34
Ben had mentioned his children in most of his correspondence with me. It was clear that he had shared the outlines of the situation. There it was again, that word: situation. Had he told them my name? He seemed to be trying to control things. If he had shared my name, then my half siblings would be able to look me up. They could get in touch with me. They could do their own genetic testing, if they so desired. I had no way of knowing what was going on, on the other side of the country. But what I could do was continue to gather information, which allowed me to feel some semblance of control as well.
I had a half sister and two half brothers. I had spent fifty-four years thinking Susie was my half sister, so the idea of a sister wasn’t foreign to me. But the concept of a half brother was new territory. Both half brothers were married with a couple of kids. I had already ascertained that one was an attorney, and the other worked in the tech industry. I found my half sister on Facebook and Twitter. There we both floated, digital ghosts, our two avatars among millions of avatars populating a universe made of pixels and bits that connected me to the Waldens, the Waldens to me—enabling not only the swiftness of discovery but discovery itself.
Emily Walden had inherited her Brazilian mother’s jet-black hair and dark eyes, but still I could see the resemblance between us. We had the same high forehead, the same proportion to our features. The details available about Emily made me think that we might easily be friends. Certainly we had a lot in common. We both had graduated from women’s colleges. Her politics were liberal. She worked for a philanthropic foundation. On Twitter, she followed many of the same people I did. Though she wasn’t particularly active on social media, it was still possible to paint a picture, however faint, of her life. She was married and had two kids, a girl and a boy. The boy looked to be the same age as Jacob.
Michael was able to track traffic on my website and had statistics that told him how many people were on my website at any given time, how long they lingered on certain pages, and where they were from. In the weeks following Ben’s final communication, there was an unusual spike of visitors from Portland, Oregon. Was it a coincidence that several of them spent hours reading deep into my old essays and interviews—particularly those that related to family? Or that quite a few people went back to the beginning of my decade-old blog to read every post? At times I thought maybe we were imagining things. Maybe I just had some dedicated readers in Portland. But at other times I envisioned us—Ben’s family and mine—all of us reading, searching, digging toward some sense of one another, and of this unexpected turn our lives had taken. Perhaps as I was watching YouTube videos of Santa and grandchildren’s excursions to SeaWorld, they were reading essays about my father’s time with the Lubavitcher Rebbe, or my spiritual journey away from my strict religious upbringing.
We were packing up the car for our trip to Provincetown when I heard the sound of Michael’s feet on the stairs. It was the sound of news. I was storing my power cords and computer in their carrying bag when he stepped into my office, open laptop in hand. He didn’t look stricken the way he had at the beginning of the summer, his screen displaying the DNA results that would change my life. This time he looked triumphant.
“Emily just followed you on Twitter,” he said.
He showed me her name atop a list of my newest followers.
Emily Walden. There she was. I felt a strange and instant comfort. She did know about me. She did. And she was reaching out.
The three of us piled into our packed-to-the-gills car and began the long drive to Provincetown. I kept my phone in my lap, refreshing Twitter again and again to see if perhaps Emily Walden had thought better of it and unfollowed me. But there she continued to be. My thumb hovered over her avatar, a Bitmoji of a dark-haired, apple-cheeked woman.
It took two days for me to follow her back. I was afraid of seeming too jumpy, too eager—though of course I was both. Finally, early one morning, as I sat in the sun-drenched kitchen of our cottage at the arts center, I touched follow on my phone’s screen. I saw it—a vision—two half sisters who had never known of one another’s existence, sending the most modern version of a smoke signal, each from her own coast.
I see you.
I see you, too.