Where We Belong (5 page)

“So I did this report today on my ancestors,” I began. “And, umm … my adoption came up.”

My mother stared at me, chewing, swallowing, waiting.

“And anyway, I was wondering … if there was any way I could find my birth mother? If I wanted to? I mean, do we even know her name?”

I could tell right away that asking the question was a mistake. The air felt thick with tension and my mother began to blink back tears.
Tears!
Over a stupid
question.
Meanwhile, Charlotte looked down at her plate with this guilty look on her face while my dad strapped on his most somber, preachy one, the same one he wore when he gave my sister and me the big “don’t do drugs” speech. Rather than just answering the question, he said, “Well. This is a pretty serious subject.”

“It’s not
that
serious,” I said.

“Well, sure it is,” he said. “And it’s important. Very, very important. I mean, if it’s important to you, it’s important to us. Right, Lynn?”

“I don’t
want
to find her or anything,” I backpedaled. “I just wanted to know if I
could.
Geez.”

“Don’t take His name in vain,” my mother said.

I told her I was spelling it with a
g,
not a
j,
fighting back the urge to ask if she thought I’d go to
heck
for it.

Charlotte laughed at this, and I flashed her a smile. No matter how much she got on my nerves, I loved making my sister laugh.

Then I looked back at my mother and mumbled, “I mean, I don’t care a single thing about her. I’d probably hate her.”

My mother looked relieved, while my father said, “Don’t say that. She did a brave thing. She did what was best for you.”

“Whatever,” I said, at my peril. It was one of my parents’ least favorite words. “It’s no biggie.”

My father pressed on. “Do you want to find her, Kirbs?”

“I already said I didn’t!”

He nodded, clearly not believing me, as he went on to carefully explain that Heartstrings, the agency that had arranged my adoption, had a provision in the documents which granted me access to my birth mother when I turned eighteen, should I want to meet her.

“Access?” I said, as casually as I could.

“If you want her contact information, the agency will provide it to you,” my father said. “Assuming she has kept her records current. She agreed to this term, but understood that it was
your
decision, not hers. Currently, she has no information about you or us, nor will she ever be given it. And,” he said, raising his eyebrows as if about to make an important point, “she was okay with this.”

In other words, she didn’t want to find me so why should I want to find her? I shrugged, as if the details of the legal arrangement bored me. To myself, I silently vowed never to bring the subject up again, at least not with my parents.

But from that day forward, I became intrigued by adoption in a way I hadn’t been before, acutely aware of stories about adopted children finding their birth mothers and vice versa. I lived for talk shows that orchestrated reunions, riveted by the emotional tales. Sometimes there was guilt and regret, sometimes anger, usually a complex mix of emotions. Occasionally there was a dramatic health issue at stake—or in a few rare cases, a murder, mystery, or kidnapping. I gathered the anecdotes in my mind as I wondered about my own birth mother, her story. I never thought of her as a second mother, more like a distant relative, a long-lost aunt or cousin who was doing something far more interesting (I hoped) than anyone in my life. Perhaps she was a musician, or a CEO, or a surgeon, or a missionary in a third-world country. I had no feelings of bitterness or resentment or abandonment, just a growing curiosity and an occasional, fleeting, romanticized notion of who she might be—and what that might make me by association. Deep down, I had the feeling that she was the missing piece of me—and I wondered if the same was true for her. I still insisted to myself that I didn’t want to find her, but I was starting to also believe that I could never really know myself until I did.

*   *   *

All these feelings only intensified by the time I entered Bishop DuBourg High School, and realized just how lost I felt. I had no real identity and didn’t seem to belong anywhere—even places I had once felt comfortable. I quit the volleyball team, avoided mass and anything related to our parish, and completely blew off my schoolwork. I even felt myself drifting from Belinda. We were still best friends, but I couldn’t stand the way she obsessed over every three-ounce weight gain, boys who had nothing going for them, and worst of all, the Jonas Brothers and other crappy Disney packaged bands. I could forgive a lot of things, but cheesy taste in music wasn’t one of them.

