Shiprock

I’m an intuitive person. I just know what I know, is how I explain it to poor Bonnie, who doesn’t have an intuitive bone in her body. If she did, she’d know that husband of hers started cheating on her about two seconds after she found her first lump. I wouldn’t ever tell Bonnie that, of course—one thing about being intuitive is you can sense what kinds of information people really want to know, and what kinds they don’t. Anyway, my friendship with Bonnie is a special one—we don’t try to fix each other’s problems, we just do our best to fill in each other’s gaps. 

Another thing about me is that I’m a talker. The hospitality industry is a great fit for me, because I can chat up just about anyone on the planet. You might think that’s just what comes from growing up in a hotel, but it’s more than that. Ever since I was a kid, words have just bubbled up inside me, so I’ve got to let them out. When no one’s around, I call someone up on the phone in a hurry, otherwise I wind up I talking to myself.

That’s where Bonnie comes in. Bonnie’s more of a quiet type, prone to dark turns of mind when she sits too long with her own thoughts. With everything she’s got going on in her life, I can’t say I’d blame her for wallowing, but we both know that only makes things worse. What Bonnie needs is a distraction—someone to take her mind off herself. I call Bonnie basically any chance I get. It’s good for her, and it works out for me, too—keeps the guests from complaining about the crazy lady in cottage number four talking to herself half the night through!

A lot of times, Bonnie hardly says a word when I call, but she likes hearing stories about other people, and Lord knows I’ve got plenty of those. I tell her about the guests that come through the cottages—all the weird little things I see when I’m going in and out to clean. And I tell her about my mother—about the drama she gets caught up in with that boyfriend of hers. It used to be I didn’t say much about myself, because there wasn’t much to say. But, thanks to Bonnie, that’s all changed. What I talk about most of all now is the journey Bonnie helped set me on—a journey to find out the truth about my life. 

I’ve dreamed of finding my birth father ever since I was a little girl. A lot of people might think it’s silly now, seeing as how I’m forty-eight years old and my father could be dead for all I know. But Bonnie doesn’t think it’s silly. Bonnie thinks I should follow my heart. For all her tight-lipped ways, I can count on Bonnie for that—the kind of support only a true friend can give.

#

One problem is, my mother is a pathological liar. I don’t just mean she lies when it’s convenient—I mean she has a real sickness. She’s lied to me my whole life. Not just about my father—anybody might lie about getting in a family way as young as my mother did—but about everything. Big important things, like where she was born, and stupid little things, like what she had for lunch. 

I’m not exaggerating about lunch—that’s a real example. Even now, if I call my mother up in the middle of the afternoon, she might tell me, “Dean and I had the nicest lake trout on the grill for lunch today. I forget how great trout is when it’s fresh-caught.” Now, Dean’s no fisherman, and the last time I saw a lid off that Weber behind their RV was when I watched a racoon knock it off right in front of me. And sure, who cares what my mother had for lunch? But that’s the thing of it. Even when there’s no reason at all for my mother to lie, she just can’t help herself. 

I didn’t really understand it until I got sucked into an episode of Dr. Phil playing on the TV in the lodge lobby one day. It was about a pregnant wife that was thinking about leaving her husband. She said she just couldn’t raise a child with a man that lied to her all the time. “I can’t even tell you how small the things he’ll lie about are,” she said, crying to beat the band. “It’s sick.” 

Dr. Phil took the poor girl’s hand and nodded in that fatherly way he has. “That’s why they call it pathological lying,” he said to her. “Pathology means disease.” 

Now I’ll tell you, that just about took my breath away.

Pathology means disease; disease means sickness. I guess a part of me knew all along that my mother was sick, but if I’m honest, it took Dr. Phil saying it to make it real. And here’s what stuck with me the most: Dr. Phil told the pregnant wife that really, the decision about her marriage wasn’t up to her, it was up to her husband. 

“Just like with any disease,” he told the husband—who, if you want my opinion, didn’t look like much of a catch even if you didn’t factor in the lying—“you have to truly commit to recovery in order to get better.” 

Well. I can tell you from experience that my mother can’t commit to so much as a favorite color, so I’m not holding out much hope for her to change. 

Margie and Dick, the owners of the lodge, are big into AA, and there’s a plaque just inside the lobby door with a poem on it I like to look at when I need a boost: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, and the courage to change the things I can,” it says. 

