You have known for years where she lives—the woman who gave birth to you. The woman who first cuddled you, who gave you your first name, taught you your first tongue. Who got on a plane and crossed an ocean without you like you were luggage that didn’t fit. Whom you have tried and tried to discard, who haunts you every day of your life.
All your life you cupped this dream in your hands like a bird: that he would come. Your baby brother, your replacement. You’ve rehearsed all the things you’d say to him, how to reduce him to nothing in only a few sentences, how to summon all those years of your own anger and make your pain lash around so vicious and wild it would break his skin and lodge itself underneath. And then he could carry those wounds back to them and infect them, too. Pain multiplies exponentially. What you cannot fix you can continue to destroy.
And then there he was.
He was nothing like you expected. But you—you were everything you should’ve expected. All those years of your plotting crumbled and you felt your old familiar self rising up, rushing in to try to ease his way and make him feel better. All those same familiar urges that make you smile when men say Smile!, that made you go to the movies with your advisor one day because he said he was lonely even though you didn’t want to, that made you worm yourself into bright Chinese dresses with your sister to take Christmas pictures your mom arranged each year growing up, that bring you home for every holiday. Who are you in the face of someone else’s pain? demand the urges. Who are you to withhold yourself? And you didn’t tell him, although you considered it, how six years ago (you work your way backward; he would’ve been about to start middle school) you went to see his father.
When you were younger your parents took you and your sister to join a group for girls adopted from China and their families. You’d go each week to one of the family’s houses and watch documentaries about China, and the moms would all try to cook Chinese food and pass out red envelopes for Chinese New Year or they’d bring in books to try to teach you words in Mandarin. Each week, you’d look around at all the other girls and think how any one of them could have just as easily wound up your sister instead. Your life was shaped by the whims of overseas agencies, by paperwork and timing. Your sister loved those meetings, but you hated them; you begged your mom to let you stay at home. Culture was important. She never let you. After returning you’d get migraines, flashes of black-rimmed light that screamed across your vision and left you weak and ill.
When you don’t live out the life you were born into, the idea that you might someday, somehow, understand is intoxicating. In undergrad you met other adoptees. It was easier, somehow, outside your family’s eager, watchful eye. Your friend Tish, from Orinda and before that from Seoul, was in reunion with her first family. She claimed it was messy, and never easy, but before something’s a reality it can be anything you wish. It can be not only easy but fulfilling and perfect, too; you can banish fear if you imagine only the most wonderful things.
When you were a junior in college you had found where your brother’s father worked and a boy from your Animal Behavior class, who lived in San José, offered to drive you over Fourth of July weekend. You will never forget the particular sound of your footsteps in the linoleum hallway, the lights flickering overhead. He was in the laboratory, sitting at a computer by an otherwise unremarkable window that’s forever seared into your memory, and when he saw you the earth stopped around him; you felt it happen, a disruption in the gravitational pull. You felt his whole life change.
He came out into the hallway. You were shy and hopeful and terrified all at once, happy in a way you couldn’t quite control, and then he wouldn’t talk with you. You have a new family now, he told you, and the whole world hardened against you, and you within it, petrified inside the stark truth of all the ugliness of a cold uncaring universe. You must go back to them. It’s not safe for you to be here. Go.
You have nurtured your hatred ever since. You are small and pretty, with a lovely smile. You hide your hatred well.
For weeks and weeks you lie awake at night remembering your brother’s visit, dissecting it and sliding it under a microscope in your mind. You think of it the nights your boyfriend comes to visit, the day your family drives up to surprise you, the day your sister calls from college in tears, homesick, and you settle back into those easy rhythms and unspoken sentences of siblinghood, the least fraught language you know and what now feels like your mother tongue.
You will admit this to yourself: when he was here, even against all your people-pleasing learned behaviors, you brought up your sister the way you did to hurt him. Or not to hurt him, maybe—although that’s what it did; you saw it in his face—but to wall yourself off from him, to place markers around yourself and let all the space between you echo back at him. It was the way you did it, tossing her out there like you didn’t know the implications. You knew them. Your sister is the one to whom you admit this, in fact, when you finally call her and tell her how he came. Ruth has always been different from you (she knows nothing of her first family, and yearns for answers): if it had been her, she would have hugged him and never let him go.
