This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2020 by Cheryl Strayed

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle

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eISBN: 9781542020596

Cover design by Zoe Norvell

1

Is it mine?” he asked.

Geraldine sat in Jim’s parked car, looking out over the river into Mexico. Not his car but the car he’d borrowed from someone he knew—a higher-up on the base.

“Of course it is,” she said, not taking her eyes off Mexico. “I mean, how could you even ask that?” She turned to him now, too humiliated to say what he knew—that she’d only ever been with him.

“Fuck,” he said and banged his hand on the steering wheel. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!”

They sat in silence then, until something under the car’s hood began ticking all on its own.

“I think it was the time when we went into that room at Roger’s party,” she said and looked at him, struck even now by how handsome he was.

“Fuck,” he said again, but more broken this time, as if he was on the verge of tears.

Geraldine wasn’t anywhere near tears herself, having spent the previous two days crying, ever since she found out. She felt drained and numb, her mind a whir of what now. “It’s due in mid-January. I mean if we—”

“We’ll have to talk through our options,” he interrupted.

He was nineteen and she was seventeen. They’d known each other barely four months. He was the son of a coal miner from Ohio, about to be sent to Vietnam. She was a military brat from nowhere because she and her mother and two younger siblings had spent their lives following her father from base to base, wherever he was stationed. Oklahoma, Virginia, Germany. They were in El Paso now, where she’d graduated high school a few weeks before.

“I’m sorry,” she said and reached over and squeezed his leg. She couldn’t help but think that she’d ruined his life.

It didn’t yet occur to her to wonder about having ruined her own.

2

Jim knew somebody. Somebody who knew somebody who had a girlfriend who had gone to this guy and then everything was okay.

It was 1964.

Jim had called this fellow—the doctor—and the doctor said to send her with one hundred dollars in cash and to send her alone.

“Alone?” she gasped. “Why alone?”

“Because it’s illegal, dummy,” Jim said. “I’ll drive you and pick you up a few blocks away, but he doesn’t want anyone pulling up in front of his house. It raises suspicion.”

“Okay,” she said uncertainly, her heart thudding like she was trapped at the bottom of a pool.

“I don’t make the rules,” he said without pity.

They were sitting on a picnic table that was tucked into the shade of an open space-age-looking shelter in a park she’d never been to, no one else in sight. She looked out at the expanse of grass that spread before them, scorched yellow by the heat, and remembered a girl at school named Anita who’d had to go to the hospital last fall because of something that had gone wrong during an abortion. Or at least that was the rumor. Geraldine didn’t know Anita well enough to inquire, and afterward, the girl had never returned to school.

“It’ll be okay, babe,” Jim said, as if reading her mind.

“How do you know?” she asked, but he didn’t answer.

She stood up and leaned against the cool concrete wall of the shelter in the spot where they’d had sex ten minutes before, making it quick in case someone came along. At Jim’s inducement, they’d been doing it as often as they could, taking advantage of the fact that she wouldn’t get pregnant because she already was.

Her appointment was set for Thursday at noon, he told her. He’d return for her at three. She was to go to the gate at the front of the house and press the intercom and say bonita when someone answered.

“Bonita?” she asked.

“It’s his code word.”

“It’s the Spanish word for ‘pretty,’” she said.

“Like you,” he said and came over and took her hands, like he possibly loved her.

She was young enough to be grateful for that.

3

Over the intercom she was instructed to wait in the backyard and then buzzed through the gate. She walked down a narrow strip of concrete that ran along the side of the house to the yard, where there were three pink metal chairs covered in dust under a big tree. She stood near them in the shade, holding her little embossed leather purse with a hundred dollars inside.

After a few minutes, a man emerged from the house with a small brown dog on a leash. He looked to be in his fifties, older than her father, his hair thick and gray, his eyes bloodshot and piercing blue. “Geraldine?”

“Yes,” she said and blushed.

“Nice to meet you,” he said and shook her hand without telling her his name.

“Bonita!” she blurted, though she’d already said it over the intercom, and blushed harder.

“I generally like to take care of the payment first,” he said.