That’s about the best advice I know of, and I do my best to follow it where my mother is concerned. I can accept that my mother is who she is—that I can’t change her. But I never should have accepted her getting in the way of my chance at having a real family—telling me so many versions of how I came to be in this world that I’d have had better luck unicorn-hunting than setting out to find my father. 

It was seeing that poor little lump of a pregnant thing sitting there on the TV listening while her husband told her what had to be another lie—that he was committed to getting better—that made me realize: I wasn’t helpless. I might never be able to change my mother, but there was nothing stopping me from being courageous enough to try to find my father in spite of her.   

Of course, I didn’t have the faintest idea how to get started, but when I told Bonnie about what I learned from Dr. Phil, she knew just what to do. It’s her that got me to send out my spit to a doctor to find out what I’m made of. And it’s her that introduced me to Roger down to the library. Once the DNA test told us what I’ve known in my heart all along—that I’m part Native American—my situation became what Roger calls a scavenger hunt for local history buffs like him: how many Indians might have had cause to pass through Bar Harbor, Maine the summer of 1969, and who might they have been? The great state of Maine isn’t exactly known for its diversity, and what natives there are around mostly stick to the reservation, so Roger says it’s easier than you’d think to track down the exceptions. Meanwhile, Bonnie’s been doing what she can on her end, too. She’s deep into genealogy, mostly because she’s got actual Vikings in her line and is more than just a little proud about it, and she knows all the tricks for sorting out what kinds of native I might be. Good thing, too, because I can hardly make heads or tails out of any of that. 

I don’t even want to think about the number of hours those two have put into all of this. It goes to show you, there’s a lot of good in this world, no matter the news tells you. The truth is, even if this whole big search were to end in nothing, I’d still count myself blessed to have two friends as wonderful as Bonnie and Roger. 

But it won’t end in nothing—I can feel it. 

It’s times like this intuitive people need to trust their guts most of all, and mine are telling me loud and clear: I have a father out there, and now I have two beautiful guardian angels who are going to lead me to him. 

#

I’ll tell you, even if you’re a people person like me, it takes some serious moxie to call up a person out of the blue and say you think you might be their daughter. I went over to Bonnie’s house to make the calls, and it was nice, having her sitting across from me at the kitchen table, all propped up on the pillows she needs under her arms to keep her comfortable since the surgery. Bonnie has a soothing sort of way about her, even when she’s not doing or saying much at all, and I was grateful for that. Because let’s just say this: I got hung up on more than once today!

That’s just fine, is what I said to myself every time it happened. Cross that one off the list and move on.

I could tell Bonnie was worried I was giving up too easily, but that’s where my intuition came in. I just knew those men weren’t my father—that when I reached my real father, he’d stay on the line until I finished saying my piece. 

And I was right. I knew the minute Joe picked up the phone that he was different from the other men I’d called. We had a connection. For one thing, he didn’t get rattled when I told him why I was calling—just sort of meditated on what I said like I was forecasting the weather. 

“Well, I sure did come through Acadia before they shipped us out,” is what he said, “and I’m not going to lie to you. I remember spending time with at least one beautiful girl when I did.” 

I liked that—him calling my mother beautiful. It’s hard to imagine now, but my mother was really something to look at when she was young. When I was a little girl, I thought she was a movie star—I looked out for her on the screen every time we went to the drive-in out back of the go-cart place on Route 1.

Joe didn’t remember my mother’s name, of course. It was such a long time ago. But he said he knew it was something pretty—something that made her sound like a queen. 

“Helen,” I told him. 

“That sounds about right,” he said. 

So there you go!

But here’s the part that really knocked me out: my father is a real-live Navajo Indian. Bonnie explained to me about my genes, but somehow the idea of my father being a member of an actual tribe never really crossed my mind. Or if it did, I guess I figured it would be one of the ones around here that don’t seem like real tribes at all—a few hundred lost souls living off the government out on Indian Island. But it turns out the only business my father ever had in the state of Maine was passing through on his way out to Vietnam. Besides that, he’s lived on a Navajo reservation out in New Mexico his entire life. 

