If Only

by Jennifer Gilmore

  This is what I look like: dark hair, just a little wavy. White skin, porcelain doll–style on good pretty days, but bad in the sun on all the days. The eyes. They’re a little too far apart if you ask me, but on the flip side, I have cheekbones people like to comment on. As in: cheekbones higher than the Alps, which is what my New York City gram always tells me. My Atlanta grandmother has never mentioned them at all.

  In the photo Mom is wearing a sleeveless collared shirt and her arms are thin and lovely. She’s looking at me like I might have hung the moon. Mo is behind her, and her light hair is cut close to her scalp. It’s not gray yet. So many freckles splashed across Mo’s face. Mom’s more serious. Always.

  No one is looking at my birth mom. Not even me.

  Me! Teeny as a loaf of bread everyone looks like they want to devour. A loaf they know they can’t slice up to share.

  All the photos.

  So some days it’s okay that I have never heard my laugh on someone else, or that she disappeared before I was even a year old. Totally disappeared—no more contact at all. Look, I know things are hard for all of us. I mean, my friends are sad and angry and some don’t know who they are, really, on the inside. Claire is none of those things. She, like, came out fully formed. She does what she wants. Or that’s what it seems like to me, as I’m never as sure of myself. How do you know you want to go to sleep now, for instance? How do you know you want a long bath and not a quick hot shower? I just don’t know. Patrick, I think, is more like me. He’s got these hippie parents who accept everything he does. They float about him. There is a lot of amaranth and patchouli around.

  For me, there’s also this extra added part. Of not knowing. Of all the maybes. Could have beens. The feeling I might have been erased and drawn back into life by someone who doesn’t know my face.

  The story is not that complicated. It is either I was wanted or unwanted. My story is I was left behind or I was stayed with. I mean, I know, as in, I’ve been told, that my birth mother loved me so much she let me go. She chose them and they chose her and they chose me and we all had this choosing thing that made us us.

  So what would have happened if she’d kept me? I would be a different girl. What would she be? Who? It is the strangest thing. To know this. To wonder about this world that almost was. The almost of me, the I that never was. And then: the me I became.

  Why did she hand me over in the end? What did I do that was so bad? Was it when I was inside her or when I came out?

  That is what it feels like on bad days. On good, normal days it’s just: she was a mess. She was a kid. I would have returned me, too. I can’t even keep a goldfish alive. That is a horrible story, my goldfish story, for another time. But can you imagine? When I think like that, yeah, it makes tons of sense. Find the people who are you but a million times better.

  Anyway, that’s not how the story ended. It ended with the three of us. Me, Mom, and Mo. There are ten million photos now. All digital. Girl triangle. The beach. Hiking. Me graduating from nursery school, kindergarten, middle school. High school will be in two years. One, two, three, four candles, all blown out. There’s one photograph with her, too. Maybe I’m a year old, standing, wintertime, hat and gloves and big puffed coat. She is kneeling down and holding my hands. But still, I can’t see her face.

  All the photos, so many years of us, a better, bigger life. Pets and parties and school and tutors and piano lessons and ballet and ice skating and sometimes theater and restaurants and vacations on the beach, in the mountains, and pretty dresses. I am lucky; I am special. In a way it’s more and in a way it’s less but no matter what, I am always holding on to these two things at once, these two stories, these two ways of seeing things, and I can’t say I’ll ever really know if I was lost or if I was found.

  So there is a quilt, a dollhouse, a few photographs, and, also, there is a letter.

  Here. In my journal, pressed tight as a flower. I bring it out more since my birthday, run my hands along the careful bubble script. A child’s letter. To another child. Only sometimes, just to touch it and wonder.

  You, she calls me. You.

  Now I run my hands across the letter. She pressed down hard; the paper still rises up around the ink. It feels like she meant it.

  But does anyone know? Were you lost or were you found? Tell me.

  Exactly.

  Ivy

  2017

  Since my sixteenth birthday party, for these six months, I can’t lie, it’s just been on my brain. Fore fronted. Not pushdownable.

