The How & the Why

by Cynthia Hand

  So I start mentally making a list of the pros and cons of giving you to this couple:

  Pros:

  You will have good teeth.

  You will never be poor—since the world is always in need of dentists. You will be financially secure.

  You will be raised in a stable environment.

  You will have a dog friend. I like dogs. Evelyn’s allergic to dogs, so I don’t have one. But I like them.

  And now for the cons:

  This couple is boring with a capital B. I almost fell asleep reading their application. You’re going to be so bored if I give you to them.

  But then I think, what’s so wrong with boring? Boring is safe. Boring is like the opposite of half the other girls who go to this school, whose parents have problems with drugs or alcohol or are like Amber busting in here in the middle of night, almost strangled to death and kicked out of her house with nothing.

  Amber’s still here, by the way. She’s been like a different person since she moved in. She’s in Heather’s old room. There’s irony for you. At least I no longer feel the urge to punch her every time she talks. But then she’s not talking a lot, either.

  Anyway. Back to the cons of Team Dentist.

  What if they’re like cardboard people, X, who have never done anything exciting in life and never will? What if they’re the type of people who hang out safely in their own little spearmint-scented bubble and take vacations to Hawaii once a year but otherwise don’t feel the need to go anywhere or do anything fun?

  I guess that brings us back to BORING.

  The kicker is the dog. That poor dog in its sweater. The perfect dog in the perfect family, doing exactly what it’s told. But in its eyes I can see the desperation. HELP ME—it’s silently screaming.

  You’re the dog in this scenario, X.

  So yeah, I put that application in the HELL NO pile.

  This next potential dad—I kid you not—was a freaking brain surgeon. The mom was cool—she had a degree in music and there was something genuinely sweet about her answers. She seemed nice.

  But they went in the NO pile, too. Because a) a brain surgeon? Really? Then he’s probably never home, is he? And he probably thinks he’s the smartest person ever. Who wants a dad like that?

  And also, they’re Mormon. I can’t do that to you, X. I mean, no offense to the religion intended. There are a lot of Mormons in Idaho, as you probably know, and they’re good people. It wouldn’t be the worst thing if you grew up Mormon. But I kind of want your religion to be your own choice, which I don’t think it would be, if I gave you to them. But maybe that’s true of every religion.

  And couple #3—the Hikers. This mom was a chef (pro: good food for you, X!) and the dad was an engineer (so probably financial security, also) but it seemed to me that they spent their every waking minute hiking or rock climbing or running marathons. And I thought, well, that’s good, too, right? I mean, if those people were your parents, you’d be healthy. Well fed. Fit. And you wouldn’t be bored, would you?

  But you’d be tired. It exhausted me just reading their application. You’d probably be one of those kids who played three different sports at all times of the year and ate dinner in the car on the way to the next practice and possibly cracked your head open falling off the side of a mountain.

  NO.

  I realize I’m being overly critical. I’m looking for reasons to say no. But I don’t know the whole story about these people, do I? What if I pick a couple who seems perfect, but the mom is secretly addicted to Xanax and the dad’s a workaholic and they hardly speak to each other? Or what if I pick a couple who fight all the time and they’re trying to adopt because they think you’ll fix what’s wrong with them? A fixer baby. That’s what my little sister was to my mom and Brett, I’m pretty sure. And that’s not fair to you.

  I wish there was a way for them to be truly honest when they fill out these forms. I wish I could see not only their beautiful little dreams of a family, but their fears, too. Their flaws, instead of only their strengths. The truth. Not the polished up for-company version.

  Anyway. I’ll keep looking and hope I don’t screw it up too badly. Because that’s why I’m doing this, right? This is exactly the point. I want you to have better parents than I could be to you. I want you to have a better life than I could give you.

  But what if I pick wrong?

  Of course, the grown-up version of you who’s reading this letter already knows. I’ve already picked, on your side of things. And you’re either happy about that or not.

  I hope you’re happy about who I chose for you. I hope you’re happy, period.

  That’s what I want.

  S

  20

  Mom’s dying. Officially, this time. It apparently started yesterday morning with a low-grade fever and a cough, which developed, in the afternoon, into a massive fluid buildup in Mom’s lungs, what the doctors call pleural edema. She was basically drowning. They tried to drain the fluid using a tube inserted into her chest, a fairly simple procedure except that it went wrong somehow, and her lung partially collapsed. Then she had to go into surgery, where she nearly bled out on the table. But they got her through.

  She’s still here. Still kicking, is how my grandma put it. Still fighting. Still alive.

  But the doctors say she’s in what they call a spiral. This is all way too much stress for her already stressed-out heart. They say she has six weeks, if that.

  I try to wrap my head around it. Six weeks. I wonder how they come up with these numbers, like if there’s a kind of handy chart somewhere where they can calculate the expiration dates for people. Because they can’t really know, can they? But they always sound like they do.

  Six more weeks with my mother.

  If that.

  “But there’s a silver lining to this cloud,” Dad says the next morning when we’re all sitting around her bed at the hospital—me and Dad and Grandma and Uncle Pete, trying to act like this isn’t the beginning of the end of our world. “She’s been moved up to the top of the donor list.”