Now that I know he’s out there, I want to meet him in person more than anything in the world. But New Mexico’s clear on the other side of the country, so we agreed to start by sending each other pictures. I gave Joe the address at the lodge, and he gave me a PO Box on the reservation. How do you like that? A father and a daughter, neither one with a mailbox to call their own. I’d get Roger to help me use the computers at the library to send an email instead, but it sounds like Joe’s even less of a computer person than me. I’m glad. I’d rather talk on the phone than type messages into a box any day, and when Joe’s picture gets here, I’m going to want to hold it in my hands for a long, long time.

#

I could tell right away that Joe was a sincere sort of person, and I knew he would do what he said about sending his picture. But honestly, I didn’t expect him to go to all the trouble he did. The box he sent is packed full of pictures of all sorts of people—my people. There were pictures of Joe’s sister—my aunt—and her family. And Joe’s parents—my actual grandparents—though Joe already broke the news to me on the phone that his father died in an accident a long time ago. There are pictures of big groups of people, too—members of the tribe—that are really something. In some of them, folks are even wearing their native costumes!

And, of course, there was the one I’ve been waiting for—the one of Joe. I knew as soon as I saw the brim of his soldier’s cap that it was him, and I got chills all up and down my body before I even picked it up. Then I saw his face! How can I explain it? If I’m honest, Joe and I don’t look anything alike, but I’ll tell you this: looking at that picture felt like looking in a secret mirror that’s been hiding behind every mirror I’ve ever looked at in my entire life. 

People have always said I’m the spitting image of my mother, and there’s no use denying it. I’ve got Helen’s pearl-button nose and her big blue eyes, and, believe it or not, underneath all this extra weight I’ve got her petite frame, too. But there’s always been something else about my looks—something shadowy about my face that makes it nothing at all like my mother’s. 

And finally, looking at my father’s portrait when he was young and fierce and headed off to war, I saw what it was. My inside-self. The one my mother buried with all her lies—all the fathers she made up for me then took away again every time she changed her life story. 

You might think I’d feel angry with my mother looking at the picture of my father, but I didn’t. I felt sorry for her. The fact is, my father was a beautiful man, and it’s no wonder my mother fell for him. She was just a kid, cleaning cottages at the lodge for the summer, and having a man like him turn up at the Acadia Lodge in the middle of the high season must have felt like a dream. I’ve got a lot more years, and hopefully wisdom, to my name than my mother did then, and even I have to admit that if I walked in to clean a cottage tomorrow and found a boy that looked like my father did then tangled up in the sheets, I’d be tempted to climb right into bed with him, too!

There is one thing I thought was a little strange, though: in that whole big box of pictures, the army portrait is the only one of my father. Not that I’m complaining. I only sent three of myself—what with all the weight I’ve put on with my diabetes, I do what I can to stay out of the way of a camera. But if I was as good looking as my father is in the picture he did send, I’d get myself one of those selfie-sticks all the Japanese tourists take with them to the park, and I’d have a field day! 

But it doesn’t matter. One picture is all I need. If you think about it, there’s a kind of fitness to it, anyway: my one and only picture of my one and only father, propped up against the clock on the table right beside my bed.  

#

I hate to say this, but I’ll feel better if I get it off my chest: I took my box of pictures over to share with Bonnie today, and I was more than a little disappointed with her reaction. For all her support through this whole process, you’d think she could summon a little spunk for the big payoff, but the way she acted, she could have been staring at a stack of photos taken at the BMV! 

I guess I can see where looking at a bunch of strange Indians might not be the most interesting thing that could ever happen to a person, but I can’t imagine how seeing my father’s face after all our searching didn’t get Bonnie excited. 

“Ayuh,” is all she said when I showed her his portrait. 

Can you imagine? I wish I could blame it on the chemo, but I know Bonnie well enough to see her through her sickness, and something was just plain off. 

I didn’t say anything, of course. Bonnie’s not the kind of person you can be direct with about things like that. And to her credit, once I gave up on the pictures, she got on her computer for me to look up about the part of the Navajo reservation my father lives on, and she perked right up at the images of wide open desert that came up. For good reason, too—it’s quite a landscape they’ve got out there! Granted, I’ve never been outside the state of Maine, so it could be I’m easy to impress, but the pictures Bonnie showed me were really something. All those big, red cliffs under more sky that you can imagine—the whole place looks like a painting in a museum. 

