I pick up a thick manila envelope now and peel away the tape. I haven’t looked inside it in at least five years. Inside is a single picture of Hilary, hair dyed with streaks of blonde, a big wide-open smile, a happy college girl. A California girl. I wonder who she would have become, if she hadn’t become me? I can’t deny it’s complicated.
I sift through photos of Evelyn. Beautiful, nurturing, gentle. My memories of her are tinted pink and soft around the edges. Even the lean years. After she got sick and couldn’t work and I wore jeans until my ankles stuck out. She thinned down to nothing, smaller than me, a child in an adult bed, but by then I’d turned eighteen. I studied her pictures. I’d saved three. One of her holding me as an infant, my father beaming behind her, the man who died before I could remember him, a slick road, a careening car, an ill-placed tree. I think. Hard to remember, I was so young when he died. All I have is Evelyn’s voice telling whispered stories under the blankets with the lights off.
I was wanted, she said. I’ve never doubted it, which I hear is a strange thing. I’ve read articles on the psychology of adoption and never connected with any of them. Evelyn’s ovaries “dried up and plain stopped working,” she told me, a predecessor to the ovarian cancer that would later take her life. But she’d twist her wrist with a tinkling laugh, “They call infertility a curse. Was the best thing that ever happened to us. We got you.”
The second picture is Evelyn and me at the beach. I was maybe fourteen and we are hugging and smiling. I never went through that all too common phase, when teenagers hate their mothers. I could never imagine my life without her. Until, of course, I had to.
The third picture is after she got sick. Our last picture together, her head wrapped in one of her paisley scarves, her hair wispy fine underneath. She’s grinning wildly into the camera, with her hands on my face. I’m not smiling, but studying her, like at any moment she might poof be gone, and I’d have only that moment to have memorized her face.
Evelyn lived her life in full force. She rejected all things mediocre, preferring only to spectacularly succeed or fail. She’d always said that she didn’t quite do things right, but she didn’t do them half-assed either, so when she failed, she did so with enthusiasm. Her advice to me, always, win or lose, do it enthusiastically.
I feel my eyes well up, and for the first time in a long time missing her fills me up, and I’m crying. I shove the pictures back in the envelope and ungracefully wipe my nose on my sleeve, which even Henry’s wife can do when alone.
I thumb through the rest, quickly, until I find what I’m looking for. It’s a yellowed copy of a birth certificate with the name of a hospital—Griffin Hospital, Derby, Connecticut—on the top. The father line is unsigned, a blank reminder that I belong to no one. The mother line, a haphazardly scrawled Carolyn Seever. The date is there, May 3, 1985. And my birth name is there. The first person I ever was before I became someone else. I run my finger along the raised letters. Zoe Griffin. Evelyn told me the nurses named me Zoe, after one of their favorite patients. Griffin came from the hospital name.
After my biological mother gave birth, she left me in the nursery. Sometimes I feel as though I am made up almost entirely of secrets, but the one that no other living soul knows is that I took my name back. Before there was Hilary, there was the baby Zoe, abandoned in a Connecticut hospital. After there was Hilary, there was a grown-up Zoe, living in an ivory tower. Sometimes I wonder how all three of us can possibly fit in this one body.
Haphazardly, I shove all the remaining papers back into the box and replace the lid. I hold on to the birth certificate and a folded-up memo from a defunct adoption agency that is fairly useless. The name on the birth certificate is a dead end, a false identity she’d left in a panic—I know this much from my last search effort.
I tip the box on its side and place it back in the corner, behind Henry’s things. I see Tara scrawled in pen on the side of one of the crates and I can’t help it, I lift the lid. I’ve seen it before, of course. But yet, I’ve never snooped. I don’t know why I snoop now. Inside sits stacks of folders, insurance, trust account, taxes labeled with the year. I thumb through them quickly; it’s all very dry. Underneath the folders is a frame and my heart skips. I’ve never seen a picture of her, isn’t that odd? Not one single photo of Henry’s wife, his precious Tara. I have no idea what she looks like, other than one drunken night when I had the nerve to ask Henry. He got this faraway look and murmured beautiful. I’ve been curious, and I grab it.