“Oh? What’d she say? Yes to Christmas in Mykonos? Stella and Cameron just confirmed.” He walked over to the kitchen and started unboxing our food.
“No. I mean, my birth mom.” I stood up and walked over.
“What?” He froze, the wooden chopsticks in his hand as he stared at me.
“She just called and apologized. It was the weirdest freaking phone call of my life.”
“It sounds intense.” His brows rose. “Is she still a nun?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“Is she still at Ellis?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“Did you talk at all?”
“I . . . yeah.” I helped him take our food to the table and sat down next to him. “It’s crazy. All my life I wanted to know about my birth mother and it took everything that happened for me to realize that it wasn’t really what I needed. I just needed family.”
I thought about The Swords, Stella, Karen, Dr. Thompson, The Eight, and all the people I’d met throughout all of this. They weren’t the family I’d been given. They weren’t even necessarily the family I would have chosen for myself. But they were definitely the family I needed. The family I loved. That I’d do anything for. I put my hand on Adam’s. He seemed to sense that I had a lot on my mind, because he stopped eating.
“What’s up?”
“You know I love you, right?”
He dropped his chopsticks and laughed.
“Why are you laughing?” I slapped his hand, unable to stop my own smile.
“Because you finally achieved your full potential.”
Afterword
One of the most common questions I get is: where do you get your inspiration?
My answer is always the same: everywhere.
I listen to conversations, have conversations, and obsess over conversations. My favorite thing to do is take something and create a “what if”.
This particular story stemmed from four things.
The first was a conversation I had with my friend’s grandfather at brunch one day. Full disclosure, I was talking to my friend’s girlfriend about weddings and my ears perked up when I heard the grandfather talking about all of the fetuses and babies found in a monastery in Cuba years back. That conversation has been at the forefront of my mind for over a year.
The second thing is this – I went to a private high school that was run by priests and nuns and monks. The monks were from Ukraine and were in our classes. My junior year, one of the monks (who was one of my classmates), killed a nun. He stabbed her 97 times. I will never, for as long as I live forget that number, or the faded bloody footprints we found days after the murder when the school went on as if nothing had happened.
The third thing, the triplet thing – I watched a documentary on Hulu and it’s stayed with me. As a psychology student, I worked in the research lab my last few years there. I helped with a longevity study they were working on about the socioeconomic impact on people, in which they were following people from the time they were in elementary school until they were grandparent age. The Hulu documentary followed triplets who met during college. They were all adopted and had no idea the other existed before then. At some point after meeting they discovered they’d been part of a psychological experiment their entire lives. It was as riveting as it was devastating.
The fourth, the burials and caskets – my grandfather used to build caskets when my mother was a little girl. Her cousins have all sorts of stories about the caskets - hiding in them, burying them and hiding things in them, etc. I’m sure I’ll incorporate more caskets in other stories because I have endless stories about them. Needless to say, my family get togethers are a bit strange ;)
So, this book is about a lot of things, as you just read, but more than anything it’s about sacrifice. It’s about our will to survive and find our place in the world, and I think that’s extremely relatable.