Bonnie was trying to educate me some, poor woman, but I was too stuck on imagining what it would be like to stand under so much sky to take in much of what she was telling me. Something about a giant rock up in the corner of the state—Boat Rock, maybe, or Farm Rock—and how it’s sacred for Navajos because a long time ago a bunch of kids got stuck on it in a lightning storm and died. And something about a volcano, too—or lava, anyway. Restrictions about who can get how close to the thing based on their status in the tribe. 

None of it made the place sound too hospitable, but sometimes it’s hard to make heads or tails of what Bonnie comes back with when she gets too deep into that computer of hers, so I just kept my focus on what I could see with my own eyes. Let me tell you, sad as the story about those kids sounds, the rock they died on is really something to see. And what Bonnie missed but I didn’t was this: that giant rock sticking out of the wide, flat desert looks for all the world just like the people in the pictures my father sent—strong enough to shoulder the weight of all the children and all the lightning storms there have ever been.  

#

I haven’t wanted to admit it to myself, but there was a bit of a come-down for me after Joe sent me all those pictures. Not that it didn’t give me a thrill, picturing all the relatives I never knew I had out there under the desert sky finding out about me for the first time. I imagined Joe showing them the pictures I sent of myself—a few from when I was younger and much better looking, and one of me now, arm in arm with my angels, Bonnie and Roger, outside the library where all of this really got started. 

But a part of me has been antsy, too, about what’s supposed to happen next. I couldn’t get the time away from the lodge to take the bus all the way out to New Mexico and back, and I could never afford to fly. Half my pay from Margie and Dick comes in room and board, and what little I do earn on top of it mostly goes for what MaineCare doesn’t cover in terms of my medications—which, I don’t mind telling you, turns out to be a fair bit. I thought about asking Bonnie to help—maybe even to come out there with me so at least that way she’d be getting something out of it, too—but with all the time she had to take off work for her treatments, I’m pretty sure she’s as landlocked as I am. 

Plus, if I’m honest, Bonnie’s still acting a little funny about the whole situation. I know this sounds crazy, but if I didn’t know better, I’d almost think she didn’t believe me about those pictures coming from my father. It’s nothing she said outright—just a sense I get. Whenever I bring them up, she changes the subject. And once or twice, I’d swear she was making up excuses to get off the phone with me when I was talking about my father, which just isn’t a Bonnie kind of thing to do.  

I’m not going to worry about it now, though, because I’ve got bigger things to think about. Focus on the positive, as they say, and here it is: I got a letter from my aunt today! Lorraine is her name—at least that’s the one of her names that I can pronounce—and she’s some fancy judge or council leader whatever they call them for the Navajo nation. She’s a woman of influence, is what I mean. And she must do a lot of writing in her job, because it’s not often these days you get a letter like the one she sent me—just as sincere as if she were talking right to me, and with lots of detail about the reservation and all the family I have out there that she says can’t wait to meet me. 

Which brings me to the best part: Lorraine says she wants me to come out to meet everyone, and that she’ll pay for my plane ticket! It’s such a generous offer, I can hardly believe it. We may be family, but she doesn’t know me from Adam—she’s never even heard my voice on the telephone. 

We’ll fix that, anyway. She included a phone number to call her at in her letter. 

“I hope you’ll reach out soon,” she wrote. “Don’t you just love that? ‘Reach out soon.’” 

She’s obviously a very capable woman, with a heart of pure gold. It’s no wonder Joe lives with her and her kids—if I had a sister like her, I wouldn’t want so much as a fence between us.

#

Well, a few months ago, I would have told you I knew Bonnie about as well as you could know a person. But her showing up at my front door at the crack of dawn today just goes to show, even when your intuition is strong, people can still surprise you.

For one thing, Bonnie doesn’t generally drive—her husband’s always done most of the driving, and she’s been extra skittish about getting behind the wheel since she got sick. And for another, as close as we are, Bonnie never comes out to the lodge. Why would she, when she’s got that big old house we can spread out in, and I’m here with just the one room? But there she was, the keys to Ed’s truck in one hand and a manila envelope in the other, all out of breath at my front door before I’d even made it down to the lobby to start the morning coffee. 

And what for? Just to show me an article she found on the internet! 

“What Can You Do with the World’s Largest Family Tree?” is what it’s called. It talks about how scientists are using the information from spit tests like the one I sent in to learn about how people all around the world are made of the same stuff. Bonnie printed the article, along with pictures of maps of the world with arrows drawn all over them—I guess to show how all the people in the different places are connected—but there wasn’t a single picture of a family tree in the stack!  