For a short time, I started hanging out with a new group of kids who I thought shared my sensibilities or at least my taste in music. But they turned out to be even more fake than the popular crowd, spending hours cultivating their emo image, listening to obscure indie bands no one had ever heard of (and who they’d immediately disown as soon as someone outside the group “discovered” them, too), spending a fortune at Hot Topic and Urban Outfitters to look as if they went to a thrift shop, and in the worst example, drawing fake scars onto their wrists and lying about suicide attempts. I decided I’d much rather hang with Belinda than a bunch of posers—because at least she was authentic in her complete lack of good taste (and even I had to admit that it was fun belting out a Kelly Clarkson song now and then). Mostly, though, I just wanted to be alone with my thoughts and music. In fact, music—
good
music—was one of the few things guaranteed to make me happy. Much to my parents’ frustration, who thought that fresh air was synonymous with
any
air, I spent hours in my room, listening to records, writing songs, singing (when no one was home to hear me), and playing the drums. I had picked them up in the sixth grade when my music teacher told me they were the hardest instrument to learn, and although I had long since quit the band, the drums were the only thing I didn’t abandon altogether. In fact, I played them all the time, saving every dollar I made bagging groceries at Schnuck’s, until I could afford to upgrade from my first Ludwig junior drum set to a sick Pearl Masters MCX kit with the coolest maple shells finished in a black sparkle glitter wrap. It was the sweetest thing I had ever seen, and for the first few nights after I bought it, I moved it next to my bed so I could sleep right beside it and then see it first thing in the morning. My parents humored me, pretending to get my fascination with drums. My dad even bought me a Sabian eighteen-inch HHX Evolution Crash cymbal that he researched on his own for my birthday, which was supercool of him. But I could tell they both wished I did something a little more normal and social. Or at the very least, found a quieter hobby.

The only person who seemed to respect and accept me was Mr. Tully, our school guidance counselor, who I was required to visit about my falling grades and the fact that I was, in everyone’s words, not living up to my potential. I pretended to be annoyed when the pink counselor slips came, but I secretly loved spending time in his office, even though he constantly nagged me to sing in the school liturgical choir, join the symphonic or jazz band, or at least play the percussion in our high school musical. (
Not
gonna happen—any of it.) Mr. Tully was young and funny and handsome with light brown eyes and dimples that showed up even when he wasn’t smiling. But more than his looks or fun personality, he was the only member of the faculty—the only adult, for that matter—who really seemed to get that being a teenager generally sucked and that it certainly wasn’t the best time of your life the way my parents always said it should be and the way it seemed to be for Charlotte. When pressed, I could even get him to admit that some of our school rules were overkill, such as the requirement that every class start with a prayer (although he was an alum himself and promised that one day I’d be proud of it, and if I put my mind to it, this place could be a launching pad for greatness as it had been for the Twitter founder Jack Dorsey). But for all his coolness, I never opened up to him completely. I believed he liked me, but I was well aware that he was getting
paid
to have empathy—so just in case, I wasn’t about to admit to him just how shitty I felt on the inside.

To that point, during one counselor visit about my failing grade in chemistry, the subject of my sister came up, and Mr. Tully came right out and asked me the question nobody else had ever dared ask: Did it ever bother me that I was adopted and Charlotte wasn’t? I thought hard about the answer, waited a beat longer than felt comfortable before I shook my head no. I wondered if it was the truth. I honestly didn’t think that was the problem. Charlotte never lorded this over me, or mentioned it at all, and we had very little sibling rivalry, kind of weird given that we were only eleven months and one grade apart.

I still found myself resenting her for reasons I couldn’t quite pinpoint. Yes, she had a great figure (or at least
a
figure while I was scrawny, flat-chested, and barely five feet two), more classic features, and the best, thick, curly hair. But I preferred my gray-blue eyes and blond hair to her muddy brown combination. She did better in school, but only because she worked twice as hard and cared three times more. She was a far superior athlete; I was a middling, retired-from-the-JV-squad volleyball player, while she was a star swimmer, breaking all kinds of school and even citywide records, routinely making headlines in the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Our dining room table doubled as a scrapbook center, a newspaper-clipping shrine to Charlotte’s prowess in the pool. But even that didn’t faze me. I had no desire to train twenty hours a week at anything, even drumming, and jumping into a cold pool on dark winter mornings seemed like a sick form of torture.