“Oh yes.” She pulled the neat stack of twenty-dollar bills from her purse, handing it to him with a smile. There was no reason for this not to be friendly.

“My wife had to run out and get a few things before we get started,” he said. “She’s my assistant. It shouldn’t be more than five or ten minutes, but make yourself comfortable in the meanwhile.”

Geraldine was shaking so hard by now she sat down on one of the filthy chairs. When she did so, the little dog came over to greet her, licking her toes through her sandals, whining with pleasure as she scratched his scraggly head. “Oh yes, you’re a pretty boy,” she said sweetly in a high-pitched tone, feeling calmed by him. “Such a pretty boy.”

“It’s a girl, actually,” said the doctor. “I like to say she’s a real bitch.”

He laughed and Geraldine laughed along with him, wanting him to like her, or at least to not think poorly of her for being there. She’d never been in trouble at school. She’d gone to church most Sundays at her mother’s insistence. She obeyed her curfew and did her chores and babysat her two younger siblings on nights when her parents went out. She was what people called a good girl. She felt an absurd urge to tell the doctor that now, to assure him that the mistake that had been made that necessitated her being there had been only one misstep in a lifetime unmarked by them. To make the case, if not for her innocence, well, then for her goodness.

“We’ll be in there,” the doctor said and gestured to the garage that sat along the edge of the yard. “It’s my office, so to speak. There’s a bed in there where you can rest afterward, until it’s time for your friend to pick you up.”

“Jim,” she said for no reason other than she wanted to draw him into this, to make it seem as if she wasn’t as alone as she felt. She looked at the small pale-green building, its lumbering front door scuffed and warped with age. It seemed preposterous that what was about to happen to her was going to happen inside that decrepit place. She wondered if the doctor had a regular job too, if he worked at a clinic or a hospital, or if he only did this, but she was too shy to ask.

“I understand your last period was in April?”

“Yes,” she answered without looking at him.

“It should be a straightforward affair.”

She nodded, hoping he wouldn’t elaborate. She’d spent the past several days willing herself to keep from imagining the particulars about what an abortion might involve. To settle her mind that morning, she’d decided it would be like the pelvic exam she’d had for the first time the year before, only more extended, and at the end of it, she’d be free.

A tapping sound came from the direction of the house, and they both turned to see a woman standing inside one of the windows, brunette and middle-aged. The doctor’s wife. She gave them a wave before disappearing from view.

“You sit tight and we’ll be out in a few minutes to get started,” the doctor said.

When he was gone, Geraldine stood up and smacked the dust from her pants and went to the far edge of the yard, suddenly sure she was going to vomit. She’d been doing that every day for the past week, barely managing to conceal it from her mother. She bent and retched, holding on to the rickety fence that separated the doctor’s yard from the adjacent property, though little came up because she’d been told not to eat breakfast. When she stood she saw that the house behind the doctor’s seemed to be abandoned—its yard an indecipherable bramble of Texas bushes she didn’t know the names of. She bent to retch again, and then she stayed down there, feeling a temporary peace overtake her as she stared at the patch of dirt at her feet, where a few ants wandered among the tiniest tendrils of weeds that poked up through the soil.

Go, a voice in her head boomed with such clarity she barely recognized it as her own.

4

I’m going to have a baby,” she announced to her father while he was eating breakfast. He had a paper napkin tucked into his collar to keep from dripping milk on his shirt. “I’m sorry,” she added when his eyes went from his newspaper to her.

What she would remember for the rest of her life was the cracking sound that came from the hallway the moment after that.

Her mother dropping the broom she’d been holding.

5

She wore a yellow dress. Also yellow shoes that belonged to her mother that made Geraldine furious because they had a green bow on the toes that she hated. She wanted the shoes to be yellow and yellow only, with no idiotic bow.

Her mother said, “You can’t let a thing like that bother you now. Not now that you’re going to be a wife. You’ll soon learn that life is not all fun and games.”

“I never said it was, Mother!” she replied as wickedly as she dared.

This was in the ladies’ room of the El Paso courthouse, fifteen minutes before she thought she would be married and thirty minutes before her father would find a note for her on his car windshield—from Jim, saying sorry, but no. When it was only her mother pushing a bobby pin into her pretty strawberry blonde hair.