Now I didn’t say this to Bonnie, because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, but who needs thousands of spit tests to tell them that people are all related? Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of science, but it doesn’t take more than the intuition in my little finger to figure out we’re all connected to one another. Just ask any priest or rabbi or shaman or whathaveyou—they’ll tell you that’s the oldest truth there is. 

No, there’s no denying it, my Bonnie’s an odd duck. I should have known better than to get worked up about her reaction to the pictures Joe sent—I guess I forget sometimes that the things Bonnie gets excited about don’t always match up with the things most people get excited about. It’s just her way.

Still, I couldn’t quite figure why Bonnie seemed to think that giant family tree should matter so much to me. Maybe if I was still searching for my father—if I hadn’t just got a letter from my aunt welcoming me to my new family—I’d take some comfort in thinking of myself as at least having a spot on some kind of family tree. But who needs the whole wide world when you’ve got a Joe and a Lorraine and a whole box of pictures showing you just where you fit in the big mess of humanity? To me, those pictures of my family on the reservation hold a thousand times more information than any strand of DNA plucked out of a tube of my spit sent to stranger in a lab. And I’ll tell you this: a hundred times out of a hundred I’d choose Lorraine’s gorgeous letter over a print-out of the biggest family tree in the universe. It’s that letter that tells me where I belong—not some map of arrows so big there isn’t room in the mess of them for even a little patch of that big old New Mexico sky I’ve been dreaming of.

#

If I’m honest, I can see how some people might say Bonnie and I rely on each other more than we should. I read a real interesting article about relationships like ours in a magazine down to the clinic. “Co-dependency,” is what they call it when two people get so used to getting help from each other, they forget how to do things for themselves. Now, don’t get me wrong, me and Bonnie are both tough as nails—it’s just that we’re at our toughest when we’re on the phone with each other. Mostly, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, but I’ve been sensing for a while that I’m coming up to a part of my journey I’ll have to take alone.

That’s why I didn’t go out to Bonnie’s to make my phone call to Lorraine like I’d ordinarily do for something as important as that. Believe me, I wanted to, but I said to myself: “Ceci, you’re almost fifty years old—you don’t need a babysitter for calling your aunt!” So, I waited until Margie and Dick were out to their son’s for the day, and I set up all by myself at the front desk of the lodge to make my call. And I know this sounds silly, but I was downright proud of myself when I picked up that phone without Bonnie sitting across from me at the table in her forbearing way. There I was: Cecilia Harmes, all grown up and calling home.

But it turns out it might have been helpful to have Bonnie there for the conversation after all—just so she could help me sort everything out. Honestly, I was a little intimidated by Lorraine—she sounded even smarter and more accomplished on the phone than she did in her letter, and you just don’t come across women like that around here. Leaders, I mean—women that know how to set things in motion, and can keep them in hand after they do. But thank goodness that’s how she is, because she’s the one that’s going to help take this whole situation to the next level. If she left it to me and Joe, we might still be sending each other wish-you-were-here Hallmark cards two years from now. 

Just to square everything away in terms of paternity and all, Lorraine—Aunt Lori, she told me to call her!—asked me for a DNA sample for a paternity test. I have to admit I hadn’t thought of that, but of course I wasn’t offended. If I wasn’t so used to relying on my gut to tell me what’s true, I guess I‘d want a DNA test before I paid to fly my long-lost niece across the country to meet her father, too. Plus, Aunt Lori said she’d pay for the test, which was another kindness, because you’d be surprised how much those tests cost. I don’t know what they pay judges on the Navajo Reservation, but it must be a lot more than they pay vacation cottage housekeepers on the coast of Maine!

Anyway, she wants me to come out to visit as soon as I can—after the tests come back, that is. She told me she’d take care of everything to do with my travel, and that unless I’d prefer a hotel, I’d stay with her and Joe and their mom and all the kids and grandkids they’ve got there with them at their place. 

A hotel, can you imagine? I told her after waiting to meet my father for fifty years, Joe would be lucky if he didn’t wake up in the morning with me sleeping at the foot of his bed like a little puppy dog.

