“He arranged the adoption,” my mother said. “He would know the agency at minimum. Whether he knows anything about where she ended up, I can’t say.”
Logan stood up from the table.
He was fifteen years old and he was very tall suddenly, in the way he sometimes seemed tall when he
was fully himself in a room, and he said: “I need to find her.”
I said: “Yes.”
The conversation with my mother continued for another hour after that, during which I asked questions
and she answered them and I cried at some points and at other points felt something colder than tears, the specific feeling of being altered at a structural level, of understanding that the foundation of something is different from what you believed it to be.
She had known for twenty-six years.
I had to sit with this separately from the rest. My mother, who had made Logan’s birthday cakes and
watched him plant lilies and stood at a distance at the cemetery while he talked to an empty grave. My mother, who had carried this for twenty-six years because she had made an agreement with Aaron and had kept the agreement past the point when it was possible to believe it was still right.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said.
“Because I didn’t know how to,” she said. “And then more time passed and I knew less how to. And then
more time. And I watched Logan and I told myself what I’d always told myself, that she was with a good family, that she was loved, that it was too late to change anything.”
“It’s not too late,” Logan said from across the room, where he had moved at some point without my noticing. He was at the window, looking at the bare stems in the garden. “It’s not too late because she’s fifteen. She’s exactly as old as I am. She’s out there somewhere being fifteen right now.”
I called Aaron.
I had his number because co-parenting logistics require contact, not because either of us maintained
anything beyond the minimum. He answered on the fourth ring with the voice of someone who has been expecting a call and has been hoping it would not come.
“I know,” I said.
He was quiet.
“Someone left a box in Logan’s garden,” I said. “With a photograph of Lily when her eyes were open. And
a note. And now Logan and I both know.”
“Grace,” he said.
“Don’t,” I said. “I am not having the conversation you want to have right now. I need two things from you
and then we can have whatever conversation you think is necessary. I need the name of the agency and I need whatever information you have about the family.”
“I don’t know if I can just give you that,” he said.
“Aaron,” I said. And I said his name in the specific way that I had never said it before, with everything that was in the room at that moment, and whatever he heard in it was sufficient.
He gave me the agency name.
He gave me the name of the couple, which he had known, a couple named James and Patricia Ellison
who had been living in Madison, Wisconsin, at the time of the adoption. He said he did not know if they were still there, that he had not maintained contact, that he had chosen not to know because not knowing was easier.
“It was not easier for Logan,” I said.
I ended the call.
I called the adoption agency, which was a forty-five minute call involving intake staff and supervisors and the specific protocol that adoption agencies have for situations of this kind, which is to say they were not unkind and they were also not going to simply hand me information without process, and the process
was going to take time.
“How much time?” Logan said, when I reported back.
“They said two weeks,” I said. “For the initial response. To determine whether they can facilitate contact.”
Two weeks.
Logan looked at me.
“Two weeks,” he said, not as a complaint but as an acknowledgment.
“We’ll start elsewhere,” I said. “The name Aaron gave me. The city.”
I found a search firm that specialized in locating individuals for adoption reunification, a firm recommended by the agency as ethical and effective. I called them that afternoon and spoke with a woman named Christine who had done this work for eighteen years and who asked questions with the
efficiency of someone who has asked them many times and knows which answers produce useful search parameters.
The Ellison family, Madison, Wisconsin, adoption finalized in early spring twenty-six years ago.
Christine said she would have preliminary results within forty-eight hours.
The forty-eight hours were the longest forty-eight hours I can remember, which is a statement that requires accounting against the months after Lily’s apparent death and the period after my diagnosis of myself as a person who was managing well and would continue to manage, both of which had involved
their own extended difficulties. But this was different because within these forty-eight hours something that had been finished was not finished, something I had grieved was not gone, and the distance
between what I had understood my life to be and what it apparently was required constant navigation.
Logan handled the forty-eight hours by going to Theo’s house on the second day, which I encouraged. He needed someone who could be present with him in a way that was not complicated by history, and
Theo was constitutionally suited to presence. He came home that evening and had dinner and we talked about what we knew and what we hoped and what we were afraid of, and he was, at fifteen, more capable of holding all three at once than I had expected, though I should have expected it because he
had always been capable of holding difficult things.
On the evening of the second day, Christine called.
The Ellison family was still in Madison. James Ellison had died four years earlier, a fact that required its own small moment of acknowledgment. Patricia Ellison was sixty-one, retired from a career in secondary school education. She was living in the same house.
Her daughter’s name was Lily.
Christine said this with the particular care of someone who understands the weight of the word they are
delivering.
“She kept the name,” I said.
“She did,” Christine said.
Logan, who had been sitting beside me while I took the call on speaker, put his head in his hands.
He was not crying. He was doing the thing he did when something was too large for the immediate response, the internal stillness.
“How do we reach out?” I said.
Christine explained the process for facilitated initial contact, which was designed to allow the first
communication to go through the intermediary so that neither party was ambushed by direct contact before they had chosen to receive it. She would reach out to Patricia Ellison, explain the situation, and ask whether Lily was aware of the adoption and whether she would be open to communication.
“Some adoptees know,” Christine said. “Some don’t. We’ll need to know where she is before we can know what to do next.”
Three days later, Christine called again.
Lily Ellison knew she was adopted. She had known since she was eight, which Patricia Ellison had determined was the right age, which was a decision I had complex feelings about and was trying to hold
at arm’s length until I knew more. She was fifteen, which was the fact that remained the most extraordinary, fifteen years old and somewhere in Madison, Wisconsin, a person who had been existing in the world for exactly as long as Logan had been planting flowers.
She was willing to write a letter.
Christine told us this carefully, emphasizing the word willing as distinct from eager, explaining that Lily’s
response had been considered rather than immediate, that she had asked for a day and had given her answer after the day, which Christine said was a healthy sign of someone taking the situation seriously rather than reacting from the surface of it.
Logan wrote his letter first.
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