“I…um…was wondering if you could tell me a little more about my father. Michael.”
I watch Mom carefully. The changes are small, but they’re there. A line of confusion between her eyes. A swallow of surprise. The downturn of her mouth as she deliberates. A rise and fall of her shoulders as she understands what I’m asking.
“Do you want to find him?” she asks finally.
I look away, and my gaze lands on the corner of Hope’s light green baby blanket sticking out through the slats of the crib. “Da-da-da-da-daaaa,” she sings.
I nod.
“Why now?”
I open my mouth to tell her the truth, but for some reason I can’t say it. “I don’t know.” It’s lame and obviously a lie, but Mom doesn’t push it.
“Okay,” she says after watching me for a second or two. Her voice sounds surprisingly steady. “I’ll tell you everything I know.”
I look back at her. “You don’t mind?”
She sighs. “I knew it was going to happen sooner or later. You know I was never keeping secrets from you, right?”
“I know.”
“But, Ry…” I wait as she seems to work something out in her thoughts. “I really don’t have a lot of information. The last time I tried to track him down, I hit a dead end.”
The last time she…huh? “You’ve tried to find him?”
“A couple of times. So I could have the information for you when…well, when this conversation happened. And…I guess I wanted to see what he’s been up to all this time. I wouldn’t mind some answers too, you know.” She fiddles with the frayed edge of her cutoff shorts, and for the first time, I see it: she was in love with my father. That’s why she doesn’t talk about him all that much. He broke her heart when he left her.
Suddenly I’m thinking about all the fights with Meg, her insistence on not terminating the pregnancy, her absolute refusal to even listen to my side of it. Even though she didn’t think she was going to die, and even though it was my fault she was in the position where she had to make that choice…in a way, when she decided not to have the abortion, she was choosing to leave me too.
Mom’s not the only one with a broken heart.
I put my arm around her, and she rests her head on my shoulder. “I’m sorry, Mom.”
She pats my knee. “I’d do it all again. It got me you.”
And I guess that’s where our similarities end. I wouldn’t do it all again. Not even close.
Hope is quiet now, asleep. The mobile continues its song.
After a minute, Mom straightens up. “His name is Michael Taylor.”
Michael Taylor. My father. The picture is becoming clearer already.
“He’d be about thirty-seven or thirty-eight now. When I checked a couple of years ago, he was no longer living in Boston. Or if he is, his information isn’t listed anywhere. I actually called every Michael Taylor in Boston—came up with nothing.”
“Mom,” I whisper, “I can’t believe you did that.”
She just shrugs. “There are a lot of Michael Taylors in the United States. And all I have to go on is his name, his incredibly common name.” She shakes her head to herself.
“You don’t know his parents’ names? Or what he does for work? Or anything that will help narrow it down?”
“I’m sorry, Ry. I wish I did. He was a concert promoter at the time—the kind of job you do in college, working off the books for cash. He could be doing anything now.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
She gives me a kiss on my forehead. After she leaves the room, I start Googling.
Michael Taylor. Approximately 531 million results.
Michael Taylor concert promoter. 126,000 results, most having to do with lawsuits against Michael Jackson’s concert promoter or second-market tickets to Taylor Swift concerts.
Four hours later, I fall onto my bed, smother my face into my pillow, and scream as loud as I can.
Why does everything have to be so impossible?
? ? ?
“Hello?”
“Hi, Grandpa,” I say into the phone. “It’s Ryden.”
“Hello?” he says again.
“It’s Ryden,” I say, louder.
“Ryden! How are you?”
“I’m fine, Grandpa. How are you?”
There’s a clicking on the line. “Hello?” my grandmother says from another phone somewhere else in their house.
“It’s Ryden, Sylvia,” Grandpa says.
“Ryden!” Grandma says. “How are you?”
I quietly bang my head on my desk. This is never going to work. My grandparents are older than they should be. They had four kids in a row in their twenties and then got pregnant with my mom when they were forty. Unplanned babies: a Brooks family tradition.
“I’m fine, Grandma, how are you?”
“Oh, we’re doing fine. How’s our great-granddaughter? Is that her crying I hear?”
Clearly Grandma’s hearing isn’t as bad as Grandpa’s. “Yeah, she’s teething. Actually, that’s what I’m calling about. I’m going back to school for my senior year in a few weeks, and I’m going to have to put Hope in day care. I was wondering if you guys would be willing to help pay for it. I have a part-time job, but it’s not enough.”