13
Indelible: the rumpled white sheets, their texture slightly nubby. The thin blanket pooled around my waist. Michael seated at the desk. Both of our laptops open. The coffee, room temperature at this point. I hadn’t emerged from my cocoon—not to pee, not to brush my teeth. Jennifer Mendelsohn was on speakerphone. We had already walked her through the basics.
“Let’s take a look at the family tree associated with this Thomas Bethany,” she began, clicking on a link we hadn’t been aware of.
“I didn’t know you could do that.”
“Got it. Here she is. Bethany Thomas.”
“I knew it!” Michael seemed almost happy.
I typed “Bethany Thomas” into Facebook. There were five or six people with the same name.
“Wait, hold on. Now I’ve just gone on her family tree,” Jennifer went on. “Her maiden name is Hort.”
I searched for Bethany Hort Thomas on Facebook. Sure enough, there she was. The air was charged with a strange, dangerous momentum, as if I was nearing the top of a roller coaster. Our educated guesses had propelled the ride up—but we had no idea what would happen once we hurtled into the wild speed just on the other side of the crest.
I clicked on a blurry image of a middle-aged woman in a striped sweater. I saw instantly that we had no shared friends, had liked none of the same pages. I would never have stumbled across her. I scanned posts and photographs from a life very different from my own, scrolling down her page with a merciless intensity, like a stalker trailing a stranger down a busy street. Little kids in a bouncy house. A bunch of people cheering at a football game. Cute kitten photos. She seemed to live in Ohio. What was I looking for? Some way of identifying my first cousin A.T. I was crystal clear when it came to one piece of logic. Later, when I obsessively tell the details of this day dozens upon dozens of times—the nature of trauma is that you have no recollection of it as a story—people will look at me blankly when I get to this part. I’ll have to break down this simple line of reasoning, one every family knows and takes for granted. If it was true, if A.T. was indeed my first cousin, then an uncle of his—either his father’s brother or his mother’s brother—would be my biological father.
“Here we go. Her husband’s name is Adam Thomas.”
Jennifer was moving even faster than we were. Adam Thomas. A.T.—Michael had been right. I kept scrolling down, my thumb against the keypad, scanning, scanning like a gambler at a slot machine until I arrived at a photograph of a man in his late fifties. Receding hairline. Round face. Glasses. Big smile. With my husband Adam Thomas at our daughter Kaycee’s wedding.
“Does he look like Dani?” I heard Jennifer’s voice from a great distance. “I don’t think he looks like Dani.”
From that moment forward I would have a uniquely intimate relationship with this journalist with whom I had never before spoken a word. The people who are with us by either happenstance or design during life-altering events become woven into the fabric of those events. The man who sat next to me on my flight home when my parents were in their car accident; the doctor who diagnosed our baby boy with a rare and frightening disease. I, too, have been that person in the lives of friends and strangers. And now @CleverTitleTK, the sister of a friend, would forever be part of our trio of detectives as we zeroed in on the seemingly impossible.
I had already moved on, frantically searching for Adam Thomas online, looking for information about his parents. It was a common name. So far I was coming up empty. If we found nothing, it proved nothing. But what if we found something? Someone? Ancestry.com—with its army of geneticists—put it at 98 percent that this Adam Thomas was my first cousin. How many uncles did he have? How could I find out? I felt no connection to this round-faced, smiling man. But he had the potential to be an arrow, pulled back tightly in its bow, aimed straight and true. Of course, none of this was a thought. I had no thoughts. I was all keen instinct. We never know who we will be in the burning building, the earthquake. We never know until we are faced with our own stripped-down, elemental selves. I wanted to flee. I wanted to stay. I wanted to rescue myself and the whole of my history.
“His mother died in 2010,” said Jennifer Mendelsohn. She had searched for him along with his Ohio town and his wife’s name. “Here’s her obituary.”
“Here we go,” Michael said. He looked over at me from his seat at the desk, perhaps ten feet away. We somehow knew before we knew. My husband has always been a remarkably comforting presence for me. Whenever the world has seemed to shudder and tilt off its axis, Michael has made me feel safe. I have felt that, together, we can get through anything. But what was unfolding now was mine alone.
Jennifer began to read aloud. “Eloise Walden Thomas passed into eternal life…born in Cleveland, Ohio…a stay-at-home mother…her church was at the center of her life…surviving her are five children, twenty grandchildren, a sister, two brothers…”
Two brothers. Surviving brothers. The brothers of the mother of my first cousin.
“One of her brothers is a doctor who lives in Portland, Oregon,” Jennifer continued. “His name is Benjamin Walden.”
At the word—doctor—Michael and I gave each other a quick, startled glance. It was almost too easy. All we had been going on were a couple of key words. Hardly anything, really. Our hunch about a medical student. A mysterious first cousin with the initials A.T. And now this. An uncle of that first cousin. Who was a doctor. Who was alive.
Michael came over to the bed and sat next to me. It had been thirty-six hours since we had sat side by side on the chaise in my office—since I had discovered that my father hadn’t been my father. Dr. Benjamin Walden. I entered his name, my fingers cold and shaking. Benjamin Walden. Ben Walden. Dr. Ben Walden. There was no part of me that believed this was happening, even as it unfolded with a sense of inevitability so profound that I will later come to think of it as a kind of fate.
On the page for a medical website: Dr. Ben Walden is a thoracic surgeon who retired from active practice in 2003. He is a well-respected speaker on the subject of medical ethics. He is a graduate of the medical school at the University of Pennsylvania.