Autofocus

by Lauren Gibaldi

“Yeah, of course,” Celine says. “Let me know what you decide for your project. I’m gonna go talk up the barista,” she says, wiggling her eyebrows. “Baristo? I don’t know.”

  “‘Guy at the counter’ works well, too.” I smile.

  My phone is in my hands the minute I’m outside.

  It rings for an excruciating second before Treena picks up.

  “MAUDE!” she literally yells into the phone, and I count down until she launches into her typical second sentence. “AHH! When are you visiting?”

  “That’s actually why I’m calling,” I say. Just hearing her voice makes me feel better, more me and less a floating buoy with no one to cling on to.

  “WHAT! Oh my gosh, details,” she continues, and I laugh at her excitement. It’s always there. She’s always turned up a few degrees more than everyone else, and it makes everything with her an adventure; I mean, even going to the library.

  “Okay, well, it’s not set in stone or anything, and I haven’t even asked my parents yet, but I have an idea that I want to run by you first.”

  “Yes, please,” she says, and I can hear wind in the background. She’s outside like me, probably walking to or from class as I walk home. We’re in different areas, but our lives are still parallel.

  “So I have to do this photography project on family,” I begin, then tell her about my idea of looking for my birth mother.

  “Wow. That’s really cool,” she says when I’m done, more gently than normal, and I know she’s worried. I know she’s thinking about what this all means.

  “This won’t be like last time,” I tell her, referring to the time that I just started calling people with the last name of Fullman who lived in Tallahassee. I was fourteen and angry and she helped me put the phone down. She was always good at that—being there for me through the hard stuff, but stopping me when it was time.

  “No, I know, that was a million years ago.” She pauses. “I’m all in, and I’m totally going to help you, you know that. . . .”

  “But . . .”

  She hesitates again, then sighs. “Okay, I love you, and that’s the only reason why I’m saying this.”

  “I know what you’re going to say. You’re worried.”

  “You’ve been down this road before. I’m just afraid you won’t find anything again.”

  I sigh, disheartened, as she states my fear out loud. “I know.” I nod, even though she can’t see. “It’s totally a possibility. But I think there’s something there, I really do. I don’t know, I want to try.”

  “I know, I get it. And I think you should, I’m just—”

  “Playing mom?” I joke, referring to how she always took the role of mom when we would play house growing up. How she kind of turned out that way, always watching over her friends, always there to take care of me when needed.

  “You love it,” she says, and I laugh.

  “I do. And I can’t wait to see you!”

  “I KNOW! Oh my god, it’s going to be so much fun. I can’t wait to show you around! And show you off! And everything!” Treena says. And I smile. Because, yeah, she knows when to stop me or caution me. But like the time she sat in the car with me the first day I got my license, she’s also always there to hold my hand and take my mind off things when I’m ready to go.

  And I’m ready.

  THREE

  When I get home, my mom is in the living room, sitting on the floor, submerged in a sea of essays. Her glasses are on and her purple pen is in her hand, meaning she’s in grading mode.

  “I was wondering when you’d come home. I was about to send out a search party,” she says sarcastically.

  “I was gone for an hour, and only spoke to seven strangers,” I deadpan, taking my shoes off.

  “Did you tell them where you lived? They need to know such things,” she says, and I smile, thinking up my retort. “I texted you, you know, after you responded to my last text.” I pull my phone out and do, in fact, see a message from her. It probably came when I was on the phone with Treena.

  “Sorry,” I say, realizing she was at least a bit worried. “I was taking photos for class, and then talked to Tree for a bit.”

  “Oh, how is she? Still loving FSU?” my mom asks, finally looking up.

  “Very much so.” I open my mouth and then close it, not ready to ask about Tallahassee. That’s a big conversation, not one for the entryway. “Grading?” I ask, nodding toward her pile.

  “Yes,” she sighs, taking off her glasses and pointing to a paper. “This one actually has a hyperlink on it. A blue, bold, underlined word. They didn’t even try to disguise the fact that they were copying and pasting. If you’re going to cheat, at least be creative.”

