…June 14th, twenty-five years ago. The day I was adopted.
My knees went weak. I sat down at the table without meaning to.
The woman’s name was Ellen. She sat down across from me, slowly, adjusting her oxygen tube. “I’m your grandmother,” she said. “Walter is my son. He’s your father.”
Walter was standing in the doorway, holding his canvas bag in both hands. He didn’t come closer.
I’d like to say I felt something warm. Mostly I felt angry. “Do you know what it’s like to be followed for four months?” I said. “I changed my routes. I stopped going to yoga. I slept with a chair under my doorknob.”
Walter’s face crumpled. “I know,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I found you two years ago on a DNA site. I wrote you a message a dozen times and deleted it every time. I thought if I could just see you, from a distance, I’d know whether it was okay to say hello. It was wrong. I knew it was wrong, and I kept doing it.”
Ellen reached across the table and took my hand. “He told me last week he’d been watching you,” she said. “I told him he had to stop, or bring you here and tell you the truth. I’m sick, honey. I don’t have a lot of time. I wanted to see you just once before…”
She didn’t finish. She didn’t need to.
I didn’t stay for cake that day. I told them I needed time. I went home and called my mom, my real mom, the woman who raised me, and told her everything. She drove over that night and listened to all of it. Then she said, “Do you want to go back? Because if you do, I’ll come with you.”
We went back the following Sunday, together. Walter promised me he would never follow me again, and he hasn’t. My mom and Ellen talked for two hours. Walter and I mostly sat on the porch and didn’t say much.
Ellen died in August. On my birthday that year, a card came in the mail, in blue ink. Inside were four words. “Thank you for knocking.”
