Relative Strangers Read online

  My heart pounded as I reached for the box, suddenly aware of every noise: Was there a sound from the entranceway? Was that her car outside? When I was convinced I was merely being paranoid, I slid the box out and set it on the floor, then pulled open the flaps.

  Atop the contents was one of those orangey tie-string envelopes, unlabeled. Rolled in one corner of the box was my favorite scarf from childhood — one I thought she’d thrown away years ago, without pausing to consider that I might like to keep it with my other “useless things.” It was sapphire blue with silver trim, soft as kitten’s fur. I had adored it. I still did, actually. Dammit. I’d wear it now if I could reclaim it without revealing my transgression. I touched it longingly but left it tucked into its corner. Why had she kept it? Of all things?

  I moved the envelope to see what was beneath it and immediately hit pay dirt: a photo album. I pulled it out carefully and lifted the cover. The first photo was a large full-page image of me as a newborn — the same one that sat on display in the living room.

  I hesitated before turning the page, suddenly wishing for Gab and Leila. Just last week, the three of us had sat paging through Gab’s enormous collection of baby books, photo albums, and scrapbooks. Every tiny event of Gab’s life was clearly cause for documentation, probably the result of having parents who were shrinks. Leila’s collection was famine, then feast. There were maybe a dozen pictures of her during her first three years at the orphanage in Ukraine, but from the time her parents adopted her, it seemed that nearly every blessed moment was chronicled.

  Wasn’t that how it should be?

  Maybe if my friends were with me now, I would feel less unmoored, less set adrift in a sea of images that should have been familiar but instead were like trying to read a foreign language. On the second page of the album, there was a photo of me in my mother’s arms in a hospital room, my face all red and scrunchy and indignant. Mom looked so much like me, it took my breath away. It occurred to me with a jolt that she was eighteen in this picture — exactly the age I was now. She could have been me — the resemblance was that strong.

  My eye drifted to the next photo, where I was being held by a boy who must have been around the same age as my mom. He reminded me of Eli — a rail-thin waif with dark eyes and dark hair, skin as pale as moonlight. My heart caught as the familiar question came to me: Could this be my father? His eyes — didn’t they look like mine? Or was I just projecting, the way I often did when I saw men in the world — wondering whether they could be my father, or an uncle, or a grandfather?

  But it couldn’t be. She didn’t know who my father was — by her own admission, my mother was such a stellar teenage alcoholic that minor events like conception were hazy at best. So who was this guy who was close enough to her to be there when I was born, and what happened to him?

  I turned the page. There were some photos of me in someone’s living room, swaddled in a blanket, held by my mother or the boy. When I turned the page again, I was standing in a hallway, chewing on the ear of a well-loved bunny, a worried expression on my face.

  Standing.

  So I was, what, a year at least? Maybe a year and a half? I stared at the photo in confusion. That was quite a leap in the timeline.

  The next photo was me in front of a birthday cake that had Jules spelled out in red icing. There were two candles on it.

  My second birthday? I flipped back to see if pages were stuck together, then flipped forward to see if the album was out of order, but no. It went from a couple months old to a couple years old.

  Where were the photos from all that time?

  Where was I?

  Mario’s was crowded and dark, the glowing red votives barely illuminating the tables. I could just make out Gab and Leila waving to me from their spot along the back wall. The smell of garlicky tomato sauce and pungent oregano and cheese was dizzying, and food as a distraction was always my best and most reliable coping mechanism. I needed a break from obsessing over the contents of that damned album. And what was missing from it.

  “We ordered,” Leila said as I scooted in next to her. “Hope you don’t mind. We’re starving.” She leaned over and touched her head to mine — a Leila greeting, tender and sincere. I lingered there a moment, soaking up the love.

  “So who won?” I asked, laying my napkin in my lap. I figured I’d get the formalities out of the way before launching into my personal drama.

  “They creamed us.” Leila shook her head. “It was humiliating.”

