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.
I give up; I accept the temporary fate that finding out more about my father was not meant to be. The sky is barely light, and I press my hands against the glass walls in the living room, the ones that remind you that the only thing separating you from nature is an inch of building material. Whether framed by wood and plaster and insulation or simple glass, a house is part of a larger ecosystem. It is so foolish to think we exist unconnectedly from nature. Foolish, I say.
Don’t even ask me how my wild brain works, which points connect to the other points, but the interconnectedness makes me think of bureaucracy—I don’t know. And for some reason, a new thought beats against my temples: Where are our important documents? Our Social Security cards and birth certificates? At home, she keeps them in a safe that I have never guessed the combination to. She’s not the kind of mom who would bring filing cabinets or plastic bins with labels here to Verona Cove. But she’s also not the kind of mom who would not have them in an emergency. They’ve got to be here.
Crazed by this lead, I riffle through her other drawers. Nothing, nothing, nothing. I pillage the joint, clothes flying like I’m the tornado. Finally, in a back corner of Richard’s closet, where the rest of my mom’s clothes are hung, I find an unmarked manila envelope. Our birth certificates, our Social Security cards, a life-insurance policy in my mom’s name. And a long envelope. The return address is a lawyer’s office in Washington.
I nearly rip the birth certificate trying to read it. Vivian Irene Alexander because I’m named after my mom’s two grandmothers, and I’ve always liked that my initials spell a word. Born in Olympia, Washington, on July 23, right on the horoscope borderline of sensitive Cancer and fiery Leo. I self-identify as Leo, though, ROAR! Mother: Carrie Rose Alexander.
Father: James Bukowski.
Inhale, a gasp; exhale a gust. Chest rising and falling, pant, pant.
I’m quivering like the warning tremors before an earthquake, tears flooding my eyes faster than I can finish reading it.
. . . Am I still breathing?
Hands trembling, I slide a single sheet of paper out of another envelope. The document surrenders full legal custody to my mother, like my father can’t show up later and have some kind of claim on me. It’s notarized from the year of my birth. My father signed at the bottom, one quick swipe of ink, like he was getting it over with.
My father’s name is James Bukowski. Of Berkeley, California. My whole face goes tingly with this new information; my blood buzzes inside my veins, a hum against nerve endings. He has a name, it is James, his last name is one I never would have guessed, a last name that could have been my own had things gone differently. Does he go by Jim or Jimmy, does he live in Berkeley still, why, why, why would my mother do this to me? Why would she keep me from him? Was he a dangerous man? Was she protecting me from him?
I think, on some level, I believed I would never in my life know anything about him, and now I’m questioning whether I really ever wanted to. No, I did. I do. I don’t know. I know nothing.
As much as I loved my previous human life as a ballerina in the 1920s, I am so colossally grateful for the Internet, and I search and search, fingers typing in a frenzy of clacks. The thought often terrifies me, actually—how much personal information you can find online. But today that is working in my favor, I have to say.
There is a man in Berkeley, California, whose name is James Bukowski. All I can tell is that he works for Berkeley College, and I guess maybe my dad could be a professor of music? Like he segued his rock career into teaching—that could happen, right?
I have to know. Even if it’s not him, I have to know.
My thoughts give way to my most secret feelings, the hopes I’ve always had that I never let myself fully imagine. How my dad probably has an old record player and the coolest collection of vinyl and we’ll listen to it and dance around his living room. How he doesn’t know anything about fancy cooking but he calls scrambled eggs his “specialty” and can make a mean veggie burger in the summer, filling the whole backyard with that grill-smoke smell. How he has a collection of vintage hats—bowlers and fedoras and newsboy caps—and he’ll let me borrow them. He probably has tattoos. What kinds? I wonder. Maybe we’ll get one together, something to symbolize our free-spiritedness, how we are connected but independent and we get each other.
So I saddle up Cherie—that’s my Vespa, obviously—and I put my helmet on because my hair will look like a flailing mess if I drive bare-headed on the highway. In my favorite T-strap pumps and a white-collared blouse, I’m a vision, especially since I’m wearing the most beautiful skirt. It falls all the way to my calves—the kind of skirt that can twirl and twirl because the bottom of the hem makes a big circle. I sewed it myself with vintage fabric, which has a white background but is covered in red and peach and blue flowers. I have to press my legs tight to the Vespa to keep my skirt from flying all over the place, but even if it does, it’s like, who cares, you know? I have much bigger concerns floating all around me like the clouds in the sky down the coastline and we’re drifting, drifting.
I didn’t pack anything really because I won’t need anything once I get there. Either it’s not my dad, and I turn around and come home or it is my dad, and he’ll have everything else I’ll need. So I just take my cell phone and my lipstick and my emergency credit card and ID, which were already in my favorite little purse. I have the address of this Berkeley James Bukowski tucked on a scrap of paper. At least, this house has a mortgage out with his name on it, so it’s probably him. Still, I drive and drive until I find it, and I park my Vespa near the end of the driveway. I have arrived.
