I was loading the dishwasher after Sunday dinner when my daughter tugged my sleeve and said, “Mommy, why does Grandma have a PICTURE of another little girl in her wallet?”
My mother had been living with us for three months. She’d had a stroke in February, and there was no one else – my father died when I was nine, and I was an only child.
At least that’s what I’d been told my entire life.
I’m Danielle. Thirty-four. Married to Kevin for six years, two kids, a house with a mortgage that keeps me up at night. My mother moved into our guest room and I didn’t complain once because that’s what you do.
Macy, my five-year-old, had been going through my mom’s purse looking for mints. She held up a small wallet-sized photo of a girl, maybe seven or eight, dark hair, gap-toothed smile.
“That’s probably an old picture of me, baby.”
But it wasn’t.
The girl in the photo had a different face. Different eyes. I turned it over. On the back, in my mother’s handwriting: Brianne, 1996.
I was born in 1991. In 1996, I was five. This girl was older than me.
My hands went still.
I waited until my mother fell asleep that night and pulled out her phone. Her passcode was my birthday – always had been. I opened her contacts and scrolled.
There was a name I’d never seen. Brianne Kessler. With a 614 area code. Columbus.
I Googled the name. A woman, early forties, dental hygienist. Brown hair. Something about the jawline made my chest tight.
She looked like my mother.
Three days later I found a birthday card in my mom’s nightstand drawer. It was addressed to my mother, signed Love always, B. Postmarked last October.
They’d been in contact. For years, maybe. While my mother told me every holiday, every Thanksgiving, every single time – “It’s just us two, Dani. That’s all we need.”
I COUNTED THIRTY-SEVEN CARDS in that drawer. Thirty-seven years of someone writing to my mother.
I sat down on the floor without deciding to.
That Friday, I called the number. A woman picked up on the second ring.
“Is this Brianne?” I said.
Silence. Then, very quietly: “She finally told you?”
“No,” I said. “She didn’t.”
Brianne took a breath and said, “Then you need to sit down, because our mother gave me away when she was SEVENTEEN, and the story she told you about your father – that’s not even close to what happened.”
What Brianne Told Me
I was standing in the hallway outside the guest room. I could hear my mother’s oxygen concentrator humming through the door.
I slid down the wall until I was sitting on the floor with my back against the baseboard. Kevin was watching something in the living room. I could hear the TV. I didn’t call out to him.
Brianne talked for almost an hour.
She was born in 1983. My mother was seventeen, unmarried, living with her own parents in a house in Chillicothe. The father was a boy named Gary Cobb who was nineteen and, according to Brianne, “not someone who stayed.” My mother’s parents – my grandparents, who I knew as quiet, church-going people who smelled like cedar and sent me twenty dollars every birthday – told her she had two options. Keep the baby and leave their house, or give the baby up and they’d never speak of it again.
She was seventeen.
She chose the second option.
Brianne was adopted by a couple in Columbus, the Kesslers. She grew up not knowing anything about her birth family until she turned twenty-five and sent a letter to the adoption agency. The agency contacted my mother. And my mother, apparently, wrote back.
“She sent me a card,” Brianne said. “Just a card. With her phone number inside.”
That was 1988.
I did the math. I was not yet born.
“So she’s been writing to you my whole life,” I said.
“Every year. Christmas and my birthday.”
I stared at the baseboard. There was a scuff mark on it I’d never noticed before. Long and dark, like something had scraped it.
“Did she ever want to meet you?” I asked.
Brianne was quiet for a second. “Once. About twelve years ago. She drove to Columbus. We had lunch.”
Twelve years ago I was twenty-two. I was in college. My mother had told me she was visiting a college friend in Cincinnati.
What She Said About My Father
This is the part I wasn’t ready for.
I knew my father as a story. He died when I was nine, car accident, highway 35 in the rain. His name was Paul. He had brown eyes. He liked baseball. That was almost everything I had, because my mother didn’t talk about him much and I’d learned early not to push.
His name was not Paul.
Or, it was Paul, but that wasn’t the full truth of it.
Brianne said our mother left Chillicothe at nineteen, after giving her up, and moved to Columbus to start over. She met a man named Paul Garrett at a bar where she was waitressing. They were together for two years. They never married. He left when my mother got pregnant with me.