You have been watching his life unspool from a distance. Despite your warning, he makes no effort at privacy. He posted when he left for college, when he arrived. He posts pictures and videos of his dorm there, the art he’s making, the things he does on weekends, the visits from the boy he brought to meet you who goes to Brown now (you’d thought he said Princeton, but maybe you were wrong), the two of them twined together lying on the grass looking so happy to be with each other it makes your teeth hurt. (Sometimes, though, in the pictures other people post of him, those ones he didn’t curate personally, you think he looks deeply sad.) He posts a happy-anniversary message to his parents; he posts the details of his first studio exhibition with his classmates; he posts when he’s going to be off campus. In fact he posts so much that it occurs to you more than once to wonder if he’s doing it for the benefit of an audience—is it you? He has shifted his life onto screens, a narrative you can tune in to, so that every day, if you like (you do), you can check in on him and see that he’s safe, that he’s busy, that he’s surrounded by people who like him and even some who love him. You think he must be doing it on purpose.
“Go see him,” your sister tells you every time she calls. She knows how you watch him. She doesn’t tell your parents. “Don’t see them if you don’t want, but at least go see him. You live basically on the edge of nowhere and I know from personal experience it’s the most boring place in the world, so what else are you going to do? Just go.”
You told no one this, not Mike from Animal Behavior who bought you a Slurpee and drove you back to campus, not Tish from your dorm who stayed up with you all that night and gave you a cool damp towel when you threw up, not the therapist who called 911 because she couldn’t be sure the panic attack you had in her office wasn’t something worse, not even Ruth. You got lost leaving your father’s campus. You were dizzy and stricken and the hallway loomed unnavigable in front of you, branching off to a maze of so many other hallways whose sum total was far too great for you to ever find yourself. You walked back and forth and finally unseeingly stumbled down a flight of stairs that delivered you into the unsparing glare of the sun. That was where you saw him again. He was crouched against the side of the building, weeping, wobbly, and trying to steady himself against the brick wall.
Still, you didn’t understand until your brother came, and then it was clear; his father had been trying to protect him. Your brother had the unmistakable air of one who’s been the very center of someone else’s universe all his life, one formed of all those hopes and dreams and fears and pains and longings and regrets. You know what that feels like, you and Ruth both.
It is no longer possible to hate them. You miss the hatred. After a while it can start to feel like a friend. Or maybe it’s just that the other things roiling underneath are unmasked now, and those things are harder things to feel. You are adrift. You cry a lot. You go drunk stargazing with Byron and Lance. Ruth sends you an Edible Arrangement and you eat the entire thing in one sitting. You go to see her and spend too much of your stipend taking her shopping and out to eat.
Like everything, it starts small. First you reread a post about his showing in December. Then you screenshot it, save it to your desktop. You let your eyes flick over your lab calendar and rest on the blank spots in between incubation and hatch.
You look up his campus on a map. You look up plane tickets to Rhode Island, just out of curiosity, just to see. You call a hotel with a forgiving cancellation policy. Finally you grow tired of pretending, and you book a flight.
You surrender yourself to momentum. On the plane you buy a miniature bottle of wine and let it blur away all the sharp corners of existence, and out the window you watch the landscape give way and give way, again and again, while you sail past it unscathed. You always feel most at home in the sky.
When the wheels touch down you feel the land returning to you, spreading like gangrene from that initial thud, and you have to take a Xanax. The mountains you flew over are all siphoned from the land, all come to press against your lungs in a rush of pressure, and in the terminal you hunch over on a grimy chair, gasping for breath, forcing a smile and a nod for the woman who stoops to ask worriedly if you’re all right. You want to grab her hand and beg her not to leave.
It takes you so long to find your way to campus and then to find the gallery space you’re worried you’ve missed it, but the room is full still. You see the other boy first. He’s leaning against the wall by the door watching, his eyes shining, and when you follow the direction of his small, private smile it leads you to your brother.
Your brother is standing by a painting talking to a woman you recognize from his posts as one of his professors. He’s engrossed in their conversation and it’s a few minutes before he looks up and sees you.
He’s across the room still; there are people between you, and you aren’t certain you won’t turn and walk out. You stay close to the door and recite the mantra your sister made you repeat (I am doing this for myself, I owe them nothing, I can always leave). But then he says something to his professor and comes toward you. All the air in the room goes hot.
There are so many ways this could have gone, so many ways this still could go. But in that instant, the one where you saw that flash of recognition strike him like lightning, you felt what you came here to see if you’d feel: the same strike at the same time, an atomic pull you can’t explain. You feel the distance between you as a physical entity, and you feel it compress with each of his steps.
And then he’s in front of you, startled and unsure.
“Hi,” he says. Something in his tone strikes you as brave. Maybe hope is always brave.
Ruth would hug him. You’re not sure you will ever be able to. But you’re there, and you can breathe still, and you say hi to him back.