  “Next subject,” Gab said, pulling a hair tie off her wrist and corralling her frizzy hair in a ponytail. Heeb hair, she called it. Jewfro. Moses mop. Slinging racial slurs at her mane was something of a hobby for her. “Oh, God,” she said, craning her head to see around me. “Jason Godfrey is here. Isn’t he the sexiest?”

  I glanced at Leila and bit down on my lips. If you looked up the word “nerd” in the dictionary, you’d find a picture of Jason Godfrey, with cross-references to “Trekkie” and “virgin.”

  “He’s with his Portal Guardians friends,” Gab said in the same reverent, longing tone I reserved for phrases like buttery caramel sauce. “They must be having a gaming night.”

  Leila craned her head and looked at Jason. “Him? Really?”

  Gab looked pointedly at Leila. “Yeah. Why not him?”

  Their eyes met for a moment, then Leila looked away. “Guys are like toilets,” she said, picking up her water. “The good ones are occupied and the rest are full of . . . poop.”

  Gab rolled her eyes at Leila. “Why can’t you say ‘shit’?”

  Their bickering both amused me and made me envious. Even though I’d been friends with them since I was six — twelve years now — somehow their longer history could still leave me feeling like the odd man out. They were almost more like sisters than friends. Admittedly, people with histories were kind of a sore spot with me, owing to my 50 percent unknown provenance and my mother’s abiding disinterest in chronicling the past — especially mine. But then I thought again of the photo of the boy who was there at my birth. Who would be there for my mom at that time if not the father of the baby? But if he really was my dad, why would she tell me she didn’t know who the father was?

  “Leila’s right about guys,” I said, just to contribute something, although this was hardly my area of expertise. My relationships seemed to blow by faster than a spring zephyr; it never took long to figure out that I’d suffered from a case of rose-colored glasses and to seek the escape hatch. In my experience, boys had been more interested in finding their way into my pants than into my heart.

  I’d had two relationships, if you could call them that, each a sexual version of the Turtle and the Hare. I, of course, was the turtle — an even more fitting metaphor when factoring in how I wanted to crawl inside myself and disappear when a guy inched toward my breasts or my zipper and I knew he didn’t love me. I was not proud of how hopelessly old-fashioned that might be, but I suppose in the back of my mind there was always the story of how I’d ended up here at all: some guy had paused only long enough to impregnate my mother before he went on his merry way. Sex might mean a good time to most people, but to me it was firmly and irrevocably imbued with the potential for doom.

  It didn’t help that I was possibly the world’s most modest person. Since puberty had blown in, changing my body lavishly and seemingly overnight, I was too self-conscious to undress in front of anyone. Even Gab and Leila. Even my own mother. And the only thing worse than having to wear the assigned gym suit in PE was having to change into it and out of it in the locker room with a hundred eyeballs in the room, even though I doubted anyone was looking.

  In any case, Leila certainly knew what she was talking about: her last boyfriend, Brett, despite having worshipped her for months (as one does with Leila, if one is lucky enough to claim her), had blown off the homecoming dance at the last minute when his brother scored tickets to a Blackhawks game, leaving Leila with a vintage Hepburn-esque black dress and nowhere to go. We e
nded up in Gab’s basement, Leila in her beautiful dress, watching Downton Abbey and drinking a bottle of champagne from Gab’s parents’ wine cellar, which she insisted they’d never miss. The next day, the wine cellar got a lock and Gab got a bill for $85.

  After the pizza arrived and the focus shifted, I told them about the photo album.

  “Two years?” Leila said, her eyes so round and blue they reminded me of the Abbey 1790 saucer at Laroche’s. Staffordshire. Circa very early 1900s.

  Gab dove into the pizza, serving herself two fat wedges. “You think she lost them?” she said.

  “No,” I said, helping myself to a slice when she was finished. Pan pizza, praise be. Cheese was my friend, and for me it was not a case of less is more. “She does not lose things. She throws things out.”

