He was 11 when he first discovered it. Jimmy knew immediately that (1) it was something remarkable, (2) he didn’t understand it at all, and (3) he dare not let his parents know he had it. It was (3) that gave him the most worry. Not what they would do to him if they discovered he had it, they were mostly bark, very little bite. It would be the mutual looks of disappointment, faces that shouted “You are a failure in every possible way, and we would disown you if we could, but we can only shun you, so we do.” And he hadn’t even asked for it or imagined he would find something like it. And really it was their fault, whoever left it to be found, for it had no value to them whatsoever. Thirty or so years on he still had it. He still hadn’t told them he had it, had never even hinted he might. They never missed it. They once, he couldn’t or wouldn’t remember quite when, intimated something about it but he quickly changed the subject to deflect them from trying to find it, and to avoid having to admit what even then in their eyes would have been a mortal sin. Though he wasn’t sure who in the family it would kill if it was disclosed, he knew the odds clearly favored non-disclosure. He wouldn’t talk about it even with close friends, fearful it would get back to his parents, never mind most of his friends had never seen, much less met his parents living most of a continent away from him. It was not nearly far enough, since the world had been electronically shrunk to the point that no distance was too far. He knew the time was running out. It may already have run out, but he had to wait a bit longer. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to know, he was dying to know, but he feared the answer in equal measure. That was the nature of uncertainty. There was a reason for everything, and the more surprising the result, the more shocking or more adverse the reason was likely to be. At least that was his experience. And knowing wouldn’t, he imagined, change anything. The time for that was on the day he found it. Its importance diminished with the passage of time. Well, not importance, but impact. He knew the fact that he was thinking about it said it was still important to him on some level. That was the thing, importance was not linked to impact, or he hoped that it was not.

He finally decided to act. His first efforts yielded little more than it had already given him. A bit more here and there, but nothing that advanced his search. With each effort he felt a growing need to go forward and an ever greater nagging fear that it would all blow up in his face, that he would once again be the failed child, the greatest regret realized. He was on the verge of giving up hope, made one more effort, and got a step closer to comprehending what it had hidden from him when the door was then slammed in his face. He was used to failure, even as he feared becoming one. But in this search there was no failure for when you start rock bottom there is no real down in which to go. Or so he hoped.

One evening, checking his email for the last time, except for the fifteen last times before that, its cousin arrived. A cousin, first or nearly so. An email to a different name than the cousin. The story of his life, he thought, but he replied. The results and the realization that he was, in half, so very different than he imagined. You grow up in a family, even as the odd one out always, and they define you. Their history is grafted onto your roots since you have none of your own. But a geographic discovery is so damned remote from a human one. Still it gave him half a sense of place, a grounding he had only imagined and cast aside. His loves in music and drink found genetic purchase. And the cousin was from the part of him of which he felt certain, that he knew already, and the old it took form and shape. It was a cascade of news and emotion. Out of the mist she appeared, a face, a name, a history. He could see himself in her. Jimmy was certain it was not merely be desire but biology. And there was family. He would now lead two separate lives. The family life he had always led would continue. They would call Jimmy son, they would be his parents. Each would know it was a lie, but a lie that neither would ever acknowledge, and such a lie is a truth of sorts. And there would be the new life, the one he would gently probe, and family he would hopefully discover. And all because of it. It was the letter that simply said: “His birth was unremarkable. He was 19 inches, 9 lb. 4 oz. The birth mother declined to see the baby, feeling that might lead her to question the adoption decision. There are no known family health issues.”

First published in Cleaning Up Glitter, Vol. 1, Issue 3, 2019
https://cleaningupglitter.com/the-talk-the-paper-louis-faber