“You’re hurting me!” she yelled, and her mother shushed her and rubbed the spot where she’d placed the bobby pin a moment before, as if she were soothing a cranky child. And immediately Geraldine felt soothed, being her mother’s child.

“How’s that?” her mother asked when she was finished.

Together they gazed at Geraldine in the bathroom mirror, the evidence of her beauty and the gravity of the moment obliterating the silliness about the shoes.

“There’s so much ahead of you,” her mother said, her voice wobbling. “I wish you and Jim every happiness.”

“I know, Mom,” Geraldine said instead of thank you.

6

Most of all, her parents did not want to be embarrassed.

“But we don’t even know anyone in El Paso!” Geraldine protested.

“What kind of example do you think you’ll be setting for your brother and sister if you stayed here?” her mother asked. “Especially your sister! Did you even take a minute to think about her when you were out there gallivanting around doing whatever you like?”

“I wasn’t gallivanting anywhere!” she hollered. They were sitting around the kitchen table at breakfast time. Her siblings were away at summer camp, so it was safe for them to shout at each other about such things. She thought about them then—Bobby and Debbie. They were little more than a year apart from each other, but six and seven years younger than her. When she imagined telling them she was pregnant, a terrible pressure seemed to push against her skull.

“It’s to your benefit if this is resolved privately,” her father said.

“Why?” she asked, but of course she knew. “Is it because you think I care what people think of me? Because I don’t!” Geraldine declared, though it wasn’t true. She was wearing her Dairy Queen uniform, which had grown tight around the middle and the bust, and she’d become self-conscious of that, worried that people would guess the truth.

“As we’ve explained, this particular home comes highly recommended,” her father said.

“I don’t care,” she said very calmly, as if she were in control of everything. “I’m not going to Portland. I’m going to Duluth to live with Val,” she continued with great certainty, though she could feel her future life unraveling with every syllable. It now seemed impossible that it had only been last Christmas when she and her cousin Valerie were seniors in high school and had hatched their plan. How they’d work their summer jobs after graduation until September, when they’d meet up in Duluth, a couple of hours from the tiny Wisconsin town where Val lived with her parents. How they’d rent an apartment and find jobs and enroll in a program at the local secretarial school that a few of Val’s girlfriends had attended.

“So you want to ruin your life?” her mother asked. “Is that what you want?”

Geraldine put her face in her hands.

“Do you?” her mother persisted. “Answer me!” she shrieked.

“No,” Geraldine said and looked at her mother. In her eyes she saw the same frantic sorrow she felt, and the shock of that recognition—of their sameness—felt like a jolt.

“Then don’t,” her mother said and burst into tears.

“Mom,” said Geraldine as gently as she could, but that only made her mother cry harder.

“This isn’t what I wanted for you,” she said through her sobs. “I wanted you to have a kind of life I didn’t get to have. For you to have opportunities. For you to be—”

“Helen,” her father said sharply.

Geraldine was crying now too, silently, the tears falling down her face and dripping onto the table. She reached over and clutched her mother’s hands with both of her own, suddenly, momentarily, and for the first and last time, feeling they were together in this. “I’ll still have my life, Mom. I promise.”

“I think what your mother means is we anticipated you’d be married before you got pregnant,” her father said crisply, standing up from the table to get the coffeepot from its electric burner.

Her mother pulled two paper napkins from the little dispenser that sat on the kitchen table, handed one to Geraldine, and blew her nose into the one she kept. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what came over me.”

“Emotions are running high,” said her father.

“It’s just that I don’t know why I have to go away,” Geraldine said, though by now she knew it was useless.

“Because it protects you,” her mother said matter-of-factly, back to herself. “You go to Portland, you get it over with, and afterward, you can go on with your life, Ger.”

“It’ll be like it never happened,” said her father.

“Except it did happen,” Geraldine said coldly and wiped the tears from her face with her hands. She looked at her parents, clear-eyed and astonished, like she understood exactly who she was for the very first time. A prisoner of her own body.

Her father poured himself a cup of coffee. His spoon made a dinging sound against his cup as he stirred in the sugar. A bell, marking the end of something.

