When We Collided(49)

I snooped and read all the letters years ago because I missed him, too, and my mom got too sad when I tried to ask about it. In the last one, he tells her he’s engaged to a lady named Saanvi and that he will always love my mom in a special compartment of his heart. After I read that last letter, I felt guilty. I don’t regret discovering the letters, but I feel like I crossed a border that was not my own, that I wandered into private territory. But Adesh’s leaving was a sad tale in my storybook, too, and I deserved to know the end. In the winter, my mom still wears a beautiful scarf he sent her from Mumbai. She wraps it around her neck slowly like she’s savoring the fabric’s lushness, and I know she’s wishing it still smelled like him, like sweet spices and warm air and the days when love wasn’t lost.

Anyway, that’s what made me think to look in the underwear drawer. I mean, that’s where she hid her most secret things in Seattle; if there’s anything worth finding in this house, it would be there, right?

Patience is not my virtue, but I knew I had to bide my time to be careful. I waited until this morning, when I knew she’d be gone, when she left very early to drive three hours to San Francisco and pick up some supplies at a specialty art shop.

Sure enough, I find Adesh’s letters in her underwear drawer. I uncover a stash of photos, too, labeled on the back in my mom’s scratchy cursive. Me and Mom: a faded picture of my mom as a little girl, standing with her own mother, who died very young. Carrie & Adesh: a picture of my mom and Adesh, nose-to-nose and smiling with their eyes closed like they’re high out of their minds on love. My Viv: A picture of me when I was four or five, wearing pink sunglasses and holding an ice-cream cone out to the camera. These pictures are the most precious to my mother. But there are none of my father, none of my mother at age nineteen or pregnant with me.

I give up; I accept the temporary fate that finding out more about my father was not meant to be. The sky is barely light, and I press my hands against the glass walls in the living room, the ones that remind you that the only thing separating you from nature is an inch of building material. Whether framed by wood and plaster and insulation or simple glass, a house is part of a larger ecosystem. It is so foolish to think we exist unconnectedly from nature. Foolish, I say.

Don’t even ask me how my wild brain works, which points connect to the other points, but the interconnectedness makes me think of bureaucracy—I don’t know. And for some reason, a new thought beats against my temples: Where are our important documents? Our Social Security cards and birth certificates? At home, she keeps them in a safe that I have never guessed the combination to. She’s not the kind of mom who would bring filing cabinets or plastic bins with labels here to Verona Cove. But she’s also not the kind of mom who would not have them in an emergency. They’ve got to be here.

Crazed by this lead, I riffle through her other drawers. Nothing, nothing, nothing. I pillage the joint, clothes flying like I’m the tornado. Finally, in a back corner of Richard’s closet, where the rest of my mom’s clothes are hung, I find an unmarked manila envelope. Our birth certificates, our Social Security cards, a life-insurance policy in my mom’s name. And a long envelope. The return address is a lawyer’s office in Washington.

I nearly rip the birth certificate trying to read it. Vivian Irene Alexander because I’m named after my mom’s two grandmothers, and I’ve always liked that my initials spell a word. Born in Olympia, Washington, on July 23, right on the horoscope borderline of sensitive Cancer and fiery Leo. I self-identify as Leo, though, ROAR! Mother: Carrie Rose Alexander.

Father: James Bukowski.

Inhale, a gasp; exhale a gust. Chest rising and falling, pant, pant.

I’m quivering like the warning tremors before an earthquake, tears flooding my eyes faster than I can finish reading it.

. . . Am I still breathing?

Hands trembling, I slide a single sheet of paper out of another envelope. The document surrenders full legal custody to my mother, like my father can’t show up later and have some kind of claim on me. It’s notarized from the year of my birth. My father signed at the bottom, one quick swipe of ink, like he was getting it over with.

My father’s name is James Bukowski. Of Berkeley, California. My whole face goes tingly with this new information; my blood buzzes inside my veins, a hum against nerve endings. He has a name, it is James, his last name is one I never would have guessed, a last name that could have been my own had things gone differently. Does he go by Jim or Jimmy, does he live in Berkeley still, why, why, why would my mother do this to me? Why would she keep me from him? Was he a dangerous man? Was she protecting me from him?

I think, on some level, I believed I would never in my life know anything about him, and now I’m questioning whether I really ever wanted to. No, I did. I do. I don’t know. I know nothing.

As much as I loved my previous human life as a ballerina in the 1920s, I am so colossally grateful for the Internet, and I search and search, fingers typing in a frenzy of clacks. The thought often terrifies me, actually—how much personal information you can find online. But today that is working in my favor, I have to say.

There is a man in Berkeley, California, whose name is James Bukowski. All I can tell is that he works for Berkeley College, and I guess maybe my dad could be a professor of music? Like he segued his rock career into teaching—that could happen, right?

I have to know. Even if it’s not him, I have to know.