  But today is when I show the letter and the photo to Claire.

  We are hanging out in my room listening to Mazzy Star because, sadness and the nineties, I love you. Red walls, my shit’s everywhere. It looks like I’ve been robbed. Flannels hanging off my bureau, Kurt Cobain smoking over my bed. Dragonfly lights like icicles lining where the wall meets the ceiling. Photo-booth strips of Patrick and me at the lake, goofing. Claire and me, too, Claire’s nose red and peeling, me, SPF 50 white. Claire’s freckles. Postcards of something from all the places I have been: paintings from the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay, Anne Frank’s house, the Colosseum. The Mona Lisa, The Lilies. Rembrandt in his floppy hat. Starry, starry nights. Hamilton Stars. Orphan Annie (adopted). Superman (also adopted). Anne of Green Gables (also . . .). The Magic Clock. Palm trees. Little squares hung that add up to things I have loved and seen and watched and heard and wanted.

  So, the photo first. Because Claire is always looking at photos. She’s the art director of the school lit mag, Crossroads, where I am the lit editor. I got her the job this year when the senior who had it for two years graduated and now, between the two of us, we see every angsty poem and every bloody Goth pen and ink that moves through this school. Also, she collects postcards and books of these oddities—boys dressed as girls, and also terribly disturbing images of babies dressed and laid out after they’ve died.

  “I’ve seen this,” she says of my photo. “You’ve shown me. Another girl in the mix.” She’s putting on lip gloss, looking in the mirror.

  “It’s her,” I say as if I don’t hear her.

  But Claire already knows the story. Sometimes I go months without even thinking about it. About what happened to her, all the things I don’t know about what it means to disappear. That adds to the story, I think. That once she was here and then she was gone. Like a story on a story on a story. A layer cake, tower-high, frosting jammed in between.

  “The third girl.” She kisses the mirror.

  “Claire!” I go to wipe it off with a tissue but it’s just smudged up now.

  I look to you and I see nothing, I look to you to see the truth, sings Mazzy S.

  “Sorry.” She giggles.

  “Third?” I ask, tossing the Kleenex. “Girl?”

  “In, like, the fifties, when girls all lived together in big cities, two roommates would advertise for a third girl. I’ve got a book of these photos of single girls living in these special hotels for girls and also in these little apartments in the city and it’s awesome.”

  Who would want a book about that? Claire, I guess. I don’t know. “Why?” I ask.

  “Why what?”

  “What’s so awesome about it?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “They’re all dressed so well, so sharply and fifties. But where are they going? They were, like, born too soon. They couldn’t go anywhere yet.”

  That I get. I think of my grandmother. She went to college and could have had a whole career. She, like, went to law school. But she never practiced law or anything; she says she did it so she could talk to my grandfather, who was a lawyer, too. What would it have been like if all the women had become lawyers?

  So Claire and this art stuff and plus she’s a runner. We used to run track together but I gave it up because I hated the long distance. Claire could run forever. It doesn’t even register. Me, I sprint and then I just lose my lung power. Not to mention my leg power.

  Also? Claire draws.

 
Sketching, she says. Be still.

  “Big cities,” I say. “Sure.” I’m about as rural as we get out here. Nowheresville, as Gram says.

  I stare at the picture. There are four girls here. But the split goes three three three three. Like me, Mom, Mo. Or Mom, me, her. Or the three of them. The three moms. Maybe the third girl is me.

  Or there could just be two. Me and her. No additional roommate required.

  Anyway, there are other things. Patrick and winter and the Take Themselves Oh So Seriously Farewells, and Crossroads.

  But this is on my mind now, it’s like it’s growing and growing. Part of the layers, Mo has told me. Sixteen and loved you so big but how can you do it right at sixteen? Can’t even take care of yourself. With this I take issue but I don’t say it. Love so big she had to let you go. We wanted you and wanted you and wanted you and would have waited for eternity until she chose us. She chose us. We were also chosen, is what Mo always says.