7

The woman who ran the home for pregnant and unwed girls in Portland insisted on being called Aunt Ruth. Even her husband, Frank, called her that. Aunt Ruth had a soft, dimpled chin and hips and butt and thighs as thick as an elephant’s. When she first stood up, she walked with a limp and had to hold the backs of chairs and sides of tables until her joints warmed up. She taught Geraldine things she’d never imagined doing. How to grow her own herbs. How to knit a scarf. How to make blackberry preserves. How to bake bread, which they ate fresh out of the oven with dinner every night, all ten of them at a long rectangular table—Aunt Ruth and Frank and Geraldine and the seven other pregnant teenagers who lived in the house.

Nancy. Babs. Linda. Anne. Sandy. Miriam. Rita.

Geraldine never forgot their names in spite of herself. Together, they lived like a flock of secrets on the second floor of Aunt Ruth’s house—paired up based on their due dates in the four bedrooms that fanned off the wide landing at the top of the stairs. When two of them departed, two more replaced them. Miriam and Linda became Joni and Alice. Nancy and Anne became Vivian and Kathy. Geraldine spent her every waking hour with them. They ate their meals together and smoked on the front porch so they wouldn’t gain too much weight and played poker and talked about their boyfriends or ex-boyfriends or refused to talk about them because their hearts were broken or because they’d never loved them to begin with. They put their hands on each other’s bellies when one or another of their babies was kicking and danced to the radio that sat on a table in the landing area after they finished the evening chores that had been assigned to them by Aunt Ruth. They festooned the headboards of each other’s beds with construction-paper garlands while they were at the hospital giving birth, and they carried each other’s suitcases down the stairs after it was over and done with and they were weepy and empty-handed and their breasts had stopped leaking and their abdomens had shrunk down enough that it was safe to go home.

Every one of them had two stories. One story was about what really happened, and the other story was the one they told the people they knew about why they were gone. Babs had fallen in love with her married math teacher in Sacramento, who’d refused to leave his wife for her, but she was pretending to be in Portland looking after her sick grandmother for the first half of her junior year. In a little town in eastern Washington, Rita had been taken advantage of at a party—they didn’t then think to call it rape—and was now, according to her parents, attending a Catholic girls’ school that took boarders. Most of their stories were, like Geraldine’s, more mundane—young love for which they alone had paid the price.

Each was to Geraldine a kind of friend who wasn’t exactly a friend but rather someone who was at once both more and less than that. Like someone she’d fought alongside in a war.

8

She could not deny that the baby looked like Jim. By the time she was born, Geraldine had almost forgotten he had any relation to the person who’d been growing inside her, his presence having been so fleeting, so paltry, so optional. But there he was, a grown man overlaid onto the body of this baby—theirs—the entire dark-haired essence of him emanating from her.

She named her Caroline, though she’d been explicitly instructed not to give her a name—it would be the real parents who’d do that, she’d been told. She didn’t care.

“Caroline,” she whispered over and over in the first days, when she’d been allowed to hold her. “Like Caroline Kennedy,” she sputtered to the social worker when she showed up to have Geraldine complete the adoption paperwork. “And also because I want our names to have the same last three letters—ine.”

For this, she got a talking-to. For this, she was yet again reminded that a doctor and his wife desperately wanted a baby. For this, she was made to name what she thought she could give her daughter that would be better than what the doctor and his wife could give her.

She couldn’t name a thing. Not one thing!

She had nothing to give but her daughter.

9

She didn’t return home afterward. She didn’t have to. She was eighteen now and free to do as she wished. She bought a bus ticket to Duluth with the last bit of money she had left over from her old job at the Dairy Queen, and she and Valerie executed the plan they’d made when they’d been seniors in high school, though it had been pushed back by six months—a delay Geraldine explained by telling Val that she had to help her mother move the family to Colorado, which was true enough, as in the time she’d been away, her father had been stationed at a base in Colorado Springs.

