Back in the car, as we’re driving to Idaho Falls, I read the letters—all seventeen of them—in the space of an hour. At one point Nyla has to pull over so I can throw up at the side of the road, because reading in the car really exacerbates my car sickness, but I can’t stop. I keep reading, one letter after another, in a rush, like I’m at the birth-mother buffet and it’s all you can eat. I gobble the letters up. Then I read them aloud to Nyla, and we spend the rest of the ride in silence, mostly, digesting the letters. These words, written for me.
When Nyla finally drops me off, I stagger back into my house and lock myself in my room and read each letter again slowly, taking it sentence by sentence, line by line, until they all start to bleed together into a single conversation.
Dear X,
Me again. Who else? . . . I’m just going to lean into this letter thing. . . . I’m sitting here all knocked up and there’s no Prince Charming in sight. . . . Your sperm donor is not a total asshat. . . . I was going in one direction, and then something happened to cause me to go the other way. . . . I’m so sorry about the weird feet. . . . You belong with them. . . . I want you to have THESE PARENTS, the teacher and the cake maker and the laughing. . . . I’m not ready to be a mother. . . . I guess I’m not ready to let you go. I’ll see you on the other side.
S
She writes like she’s speaking, pages and pages of her talking with me—at me, directly to me—and I feel irrationally guilty that I have no memory of her or of any of the moments she describes when I was with her. But her letters make me laugh my head off and cry my eyes out. I stare and stare at the picture of myself, the grainy black-and-white sonogram, and I try to imagine what it must have been like to hear her voice, to feel her touch, to drift off to sleep to the beating of her heart.
Then, when I’ve fallen apart a few times and put myself back together again, I get Nyla to pick me up and drop me at the hospital. My mom is officially being released in about three hours.
My parents are kissing when I come through the door to Mom’s room. Kissing. Like old times when I used to catch them kissing when they thought I wasn’t looking. In the hallway. Kissing. In the bathroom right after they brushed their teeth. Kissing. Folding laundry. Kissing. Making dinner. Kissing. Like, well, teenagers. I used to think they were excessive and gross. But now the sight of them kissing again like normal, healthy people fills me with joy.
I try for a joke. “Hey, is that good for your heart?”
“Oh, hello, sweetie,” Mom says, and she’s smiling, and she’s not wearing a cannula or an IV anymore, not hooked up to anything. It’s a sight I never thought I’d see again. “I was hoping you’d come by,” she says. “How was your day?”
“Fine,” I croak.
“No more rehearsals. You’re a free agent.” Dad grins. “Want to all go to a movie?”
“Bill.” Mom frowns. “Not a movie.”
“Well, why not?” he says. “Okay, so we had one epically bad movie experience. But does that mean we should never see a movie again?”
“I think it might mean that, Dad.”
“No,” he says. “No, we have to get back on the horse. I used to love movies. I miss movies. We should go.”
“All right,” Mom laughs. “What’s playing?”
“The new Star Wars movie,” I inform them.
Dad groans. “Okay, it’s too soon. How about dinner? What’s close to here?”
He’s joking; at least I think he is. Mom’s supposed to go home tonight, not out on the town. She’s supposed to go straight home and straight into bed, where she’s supposed to rest and rehabilitate for weeks. Months. Years, who knows? But that’s fine by me, so long as she’s home.
“Perkins,” Mom says, playing along. “Oh, I do miss pie.” She turns to me. “How was Perkins, by the way? You’ve kind of clammed up on us since Saturday. Somehow I never got the details about your date with Bastian.”
“Bastian’s gay.” I feel weird about telling them this, this thing that is so personal about Bastian, but if I don’t tell them they’ll continue to build it up.
“He is?” Mom is shocked. “But I thought you liked him.”
“I did.”
“So when did you find out he was gay?”
“Right after I kissed him, on Saturday night, after our date at Perkins.”
“Oh, Boo,” Dad says, in sympathy. “Bummer.”
I shrug. “We discussed it, Bastian and me. I’m okay, and he’s okay.”
“Obviously it wasn’t meant to be,” Mom says.
“You don’t seem too broken up about it,” Dad observes.
“I’m fine. I’m better than fine. You’re coming home.”
“Home,” Mom sighs, smiling. She turns to Dad. “Let’s go home, Bill.”
He checks his watch. “We’ve got a couple more hours. What will we do to pass the time?”
That’s my cue. “I need to tell you something,” I blurt out. Because if I’m going to shock my mother with this news, it should probably be at the hospital. Just in case.
“Uh-oh,” Dad says. “Tell us what?”
“I need you to be calm, all right? Both of you. Don’t freak out.”
“Cass . . . ,” Dad says like a warning. “What are you doing?”
“I can be calm.” Mom grabs Dad’s hand. “We can be calm, can’t we, honey?”
I just spit it out. “I went to Boise today. Well, yesterday and today. I just got back.”
My parents look at each other. “What? Why?” Dad asks.
“They found the letters from my birth mother.” I sling my backpack off my shoulder. “They called and left me a message on Saturday, saying I had to pick them up in person. So I went to get them.”
Silence. They’re both staring at me in shock.
“Letters?” Mom asks after a minute. “As in, more than one?”
I take the bundle out of my backpack and hold them up.
“There are seventeen of them,” I report with a giddy laugh. “Some of them are really long, too, like ten pages front and back. She’s long-winded. But she’s honest and whip-smart and hilarious, Mom, and I feel like I know her, reading what she wrote.”
“What do they say?” There’s a tremor of fear in her voice.
“They’re amazing. Some of them are about my birth father, who was an actor—an actor, right?—and some of them are about her life at the school, like she’s writing in a diary. She was living in a home for pregnant girls. I don’t know if you knew that. And some are about her dad and her evil stepmother and her mom in Colorado and this guy Ted she had a crush on.” I stop myself. I can’t tell them everything right now. There’s too much.
“Did she give . . . names?” Mom asks.
“No. She made up names, like aliases, for everybody in her life. And she always signed what she wrote with the letter S. So I guess that Amber lady was right, after all.”
Dad’s expression freezes. He’s been looking kind of frozen this entire time, actually. Like my news has turned him to stone.
“What Amber lady?” Mom asks.
I’d forgotten that I never told Mom about the false alarm with the adoption registry website. My bad.
“I’ll tell you everything later,” I say quickly. “I promise. But you can read the letters yourself. When you get home. Or . . . now. If you want.”
I hold the bundle out to her.
She’s calm. But she gazes at the stack of letters like she’s not sure what to do.
“You’re my mother,” I say like it’s a disclaimer. “Nothing will ever, ever change that. Do you still want to know about her, even though you’re not dying anymore?”
She looks up at me, and her eyes are uncertain, and sad, and understanding, all at the same time. “I don’t know,” she admits softly. “Everything’s happening so fast.”
“Cat, we don’t have to—” Dad starts.
“I want to know,” I say firmly. “And I want to share this with you.”
Mom takes the letters carefully out of my hands. “Thank you, honey,” she says.
“Okay. Good.” I go out and close the door behind me. I want to give them time, alone, to read and process it all.
Then we have a lot to talk about.