“…result,” my mother finished, and then she saw my face, and she lowered the phone. The countdown had started on the television. Ten. Nine. Everyone around us was shouting the numbers. My mother and I just stood there looking at each other across the room. When the clock hit midnight and everybody cheered, she was the only one crying.
She took me into the kitchen and closed the door. My father followed. He didn’t look surprised. He looked tired, like a man who had been waiting for this for a very long time. “Helen is my sister,” my mother said. “My older sister. You’ve never met her. She moved to Arizona before you were born.”
I stared at my DNA results on the phone. Possible parent or child. “So she’s…” My mother nodded. “She was seventeen. Our parents were very strict. They sent her away to have the baby. I was twenty-four and married. I couldn’t have children. We decided together, the two of us, in a hospital hallway. She would give you to me. And she would never, ever come back, so you’d never be confused.”
My father put his hand on her shoulder. “I always said we should tell you,” he said quietly. “That’s why I wouldn’t take the test. I already knew what it would say.”
I didn’t know what to feel. Betrayed. Grateful. Dizzy. “Why did she take the test?” I asked. My mother laughed through her tears. “She didn’t take it for herself. She took it so that if you ever looked, you would find her. She told me thirty years ago, ‘I won’t go looking. But I won’t hide either.’ She’s been on that site for six years. Waiting.”
I called Helen at 12:40 a.m. on New Year’s Day. She answered on the first ring, and she didn’t say hello. She just said my name, the name my mother gave me, very softly, like she’d practiced it. We talked until three in the morning. In March, I flew to Arizona. My mother came with me. When the two sisters saw each other at the airport, after thirty-one years, they held on so long that I finally had to put my arms around both of them, because I didn’t know which of my mothers to hug first.
