The How & the Why by Cynthia Hand

Author:Cynthia Hand
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-08-27T16:00:00+00:00

23

So the letter thing turned out to be a total waste of time, but try telling that to my mother.

“We have to be patient,” she says when I report back on my Boise adventure the next morning before school. Like always, she’s determined to be optimistic. “We’ll have to wait and see what happens.”

But she knows. She’s lying there hooked up to a machine that is functioning as her heart. Her lungs are slowly filling up with fluid again. Her other organs are strained and on the brink of shutting down. There’s not a lot of time left. Not months, like the lady in the office said it could be before they get to my request in the backlog. Maybe not even weeks.

“Right. Wait and see,” I agree, like I believe that’s going to work.

“In the meantime,” she says, “you could try another approach. It’s easy to find people these days, with the internet and social media. There are search sites solely for adoptions. There are registries.”

I sigh. “I know.”

“Just think about it. Who knows? Your birth mother could already be looking for you.”

“She’s not,” I say automatically.

Mom frowns. “She’s not? How do you know?”

I swallow, hard. “I did a search . . . once.”

“Oh.” She’s got hurt written all over her face. It’s exactly what I was afraid of. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I didn’t want you to think . . .” I take a deep breath. “You’re my mom. I didn’t want you to think I wasn’t happy, or I was looking for another family, or that you weren’t enough.”

“I would have understood,” she says. “I do understand. I always assumed that someday, when the time was right, you’d search for her.”

“You did?”

“It’s what I’d do, if I were you,” she says. “So what happened? What did you find?”

“Nothing,” I confess.

She looks confused. “Nothing?”

I shrug. “All you have to do is put in your date of birth and the state you were born in, and if anyone from your biological family is looking for you, they’ll get a match. It’s easy. But there was no match.”

“Which means?”

“She’s not looking for me.” I try to smile. “Which makes total sense. She picked a closed adoption, too, right?”

Mom squeezes my hand. “We don’t know her story, or why she chose what she chose. But it’s been eighteen years, Cass. She may think about things differently now.”

“She’s not looking.”

Mom’s lips flatten in that way she gets when she’s made up her mind about something. “She might not know how to look.”

“She’s thirty-four,” I point out. “She probably knows how to google.”

“How long has it been since you did the search?” She looks around. “Where’s your phone? We could look it up right now. It couldn’t hurt to check.”

“No.” The word kind of bursts out of me. I can’t imagine going on one of these sites with my mom watching over my shoulder. I remember how I cracked up in the parking lot yesterday, for a reason I still can’t fully understand.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.