  I chose you, I have always wanted to tell them. On my best, happiest days. On those days I know I did and there was purpose to the choosing. My heart chose them. Sometimes I love Mo more and sometimes Mom. They say love is big enough to love us both. It’s not finite. In that there is no science. But isn’t there? It’s hard to love them both the same at the same time. But I know I chose them.

  After the first time Patrick and I kissed—on a walk along a gorge, fall trees bursting around us—he gave me this book about the butterfly effect. He had seen a movie about it and how the flapping of wings on one corner of the world can alter the flight of another somewhere far away. His card said In praise of that butterfly.

  That’s what this is, too. Who else could have taken me? I could be anyone. Anyone could be my parent.

  “I want to find her,” I say, which surprises me because I don’t know that I’ve thought this yet, for certain.

  Claire says, “Of course you do.”

  I’m silent.

  “How could you not?” she asks.

  “I know,” I say, but I’ve never really felt the need until I turned sixteen and just imagined being her age. Every day I imagine it. “But you can’t go back from it. Or unknow it. I always thought I’d wait until I was older.”

  “Let’s do it!”

  There she goes, Claire, just knowing. But I’m still, bath or shower, not sure yet. Don’t even know if I’m tired.

  I think of the letter, her letter. Her big, careful handwriting, how hard she pressed down, how tight she must have held that pen. How much she wanted those words to stay on that page, forever.

  “Do you want to ask your parents?” Claire asks. “Maybe we can all do it together. I mean, if you want help.”

  I love Claire, my friend from and for a million years. Sometimes I wonder if she would choose me now—Claire got way cooler than I did. But she’s as close to a sister as I’ll ever get. I am for her, too, I think—she’s got two brothers. Sandwiched in.

  I guess when I think about it, I would like a brother or sister. To not be alone in all this. But all this can be different stuff for everyone.

  For Claire? I don’t know yet. She likes that I’m her weird Martian friend, adopted, two moms (the third girl), lives in the sticks. Super rural. I know that makes her love me more. Or just love me still.

  If there’s anyone I want to bring to meeting my birth mom, it’s her. Third girl. Claire. Long dirty-blond braid down her back. She’s wearing it fishtail-style today, but I can tell she did it yesterday and it’s frizzed. Bangs across her forehead. Full eyebrows. She acts like she never touches them, but I have seen her with those tweezers. She has a brow game, promise.

  “I could. They wouldn’t mind, I don’t think, but it would mean discussing it,” I say.

  “Oh God.”

  “And processing it.”

  “No.”

  “And talking about why I want to find her now. Then Mom would cry and Mo would tell me how I am the light of their lives and they will help me do whatever I want. In anything. Be anything, they’ll say, and it will all go so off topic I can’t even.” I think about it. “Really,” I affirm, “I just can’t.”

  “No, no, no.” Claire is laughing, slapping her knees. “But I gotta say, it will save you a lot of time. Talking to your moms. How else will we look?”

  I don’t mention the few times in the wee hours of the night, those dark, strange feeling hours, I tried to find her online. Over Christmas and then again, just when it turned to the new year. Brand new. But there is nothing there. Not that I could find. No footprint at all. I don’t mention the adoption registries I’ve hovered over, scared to give my contact information. The Facebook pages for adoptees. I just can’t bring myself to press send. You can’t unsend a sent message, now can you?

  I half groan and fling myself facedown on my bed. I flip over and prop myself on my pillows and look at Claire, twisted around at my desk, her arm slung over the back of the chair. “Okay,” she says. “I know. I can stay for dinner and we can just ask them. It can come up, like, totally randomly. Casual.”

  Interesting. If Claire is there, how crazy can it be? How much emotion can there be, how many questions? “That’s a good one.”

  “I could be doing a family portrait while you’re all talking.”

  “No thanks,” I say. The last time Claire tried to draw Patrick and me it was a three-hour nightmare and we all got into a massive fight.