  “That’s right,” Grandma says. “Now we’re going to get you a brand-new heart.”

  “A superhero heart,” says Uncle Pete.

  Right. I try to imagine then that there is a heart for my mom out there somewhere. A person walking around using that heart, unaware that disaster is about to befall them—a car crash or an aneurysm or a freak accident that will mean that person dies and my mom gets to live.

  It feels wrong, hoping for it.

  Mom squeezes my hand three times. When I was little that was the secret message she taught me: three hand squeezes = I love you. She’d do it when she dropped me off at swimming lessons, or at the doctor’s office when I was about to get a shot, or when I accidentally dumped out the entire contents of my backpack in the middle of the hall at school one morning and a group of boys laughed at me. When she first had the heart attack there were a lot of times she couldn’t talk for one reason or another, but she would squeeze my hand, so weakly sometimes I could barely feel it, but I’d hear the words loud and clear, and I’d squeeze back.

  Squeeze squeeze squeeze. I love you.

  “I’m sorry you had to rush home from the drama competition,” she says when the rest of my family’s gone home and we have a minute alone.

  “It’s fine. The competition was over. We won first place,” I say, trying to smile.

  For a second I plunge right back into that awful moment, the governor and Nyla and me and the realization that I am not going to go to C of I. I consider telling Mom about the epic fail regarding the scholarship situation. But then I don’t. I don’t want to put that on her.

  “I wish I could have seen it,” she says, with effort. “I feel like I’m missing everything good and exciting in your life.”

  “You aren’t missing much of anything,” I say, but what I think is, But you will. I know that’s not her fault, but it still feels unfair. If she dies—and I force myself to think the word if
and not when—there will be a giant Mom-shaped hole in the rest of my life.

  She’s quiet for a while, and I think she’s gone to sleep. I stare at the oxygen tubes in her nose. Her face is the color of chalk, her lips, in spite of the oxygen, a weird mix of pink and gray.

  “Don’t you have rehearsal tonight?” she whispers.

  “What? No. It’s Sunday.”

  But of course I’m going to quit the play.

  Her eyes open. “I need to tell you something.”

  I lean forward so I can hear her. “Tell me what, Mom?”

  I brace for a goodbye, the “I’ll always be with you, in your heart” speech you see in the movies. I swallow back my tears. “Maybe you shouldn’t talk.”

  “There’s a letter.” She sits up a bit, clears her throat, and says it more loudly. “There’s a letter for you.”

  “You wrote me a letter?”

  “Not me,” she says. “Your birth mother.”

  “What?”

  “I know you’re curious about her. Your dad told me you were asking questions.”

  “I was, but . . .” Right then I’m tempted to confess everything, the real reason I requested my birth certificate, the way I’ve been thinking about my birth mother so often these days, my conversations with Nyla, my unproductive search of an adoption registry, but I can’t see how this information wouldn’t upset my mom, and it’s important for nothing to upset her right now. Better for her not to know that only yesterday I was at the Boise Public Library scouring the high school books, searching for my birth mother. “I don’t think—”

  “It’s okay.” Mom puts her hand over mine. “I want you to find her.”

  I’m so shocked it takes me a few minutes to form a one-word response. “What?”

  “I’ve always thought about her, out there somewhere,” Mom says. “I want to meet her. I have some things I’d like to say.”

  I sit back. “You want me to find my birth mother because you want to talk to her?”

  “I want to know more about her. Don’t you?”

  “But you chose a closed adoption,” I rasp out. “You were fine with not knowing who she was before, right?”

  “Your dad and I were scared, especially in the beginning,” she answers. “We didn’t want to risk that someday she might want you back. We thought it’d be for the best if we didn’t have contact. The other way seemed messy.” She smiles faintly. “But you’re eighteen now. And you have a right to know about this part of yourself.”

  She takes a minute to rest from all this talking.

  I still can’t catch my breath. “And Dad wants me to search for her, too?”

  Her smile fades. “He’s not in complete agreement, but he’s okay with it. If you are.”

  My heart’s beating fast, my palms suddenly sweaty.

  “The day we got you”—Mom smooths the sheets down over her legs—“the social worker told me about a program they had, in the state of Idaho, where the birth mother could leave a letter for her baby.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “And the social worker told me, even though I don’t think she was supposed to, that there’s a letter there for you. Your birth mother wrote you a letter.”

  I sink down at the edge of the bed again. Right. The letter. “She wrote me a letter.”

  “And the social worker said that when you turned eighteen you could request that the letter be given to you.”

  I’ve been eighteen for weeks, and she never said a word. “Why didn’t you mention this before?”

  “I don’t know. I—maybe I didn’t want to share you. But I’m thinking about things differently now.” She tries to laugh, but it comes out as a cough. “Come here.”

  She hugs me, but she’s so weak we both just kind of lean into each other.

  “Are you sure?” I ask her, because my birth mother seems like the last thing we need to be thinking about right now.

  “I’m sure, sweetie.” She pulls back and tucks a loose piece of my hair behind my ear. “Get the letter,” she says. “Then we’ll go from there.”