So, it’s off to the lab for me. I don’t know how Lorraine did it, but she already sorted out where I could go and ordered the test so they’ll be able to pair it with Joe’s, then email her with the results. The whole thing shouldn’t take too much longer than a couple of weeks, Lorraine said—provided Joe doesn’t drag his feet on his part of the test. “But don’t worry about that,” she said, “I know where he lives.” 

Well, it wouldn’t have occurred to me that Joe wouldn’t be excited about the test, but as soon as Lorraine said that it made perfect sense. I’m sure he’s thinking the exact same thing I am: who needs a DNA test when we already feel each other inside our own blood and bones?

#

I didn’t get my gift for gab from my father, that’s for sure. As kind-hearted as he is, he doesn’t offer much to a conversation—at least not over the phone. Between him and Bonnie, I’ve got my work cut out for me! Not that I mind. I only worry about coming on too strong—being a nuisance. But Joe is like Bonnie—happy to hear from me every time I call. I can tell by the soft, surprised way he says, “Well hello, stranger,” when he picks up the phone. Plus, I don’t get the sense I’m interrupting much when I call. To tell you the truth, Joe seems to have a fair bit of free time on his hands. 

Here’s something I haven’t told anyone, not even Bonnie, though I’m really not sure why I’ve been keeping it to myself: after my beautiful Navajo father left New Mexico for the first time to soar all the way across the country and bed my mother, he got onto another airplane—one that took him halfway around the world, where it dropped him right into a jungle full of bombs. Lorraine says he wasn’t there more than two days before he lost both his legs to a landmine. The grass under his feet just exploded, blowing his bottom half clean off. Can you imagine surviving a thing like that? I can feel the strength of the spirit in Joe that carried him through even across the all the miles between us. 

But I wouldn’t know anything about my father’s legs it wasn’t for Lorraine—he’s never said a thing about them to me. I guess it’s not the kind of thing you lead with, but still, if I didn’t know better, I’d think he was going out of his way to hide his injury from me. Sometimes when I call, he’ll talk about doing something I just can’t picture a man with no legs being able to do—loading a horse into a trailer or changing the carburetor on a truck. But what do I know? Could be that if you can make it through a bomb ripping your own flesh and bones off your body, you can do just about anything you set your mind to.  

Anyway, the point is, I don’t mind a bit about Joe’s legs, and I’d like to tell him that. But for all the deep sense of understanding between us, we don’t have the kind of relationship where you put things into words that don’t want to go. It’s alright. I know when I meet him in person I can tell him with my eyes that he’s complete just as he is, just like he’ll tell me with his eyes that it doesn’t matter what a big, swollen lump of a woman I’ve become. 

Still, I’m getting a little jittery with waiting for that moment to come. 

The DNA test is taking longer than Lorraine said it would. I got in and got my part done right away, mind you, and when I asked, Joe said he did his, too—or at least he said he’s not a man to cross his sister—which is how he talks, coming sideways at things so there’s always a little mystery in what he says. At least there would be if you didn’t understand him like I do: I know he was saying that he did his sister’s bidding, but just to satisfy her. All Joe wants is to get me on an airplane so we can sit out side by side and watch the sun set across that giant horizon they’ve got out there.

But for all my intuition, even I can twist a thing up into something to worry about if I think on it for too long, and I’m just about there waiting on these results. I said so to Bonnie today. “What if there’s some kind of mistake, and the test comes back negative?” I asked her. “Well,” is all Bonnie said in reply, and frankly, her tone wasn’t very reassuring. Of course, Bonnie’s a glass is half empty kind of person. Still, she could have at least reassured me about the test itself. I mean, what I want to know is, how do you know they don’t accidentally try to match your DNA with the wrong sample? Especially when you’ve got samples coming from different states. Wouldn’t that be a stupid, terrible reason to lose a family?

But that’s getting way ahead of the situation. I have to remind myself that even if something did go wrong with the tests, it wouldn’t matter to Joe and me. The other day on the phone he said he was looking at the store for a card to send to me and it was impossible to find one that made any sense unless he called me Daughter and I called him Dad, so we should go ahead and do that. I told him that was more than fine by me! Obviously, he wouldn’t say something like that if he gave a hoot about a DNA test. 

No, the test is for Lorraine—she’s an official kind of person that wants an official kind of stamp on our being a family. That’s fair enough, but I sure am ready to get the results and move on with it. Until then, I’m distracting myself by watching the lodge mail for my card from Joe. I can’t wait to trace my fingers over the letters: D-A-D.