By the beginning of March, she and Val had rented a studio apartment downtown that had a creaky set of bunkbeds and a partial view of Lake Superior. Geraldine got a job as a hostess at a breakfast and lunch place, and Val was a cashier in a drugstore. In the evenings they took classes at the secretarial college, and afterward they went to a bar called the Lakeshore Lounge. They played the jukebox and drank rum and Cokes and had flirty conversations with men and met other women their age, a few of whom would become their best friends for life. They worked out a system where Val would fold a napkin and place it on the table in such a manner that Geraldine would know where to look when she’d spotted an attractive man, though the truth was nothing stirred inside her when she turned her head.

It wasn’t that she didn’t want to find love. It was that she felt dead to it now and also afraid of what it might lead to.

“You’re such a prude!” Val scolded her after their nights out together, believing that she was the more sexually experienced of the two.

Back in their apartment, tucked into their beds, Val would regale Geraldine with stories of her escapades, telling her about hand jobs she’d given to the two men she’d given them to and groping sessions in the back seats of cars with the boys she’d gone to high school with in Wisconsin.

“You next!” Val would demand from the bottom bunk.

“I can’t think of anything,” Geraldine would say from above.

“Come on! Tell me!”

“No,” Geraldine once replied too sharply. “There’s nothing to tell.”

10

Eventually, that changed. There was Richard. There was the birth control pill. There was Dave.

There was a brief, enraging letter of apology from Jim that had somehow found its way to her after traveling from El Paso to Colorado Springs to Duluth, in which he called her a “great girl.”

There was a low-grade longing for the man who worked behind the meat counter at the grocery store, who turned out to be gay.

There was Richard again.

There was feminism and her extremely quiet endorsement of its general principles, though, aside from her status of what people then referred to as a “career girl,” it was indiscernible to the untrained eye.

There was the Charley Pride concert at the Duluth Arena to celebrate Val’s twenty-sixth birthday, which coincided with the occasion of Geraldine’s first and last one-night stand.

There was no one for what felt like ages but what was actually about a year.

There was the man who worked as the supervisor of maintenance at the high school where she’d recently been hired in the attendance office, whose file she looked up. He was seven years older than her and single.

His name was Buck.

11

According to this, you’re a dragon,” she said to him on their second date, reading the Chinese zodiac on the place mat. “You’re courageous, direct, hardworking, and passionate.” She looked at him across the table; a red votive candle glowed between them. “Does that sound like you?”

“Close enough,” he said and laughed. “You’re twenty-eight, right—1947?”

She nodded.

“A baby!”

“A pig, unfortunately.”

“Not unfortunately!” he said, thumping his finger on the place mat. “Ger, listen to this: ‘pigs are a symbol of abundance and good luck.’”

“Well then, we should go to Vegas!”

“We can leave tonight,” he said, and his eyes went to hers like he wasn’t kidding.

“Let’s go!” She laughed, and for the first time ever, she wasn’t kidding either. For the first time ever, she kept her eyes on his.

She was married to him until the day he died.

12

She never told Buck about Jim or Caroline or Portland or Aunt Ruth or the doctor whose code word was bonita. She thought about it a few times in the weeks after their twins were born, when she was exhausted and bleeding and given to sobbing in the evenings for no reason she could explain, but each time she decided against it.

By then Geraldine was thirty, and she’d come to think differently about the matter. She’d come to believe that her parents had been right to send her away, right to persuade her to give up her baby, and most of all right that her secret should be kept. Indeed, it was her secret all along that had protected her, which is to say it had done precisely what her parents had promised it would do—if not always, then most days. It had made it seem as if everything that had happened to Geraldine in that particular era of her life had not happened.

It was a lie that had turned into its opposite: the truth around which she’d built her life.

13

Except that her heart clenched every time someone asked her how many children she had.

“I have two,” she’d say. “Julie and Jason.” But she always thought three. She thought, Caroline. Caroline. Caroline.

Her name was a jagged stone that had been worn smooth inside her. Her existence an ancient pulse that only Geraldine could detect.

14

Remember these?” Debbie asked, and Geraldine turned to see a pair of shoes in her sister’s hands. Yellow heels with a discreet green bow on each toe—the shoes she’d worn in El Paso on what she’d thought would be her wedding day.

“I do,” Geraldine replied blandly.

