Vivi
Here is why I ransacked my mother’s room: I had to know. I’ve been thinking about it ever since the night of my birthday when Jonah and I talked about our dads at the lighthouse. Jonah’s dad was always in his life, so that loss is a staggering subtraction. I wonder now—could my dad be a meaningful addition to my world?
So many years, I told myself, I don’t need to know about my dad. But I think that might be some sort of myth that I created about myself: I am no man’s orphan, not a silly girl who is having an identity crisis, nothing like that. Except what if I am, you know? Like, what if I let myself be that girl for a minute?
So I did. I gave myself a tiny open window to really feel what I feel, and a gust of curious wind poured in. I studied my own face in the mirror yesterday, searching for clues of him on my very flesh. I have my mom’s button nose and full lips, but she has dark eyes, and I have blue. So these are his eyes, which I guess I’ve always known—his genes are right inside my eye sockets, and I don’t even know what his first name is. My natural hair color is darkest blond, and so is my mom’s. But my eyebrows. My eyebrows are full, and my mom’s are sparse; she fills them in with eyebrow pencil anytime she leaves the house. My mom has long, slender fingers, and my hands are teeny. I have his eyes, his eyebrows, his hands, what else? When I emerged from the bathroom, it had been over an hour.
If my mom had married someone, maybe I would have forgotten about my biological dad completely. There was only one person I ever wanted for the role of stepdad. When I was little, there was this man named Adesh, and my mom loved him in a way that made her a different person after he left, and I loved him, too, because he was handsome and so unbelievably kind. If he had ever yelled, I think I would have burst out laughing because his accent made everything sound beautiful. But he would never yell—no, never; he was too busy singing and introducing me to new music and making my favorite meal called makki paneer pakora. He moved back to India to take care of his aging parents, and I remember overhearing a conversation in which my mom said, Let me just come with you. He wouldn’t let her uproot her life and me, is what he said. What is meant to be will find a way, is what he said. They wrote letters back and forth for so long, real letters, and she keeps all his words bundled at the back of her underwear drawer.
I snooped and read all the letters years ago because I missed him, too, and my mom got too sad when I tried to ask about it. In the last one, he tells her he’s engaged to a lady named Saanvi and that he will always love my mom in a special compartment of his heart. After I read that last letter, I felt guilty. I don’t regret discovering the letters, but I feel like I crossed a border that was not my own, that I wandered into private territory. But Adesh’s leaving was a sad tale in my storybook, too, and I deserved to know the end. In the winter, my mom still wears a beautiful scarf he sent her from Mumbai. She wraps it around her neck slowly like she’s savoring the fabric’s lushness, and I know she’s wishing it still smelled like him, like sweet spices and warm air and the days when love wasn’t lost.
Anyway, that’s what made me think to look in the underwear drawer. I mean, that’s where she hid her most secret things in Seattle; if there’s anything worth finding in this house, it would be there, right?
Patience is not my virtue, but I knew I had to bide my time to be careful. I waited until this morning, when I knew she’d be gone, when she left very early to drive three hours to San Francisco and pick up some supplies at a specialty art shop.
Sure enough, I find Adesh’s letters in her underwear drawer. I uncover a stash of photos, too, labeled on the back in my mom’s scratchy cursive. Me and Mom: a faded picture of my mom as a little girl, standing with her own mother, who died very young. Carrie & Adesh: a picture of my mom and Adesh, nose-to-nose and smiling with their eyes closed like they’re high out of their minds on love. My Viv: A picture of me when I was four or five, wearing pink sunglasses and holding an ice-cream cone out to the camera. These pictures are the most precious to my mother. But there are none of my father, none of my mother at age nineteen or pregnant with me.