The house is so homey, so suburban. Brick and square and fancier than I expected. But no matter. This is it, my moment, and I could finally be meeting my dad. I know it’s probably not him, but if it is, he’ll be so thrilled. All these years he’s had to legally stay away from me because of that stupid custody agreement, but I found him, and now he can know me. Now we can fill those gaps in our souls—him from never knowing a child, me from never knowing a father. The front porch makes me feel small, like I’m peddling cookies or holiday gift wrap. But my knuckles find the door, and it’s only a moment before someone answers.
“Hi,” I say. My voice sounds like a little girl’s. “Are you James Bukowski?”
“Yes. Can I help you?” This can’t be my father. He’s older than my dad would be, older than my mother. He’s wearing a tie and a pressed shirt rolled up at the sleeves. His hair is starting to gray at the temples; he has a beard trimmed short to his face. But he has blue eyes, full eyebrows, like mine, exactly like mine. No.
“Are you . . . ?” I begin. “The musician James Bukowski?”
“No. I’m a professor.” He’s confused, perhaps imagining that I’m a groupie and stalker. “Of economics. Why?”
So it’s not him. I think I’m relieved; am I relieved? “Okay. Okay, thanks anyway. Never mind.”
I turn to walk away, and he’s still standing with the door half-open. But something spins me back around like a windup ballerina in a music box. “I’m Vivi. That doesn’t mean anything to you, does it?”
I’m sure it doesn’t, but his expression changes—it drops to the concrete porch below us and shatters. His eyes turn from confused to angry in a single flash, which I can’t comprehend. I’m finally here, his daughter—I finally found him so he can know me. He steps out onto the porch, pulling the door closed behind him. But not before I see them. The pictures in the entryway of kids. His real kids.
“You can’t be here.”
I stand paralyzed, a lawn ornament frozen in horror.
His face pools with blood, red and pulsing. “You cannot be here.”
Oh my God, it is him. Oh my God, this man is my dad, and he hates me, and his family doesn’t know about me. I want to say no, YOU can’t be here. This can’t be happening. You can’t be this ridiculous person, this boring non-rock-star professor, with a life that is all neatly formed. He’s not a wild musician with a drifter’s heart. He’s a regular man. He’s a regular, responsible old man?!
“Carrie promised me this wouldn’t happen,” he said, like he can rationalize my presence away. “I’ve sent the check every month. Is that what this is about?”
My body makes a sob noise, the air forced from my stomach and out my mouth as if someone punched me in the gut. I’m not crying or maybe I am; I really have no idea what is happening except this angry man who has my eyes, and I can’t believe how poisonously I hate him.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, but then hearing my own voice is proof. I am here. I am someone with an opinion and rights and, actually, I’m not sorry. At all. A deep breath fills my stomach and I think I’m yelling. “I’m a real person. I am not a promise someone made about me! And you—you know what? You’re pathetic. You may not want me, but now I don’t want you either!”
“Lower your voice this instant,” he hisses at me, and now I’m sure that I’m crying, I’m sobbing, making these gross, primal noises like a grief-stricken cow braying on his front porch.
Lower my voice? He doesn’t get to tell me what to do! Like a dad. I gather enough breath to retort. Oh, I will, oh yes, because my lungs are swirling like a windstorm, circling up the words like floating leaves, and I will carry them together with violent force. “LOWER YOUR FUCKING VOICE! YOU ARE THE BIGGEST DISAPPOINTMENT OF MY LIFE. So just KEEP your REAL FAMILY because I really don’t CARE. I’m just SO RELIEVED to know I was never missing anything. But you were, JAMES BUKOWSKI. Because I’m pretty FUCKING GREAT, and I’m SORRY FOR YOU that you don’t know it. Have a GREAT LIFE. I will NEVER think about you AGAIN.”
My legs carry me in long strides, but I curse myself for wearing heels, even low ones. I didn’t think I’d need a getaway plan, didn’t think I’d be running for my life from a man who is everything I don’t want to be. I’m sobbing so much that snot is warm beneath my nose.
“Jim, what the hell is going on?” I hear the shaky voice of the woman behind me as I run down his driveway toward my Vespa, and I glance back in time to see the door close. Good. GOOD. I’m glad his wife knows. If he didn’t have the balls to tell her he’s had a daughter for seventeen years, I’m glad she knows now. Maybe I was the angel of death for his marriage, and I wouldn’t even be sorry, I swear to God I wouldn’t be. DO YOU HEAR ME? I AM NOT SORRY FOR MY CREATION OR MY BIRTH OR MY LIFE.