So if it wasn’t her miraculous conception, her looks, her brains, or her athletic ability, I wondered why I was jealous, sometimes even wishing to be her. I wasn’t sure, but had the feeling it had something to do with the way Charlotte felt on the inside. She genuinely seemed to like who she was—or at least had the luxury of giving it no thought whatsoever, all of which translated to massive popularity. Everyone knew her and loved her regardless of clique—the jocks, geeks, burnouts, and hoosiers—while I felt downright invisible most of the time.

On one particularly bad day during my junior year, the gulf between Charlotte and me was illustrated in dramatic fashion. First, I failed an American history pop quiz on the one day that week I had blown off my homework. Then, I got my period all over my khaki pants, which was called to my attention as I did a problem
wrong
on the whiteboard in trig. Third, I heard that Tricia Henry had started a rumor that I was a lesbian (which wouldn’t matter if it was true, although she was too much of an ignoramus to realize that distinction) simply based on the fact that I play the drums.

Meanwhile, Charlotte made the homecoming court. As a
sophomore
—virtually unheard of at DuBourg. To her credit, she looked genuinely surprised, and completely humble as she elegantly made her way down from the bleachers to the center of the gym where Seth O’Malley, the most beautiful boy in the entire school, gave her a high five and threw his muscled arm around her neck. I didn’t want to be on the homecoming court, nor did I want our entire class body watching me, in bloodstained pants or otherwise, but I ached with envy over how effortless it all was for her. How she could stand there with no trace of self-consciousness, even waving at a group of obnoxious freshmen boys bellowing, “Hottie Lottie!” It didn’t help matters that Belinda shot me sympathetic stares during the pep rally and asked me no fewer than four times if I was jealous of my little sister, a more direct version of Mr. Tully’s question. Clearly, I was
supposed
to feel that way, even in the eyes of my guidance counselor and best friend.

Later that day, I passed Charlotte in the hall in a pack of happy, pretty girls. She was still wearing her red sash from the assembly over her long-sleeved, button-down white blouse and red plaid kilt. (I could never understand how she could make a uniform look good when I looked like crap every day. Then again maybe it was because I typically went with the more comfortable but decidedly unstylish polo shirt and khaki pants option.) We made eye contact, and she eagerly smiled at me, pausing as if on the verge of breaking free of her posse. But I didn’t give her the chance. I put my head down and kept walking. I glanced back just long enough to tell I had hurt her feelings, maybe even tarnished her big day. Instead of feeling guilty, I felt a dark, shameful satisfaction that I had managed to wipe that near-constant grin off her face.

It was short-lived, though, as she was back to her same old cheery self that evening, chatting with our mother in the kitchen like the best friends they were. The two had heart-to-hearts all the time, if you can call surface revelations such as “if only green beans tasted as good as chocolate cake” and “isn’t Suri Cruise precious?!” heart-to-hearts, while she and my father bonded over her swimming. There were few things as sacred as sports to my dad, and I watched him brimming with pride whenever they returned from her meets, memorizing every boring race, then rehashing the details, over and over and over. So I guess it was inevitable that our parents would come to like her better, all but saying the words they were thinking: “Why can’t you be more like your sister?”

Deep down, I knew they
loved
us both equally, and that any favoritism had to do with the fact that she brought them daily pleasure and was just plain easier to live with—not that she was their biological kid. Yet over time, that fact certainly didn’t help matters in my head. Nor did the fact that they all looked alike. Even my parents could pass for siblings, with their athletic builds, curly brown hair, and perky Irish noses complete with a smattering of outdoorsy freckles. Their personalities were similar, too, all of them hardwired to be cheerful and outgoing, even with strangers. The three of them all talked nonstop about anything and everything and nothing. They could talk to a freakin’ wall while I couldn’t conceive of making small talk just for the heck of it, especially with a stranger (much to the annoyance of my boss at Schnuck’s who seemed to think that chatting up the customer while I bagged their groceries was crucial to their shopping experience). It was just another example of me feeling like an outsider.