“Yes,” I tell him. “You’re my brother.”
Talking with him is wildly exciting and deeply comforting, like going away to somewhere you’ve been a hundred times and know that you love. His birth mother was eighteen years old when she visited LSU. It was 1965. My father was a college junior and she was a high school senior. They met at a fraternity house. She got pregnant and put the baby up for adoption. My daddy had no idea.
My father finished school and went to Vietnam. She went to college in Arkansas. David was adopted by a college professor at the University of Mississippi. He lived there most of his life and went to Ole Miss in Oxford, just like I did. I wonder if we’ve met before or shopped at the same grocery store, if we ever chose the same patch of grass at the Grove to lie down on. We’ve been to many of the same places, it turns out. We’ve been inches away from meeting for most of my life.
David sent his daughter, Mary Halley, to Camp DeSoto, the safe place I spent all my summers, where the air smells like sap and burnt marshmallow. As a college student, she was a counselor just like I was. She knew and loved all my nieces, who were her first cousins. She helped shy Kitty make friends and cut up her dinner into the right-size pieces. A few summers later, Mary Halley got a job at the boys’ camp where my nephews go, and where Tim works summers as the doctor. They saw each other almost daily, waving across the cafeteria and nodding on the paths through the forest. Tim stayed up with her in the infirmary when she got a stomach flu, tying her matted hair back and sitting with her as she hugged the toilet, both totally unaware that they were uncle and niece.
Years later, she invited Tim’s entire family to her wedding. They sat in the pews, smiling broadly at David as he walked his daughter down the aisle.
Time fades away from us as we talk. I scroll through the pictures on Facebook. He looks more like my daddy than any of us—the way he stands, the way he crosses his legs and seems to jump out from the photographs, his personality too big to be caught on camera. I tell him my story, about the accident, my pain, the medicine that made me lose myself. I recall the grief of losing my—our—daddy and he recalls the grief of losing his son.
The day David found me on Ancestry.com was the sixth anniversary of his son William’s death; it was an accidental drug overdose. He died in Nashville like my daddy did, not ten miles from my house. I feel the Divine lay its hands on both of us, hundreds of miles apart as we speak, as a connection we’d both imagined materializes. We talk about pain, about what it is to lose yourself in it, to find yourself beyond it, about the hard lessons that come in learning to honor it. David tells me that he’s started a wellness center at Ole Miss in honor of his son for drug and alcohol education and support, and suddenly I feel my precious Laura Treppendahl. I remember getting the call when she was killed by a drunk driver at Ole Miss. I think about her big bright eyes and how proud she’d be to know what my brother was doing. I feel her lay her hands on us too. None of it is accidental.
We get off the phone at dusk, when the sky is like artwork, pink and purple cloud dots with a squeeze of orange. I call my brothers and my mom: none of them are as shocked as I expect they’ll be. Tim can’t believe that they’d met before and Lile can’t believe that they hadn’t yet. My mom is peaceful, grateful to have another piece of my daddy in the world. We make plans to welcome David home.
* * *
A month later, we gather on our family farm in St. Francisville, my daddy’s happiest place on earth, where he plowed his garden with his mule, buried his favorite dogs, and raised his children. Now it’s where Tim and Laura raise theirs.
David had come to see me in Nashville a few weeks before. I was blown away by his face, his mannerisms, the way he held court with all my friends and captivated the room just like my father would. I felt unconditional love when we stood out on the curb of my house and held each other for the first time. It was like I had a piece of my daddy’s love again, and now, right next to my daddy’s garden, I watch that love grow wild.
I look out into the yard and watch my brothers, the three of them side by side, telling jokes and releasing enormous roars of laughter. I watch their children playing together and blow kisses to David’s nine-month-old grandbaby, my daddy’s first great-grandchild, perched peacefully on his mama’s hip. I close my eyes for a moment.
Thank you, I say silently to the universe. Thank you so much.
We line up on the lawn for a family photo: me, my brothers, too many nieces and nephews to count, my mother, a bushel of cousins and friends, and I smile. We’ve come together to celebrate one another, the gift and collective strength of family, a family larger and farther reaching than any of us had ever known. My father and William are the only ones not here, but I know, I trust with all of me, that they were the forces that brought us together.
I sling my arm over the shoulders of David’s daughter, my newfound niece, Mary Halley, as the camera on the tripod whirs and blinks and I peek down at her pregnant belly, life flourishing beautifully before my eyes. I’m floating over the farm in St. Francisville on a dream cloud. Pain is small and far away from us. It’s still there—it always will be, but so will the magic and the miracles and the joy. Everything that happened did so for a reason. It happened to bring me home, to my family and to myself. It helped me see beyond the stories in my head; it helped me seek deeper truth and love earnestly. It led me to make peace with the God I thought had abandoned me and trust in the Divine, the love that had always been pouring down over me even when I couldn’t see it. It pours down over all of us.
The line is noisy. The brand-new brothers can’t stop laughing and telling stories, and the children are itching to get back to their games. My mom is smiling broadly with the deepest sense of pride. We stand under a sky that seems to stretch wider than the face of the earth we stand on. It’s brilliant and beautiful, but on this day it can’t compete with what’s unfolding beneath it.
I see the red ants marching in another direction, away from me. I know they may come back. Healing isn’t a process you complete—it’s a journey you are on for a lifetime. I’m still journeying, just like anyone else.
The sun feels warm on my face and I hear my daddy’s voice.
Home is all it says. It’s all that needs to be said.
The camera’s shutter flickers.
I’m awake but I keep my eyes closed, letting just enough light in to remind me that I’m home, that I always will be.