  “She wouldn’t throw out your baby pictures,” Leila scolded, elbowing me. “Nobody throws out pictures of their kid. Besides, she has all the others.” She finally picked up the serving spatula. This was a classic order of operations for us: Gab, confident and perfectly entitled, would serve herself first. I, desperate to get the food in my mouth but self-conscious and neurotically polite, would go second. And Leila, patient and unconcerned, would go last. You would think the former orphan would perhaps be the grabbiest, but no. When she served herself now, a glistening, oozy glob of cheese fell off and remained in the pan. I stared at it. Was she going to leave it there? I would never leave behind cheese that was rightfully mine.

  “There are other pictures she took from during that time. Just not of me.” I picked up the wad of cheese once I was sure she wasn’t going to and popped it in my mouth.

  “It’s probably nothing,” Gab said.

  Easy for her to say. Gab, who’d never had a moment’s doubt in her life — nor a reason for one.

  She rattled the ice in her glass, glanced up for a busboy, and then, giving up, set it back down and drank some of Leila’s water.

  See, she wouldn’t do that with me. With me, she’d ask first. But with Leila, it was different. There were assumptions, unspokens, givens. I had some of that with them. But not as much as they did. Not as much as I longed for.

  I broke off a piece of crust, blackened on its edge where the rich tomato sauce had caramelized against the pan, making it both sweet and bitter. Rich and sweet and bitter. Maybe Eli was on to something about me.

  “People categorize information differently,” Gab said. “Your mom is an artist. You can’t expect her brain to process and file information like other people.”

  I figured Gab knew what she was talking about, since her parents were experts on humans, and a lot seemed to trickle down. They were the coolest parents I’d ever met — I loved and coveted them. And her brother, Daniel, was amazing, too, although I didn’t know him well, since he was twelve years older than Gab and went away to college when we were six — the year we became friends. But somehow they were close despite the age difference. He called her Gumby. They messaged all the time. She confided in him. He teased her and adored her. I knew it couldn’t be objectively true that she had everything, but it really seemed like she did.

  Leila’s family was equally wonderful — I’d spent enough time at her house to know that my envy there, too, was warranted. For an adopted kid, it seemed like she’d totally hit the jackpot. She had an at-home mom who used to be a chef, which meant the meals at the Hathaways’ were amazing. Dinner chez Hathaway could mean seared guinea hen with caramelized oranges or a Malaysian noodle curry — there was nothing that woman couldn’t cook, nothing that wasn’t the most delicious thing you ever had. And then there was Leila’s dad: a sports doctor with prematurely white hair and a roundish belly who was perennially in a cheerful mood. He was a physician for the Chicago Bulls, and more than once he’d invited famous players to dinner. Often Gab and I were included, and these meals usually ended with NBA players giving Leila and Gab some coaching out on the driveway while I stayed behind, helping with cleanup and nibbling at leftovers.

  In addition to two perfect parents, Leila had an adorable baby brother, also adopted from Ukraine — born with kidney problems, now in perfect health, thank God. Leila also had a network of aunts and uncles and cousins as abundant as flowers in a meadow. I had bupkes. My mother was the only known link I had on the continent. And vice versa. And I didn’t get the feeling I was any more satisfying to her than she was to me.

  “Did you find one?”

  I realized Leila had been talking. “One what?”

  She regarded me with her Jules! look: head tilted, almost exasperated, but warm, and so, so familiar. It was one of my favorite Leila faces. “Photo,” she said mock-patiently. “For the yearbook.”

  “Not really. I guess I could bring a newborn picture, but those aren’t even interesting. Newborn babies pretty much all look alike. Or I could bring the one from when I was two, and just hope my mom never finds out.” It seemed stupid to take such a risk, though, especially since it was clearly me in that photo. But the fun of senior baby photos was the in-between zone, the trying to guess.

  Leila smiled. “I’ll bet you were adorable when you were two.”

  “She’s still adorable,” Gab said, bumping me lightly under the table with her foot.

  I rolled my eyes. “Hardly.”

