Where We Belong

  But the answer was still yes. With every beat of my heart, I heard yes. And then I said it aloud, holding his gaze, so there would be no mistake about my decision. Heat, lust, and alcohol aside, I knew exactly what I was doing—that I was making an indelible, irrevocable choice. I knew it as I felt him enter me slowly, lingering for a few seconds before he withdrew to put on the condom and begin again. I knew I was changed forever.

  Yet in that still, salty aftermath, I never imagined what would follow. I never dreamed that it would be anything other than a moment in time. A story from my youth. A chapter from that summer. A heat wave with a beginning, middle, and definite end.

  3

  kirby

  My name is Kirby Rose, and I’m adopted.

  I don’t mean to make it sound like an AA confession, although sometimes that’s how people take it, like it’s something they should be supportive about. I just mean that they are two basic facts about me. Just as you can’t pinpoint the moment you learn your name, I can’t remember the first time I heard my parents tell the story of that out-of-the-blue phone call announcing my birth and the news that I would be theirs in seventy-two hours. All they had to do was drive to Chicago (a short trip from their neighborhood in South City, St. Louis, where they both grew up and still lived), sign some papers, and pick me up at the hospital. All they had to do was say yes.

  It was April Fools’ Day and for a second my mom thought it was a joke, until she reassured herself that nobody would be cruel enough to play such a trick on a couple who had been trying and wishing, waiting and praying for a baby for over ten years, from virtually the day they got married. My dad was an electrician, my mom an administrative assistant at a big law firm in town, so they made decent money, but they couldn’t afford any fancy fertility clinics. Instead, they looked into adoption—first sticking with domestic Catholic agencies, then gradually registering with any organization in any country that might have a baby to give them. China. Russia. Colombia. Shady lawyers. It didn’t matter; they just wanted a baby.

  So of course my mother shouted yes into the phone before she knew a single fact about me. Then, as my dad picked up the other extension, the lady on the phone calmly reported that I was a healthy six-pound-three-ounce baby girl. Nineteen inches long, with big, blue eyes and a head covered with peach fuzz. She said I had a big appetite and a sweet disposition. She called me “perfect”—and told them that they were the lucky ones chosen by the agency from hundreds of adoptive parents.

  “Congratulations,” she said. “We’ll see you soon.”

  My parents hung up, wept, embraced, then laughed through more tears. Then they rushed out to Babies “R” Us the way people hit grocery stores before a blizzard. They bought tiny pink clothes and a crib and a car seat and more toys and dolls than I could ever hope to play with, then came home and transformed my mother’s sewing room into a lavender and yellow nursery.

  The next day, they drove to Chicago and checked into a hotel near Northwestern Memorial Hospital. They had to wait three more days to meet me, neither of them sleeping for more than a few minutes here and there, even though they knew it was the last good rest they’d have for a while. In the meantime, they discussed baby names, my mother lobbying hard for her maiden name, Kirby. We have to see her first, my dad insisted. I had to look like a Kirby—whatever that was.

  My dad typically picks up the story from there, telling me how he cut himself shaving, his hands shaking so much that he almost let my mother drive to the hospital, something he never does because she sucks so badly at it. Then he skips ahead to the papers they hurriedly signed, and the moment the lady from the agency returned with a baby—me—swaddled in a pink fleece blanket.

  “Meet your daughter,” the lady said as she handed me to my parents. “Dear one, meet Lynn and Art Rose. Your parents.”

  It has always been my favorite part of the story. The first time they held me, gazed down at my face, felt the warmth of my body against their chests.

  “She has your nose,” my dad joked, and then declared me a Kirby.

  It was the moment, they said, when we became a family. They said it felt like an absolute miracle, not unlike the moment they met Charlotte, my little sister who was conceived by complete surprise shortly after they adopted me. The only difference, my mother was fond of saying, was that she wasn’t in any pain when she met me. That came later.

  Growing up, I heard the story a million times, along with all the sentimental quotes about adoption, like the one framed in my bedroom for years: “Not flesh of my flesh, nor bone of my bone, but somehow miraculously still my own. Never forget for a single minute, you didn’t grow under my heart but in it.” I knew which celebrities had adopted babies, and more important, who had been adopted themselves: Steve Jobs, two presidents, including Bill Clinton (who was in the White House when I was born), two first ladies, Faith Hill and Tim McGraw (who happened to also be married—how cool is that?), Darryl McDaniels from Run-DMC and, as my mother sometimes pointed out, Moses and Jesus.

  Yet despite my full understanding of my adoption, I didn’t give much thought to my birth mother, and even less to my birth father. It was as if they were both bit players in the whole drama, completely beside the point but for their necessary contribution of a little DNA. And I certainly never felt rejected because they had given me up. My parents knew nothing about my birth mother, yet always explained with certainty that she didn’t “give me up” or “give me away”—she made a plan for me, the best one she could make under her circumstances, whatever those were. Looking back, I think they were probably just following the advice of some adoption book, but at the time I bought it, hook, line, and sinker. If anything, I felt sorry for her, believing that I was her loss; she wasn’t mine.

  In fact, the first time I really wondered about her with anything more than a passing curiosity was in the fifth grade when we researched our family ancestry in social studies. I did my report on Ireland, like many of the kids in my class, explaining that my father’s people came from Galway, my mother’s from Cork. Of course, I understood that they weren’t really my bloodlines or my ancestors—and I made no bones about that fact in my report. Most everyone knew I was adopted, as I’d been in the same school since kindergarten, and it was no big deal, simply one of those bits of trivia, like being double-jointed or having an identical twin.

  So I matter-of-factly informed the class that I knew nothing about my birth mother except that she was from Chicago. I didn’t know her name, and we had never seen a photo of her, but based on my blond hair and blue eyes, I guessed that she was Scandinavian—then narrowed it to Danish, maybe because I have a sweet tooth and liked the sound of it. My classmates seemed satisfied with this theory, except for annoying Gary Rusk who raised his hand, and without waiting to be called on, asked whether I was mad at my mother and if I ever planned on tracking her down. Envisioning a bounty hunter with a rifle and a couple of bloodhounds, I exchanged a look with my best friend, Belinda Greene. Then I cleared my throat and calmly replied, “I already have a mother. And no, I’m not mad at anyone.”

  The seed was planted. Maybe I should be mad; clearly others would be—at least Gary would. He pressed on with his nosy line of questioning. “Could you find her if you wanted to? Like with a private investigator?”

  “No. I don’t even, like, know her name. So how would I find her?” I said, thinking of all the many women who must have given birth at my hospital in Chicago on April Fools’ Day 1996.

  Finished with my report, I sat down, and we went on to hear about Debbie Talierco’s Italian heritage. But for the rest of the class, and all that day in school, I couldn’t shake the thought of my birth mother. I didn’t yet want to find her, but I kept wondering if there was even a chance that I could.

  So that night at the dinner table, during a tedious conversation about the Gallaghers’ newly adopted Yorkie puppy and how he kept nipping their toddler, and that they really needed to show that dog who was boss, I silently rehears
ed the question that Gary had posed to me, somehow anticipating that it wasn’t something my parents, particularly my mother, wanted to discuss. It was one thing when they brought it up in the context of their prayers being answered; I knew it would be another thing altogether for me to focus on her.

  “Why’d they get a Yorkie anyway? They should have rescued a dog,” Charlotte said, a tenderhearted animal lover. “I mean, it saves a life.”

  I suddenly felt like a rescue dog myself, a total mutt, as I casually shook A.1. onto my pork chops, a habit I had picked up from my dad, who puts it on everything, including scrambled eggs.

  “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.