  “Wow,” I laugh. “That’s really bad.”

  “Never hang out with any of these kids. Never,” she says, and I nod, grateful that she doesn’t teach twelfth-grade English at my school. I’d rather not know the victims of her purple pen.

  “How do you know I don’t already?” I ask, taking off to my room.

  “Funny. Dinner in ten minutes!” she yells as I leave.

  “Okay,” I yell back, then flop on my bed. I feel uneasy, knowing what I’m about to ask her. It’s not like my mom’s ever been secretive about my adoption, but I also don’t know how she’ll react to me hunting for details. She knows about my previous attempts, but for some reason this feels so much bigger. I’m stepping away from my computer and actually scouring for information on my own, in person, in another place. It’s all been so fast, this whole afternoon, deciding this. I don’t even know if it’s the right thing to do.

  Do I ask my parents if I can go look for a woman who gave me up seventeen years ago? I could find out everything I’ve ever wanted to know about her, right when I need it the most, when I’m about to pick a college and start a new chapter in my life. But that would mean maybe hurting my parents. How would they feel about me focusing my senior project on someone I’ve never met?

  I go to my dresser and pull out the blue box in the very back. It has a few silly notes from Treena I don’t want my mom reading, my journal, and there, at the bottom, the only picture of my birth mother I have. She gave it to my parents when she met them. It’s from her high school graduation. She’s wearing a black cap and gown and smiling at the camera. It’s obviously posed, so I can’t tell how she was actually feeling at the moment, but still. It’s always surreal looking at her—in a way, at me.

  The little girl on the slide earlier flashes in my mind, and I wonder once again—would that have been me with my birth mother? Probably not—before I was born, she was already planning on putting me up for adoption. But if she hadn’t died and had decided to keep me, how different would my life have been? It’s not just the photography assignment that’s making me question it—it’s everything. It’s college. It’s life.

  It’s this deep yearning I’ve always felt in the pit of my stomach to know more about the other life I could have had, the mother I never knew. And this is the opportunity to explore that. If blood makes a person, am I more her than my real parents? Or maybe blood is just blood.

  “Dinner!” my dad calls, and I know what I’m going to do.

  “Your dad cooked. Be forewarned,” my mom says when I walk into our very tidy kitchen. My dad is a bit of a neat freak, and he ensures the kitchen is perpetually straightened. Even now, there’s not even a splatter of sauce on the granite counters.

  “It’s just pasta. I can’t get pasta wrong, honey,” my dad says while putting plates on the table.

  “Hi, Dad.” I give him a hug before sitting down.

  “Hey, Maude. Good day at school?”

  “It was okay,” I say. I put my fork into the pasta and twirl it around. Over and over again.

  “Not bad, honey,” my mom says after taking a bite. My dad gives her a pleased look.

  “And you sound so surprised,” he says, passing the pre-made frozen and thawed garlic bread around.

  “I might make you cook every nigh
t,” she says, picking up a piece of bread.

  “Let’s not go that far,” he says, laughing. They both look at me when I don’t join in on making fun of Dad, which is a normal ritual.

  “Everything okay?” Dad asks, putting some pasta into his mouth. He has the straightest, best teeth out of everyone I know, which is probably why he’s a dentist. I’m convinced it’s a requirement for the job.

  “Yep, all good,” I say. I make a show of eating the pasta and smiling.

  “I saw you received more college brochures in the mail. Narrowing down your list yet?” Dad asks, adjusting his glasses.

  “Um, not yet,” I admit.

  “Well, let us know if you want to visit any of the schools,” Dad continues. “We can make a weekend trip of it.”

  “Mmmm,” I answer, nodding and smiling. “Actually, I was wondering . . .” I pause, heart thumping in my chest. “What if I go check out Florida State next week during fall break?”

  My mom looks at my dad and I grab my napkin and twist it around on my lap.

  “That’s a great idea!” my dad says eagerly. “Perhaps on the weekend? We can drive up there together.”

