All You Can Ever Know

by Nicole Chung

  Mom agreed that my medical history was important. Again, for the good of her grandchild. What else could she say? She said it was too bad I could only get it by writing to them. “Will you talk with them, too?”

  “Yes,” I said. “If they want to talk to me.”

  She told me not to forget who my real family was. As if I could forget—they were the only family I’d ever known. We all knew what I owed them; it went without saying: I would not call another parent Mom or Dad. I would not replace my adoptive family with my biological one.

  Yet my biological family was the one I’d been made for. Whoever they were, my birth parents were the people who had brought me into the world, and I wanted them to know I recognized that; I could honor them for it, even if I never learned anything else about them. I felt I owed them that much.

  I’ve had a full, healthy, happy life. And I have you to thank for that life.

  I tried to put myself in my birth mother’s place. As I couldn’t conjure a clear image of her face, I settled for picturing her hands—like mine, perhaps, but smaller, lined with age. I saw them opening the mailbox, retrieving my letter, unfolding the two sheets of paper. How would she react when she realized the words were mine? Would she weep from joy or sadness? Would she resent the sudden intrusion into her life?

  If you would like to write back to me, the person forwarding this letter to you can share my information. If you would rather not write or call, then please consider sending the medical and family history back to me. Whatever you choose, thank you for reading this letter.

  “Best wishes” seemed impersonal; “Sincerely” was worse. I hesitated. Then I typed:

  Love,

  Nicole

  If not something I felt, not precisely, not yet, love was something I aspired to. She was my mother, or she had been at one time. Maybe a part of me just wanted to love the idea of her.

  In the end, I wasn’t entirely satisfied with my letter. There was so much I couldn’t ask, yet so much I had to pack into a handful of paragraphs. I wanted my words to be warm, clever, reassuring, but instead I’d essentially written a note of introduction, sprinkled with assurances of my well-being and hints about my life that didn’t give too much away. That was how we had to begin, Donna had said; everything else—if there was to be anything else—would have to wait.

  The week before Christmas, I finally printed out the letter, signed it by hand, and mailed it off, resisting the urge to tear it apart word by word and make it anew. My birth mother wouldn’t make the decision to talk with me based on my wit or my word choices.

  Donna emailed to let me know she had received it, adding that there was “an unwritten law” among intermediaries not to reach out to biological relatives close to the holidays. It’s a very emotional time for people. They tend to have too much stress at holiday time. She said she would mail it after Christmas—definitely before New Year’s.

  On New Year’s Day, I would begin my thirty-second week of pregnancy. My birth mother had never reached that point with me. While I’d hoped to be in touch with my birth family by the time I delivered my daughter, now my task was simply to hold and wait for the choices of others to determine what happened next. With the letter written and sent at last, the uncertainty was somehow easier to bear. Everything in my life was about to change; I would savor the peace, the calm, while I still could.

  A few days into the new year, Cindy was at the community health clinic where she worked. She was not a doctor, or a nurse, but the person who kept things running: she managed schedules for the director of the clinic as well as multiple staff, always knew who was supposed to be on call, and was the one who had an answer when no one else knew what was going on. She liked her work; she knew her value, and was always busy.

  So when she got a cryptic email from Jessica—Call me right away—she ignored it at first. She had a lot to do; she could check in with Jessica when the workday was over. Cindy assumed she wanted to talk about their mother, who had moved in with Jessica in another state. But then came a string of increasingly urgent texts (Are you there? It’s really important), so Cindy slipped out to make the call. “Hey. What’s going on?”

  She listened, mostly, while Jessica talked at high speed. Even if there had been an opportunity to interrupt, ask more questions, Cindy had no idea what to say. Their family had its problems; their parents had their secrets, no doubt. But what Jessica was telling her seemed too outrageous. Even for them. It couldn’t possibly be true.

  Could it?

  Cindy heard herself telling Jessica that her break was over; she had to get back to work. But she didn’t. Instead she walked over to her coworker’s desk. Her friend took one look at Cindy’s face and asked what had happened.

  “I just found out that I have a sister,” Cindy told her. “I thought she was dead . . . but she’s not. She was adopted.”

  Her coworker was the mother of two children, both adopted from foster care. She gently took Cindy by the arm. “Come on,” she said, and led her toward the door. “We’re going for a walk.”

  That evening, when they both got home from work, Cindy told her husband, Rick, what she had learned. She had met Rick in the army reserves and married him in 2002. He was one of few people she’d ever told about what her childhood was like.

  “They lied to us,” she said over and over.

  That her parents had withheld information, that they had secrets beyond her ability to imagine, was not so shocking. But why had they covered it up? That was the part Cindy couldn’t understand. They had always insisted they didn’t have to explain anything to her. That’s our business, not yours. They could have told her the truth about the adoption, forbidden any further discussion, and that would have been that. She would never have gotten anything else out of them, but at least she would have known. Instead they had managed to hide a sister—“a whole person!”—from her.