Their mother had died the week before, and they were cleaning out her things from the last place she’d lived, a condo in Tampa, where she’d settled after their father had died a decade ago.

“Funny that she kept them all these years,” Debbie said.

“She liked fancy things,” Geraldine said and turned back to her work removing the clothing that was folded in their mother’s dresser drawers and putting it into a plastic garbage bag that later they’d bring to Goodwill.

“I used to play dress up in them,” said Debbie. “I’d clomp all over the house pretending I was a princess or a movie star or a bride.” She looked at Geraldine, both of them plump and gray-haired now that they were fifty-eight and sixty-five, respectively. “I don’t suppose you remember that. It was when you were a teenager—always in your room or out with your boyfriend. What was his name? Tim?”

“Jim,” Geraldine said, refolding an old sweater. “He was barely my boyfriend. We only dated a few months.”

“I remember once you had to babysit me and Bobby, and he came over to visit you, and you told us not to tell Mom and Dad when they got home. You told us to watch TV, and you went into the laundry room with him and shut the door. Do you remember that?” Debbie asked and laughed.

“No,” said Geraldine, though suddenly she did. Jim lifting her up to sit on the washing machine. Jim pushing his hands up her shirt. Sometimes it shocked her, the things that would come to you if you let them. She shut the empty drawers and bent to tie the garbage bag closed.

“You forgot these,” said Debbie and handed her the shoes.

15

Five years later, Geraldine got a message from Jim on Facebook. He thought she should know that his son Jeff had taken a DNA test on Ancestry.com and one thing had led to another. He’d corresponded with a young woman named Rose Lopez, who said she was the daughter of the now-deceased Susan Taylor-Lopez.

The baby Geraldine had given birth to in Portland fifty-two years before.

16

It was as if she’d been struck. She stood gazing out the window that faced the front yard, seeing nothing. The early-evening spring light, the pale-green grass sprouting up in the places that weren’t mud, the daffodils and tulips blooming yellow and red along the walkway—she knew it was there, but she was blind to all of it. She felt like she’d finally been apprehended after years on the lam. Like she’d been hiding in a cave and now she’d been dragged out into the brightest, most punishing light.

She regretted having given up cigarettes two decades before. She missed Buck, who’d died three years ago. She missed her parents, who’d be the only people she could speak to about this—though in all the years afterward, neither of them had mentioned it once. She missed being able to assume the baby she’d given away was out there somewhere living a grand life. The daughter of a doctor, she’d always been told, and she’d held on to that all this time. It was only now, gazing out the window at the things she couldn’t see, that it occurred to her perhaps that hadn’t been true, perhaps he hadn’t been a doctor. And perhaps now it didn’t matter because the girl she’d named Caroline wasn’t the daughter of anything or anyone anymore. She was dead. Of ovarian cancer at the age of forty-eight, Geraldine had learned, after she’d followed up with Jim.

Abruptly, she turned away from the window, willing herself back to herself. Geraldine! she hollered inside her head. Geraldine!

All this time and she hadn’t ever grieved her daughter.

She wasn’t going to start now.

17

She saw the first line of the email the next morning when she got a notification on her phone, but she couldn’t bring herself to go to her computer to read the rest of it. She took the decorative pillows from the couch and thumped them against each other and then placed them very carefully back where they’d been as if a guest were about to arrive. She rearranged her collection of horse figurines, wiping each one with a special cloth she kept in a drawer for just this purpose. She swept the kitchen floor and gathered almost nothing with her broom. Dear Ms. Turner (or should I call you Geraldine?) that first line said—the one that had appeared and then disappeared like a phantom on the screen of her phone. She’d been expecting it—she’d given Jim her email address and permission to pass it on—but still it came as a shock.

By lunchtime she was standing in her gleaming kitchen, looking around for something else to do and finding nothing. Finally, she approached the little nook in the corner where she kept her computer and sat down and clicked on the email.