  “I mean, what if I go up there . . . alone. And stay with Treena.”

  “Oh,” Dad says, putting down his utensils. Automatically I feel bad.

  “I don’t know if I want you driving that far without us,” my mom muses, also playing with a napkin.

  “It’s only four hours from Orlando to there, and Treena has been begging me to visit ever since she moved. I mean, I’d love to go with you guys, but maybe it’ll be fun to really experience the college life.” I stop as my mother raises her eyebrows. “Okay, not like that. God, it’s Treena. She’ll probably be studying the entire time.”

  “I do like Treena,” my mom says. “I bet she’d never put hyperlinks in her essays. I don’t know, though.”

  “I’d also like to,” I say, faltering, “go there because I’d like to see where I was adopted.”

  There is silence for what seems like minutes.

  “It’s for my senior photography project, and . . .”

  “Oh,” my mom says, and I don’t dare meet her eyes.

  “Sorry,” I say instead.

  “No, it’s okay. It’s only normal . . .” she continues.

  “Looks like you’ve given this a lot of thought,” Dad says, a bit louder than necessary.

  “What . . . have you asked Treena yet?” my mom asks, still not looking up.

  “Yeah, she’s excited,” I say.

  “When will you leave?”

  “Sunday? Then come back in a few days. . . .”

  “A few days? How long do you plan to stay out there?”

  “Not long. It’s fall break. I have time.”

  Mom sighs and picks up her fork again. “We’ll see.”

  So all I say is “Okay,” and I go back to eating my pasta in silence. I want to fight, I want to state my case, but not now. It’s not the time.

  After dinner, I go up to my room and open my trigonometry textbook and work out some problems. I like math because, unlike life, there are concrete answers you can always find if you work hard enough.

  I’m into my seventh problem when I hear a knock on my open door and look up to see my mom standing there. She seems small, worried. “Hey.” I sit up on my bed, a silent invitation to come in.

  “I’ve been thinking about what you asked at dinner . . .” she starts, her sentence drifting off at the end. She sits on the bed with me, playing with her hands as she speaks. “We’ve never been secretive with you about the adoption, you know that. We want you to know as much as we do. And the thing is, you do. There really isn’t anything more to know.”

  I nod my head. “I know. I just . . . maybe there’s something out there? Something that we missed or weren’t told. Something from my birth mother’s family, or—”

  “Honey, you tried before. There are hundreds of people with her last name, and we can’t access your adoption files until you turn eighteen in August. And the last address we were aware of, the one from when you were born, was Return to Sender.”

  “Right,” I say. “Maybe we can try again?”

  “Maude, it was seventeen years ago. And you tried again a few years back, remember? Honestly, I don’t think you are going to find anything new.”

  I do; I just don’t admit it. It hurt seeing the Return to Sender stamp on the letter, even though I was expecting it. My parents tried, I tried. That family moved on. But knowing they’re still out there, maybe, gives me hope.

  “But maybe going there will help. I can see, I don’t know, her high school?”

  She opens her mouth, and then shakes her head. “If you find out where she went to school, what then?”

  “Maybe I can find her friends . . . or family from there?”

  She nods, staying silent, which unnerves me. My mom is usually so much more talkative than this, so much wittier, and sarcastic. I know this is hurting her, and I hate that I’m doing it, but I still want to know. “I won’t stop you from doing it. I didn’t stop you in the past, and I won’t now, because I’d love for you to have all your questions answered. I’m just afraid you’ll be disappointed. I know what you know. I know her name was Claire Fullman. She grew up in Tallahassee, and went to Florida State University.”

  “That’s it.”

  “That’s it,” she says, turning to me. Her eyes are serious, leveled. I brace myself. “Your dad and I only met her the one time, when she agreed to give us you through the adoption agency. She was really nice. She knew what she was doing was hard, but she wanted you in good hands, and she knew hers weren’t the best. I don’t know anything about her personal life, just that she wanted you to be cared for.”