Not dead.
Left.
He was alive for years after that. Brianne didn’t know if he was still alive now. She’d done some looking herself, a few years back, and found a Paul Garrett in Akron, late sixties, which would be about right. She hadn’t contacted him. She didn’t know if I’d want to.
I sat on the floor and I thought about every time I’d asked my mother about my father. Every time she’d gotten that look, that careful, closed-off look, and said something like, “He was a good man, Dani. He just ran out of time.”
He didn’t run out of time.
He ran.
The Part I Keep Coming Back To
Kevin found me on the floor around nine-thirty. He stood in the hallway in his socks, holding a glass of water he’d clearly been bringing to me because he’d heard my voice through the wall and figured something was happening.
He didn’t say anything. He just sat down next to me.
I told him everything. All of it. The cards, the lunch in Columbus, Paul Garrett in Akron. He listened without interrupting, which is not always his strong suit, but he knew to just be quiet.
When I finished he said, “What do you want to do?”
And I didn’t have an answer.
Because here’s the thing. My mother is sixty-seven years old. She had a stroke four months ago. She gets tired by seven in the evening. Some mornings she can’t work the coffee maker and she stands in the kitchen looking at it with this expression that breaks my heart a little every time.
She is not the woman who made these choices anymore. She is also completely that woman.
I kept thinking about her at seventeen. In that house in Chillicothe, with parents who gave her two options and no good ones. I kept thinking about her driving to Columbus alone when she was fifty-five, sitting across from the daughter she gave up, and then driving home and never telling me.
I don’t know what I feel. I’ve been trying to figure it out for six weeks and I still can’t get a clean answer. It’s not quite anger. It’s not quite grief. It’s something that doesn’t have a name, or if it does, I don’t know it.
The Conversation I Haven’t Had Yet
I have not talked to my mother about any of this.
I know. I know.
Kevin thinks I should. Brianne thinks I should. My friend Pam, who I finally told last week over coffee, thinks I should, and she said it with the kind of emphasis that made clear she thinks I’m being a coward.
Maybe I am.
But my mother had a stroke. She has good days and bad days. On her bad days she calls me by her sister’s name sometimes, and her hands shake when she pours her orange juice, and she falls asleep in her chair before the evening news is over.
I keep starting the conversation in my head. I sit with her in the mornings when the kids are at school and I think, today. I’ll ask her today. And then she’ll say something like “Macy looks so much like you did at that age” and I’ll look at my daughter and I’ll just. Not.
Not yet.
Brianne and I have talked four more times since that first call. She’s careful with me. She doesn’t push. She told me she spent years being angry, worked through most of it in her thirties, and now she mostly just wants to know where she came from. She’s curious about my kids. She asked if they have her eyes.
She sent me a photo of herself. Recent, taken at some family thing, her husband and two teenage boys. I looked at it for a long time.
She has my mother’s cheekbones. And something around the mouth that I see when I look in the mirror.
I printed it out. I don’t know why. It’s in my desk drawer.
What I Know Now That I Didn’t Know Then
There’s a Paul Garrett in Akron.
I haven’t done anything with that information. I wrote his name on a piece of paper and then I put the paper in the same drawer as Brianne’s photo and I closed it.
Some days I think I’ll never open it. Some days I think I’ll open it tomorrow.
I’m not the kind of person who lets things sit. Kevin will tell you that. I follow up on emails within twenty minutes. I finish what I start. I am, in the words of my mother-in-law Barbara, “relentlessly organized.”
But this one I can’t organize. There’s no system for it. There’s no order of operations.
I have a sister who grew up three hours away and we never knew each other existed.
I have a father who is maybe still alive and chose not to be my father.
I have a mother sleeping in my guest room who kept both of these things from me for thirty-four years, and who I love, and who I am furious at, and who needs me to help her with the coffee maker some mornings.
Macy asked me last week why I looked sad.
I told her I was just tired.
She patted my hand and said, “I’ll get you a mint, Mommy.” And she went to get her grandmother’s purse.
I watched her little hand reach inside it.
—
If this one got under your skin, pass it on. Someone else out there is sitting with a drawer full of things they haven’t opened yet.
