“I didn’t tell anyone when I started the search for my biological mother. I didn’t want to call any more attention to the fact that my make was different, or have to explain any of it to my adoptive mother, who would only hear that she wasn’t enough of a mother for me. Lots of adoptees report wanting to meet their birth parents because they can never shake the feeling of rootlessness, or they want to make sense of their origin story, or they’re simply curious about where they came from. My motivation was strictly clinical. I wanted to look my birth mother in the eye and ask her if she was sick and if I was going to get sick too, and if so, how could I get better before anyone noticed?
“My adoption was a closed adoption, which might have meant something in the 1980s. In the early aughts, around the time I started my search, the Internet may not have been what it is today, but you could pay to run a background check if you had a name. And I had a name. When I was seven, I’d come home from a movie with my mom to find a message from the housekeeper: Sheila Lott, 12:47 P.M. I would never have remembered this if not for my mother’s pallor when she suggested I go read in my room for a bit. She’d spent all afternoon on the phone, her shrill terror occasionally snaking its way up our double staircase and interrupting my umpteenth reading of Beezus and Ramona. I had to memorize a new home phone number after that and all I knew was that Sheila Lott was to blame.
“There were ninety-seven Sheila Lotts on Foundit.com, thirty-nine once I eliminated any over the age of forty, and seventeen once I narrowed down the ones who lived on the East Coast. At $24.95 a pop to ‘get the report on,’ I would have had to explain the charge of $424.15 on my credit card if I hadn’t found her on my fourth try.
“I knew it was my mother the moment the image loaded. We had the same grouping of freckles under our eyes, the same sweeping, smooth foreheads. Had she been smiling in the mug shot, I was sure she’d get those brackets around her mouth, the ones that made my cheekbones appear both soft and sharply pronounced. A boy at my school once told me that when I smiled, I was prettier than most white girls he knew.
“My real mother was thirty-two, my adoptive mother’s junior by thirty-five years, which made her fifteen when she had me. She had been arrested twice on drug charges. There was an address in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Two weeks later, I told my mom I was helping set up for the Spring Saturday dance at school and crossed state lines in my blue bimmer. I didn’t find my mom that day—it would take three more tries until I did that—but I did find A.J.”
I could go on. I could turn the pages, recount the times A.J. elbowed me in the throat, sat on my chest, or covered my mouth and squeezed my nose until I was flapping like a fish on land. He never hit me. Never left a mark. He preferred me blue in the face, wheezing like a longtime smoker, burning for one good breath. I close my copy of Seen. It burns enough, remembering that day in Nordstrom. “Thank you.”
The Cindy Pritzker Auditorium is silent a moment. Women look left and right, some with their hands poised to clap, as though they are unsure if I am finished or not. They left their jobs early and shelled out twenty-nine dollars a ticket to hear me describe what it feels like to be starved of oxygen for eighty-three seconds by the first man who ever told me he loved me. I have to say thank you again before I receive their applause.
I am still not used to it. How different the applause for my memoir is than it was for my fiction. At my early readings of the She’s with Him series the reception was frisky, lanced with plenty of Woo-woos! and Whoops!, which always rankled. Yes, I wrote about sex, but I also wrote about identity, race, power, and the inescapable cycle of abuse. But that wasn’t enough to quiet people down, to be heard, to be respected. You want a full-page review in the New York Times? You want serious clappers at your readings? Open a vein.
“Babe,” Vince says, arms and mouth open wide, in this Are you kidding me with what an absolute inspiration you are? kind of way. He could just lean across the table and give me a kiss, but he comes around to my left so that Marc has to adjust the magnification of the Canon 5D. The producers left film of me, marching in protest of George Zimmerman’s acquittal, on the cutting room floor in season one. ‘Too polarizing,’ I heard Jesse had said. Three years later, when enough white people agree that Black Lives Matter, Jesse sends a crew to document the scores of black women who gather to hear me say that sexual violence against us has gone unchecked for too long. To her, we’re bulletproof coffee or millennial-pink blazers. Just another coastal-elite trend that she will tire of soon enough.
I kiss my husband on the mouth for the first time in a few weeks. Gwen, my editor, looks away when it lasts too long. One of the most frequent questions I’ve been asked since the memoir came out is how Vince feels about it, if he’s disturbed at all by the revelation that the fictional couple in my trilogy is loosely based on my first relationship.
My husband and I don’t keep secrets in our marriage. He already knew. That’s what Gwen had me practice saying. And then she had Vince practice too: My wife and I don’t keep secrets in our marriage . . .
Vince doesn’t usually accompany me on the book tour—and for reasons I won’t get into today, I prefer it that way—but he can always be counted on to show up when the cameras are around, because it’s success through osmosis. All the glory and none of the work. Gwen has been referring to him as the Human Step and repeat since we’ve been on the road and she’s exactly right. Get your book signed by Stephanie and your selfie taken with Vince, just to the right of her table. Even the serious clappers can’t resist an Instagram photo-op with my husband, who at thirty-two should really be losing his hair by now.
The line disappears out the door, “All the way to the lobby,” Gwen whispers to me, and there are two security guards on crowd control. No one is allowed in this room without buying a book. I have my Caran d’Ache ballpoint pen punched and ready to sign when Gwen waves over the first audience member. She can’t be twenty-five and she wears a bright yellow cardigan, pulling across the chest to reveal a pink bra that matches the neon smear on her lips. Dark acne scars mottle her jawline and is she . . . ? Yes. She’s already crying. My stomach gets that sensation, like it is a deep and maybe endless tunnel, like sadness will have a place to travel through me my whole life.
“Oh, sweetheart,” I say, and I stand and wrap my arms around her. I learned early in the book tour: no silk blouses. The women destroy them.
“I want to leave,” she sobs into my shoulder.
Ugh. So she’s one of those. One who is still holding on, hoping it will get better. I could knit the world’s least cozy quilt out of the things they’ve confessed on my shoulder: I’m so stupid. No one knows. My mom said it’s nothing compared to what my dad did to her. I should be grateful. He has a job. I’m being dramatic. I have nowhere to go. I have no one. It’s not that bad. It’s not that bad. Black women are three times more likely to die at the hands of an abuser than white women. It’s unconscionable that our government hasn’t stepped up to do more for us. One of the things I’m planning on speaking about with the Female Director when I meet her in a few months is the possibility of an initiative specifically devoted to helping black women extricate themselves from their violent partners. I was thinking we could roll it out in tandem with the movie’s release.
I pull away and pat her on the shoulder. “We’re going to get you help, okay?” I beckon Gwen, who is armed with the numbers for Chicago’s women’s shelters and some of the national hotlines. She will call none of them. Or maybe she will, and he’ll kill her anyway. As Gwen passes her the cards, I scrawl Be strong in the book she was forced to buy to enter this room.
A small woman steps forward next. It’s nearly June but she’s drowning in a heavy winter sweater, which either means she runs cold or she’s covered in bruises. Her face is unsmiling as she passes me my book, telling me her name is Justine.