  “Did she know she’d have . . . complications?”

  “I don’t think at first, but she was aware later on. We were told she had a preexisting heart condition, and labor was too much for her. We only knew because the doctors wanted to test you, to see if you carried that gene, too. Thankfully, you don’t.”

  “Yeah . . .” I say. “But did she know she was sick when she decided to give me up? Or do you think if she wasn’t sick . . .”

  “I think she decided before she knew. But you never know. You never know if there’s more going on with someone; we see only what’s on the outside. And though she was nice, she didn’t completely let us in or anything. She didn’t have to.” She stops, then begins again. “Maude, I wish I could tell you more, I really do. But that’s all I know.” I know she’s being truthful. She’s always been open and honest with me.

  “Okay,” I say simply, not sure what’s left to discuss.

  She looks down, and then back up at me, and I see it. I get it. It’s in the tears gathering in the corners of her eyes. And I don’t know how to tell her that she’ll always be my mom, no matter what. The words don’t come, so instead I hug her, and when I feel her chin on my head, she says, “Okay, you can go.” My heart fills with joy as she talks. “But you have to check in every day, keep me updated, and come home immediately if anything goes wrong.”

  “Of course,” I say, smiling and containing the excitement and fear bubbling in my throat. I’m going. This is real.

  “And Treena’s okay with you staying with her?”

  “Absolutely,” I say, already planning the call in my head. Already knowing how she’ll react. But before I go there, before I get too excited, I ask, “What does Dad say about all of this?” My dad doesn’t let on his feelings toward my birth mother–based inquiries, and I’m never sure if it’s because he doesn’t care about the subject much, or because it pains him to talk about it. Does it hurt him that they couldn’t have a child of their own?

  “Not much.” She shrugs. “I told him I was going to let you go, and he grumbled. But you know your dad. No matter what you decide, he’ll be worried about you.”

  “I’m going to grow up one of these days.”

  “Don’t tell him that,”
she whispers, and I smile. “When you get to Tallahassee, start at the school’s registrar. Maybe they’ll have a lead. They probably won’t be the easiest to work with, but you’re sweet. Hopefully they’ll be nice and not DMV mean.”

  “The registrar. I wouldn’t have thought of that.” I give her another hug.

  “Okay, go call Treena, like I know you are dying to.”

  I laugh as she gets up to leave, then grab my phone.

  “MAUDE!” she yells, again, when she answers.

  “I’m coming!” I say back excitedly.

  “NO!” she yells.

  “YES! I’m coming! Ahhh!”

  “Ahhh! Okay, when? Now?” she asks, excitement oozing out of the phone, and I can’t help but laugh, because it’s how I feel, too. I’m glowing, in awe of everything. How my mom is letting me go. How good it feels to know that, to realize I’m actually doing it. I might see a part of me I’ve never known. And, also, I get to see my best friend. “Oh my god, tell me!” Treena continues, mashing the five words into one, so it sounds more like ohmygodtellme.

  Just hearing her voice is making me think of last year and all our trips to the ice-cream place across from the high school, our lazy pool days during the summer at her house, and how she always smells of her vanilla body spray. The time we stayed up all night watching as many episodes of Degrassi: The Next Generation as possible. I didn’t realize how much I miss her. It’s getting me even more excited for my trip.

  “Next week, during fall break.”

  “Perfect! You’re going to love it here. Everyone is awesome.” I then hear her say, “Yes, you’re awesome, too.”

  “Oh, sorry, is there someone there?”

  “No, it’s just Trey being a dork.”

  “Trey . . . ? Who’s Trey?” I ask.

  “A guy in my hall.” Then off the phone again: “Yes, I’ll tell her you’re extremely handsome.” I hear a shuffle, then she’s back. “Sorry, anyway, I’m so excited to show you around, and for you to meet everyone, and to just get us time.”

  Hearing that—“us time”—calms me a bit. Of course Tree has new friends up there; it would be weird if she didn’t. And I’m excited to meet them.