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Sometimes I let my generosity of spirit get in the way of my intuition. At least that’s the best explanation I can come up with for how I got things so wrong about Lorraine. It’s not that I can’t understand her being upset by the results of the test. The fact that Joe and I both know in our hearts that the results are wrong doesn’t give a person like Lorraine much to hold onto. Still, I never would have expected her to do what she’s done—slamming the door between me and her family like I’m some kind drifter begging for table scraps.

I mean, after all we’ve shared, to send a letter instead of calling me when the test results came back negative—can you imagine? And then to try to come between me and Joe! “I regret to say that this information renders further contact between yourself and my brother not only unnecessary, but inappropriate,” her letter says. Oh, she’s a legal sort of person through and through! But I checked with Bonnie and Roger, and they both said there’s nothing in that letter that’s to do with the actual law—nothing to make it illegal for me to keep calling either Lorraine or Joe until Lorraine gets worn down enough to let Joe and I talk.

I know, Joe’s a grown man, and you’d think he’d get to make his own choices about who he talks to on the telephone, but Lorraine has him over a barrel. I can see now that it’s on account of his legs he lives with Lorraine. Where is he supposed to go if he crosses her? 

It’s times like this I wish I’d made different choices in my life—choices that might have landed me in a big old house like Bonnie’s out past the park, so I’d be able to send Joe a plane ticket and a house key and a note that says, “My door is always open.”

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I’ve tried hard to stay centered through all of this—I really have—but I’m starting to feel awfully turned around. Bonnie says it’s not a failing on my part that I’m at the end of my rope—that this situation would take its toll on anyone. But I’m not so sure. There I was, crying my eyes out at Bonnie’s kitchen table after making another stupid decision—to try to get my mother to help me with proof that Joe is my father—and Bonnie just sat there, calm as a mother about to put a band aid on a kid’s scraped up knee. It’s pure Maine grit Bonnie’s got: the chemo is making her shed like a German Shepherd, and I swear I saw her drink an actual hair that fell from her head and into her teacup while she nodded sympathetically at me through the steam. 

God bless Bonnie, truly, and Roger, too. But the truth is, they can’t really help me anymore. I think Roger’s willing enough to allow me to go my own way without needing to understand why, but it’s harder for Bonnie to let go. We could just look into what my mother told me today, is what Bonnie thinks. “What’s the harm?” she says, “in finding out if what she says might be true?” 

How could I explain it? “You weren’t there,” is what I said, meaning at my mother’s today, or at the reservation out on Indian Island that I drove out to after I talked to her, or even out back of the lodge where I sit sometimes with my eyes closed, pretending it’s the big, hot, New Mexico sun that’s warming my face. 

Because there’s just no way that my mother was telling the truth this morning. She’s no more an Indian than I am a size six, and there’s no way either one of us is made up of the same stuff as those sad souls I saw out on Indian Island today. For one thing, one look at my mother’s falling-down Hollywood face tells you she doesn’t have a drop of native in her. And for another, if what my mother said is true, then I was a stone’s throw from my real grandparents out on that reservation today—the Penobscot mother and father Helen says she ran away from when she was fourteen years old—and I didn’t feel a thing. 

Now, it’s true my intuition hasn’t served me one hundred percent through this whole ordeal—but I refuse to believe it could ever fail me so completely as that.

No, if anything, watching my mother’s eyes light up as she spun today’s new version of her life story—her difficult childhood as the only yellow-haired kid on the reservation, the falling out between her and her parents that lead her to leave home and take up with Margie and Dick as a teenager, the truck driver that backed her up against the cigarette machine outside the lodge late one night the summer I was conceived—made me feel more strongly than ever before that I know what I know: Joe is the man that touched my mother’s beauty when it was at its peak. That’s how I was made.

Which is how I figured out just what to do—how to get through to Joe in spite of Lorraine. I gave him the only picture I have of my mother when she was young. For all I know, it’s the only picture there is of Helen looking like she did then—perfect. 

But Joe is worth it. 

I didn’t put a return address on the envelope I stuffed it in, so Lorraine won’t get in the way of the picture making it to Joe. And I know that the second he sees my mother’s gorgeous face, the note I put in with the picture will make perfect sense. “Still yours,” it says. “With love from your daughter, Ceci.”