  21

  When Dad and I get back to the house we discover Ronnie, Bender, and Bastian sitting on the front porch. They jump up when they see us. “Hey, Cass.”

  It’s Sunday afternoon. I’ve hardly slept. I haven’t showered. I’m sure I smell like hospital. I was hoping to come home and clean up and maybe take a nap. “Hey?” I say blearily. “What are you all . . . doing here?”

  “Nyla sent us,” Ronnie explains. “She had church, but she thought maybe you could use some moral support. Like a group hug or something.”

  They give me a group hug. It’s awkward, but good. Then they step back and consider also giving a hug to my dad, who looks so tired he’s about to fall over.

  “Hey, Papa Bill,” says Bender.

  “Hello, Mr. McMurtrey,” Ronnie says at the same time. Dad was her teacher in fifth grade, and she’s never been able to call him Papa Bill like the rest of my friends.

  “Hello, kids,” he manages, trying and failing to call up a smile. He glances around the group. “Ronnie, of course. Bender. And . . .” He frowns when he gets to Bastian.

  “Bastian,” Bastian provides. “I’m in the play.”

  For some reason the boy I like introducing himself to my father makes me blush. Which is so dumb I can’t even. But then, I’m ridiculously tired.

  “Right. The play,” Dad murmurs. Because he also knows that of course I’m going to quit the play now.

  “We brought pizza,” says Bender helpfully. “And salad and bread and cheesecake from the grocery store.”

  “And flowers, for your mom,” says Bastian, picking up a bouquet of daisies from the porch.

  “That’s so thoughtful of you,” Dad says. “Come in.”

  We shuffle inside and force down some of the pizza, and then my dad disappears into his bedroom. I sit in the living room with my friends for a while, chatting about I don’t even know what—my mom, a little, how great it is that she’s been moved up on the donor list. How everyone’s sure she’ll get a new heart now. How much hospital life sucks. And then they talk about the play, which leads to how Alice is still ticked off at Bastian, and how that’s problematic because Bastian is the wolf and Alice is Little Red Riding Hood, but they’re just going to have to work together like professionals.

  “She’s right to be mad” is all Bastian has to say on the subject. And then everybody kind of stops talking. No one wants to discuss state drama, which is how I can tell they all know about the scholarship situation.

  Nyla must have told them. I’m so exhausted I don’t even know how I feel about Nyla telling my friends that I didn’t get the scholarship. I mean, of course everyone was going to find out eventually, at school. But Nyla and I haven’t even had a chance to talk about it. Not that I want to talk about it. Not that a stupid scholarship should mean anything to me right now.

  My mom’s what’s important.

  Eventually my friends get up to leave, but Bastian lingers.

  “I know I haven’t even met your mom,” he says, “but I’m sorry.”

  I try to smile at him. “Thanks.”

  “I’m here for you, okay?” He gives me a long hug. It’s warm and comforting and nice, and he smells really good. “You let me know if there’s anything I can do for you,” he says when he pulls back.

  I think about it. I mean, he has a car.

  So I say, “Actually, can you give me a ride?”

  “Yeah. Anywhere,” he says.

  I bite my lip. “I need to take a shower first. Can you wait?”

  “Absolutely. Take your time.”

  I leave him in the living room and hurry myself in and out of the shower. When I’m done I feel about 25 percent more human than I did this morning. And I look and smell a whole lot better.

  Bastian stands up when I come back into the room. “Okay. You ready?”

  I take a deep breath. “Yeah.”

  “Consider me your o
wn personal Uber.” He slings an arm around me. “Just tell me where.”

  When Nyla’s family gets home from church, I’m the one sitting on their porch. Mama Liz rushes out of the car with her arms outstretched to hug me until I think my ribs might be bruised. Then I get hugs from Nyla’s dad and all of her many siblings.

  It’s been a huggie day. It makes me feel like my mom’s dead already. But I know everybody means well. All this hugging means that I am loved.

  “Oh, you poor baby,” Mama Liz keeps saying. “I’m so sorry, sweetie.” She cries a little and hugs me again and asks me if I need anything to eat.

  It’s a while before I’m alone with Nyla, but finally we’re in her room. The scholarship thing is still hanging in the air between us. I can’t look directly at her, because even though I know it’s not important, it still hurts in this weird way, so I wander around her room examining the posters on her bright yellow walls like I’ve never seen them before. I run my hand along the length of her dresser. I look out the window, where there is absolutely nothing interesting to see.

  “Cass,” Nyla says finally. “About state drama, I want to say—”

  “Don’t,” I say quickly. “It’s fine.”

  “But—”

  “Please don’t.” I sigh. “I just need you to do something for me now, okay? Do you think you can cut school tomorrow?”

  “Um, sure. Why?”

  Get the letter. Then we’ll go from there. “I have someplace I have to go,” I say. “For Mom.”

  22

  The Idaho Bureau of Vital Records and Health Statistics is located in a redbrick building in downtown Boise. My stomach sinks when I see all the people crowded into the waiting room. There’s a machine where you take a number that they’ll call when it’s your turn.

  My number is E145.