Jodi Picoult - Handle with Care

“You are such an insensitive troll,” I said.

“This was a lot more civilized, if you ask me. What was the alternative? Some big argument where you tell me to fuck off and die?”

“Yes!” I said, and then I took a deep breath. “Is there someone else?”

“There’s some thing else,” Joe said soberly. “For God’s sake, Marin. You’ve blown me off the past three times I’ve tried to get together. What did you expect me to do? Just sit around waiting for you to have time for me?”

“That’s not fair,” I said. “I was reading marriage license applications-”

“Exactly,” Joe replied. “You don’t want to go out with me. You want to go out with your birth mother. Look, at first, I thought it was kind of hot-you know, you were so passionate when you talked about finding her. Except it turns out you’re not passionate about anything but that, Marin.” He slid his hands into his pockets. “You’re so busy living in the past, you’ve got nothing to give right now.”

I could feel my neck heating up beneath the collar of my suit. “Do you remember those two amazing days-and nights-at my house?” I said, leaning toward him until we were a breath away. I watched his pupils dilate.

“Oh yeah,” he murmured.

“I faked it. Every time,” I said, and I walked out of Joe’s office with my head high.

My birthday is January 3, 1973. I’ve known this, obviously, my whole life. The adoption decree I’d gotten from Hillsborough County was dated in late July, because of the six-month waiting period to fi nalize an adoption and the time it takes to schedule the hearing. There’s a lot of debate about that six-month period, in the adoptive community. Some people feel it should be longer, to give the birth mom time to change her mind; some people feel it should be shorter, to give the adoptive parents peace of mind that their newborn won’t be taken away. Where you fall on the spectrum, of course, depends on whether you have a baby to give away or one to receive.

I was a few days late. My father used to say that he was counting on me being his little tax deduction, but then I foiled that by arriving in the new year. On the slip of paper that came home from the hospital with me, saved in my baby book, was a bassinet card with my name torn off-but I could still make out a loop in the middle of the last name that hadn’t been ripped away: a cursive y or g or j or q . I knew this about my former self, and I knew that my birth parents had lived in Hillsborough County, and that my mother had been seventeen. In the seventies, there was still a good chance that a seventeen-year-old would marry the father of her baby, and that had led me to the records room.

Using a due date calculator on a pregnancy website, I figured out that I must have been conceived sometime around April tenth in order to be due on New Year’s Eve. (April tenth. A high school spring formal dance, I imagined. A midnight car ride to the shore. The waves on the sand, the sun breaking like a yolk over the ocean at dawn, he and she, sleeping in each other’s arms.) At any rate, if she found out she was pregnant a month later, that meant getting married in the early summer of 1972.

In 1972, Nixon went to China. Eleven Israeli athletes were killed at the Munich Olympic games. A stamp cost eight cents. The Oakland A’s won the World Series, and M * A * S * H premiered on CBS.

On January 22, 1973, nineteen days after I was born and living with the Gates family, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade .

Did my mother hear about that and curse her bad timing?

A few weeks ago I had started scouring the records of Hillsborough County for marriage certificates from the summer of 1972. If my mother was seventeen, there must have been a parental consent form attached, too. Surely that would limit the numbers I had to wade through.

I had blown Joe off for two consecutive weekends while I waded through over three thousand marriage certificate applications, and learned incredibly creepy things about my home state (like that a girl between thirteen and seventeen, and a boy between fourteen and seventeen, could marry with parental consent), and yet, I didn’t find an application that looked like it might belong to my birth parents.

The truth is, even before Joe dumped me, I had resigned myself to giving up my search.

I went back to work after I left his office, and somehow phoned in a performance the rest of the day. That night, I came back to my house, opened a bottle of wine and a tub of Ben & Jerry’s Coffee Heath Bar Crunch, and faced the truth: I had to decide if I really wanted to find my birth mother. Presumably, she had gone through significant moral contortions deciding whether or not to give me up; surely I owed her the same self-assessment in deciding whether or not to find her. Curiosity wasn’t good enough; neither was a medical scare that had left me wondering about my origins. Once I had a name: then what? Knowing where I came from did not necessarily mean I was brave enough to hear why I had been given away. If I was going to do this, I was going to be opening the door for a relationship that would change both of our lives.

I reached for the phone and dialed my mother. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“Trying to figure out how to TiVo The Colbert Report, ” she said. “What are you doing?”

I glanced down at the melting ice cream, the half-empty bottle of wine. “Embarking on a liquid diet,” I said. “And you have to push the red button to get the right menu on the screen.”

“Oh, there it is. Good. Your father gets cranky when I watch the show and he falls asleep.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Am I passionate?”

She laughed. “Things must be really bad if you’re asking me that.”

“I don’t mean romantically. I mean, you know, about life. Did I have hobbies when I was little? Did I collect Garbage Pail Kids cards or beg to be on a swim team?”

“Honey, you were terrified of the water till you were twelve.”

“Okay, maybe that wasn’t the best example.” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Did I stick with things, even when they were hard? Or did I just give up?”

“Why? Did something happen at work?”

“No, not at work.” I hesitated. “If you were me, would you look for your birth parents?”

There was a bubble of silence. “Wow. That’s a pretty loaded question. And I thought we’d already had this discussion. I said that I’d support you-”

“I know what you said. But doesn’t it hurt you?” I asked bluntly.

“I’m not going to lie, Marin. When you first started asking questions, it did. I guess a part of me felt like, if you loved me enough, you wouldn’t need to find any other answers. But then you had the whole scare at the gynecologist’s, and I realized this wasn’t about me. It was about you .”

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I’m old and tough.”

That made me smile. “You’re not old, and you’re a softy.” I drew in my breath. “I just keep thinking, you know, this is a really big deal. You dig up the box, and maybe you find buried treasure, but maybe you find something rotting.”

“Maybe the person you’re afraid of hurting is yourself.”

Leave it to my mother to hit the nail on the head. What if, for example, I turned out to be related to Jeffrey Dahmer or Jesse Helms? Wouldn’t that be information I’d be better off not knowing?

“She got rid of me over thirty years ago. What if I barge into her life and she doesn’t want to see me?”

There was a soft sigh on the other end of the phone. It was, I realized, the sound I associated most with growing up. I’d heard it running into my mother’s arms when a kid had pushed me off the swing at the playground. I’d heard it during an embrace before my newly minted prom date and I drove off to the dance; I’d heard it when she stood at the threshold of my college dorm, trying not to cry as she left me on my own for the first time. In that sound was my whole childhood.