  The baby had been a girl, she remembered that much. They were going to call her Susie. She’d long since forgotten nearly everything else about that strange, confusing time when she was almost a big sister, but Cindy distinctly remembered that name, the name they had chosen.

  For an instant, Rick was speechless; uncharacteristically so. Then he remembered when Cindy began to tell him about her family, back when they were newly dating. It had taken time to explain it all—the story came out painstakingly over many long drives and weekend trips—and that was how Rick came to understand the kind of pressure she’d lived under when she was young. Maybe that’s what he was remembering when he admitted that, while the adoption was a wild story, he could believe it.

  “Get as much information as you can,” he said. “Then you can figure out what you want to do.”

  So Cindy got Jessica on the phone again. She learned that a young woman had sent their mother a letter through an adoption intermediary. She had asked for medical information. She was having a baby soon. She had grown up in Oregon. So close, Cindy thought. For all those years, her sister had been so close.

  Their mother’s English had never been strong. Her daughters had often helped her decipher bills and contracts and other important documents. When the mysterious letter had arrived, she was confused by it; she couldn’t understand. So she’d asked Jessica to help translate.

  That was how Jessica learned that their sister was still alive.

  Their mother didn’t try to deny it; yes, she said, it was true. The girl had been tiny, and sick, but she had lived. She had been adopted by another family. “Mom said they couldn’t afford the medical bills,” Jessica said. “He said that adoption was the only choice.”

  Their mother told Jessica the adoption was her husband’s “fault”; that she herself had wanted to tell the daughters the truth about their sister, but he wouldn’t allow it. They wondered if this was true. They remembered once, years ago, before she died, their grandmother had mentioned something about your other sister. Had she been confused in her old age, or had she known about the
adoption that was hidden from them?

  Jessica didn’t know if the young woman had also reached out to Cindy’s father. During the years they’d all been together, Cindy’s father, though not Jessica’s biological parent, had been a father to both of them. But after the divorce, Jessica had stayed in touch only with their mother, and when Cindy went to live with her father the two sisters weren’t permitted to communicate. They tried to keep in touch across the miles, but rarely saw each other. Now Cindy no longer talked to their mother, and Jessica was not in contact with Cindy’s father; they knew they would have to get the story out of each parent, separately, and compare notes.

  They couldn’t move forward with their sister until the proper forms were signed and filed, and it would take some time—maybe a few weeks, maybe a month. Jessica promised to pass along her contact information as soon as she could. “But let’s not tell her about the bad things, Cindy,” she added. “Let’s keep it positive. Once she knows us better, maybe we could tell her more of what happened. We don’t want to scare her away, do we?”

  Cindy could see the logic in this. She didn’t want to scare her sister away, either. But all her life, she had been told what to say and what not to say. She’d been subject to them all, to their values and their rules: Don’t tell anyone about what happens at home. Don’t tell anyone about the divorce. Keep the family secrets; help us save face. And she had gone along with it, if sometimes grudgingly, even when it meant that terrible things went unspoken, unacknowledged. As the youngest, she had known her opinion counted least, counted last—if at all.

  But this, she couldn’t help but feel, was different. Already she felt a surge of resentment at being told how to handle this revelation, what to say when she made contact. She wasn’t a child anymore. And who was she to try to keep secrets from this girl who’d been given up, whose very existence had been denied?

  Cindy was two weeks away from turning thirty-three when she learned that her family was not what she’d always believed. Her little sister was alive. She had been raised by strangers. What had they been like, her little sister’s parents? How might her sister’s childhood compare with hers? Had she been safe? Had she been happy?

  Cindy would write to her as soon as she could, she knew that already. She just had to decide what to tell her.

  I felt as though I’d been staring at a waiting chessboard all my life, and now the dusty old pieces were finally beginning to move. A few days into January, Donna called to tell me that my birth mother had received my letter, and that one of my sisters had helped her to read it. I fully intended to ask more about my birth mother, to find out if she was eager to talk to me, but was momentarily distracted—what about my sisters? Donna couldn’t share their full names, but my half sister was named Jessica, and my full sister, Cindy.

  Donna couldn’t send me my birth family’s contact information, or share mine. It would take a few weeks to collect and file the paperwork. In the meantime, if I wanted to, I could prepare another letter for my birth father, and Donna would forward it to him. “I know waiting is hard,” she said. She was right, but it was even harder to try to wrest emotional focus away from the baby as I drew nearer to full term. I confirmed that Donna could tell me nothing new and said goodbye.

  How strange that the weeks of my pregnancy had been spent waiting, looking ahead, not just to the birth but also to my hoped-for reunion with my family of origin. While I had thought of my pregnancy and my search as parallel journeys, I had not expected the two winding paths to join together here, now, at the summit. The slow-turning cogs of bureaucracy and my own hesitancy in composing the letter to my birth mother forced this pair of stories to converge: I might rejoin one family while beginning another. Would it all be too much for me to handle? Even if it was, what choice did I have, except to move forward?