  Claire’s right hand disappears inside her fisherman sweater, like she’s trying for a moment to disappear. I watch her shoulder go up, all hunchback like. Then she straightens. There she is again. Hi.

  “Maybe,” I say. I can’t tell if they’ll be into it, Mom and Mo, or if they’ll be even more hurt. “We can try to talk to them. Or see how it goes anyway.” We do everything at dinner here. It’s like our own personal town hall over pasta and Mom’s sprouted wheat bread.

  I feel bad. Am I choosing Claire? Over my moms? Over Patrick? Everything is a choice. Everything is yes or no or not that one or that one, certainly. What just happens on its own? Just dying, far as I can tell. Choosing is exhausting. And the rest of my life is just going to be choosing more things.

  Anyway, Claire’s already whipping out her phone and texting her mother.

  She looks back at me. “Gonna turn up!” she says, ironically, because that’s not how she talks, at all.

  I pick up the letter again. I hold it out to Claire but I am really holding on to everything. Everything all at once.

  “Here,” I say. “Her letter.” Because I have never shown it to anyone.

  Claire turns back toward me, reaching out her hands.

  Bridget

  April 2000

  My mother comes up from behind me while I’m putting on lip gloss and says, “No.” That’s all she says. “No.”

  She is so pissed. I mean she’s trying to be cool about it, I guess, just to make sure we go through with it. She has bought me some cute clothes already to show that she’s being supportive. I take one look at these jeans with their massive little pouch in the front, some serious nerding out, though I will say it reminds me of a kangaroo and here you are my little joey all packed up tight inside. Hi, I think, looking down at the you that is protected by the total geek that is now me.

  Only of course, of course, it won’t be mine by then. We will be handing it over to these people, I think. I think I think.

  “Baylor,” I say because I still want him to be here for this with me. I don’t want him with Rosaria; I want us to be together forever, when we can have babies of our own. I mean, like, in a planned kind of way. I know that’s not going to happen now, no matter what, though I do keep thinking that if I say no to all of this, maybe I can still keep him. He will have to stay. That is how it works. We will be a family. Sometimes that feels okay, but when the social worker says to me, you need to parent when you want to, when you’re ready, when you choose, I just think she is trying to take her. For her business. There are a lot of people who are choosing to be pa
rents only it’s too late for them now. There are many more of them than there are of me. I can see how many profiles this lady has in her stacks.

  “Sit here,” I say to Baylor. “Please?”

  Poor Bayle. Kid has no idea what he’s getting into. I don’t have those feelings like some girls do, like, well, you should have thought of that before when we were doing it, because it was both of us who decided. We love each other. Loved. It wasn’t a mistake. Just bad timing I guess. Poor timing, my mother calls it. Timing and Judgment. All poor. All-against-the-Lord poor.

  Now he sort of shuffles over my way. Sits down. Clueless. I can tell he doesn’t know whether he should take my hand. Where is the place that it says when you are about to meet the family who will be taking your child away, take the girl’s hand? There is no handbook that says ask for it either. The hand. At least not that I know about.

  I don’t want him to touch me because something about that makes me feel like I will unzip and all of me will spill out. Blah. Me. Here you go, Baylor Atkins, all my fears and memories. Even if he just touches my shoulder. The good ones of being little and hiking with my father. Before boys. Through the woods. Boots on soft moss. That feeling. The one where you broke up with me at the reservoir while your friends waited for you at the rocks. That feeling, too, Baylor Atkins.

  I am desperate to be humble but I don’t know that I am, not yet. I don’t know where to look. The part about being humble I can take. That part of what my mother tells me sounds good to me.

  But where is the place that tells you where to look?

  Originally Baylor hadn’t wanted to come today. But both our moms were like, you were there when it happened, you’re sure as heck going to be there now. You need to help Bridget choose. Help me. Help me choose who this little person will grow up with. Will grow up to be. Bayle, I said to him, this person can be better than we are. She can have all the things forever and ever. Please, please, someone help me choose.

  I get to pick the life you will have. Do I get to pick who you will be?