Chapter 1
1.
I’ve been troubled of late. My friend’s mother died last week. She was killed. Killed by a drunk driver. All his life, Eric grew up with his mom and dad, and so did everyone else. Except me. I grew up with two dads. I’m adopted, of course, but that never bothered me before now. I can recall times when I’ve been over at Eric’s house and his mom would make us dinner. My favorite of hers was her chicken alfredo, a recipe she inherited from her mother. Most of the time in the same situation, one of my dads would most likely order a pizza or go get take out. It all had me thinking and asking myself the same question; where was my mother?
That question, burning itself into my skull, was all the more strange as I stood behind Eric as he knelt before his mother’s gravestone. They had finished burying her quite a while ago, and the funeral had ended hours ago. He and I were the only ones left. It had been two hours since anyone had said anything and I dared not say anything. I couldn’t imagine the kind of things going through his head. The only break in the silence was when Eric finally stood and said, “Let’s go.”
The drive home was just as silent as the hours spent at the gravesite. By now, it was night and New York was lit up just as bright as if it were still day. I entertained myself by peering out the window and watching all the people pass by. All of them passing by: all the nurses and prostitutes, all the doctors and junkies, all the lawyers and the priests, all the cops and robbers, all of them had mothers.
“Hey,” I broke the silence. I had to say something. It had become unbearable, “do you want to go get a drink somewhere?”
“Oof!” Eric sighed and said, “I’d love to tomorrow. I should spend tonight with my dad.”
I nodded my head and went back to staring out the window, right back into the silence.
“It was a nice funeral,” I rejected the silence.
“Yeah,” he groaned.
“I’m sorry, I…”
“You already said that.”
“I know. It’s not what I meant.” I sat there for a moment trying to gather the words. “I’m not very good at this. I don’t know what to say.”
“It’s fine. I don’t expect you to understand. You don’t have a mom.”
“That’s the problem. I don’t have a mom. This is all so confusing to me.”
“Me too.”
This response made me turn my gaze towards him and it was within that moment that I realized just how changed Eric was from this whole ordeal. I returned to silence and contemplated what it would be like to have a mother. Would she be like Eric’s mom? Someone who would bake sweets on the weekend, or would she be out of the house hard at work? These questions, and questions like them plagued my mind all the way up until Eric dropped me off at my building. I hardly noticed walking through the lobby, going up the elevator, or even walking down the hall to find my door.
Like Eric, I had decided to stay with my dads tonight. Most of the evening was a blur. I hadn’t even noticed that papa decided to bake a prime rib while dad probably threw together the mashed potatoes and brussel sprouts. They were both at the funeral, but left with most of the other guests and kept mostly to themselves. It wasn’t until dad noticed me poking at my food with my fork before he said anything:
“You doing alright?”
I sat there for a moment threatening to run through one of my brussel sprouts when I blurted out, “Where’s my mother?”
Dad and Papa sat there and looked back at each other as if they were expecting this question sooner or later.
Papa let out a deep breath, said, “It’s a difficult question to answer.”
“She was living in Oregon when she had you,” Dad interjected.
“Was?”
“Come on, it’s not like we kept tabs on her,” Papa tried to play it off, but Dad and I gave him our infamous “shut your dumb ass up” look.
“He is right though,” Dad continued. We don’t know if she still lives there or if she moved.”
“Who is she?”
“That I can answer a lot more easily,” Papa declared as he rose from his chair and went off to the master bedroom where he could be heard rifling through all his belongings until he came back out with a folder full of documents. He opened it up and spread the contents across the table. My adoption papers.
He scanned through what was left of the folder until he belted out a large hoorah, and pulled a page with a picture of a young woman’s face in the top left corner and handed it to me. I stared at the picture for a moment and looked at her information. Her name was Elle Smith. I looked on and found that she was in her teens when she had me.
“She was only fifteen when she had me?” I asked.
“Kind of explains why she couldn’t keep you,” Papa replied.
I looked down at her picture again and thought about the pregnancies that would happen at school. All the lives changed, and futures ruined seemed more tragic to me than before because now I knew that this was my mother too. It was at that moment when I decided to find her.
“Where is she?” I asked again.
“When we adopted you, we went to the Legacy Emanuel Hospital in Portland Oregon to pick you up. We never met in person. The closest we ever got to that were the Skype calls while she and her parents interviewed us for the adoption process. When you were born, we just came and picked you up and brought you home. At the time, Elle was unconscious from the procedure, so we never got to see her, but she knew you were in good hands.”
I sat back in my chair attempting to digest all the information that had just been thrown at me. I wanted to cry knowing that she didn’t even get to see me when I was born, but I held it down. I held it down so deep that it set a fire under my rear and gave me a drive I had not felt before. I was going to find my mom whether God allowed me or not.
And with that thought, I stood up from the table and marched off to bed only to be met with a sleepless night filled with even more questions, such as: How can I get in contact with her?, or where could she be?, or what does she do?, or how do I even get myself all the way to Oregon? The two thousand mile westward journey worried me the most. One thing’s for sure; I can’t do it alone.