  Only after I’d hung up did I realize that I’d forgotten to ask Donna if she could tell me my birth mother’s name.

  One week into February—an email from Jessica. Hello, Nicole. I am not sure how to start or what to say. It was never clear to me what happened 26 years ago. Our parents told us you had died.

  I felt sad and angry again when I read those words, though I wasn’t sure I had a right to either feeling. It hurt to see a guess from my adoption file confirmed in black-and-white on my computer screen: my birth parents had never told their other children about me. They let them believe I had died in the hospital.

  I couldn’t help but feel guilty for what my sisters must have gone through. They might be eager to speak, as my intermediary had put it, but that didn’t mean they hadn’t been shaken by their parents’ omission. And I—with my curiosity, my determined pursuit of the facts, my selfishness?—was the reason. I had questions, yes, and I had much to gain from a search. But did I truly have the right to disrupt my sisters’ lives with a letter announcing a truth their parents had not wanted to reveal? In time, as everyone learned more about what happened, would they come to resent the stranger who had shattered the family equilibrium? Perhaps they blamed me already.

  But Jessica did not seem to believe I was at fault. She told me that she had read my letter, seen the enclosed photographs, and confronted our mother, who had told her about the adoption. They had been struggling financially, Jessica said, and they could not afford the medical bills. My birth father, Jessica was told, had suggested that adoption was “the best way.” I paused at these words, a direct echo of the story I’d heard time and time again from my adoptive parents.

  Jessica said that our mother would prefer to talk with me on the phone. When you are ready, she added. In the meantime, they would fill out the medical forms and send them back via the intermediary. This is all meant to be, she wrote, with God’s help. The invocation reminded me of my adoptive parents, who’d been so convinced that God had willed my adoption—others still seemed to see divine planning, the hand of fate, where I saw the result of every small, careful step I had been weighing over the course of months; years.

  Jessica told me that she thought our mother must have kept a great deal of pain inside, and now, she was implying, I could help her heal. I had trouble thinking so highly of my healing abilities. That my birth parents had kept my adoption hidden seemed to me an ominous sign, proof that they had never been at peace with the decision. I felt so foolish for having once imagined them explaining it to my siblings, telling them: It was a difficult decision, but it was the right one. Even if they hadn’t wanted to tell them as children, I’d reasoned, surely they could have sat them down at some point, as adults, and given them the truth. But they never had.

  What should I do now? I didn’t see how talking with me once, or even many times, would help my birth mother feel better about a choice she’d buried so deep her own children had not known about it. Nothing I had learned so far made me eager to book a flight to the west coast to meet everyone.

  Contact had always been a risk. I had pursued it because I felt it was important; because I knew not everything in life could remain simple and compartmentalized forever. But as I thought about how to respond, I realized I had no idea what would happen next. They had all learned far more about me than I knew about them. If they didn’t even share their truths with one another, what could I hope to learn?

  There is another sister. Her name is Cindy. She is 33 years old, and beautiful like you. I told her about you.

  This was the part of Jessica’s email that interested me more than all the rest. I read these words over and over, trying to think what “beautiful like me” could mean—I’d never thought of myself as attractive, partly a function of growing up in my overwhelmingly white hometown. As my full sister, did Cindy look the most like me out of all of them? Was she taller or shorter than me? Was she also a night owl, chatty but socially awkward, too lazy for makeup, always in the middle of reading five books at once? Did she save her best singing for the car? Did she ever dream about becoming a writer?

  Where my birth parents were concerned, I now
felt an urge, justified or not, to protect myself—not to shut things down, but to proceed slowly and warily, for reasons I could not quite identify. But despite these misgivings and the guilt I felt over my sisters’ shock, knowing that they were no longer in ignorance of my existence filled me with a strange hope, a wild and new kind of happiness.

  They were out there. They might want to know more about me. Whatever had happened with our parents, whatever might have gone wrong in our family, maybe this was a new beginning.

  Cindy knew she had to give her father a chance to explain. She couldn’t simply drive the three and a half hours to his house uninvited, not in the middle of the workweek. So she called him the day after she learned the truth from Jessica.

  “I have to ask you something,” she said. “Do I have a sister you never told me about?”

  There was a long pause. “Do you mean your half sister?”

  “No.” She could already feel her anger rising. “Another sister, my full sister. Did you and Mom ever have a baby you didn’t tell us about?”

  The denial was immediate, but his voice sounded a bit strange. He said he didn’t know if her mother had had another baby with someone after the divorce, but there were no other children he knew about. “If there had been another child, don’t you think you’d already know?” he asked.

  Cindy thought of her sister’s letter. It was too much, too detailed to be a fabrication. Somewhere, there were documents, birth and adoption decrees: hard proof, even if she hadn’t seen it yet. And Cindy knew the letter had included photos. Jessica had told her there was a family resemblance.

  She knew that she had a sister. She had known for a matter of days. Her father had known for almost twenty-seven years. She didn’t know what she expected when she called, but she had hoped he would admit it. Tell her why her sister had been given away.