“You were quiet at dinner,” Mom says. “What’s going on in that head of yours?”
She’s still too darn perceptive.
I shrug. I’m sitting hunched over the kitchen counter, watching my mother frost a cake. “Sandra Whit,” I confess as she smooths the frosting with an expert hand over the surface of the cake. The whole kitchen is filled with the heady smell of vanilla and my mother’s dreams come alive again.
But my dreams, well. I don’t know.
“What about S?” Mom asks. She still calls her S, while the rest of us have taken to calling her Sandra Whit like that’s all one name. And who knows? Maybe Sandra Whit doesn’t go by Sandra, any more than I go by Cassandra. Maybe she’s something else.
“I don’t think I should contact her,” I say.
Weirdly, Mom doesn’t seem surprised by this. “That’s a tough decision,” she says.
“What do you think?”
She sighs. “I can see it both ways.”
“Would you still like to meet her?” I ask.
She dips her knife into a small glass of milk, then keeps frosting, smoothing the wrinkles, perfecting it. “Yes. Of course. I would still like to thank her. But only if I knew that my presence—our presence—wasn’t going to be any big disturbance to her life.”
“Exactly,” I agree glumly. “That happens to be exactly what I think.”
“Good,” Mom says. “Maybe I raised you well. You’re thinking of her, instead of yourself.”
“But you know, on one of those adoption registry websites it said that ninety percent of the women who give their babies up for adoption are open to being reunited with them at some point. That’s a pretty high percentage.”
“Yes, it is. So I guess that means it’s likely that she’s open to it, too.” She sets the knife down and turns the cake, eyeing it from all angles. “Like I said, it’s a tough decision.”
I nod. I go to stick my finger in her big bowl of frosting, and she smacks my hand. We both laugh.
“But you told me to find her. You were up for disturbing her life back then,” I argue.
“I was thinking of what you needed.”
“What, you thought I needed a mother?”
“I thought you needed an answer.”
“Oh. Well, now I have lots of answers.”
“Yes, you do.” She picks up an envelope she’s created out of wax paper and spoons some of the frosting into it. Then she folds it closed and squeezes it until a little bit of frosting comes out of the end. She takes a toothpick from a box and holds it up, then starts to make petals on it, from the center on out. A rose out of frosting, which is something she often tried to teach me, but never could. My roses always ended up looking like pine cones.
“When I was dying, I used to think about my heart,” she says, and my breath catches. I’ve never heard her say it like that. When I was dying.
“People would tell me that I’d get a new heart. Someday, when I’d given up hope for it, they’d say, a new heart was going to come along, like magic. I tried to believe that, to have faith in the idea, to visualize it happening to me. But I knew that this heart wouldn’t actually be magic. It belonged to someone else. It was being carried around, even in the moment I was thinking about it, in someone else’s chest, beating for them, keeping them alive. I used to think about that heart so much, even in the dark moments when I wasn’t sure it really existed or if I’d ever receive it. What was the heart doing, I wondered, out there in the world? Was the woman jogging, and so her heart was racing as she sprinted around some track? Was she in love, and her heart fluttered when she saw the person she was in love with? Was she a mother, too? Did she love her child the way that I love you—so fiercely she’d easily give up her life on her kid’s behalf, so completely, so truly?”
I bite my lip. I don’t know where she’s going with this, but I know it’s important to listen.
“And then one day, out of the blue, in the nick of time, I got the heart. Now I carry it inside of me, and I feel responsible for both of us, this woman and me. I have her heart. I have to take care of it, and love my life because of it, and never take it for granted, not even for a moment.”
I nod. “I think I’d feel that way, too.”
My mom closes her eyes for a second. “That’s also how I feel about your birth mother. She carried you inside of her, and loved you, and looked out for you, until the day that you came to be mine instead. It’s like . . .” Her voice wavers. “I know that I have her heart. And I have to take care of it. And I have to honor her choice, her sacrifice.”
We’re both in tears by this point. She’s still making the rose out of frosting, so I can’t hug her. I want to hug her. Finally, she finishes with the last petals. “Hold out your hand,” she says, and I do. She places the rose gently into the palm of my hand.
“For you, my Cassandra Rose.”
“I love you, Mom.”
“I love you, too.”
We would probably have started crying again, but then Dad comes through the door. He stops in his tracks, and lifts his head and smells the air.
“Cake,” he whispers.
Mom laughs and wipes her eyes. “We’re almost ready to eat it.”
I put the rose in my mouth. It tastes fragile and sweet and like a perfect representation of what my mother is.
“Hey, you got some mail,” Dad says, and holds up a large, official-looking envelope.
“What is it this time?” I groan.
It turns out to be the log-in information for the DNA test I did last year, the Christmas gift from my parents. The results are available for me to see.
Mom cuts the cake, and then she and Dad and I sit at the table and eat the entire thing. We’re so stuffed by the end I can hardly move. Then I take the DNA test stuff down the hall to my room and sit down at my desk and open my laptop. I intend to simply read the results, but something stops me.
There’s something I should do first.
I locate the draft of the email I was composing to Sandra Whit, and I delete it.
I’ve decided: I’m not going to contact her. I’m not going to cyberstalk her anymore. She deserves her privacy.
I’ll let her go.
I know what I need to know, I tell myself. I know my medical history. I know the story of how I came to be a person. I know Sandra Whit loved me. She loved me. That will have to be enough.
You go your way, I think. I’ll go mine.