When the Lights Go Out(64)

If Mom is not my biological mother, then how did I come to be with her? How did I come to think of her as my mom?

Maybe it was something innocuous, like she adopted me as a child. And in an effort to keep me from my birth mom—who, for all she knew, would try and track me down in an attempt to regain custody—she stole a dead child’s identity and gave it to me so that I’d be impossible to find. Maybe my birth mother was abusive, neglectful. Or maybe she was thirteen years old, a victim of rape, not ready to be a mother. A teenager who’d gotten loaded at a party and went too far with some guy. Mom was saving me from a life of abuse and neglect at the hands of a reluctant mother.

Or maybe it’s not so innocuous after all.

Maybe it’s more toxic than that. Maybe I wasn’t adopted, but rather taken. Kidnapped. It’s a thought I go to only because it’s the middle of the night, the time my imagination most often takes flight.

Did Mom kidnap me?

I feel an overwhelming sense of guilt for thinking these things about Mom. That she took me. That I’m not hers. That she did something illicit, that she did something wrong. I think of myself, twelve years old, Mom, woozy on a glass of wine, confessing, A long time ago, I did something I’m not proud of, Jessie. Something that shames me.

And that’s how I got you.

I know now what she means.

Eleanor Zulpo, the woman Mom used to work for when I was a girl, told me that as a child, I insisted my name was something other than Jessie. She remembered that I’d pout my face and stomp my foot and demand that Mom stop calling me Jessie.

Jessie isn’t my real name. That much I already know. It’s a name Mom forced on me, one I accepted with resistance, because even a three-or four-year-old knows their name and isn’t quick to change it.

But not only did I call myself by a different name, but I called Mom Eden. Did I call her Eden because she wasn’t my mom? Because she’d kidnapped me? Because my mom was someone else, and if so, then who?

In the back of my mind I tell myself that if, if, Mom kidnapped me—that word itself lumbering through my brain, clumsy and awkward, finding it hard to travel from neuron to neuron because the very idea of it is so incompatible with Mom, who was always so loving, so kind—she had a good reason to do it. She wasn’t just some run-of-the-mill child abductor.

But something doesn’t add up, like a puzzle with interlocking pieces, the rounded tabs and the carved-out openings that are all supposed to connect. They don’t.

Because there’s the photograph of the man. The one I hold so tightly in my grip that the edges of it begin to disintegrate with sweat. I spend the night holding the photograph of the man with the lake and the trees, knowing he meant something to Mom, that she intentionally kept this photograph and this man from me.

Who is he? I have to find him. I have to find him so that I can know who he is, if he’s my father. Then I’ll know how and when and why I came to be with Mom. Mom who is not my mom.

I look hard for something, for some clue that I’ve failed to see. The cut of his hair, the color of the lake, the type of trees in the backdrop. The way he stands, the brand of his jeans—the tag far too small to read, but still I try—that sailboat in the distance. Is it really white like I believed it to be, or is it more of a pale yellow, or white with pale yellow stripes? None of which matter.

And then I see it. It’s a small thing, but significant enough to me. Because suddenly every detail is significant to me.

This man is left-handed. I know this, or convince myself I know it, because he’s wearing his watch on his right wrist. It isn’t one of those hard-and-fast rules, and yet it’s common enough to be true. People tend to wear their watches on their nondominant wrists.

I think that there are only a handful of lefties in the world, which narrows down my search exponentially, though still the field is huge. Instead of being one in seven billion, the odds that I’ll find this man are now more like one in seven hundred million.

And I know it then; I’ll never find this man.

He could be anywhere. He could be anyone. Even if I found myself staring right at him, I’d never know it because I’ve never seen his face before.

I set the photograph aside. I’m so cold that my skin turns mottled and gray. It’s got a purplish tint to it and looks like it’s covered in lace, a white overlay to the purple skin. I sit there on the floor, staring at my hands, my legs. All that exposed skin, which is as cold and as mottled as Mom’s was before she died.

And I come to one conclusion: like Mom, I’m also dying.

At first, everything around me is black. I can’t bring myself to move. I’m too cold, too tired, too scared to move. I can’t bring myself to throw the covers over my arms and legs. Night goes by with the speed of a sloth. Painfully slow.

But then it begins. Sunrise. Daylight. Morning comes. Out the window, I watch it happen.

It starts as a single pixel of light. The sun still tucked safely below the horizon, scattering its light into the atmosphere. A semidarkness. A soft glow of yellow and blue. The clouds thicken around it, getting drawn in, like nuts and bolts to a magnet. They flush at their edges, turning shades of pink and red. As if the clouds themselves are embarrassed.

The sun rises higher and higher into the sky.

And just like that, day has arrived.

The air in the room starts to warm thanks to the sun’s rays pouring in the open window. My mottled, purple skin disappears, getting replaced with a healthy pink. I’m not dying after all. I’m still very much alive, it seems. For now at least.