Dear Ms. Turner (or should I call you Geraldine?),

I hope it doesn’t upset you that I’m contacting you. My name is Rose Lopez and I’m your granddaughter (biological). My mother was Susan, who was born in Portland, Oregon, at Emanuel Hospital on January 19, 1965 (the last day of Capricorn!). She was the baby you gave birth to and gave up for adoption. I learned this when Jim’s son Jeff was listed as a DNA match on my Ancestry account and we did some detective work and he talked to his dad, who told him the whole story. Also, after MUCH effort, I got my mom’s original birth certificate and your name is on it, though your last name was Waters at the time (which I know you know, so why am I writing all of that?!!).

Can you tell I’m nervous?

Okay, some facts about me. I’m 25. As I know Jim told you, sadly, my mom/your (biological) daughter died four years ago, which was really hard and awful (and still is and will always be). I have a great dad (he and my mom got divorced when I was 12) and I’m happy to say all of my grandparents on both sides are still alive too, though they’re all getting old. I don’t have any siblings.

So why am I writing to you? Because I’d like to meet you. I’d also like to hear about my mom, even though I know you didn’t know her for very long (the records I was able to obtain said five days?).

I want you to know that I do not blame you for making the choice you did. I’m ALL ABOUT women having reproductive choices—and so was my mom, who, by the way, never knew your name. She only found out that she was adopted when she turned 16 because her parents thought they shouldn’t tell her until then.

I live in NYC, but I could fly to Duluth to meet you. Can I? Please say yes! I think it would be healing for both of us.

xRose

18

There’s something I need to tell you,” Geraldine said to Julie the next morning. “Something important.”

“What is it?” Julie asked, turning abruptly to her mother. She’d been making the rounds, gathering up the things her son, Isaac, had strewn about. His dinosaur coloring books and toy automobiles, a stuffed bunny they called PawPaw.

Geraldine had rehearsed every word on the drive over, what she’d say to Julie in person and to Jason later on the phone, but now that it was time to speak, she found herself unable to do so. She took a sip of the green tea Julie’s wife, Dana, had made for her before she and Isaac had departed for work and preschool. It was cool now, and bitter, which reassured her somehow. “When I was younger,” she began, but her voice wavered with so much emotion she had to stop.

“What is it?” Julie asked, alarmed now. She came over and sat down at the kitchen table, still holding PawPaw. She was forty, her strawberry blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail. She reached across the table and took Geraldine’s hand. “You can tell me anything, Mom.”

“I know,” Geraldine replied, and it was true. She and Julie were close in a way she hadn’t been with her mother. They talked to each other on the phone every day and had dinner together at least once a week. When Julie and Dana had decided to conceive Isaac via donor insemination five years before, they’d solicited Geraldine’s opinions about the questions that inevitably arose. Should they choose a donor who was an attorney or a graduate student in art history? Was it better if he was six four or five eleven? Introverted or extroverted? Skilled at math or piano? And then, after Isaac was born, she’d been the most devoted grandmother, babysitting him several days a week to cover the hours that needed covering when Julie and Dana were both at their jobs, taking him for overnights so they could have time alone.

“When I was—” she began again and again stopped, feeling as if she were being choked. She’d kept the secret sealed so tightly inside her for so long it could not be extracted without altering who she was, she realized now. The secret was not separate from her. In the telling of it, she’d come undone. She remembered a time in her forties when she’d been with Julie and Jason at the mall, and she turned and there was one of the girls she’d lived with at Aunt Ruth’s. Sandy! she thought but didn’t say, when their eyes had met with recognition, in the flash of a second before they each turned away. Where were they now, Geraldine wondered. What had they told?

“When I was a teenager,” she said.

“When you were a teenager, what?” Julie asked with some impatience.

She looked at her daughter, and all the words she’d rehearsed that morning in the car came back to her. About how a body can be a prison. About the ancient pulse that only she could detect. About her poor sweet lonely mother screaming did she want to ruin her life.

She didn’t. She wouldn’t. For the first time ever, she knew that this telling was part of that.

“Mom,” Julie whispered.

And Geraldine began.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo © Joni Kabana

Cheryl Strayed is the author of the number one New York Times bestselling memoir Wild, which was adapted into an Academy Award–nominated film of the same name, as well as Tiny Beautiful Things, Brave Enough, and the novel Torch. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post Magazine, Vogue, Salon, the New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere.

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About the Author