  “You are,” Leila said. “You have the sweetest smile, and you know I’d kill for your hair —”

  “And you’re built like a fucking pinup girl,” Gab added. “I’d kill for half your curves.”

  “You’re welcome to half my curves,” I grumbled. My exaggerated shape was a bequeathal from my mother. In that sense, I was her carbon copy.

  In other aspects, though — a lot of other aspects — I hoped that I was not.

  Mom was not home at ten. She messaged at some point saying she was out for the evening. Out where? She had said she was “meeting some people.” What people? That was a lot of atypical behavior in a couple of short messages, now that I thought about it.

  I tried to wait her out by starting to study for Monday’s bio test, but cell cycles were less enthralling than one might think.

  Or maybe I was just distracted. I kept finding my attention orienting itself like a periscope to my mother’s closet. I wanted to see those pictures again, to study them for clues. I wanted to know what else might be in that box. It poked and pressed relentlessly into my mind, dangling the possibility of answers that would fill the holes in my mother’s stories.

  I picked up my phone and messaged, Hey, when will you be home? Maybe there was time for a second recon.

  I waited nervously. If she was driving, she wouldn’t reply — and she could be home any moment.

  Exactly five minutes passed before I leapt into motion.

  I flipped her ceiling light on and pulled the box onto the bed. I opened the album and turned the pages, my focus drawn to the boy. Except for the fact that my mother told me she didn’t know who the father was, this would sure as hell look like a young couple and their new baby.

  I set the album aside and pulled out the string-tie envelope I’d noticed last time. With impatient fingers, I unwound the string and pulled out the thin stack of papers inside. They carried the letterhead Wisconsin Department of Children and Families.

  Confused, I flipped through them, deeply unsettled to see our names on the forms. Why would there be all this official paperwork from a social services agency?

  I jumped about a mile when my phone dinged, but it was nothing — just a question from a girl in my English class about an assignment. Still, I quickly packed up the box and shoved it back in the closet, diving to flip the light switch off. My heart rate was well into the triple digits; I was not cut out for this kind of work.

  But I was also not cut out for not knowing things about myself. So when my mother got home, I would confront her, and I would not back down.

  I returned to my room and answered the girl’s message — I took comfort that someone else in the world was also living the high life on a Friday nigh
t. I tried to study, but soon surrendered to Netflix, unable even to focus on that. Finally, at one, with no sign of my mother, I gave up and went to sleep.

  I woke to the sound of the shower — our ancient plumbing produced a sound that resembled a five-year-old’s first shrieking effort at the violin. I lay there, hands pressed to my ears, waiting for my mom to finish. There was the faintest glow of light around my blinds. I squinted at the clock. Just after seven.

  When she was finished, I used the bathroom and headed to the kitchen, nervous about the upcoming confrontation but even more anxious about the outcome.

  The door to her studio was open. She stood in front of her easel in her blue robe, hair dripping, a paintbrush already in her hands. She had all six track lights directed on her painting. “I’m rounding the bell curve,” she said. “Stop me.”

  “You shouldn’t try to do this in artificial light,” I said, leaning against the door frame. “Wait until the sun comes over.” She was dinking with the sky, always her personal Moby Dick. She never seemed to capture what she was after, and “rounding the bell curve” was her expression for when she started to ruin something by not leaving it alone, not stopping when it was done.

  “I can’t wait on the sun.” She laid her brush down, making a noise of disgust, or maybe despair. “I need coffee.”

  I followed her to the kitchen. “So you were out late,” I said.

  She rustled through the cabinets on tiptoe.

  From this angle, her hourglass shape was even more exaggerated. I was built exactly like her, although her butt was bigger. This was my genetic fate: my ass would just continue to expand, like the universe.

  She picked out a powdered creamer for her coffee — peppermint mocha this morning, gag. “I met some art people at Harbach’s, and I hung out with them for a while after my meeting.”

  “What meeting?” I asked.

  “AA.”

  AA? When was the last time she went to an AA meeting? Was she struggling with wanting to drink, for some reason?