . . . What if he comes after me? I’m not sure, Mom.”
“What do you do, Kylie?” the doctor repeated. “Do you hold on or let go?”
“I—”
“What do you do?” Dr. Indigo insisted.
Kylie sniffled. “Let go, I guess.”
“Enough,” I said. “She’s crying. This ends right now.” I held my arm out, and Kylie—her eyes wide open now—scooted over, burrowing into my side.
Silently, Dr. Indigo rose and flipped the light switch. She placed a metal snuffer over the fire plate and resumed her place behind her desk, gesturing for us to sit opposite her. Displeasure oozed from every crevice on her face.
“Kyl
ie’s blood work showed inflammatory markers consistent with an autoimmune disorder,” she began. “Which one? It’s not clear. We do know that autoimmune issues have some commonalities—the immune system is attacking its host, the person it’s meant to protect.”
“I know what an autoimmune disorder is,” I snapped.
“Well, then you understand that Kylie needs to learn to calm the dog.” Dr. Indigo stared at me, like she was waiting for my brain to catch up with hers.
I stared right back—I didn’t need to catch up, I was already there. “And how is she supposed to do that? Calm a dog that’s bigger than her? An uncontrollable dog.”
“She’ll learn that there are plenty of ways to settle it down. Ways she hasn’t even thought of.”
“What ways?” Kylie said. “There were two. I could try to hang on, or I could let go.”
“There was another way,” Dr. Indigo said, smiling at Kylie. “Do you want to try to figure it out?”
“No,” Kylie said, her voice flat.
Dr. Indigo’s smile turned down a notch. “Help. You could have asked for help.”
“From who?” I said. “The trees?”
“From the dog,” Dr. Indigo said.
“Aren’t you an allergist?” I said, not bothering to hide the irritation in my voice.
“I am.”
“Shouldn’t we be focusing on her allergies and health issues? I thought that’s why I was here. I didn’t come to see Mr. Miyagi, I came for help.”
“How many doctors have you been to already?” Dr. Indigo asked. “And how much have they helped?”
I had to admit, she had a point.
“I failed,” Kylie said on the drive home. “I couldn’t calm the dog.”
I inched the car forward about three feet. It was the fastest we’d gone since we left the wellness center. Chicago traffic at the height of rush hour tested my every last nerve, and I didn’t have much patience left after that doctor visit. “You can’t fail at meditation. No one does. Don’t you pay attention in yoga?”
The Other Family Page 5