Page 68 of Wish I Were Here
“Thank you.” I stand a little bit taller. Maybe she expected me to become a clown, like Dad. Or maybe she didn’t give it much thought until this very moment. But now she knows, and she’s impressed with me. I don’t know why I care. I shouldn’t care.
“I regret that this birth certificate issue is causing you problems,” Melanie admits. “But I do need to get back to work.”
Her words cut through me. Is she going to blow me off, just like Dad did? Maybe my parents were young and ill-equipped to have a baby. Maybe they didn’t want a child. But they got one, and they owe it to me to help me find my identity. And I don’t mean only what it says on some paperwork. This is about so much more than my job now. It’s about who I am and where I come from. Melanie doesn’t just hold my birth certificate. She holds the answers I’ve spent my life looking for.
But before I can open my mouth to argue, she says the last thing I’m expecting her to say. “Come over to my apartmenttomorrow night. I’ll give you your birth certificate and we can talk then.”
My mouth drops open, and for a moment, I’m speechless. My gaze swings to Luca and he gives me an encouraging smile.
“What time would you like us to arrive?” I ask.
“Oh.” Melanie’s gaze lingers on Luca’s tattoos before she turns back to me. “Your friend will be coming, too?”
Funny how I automatically assumed he would. He’s been with me for all of this, and I realize how much I want him there. How much I don’t want to go it alone anymore.
“Catherine and I are a team,” Luca says, and I give him a grateful smile.
Melanie stands up, snapping her laptop closed. She pulls a business card from her pocket and writes something on the back. In a smooth gesture, she holds it out to me. I take it, glancing down at the neat script where Melanie has written7 p.m.and an address. She moves gracefully toward the door.
I clutch the card in my hand. “It was nice meeting you.”
She turns and gives me a hint of a smile. “It was…” She nods. “… nice meeting you, too.”
And then she’s gone.
Ijust can’t believe it,” I say as I settle into the soft velvet of my couch cushions. “I can’t believe she’s…”
An ER doctor.
Smart and efficient and organized.
“Everything you imagined when you were a kid?” Luca fills in the silence with exactly what I’m thinking.
My head jerks up. “Well… yes.”
“She’s definitely saving lives, just like you thought she’d be.” He gives me a sideways grin as he crosses my living room. “For example, I will never eat gas station sushi, or any sushi, ever again.”
I can’t help but smile.
After the nurse discharged Luca with a printout about the horrors of food poisoning and detailed instructions to never eat sushi from the Sunoco again, we headed back to the DeGreco building. Luca walked me to my apartment, and I invited him in to drink that bottle of red. He took charge of opening it, and now he hands me a glass of wine and sets the bottle on the coffee table without a coaster or a place mat underneath. But at this point, I’m too keyed up tocare. Luca takes a small sip from his glass, and I gulp mine down and dump in another splash from the bottle.
“She seemed interested in my career, didn’t she?” Her reaction reminds me of something else I longed for in childhood. Someone who cared about my work and encouraged me to be successful. Dad was always proud no matter what I did, but he was much more likely to celebrate if I landed a six-ball juggling trick than he was if I got straight As. Even now, I flush when I remember hisalgae-brajoke to Dr. Gupta.
I pull Melanie’s card from my pocket and stare at the neat script on the back. “She wants me to come over. If it was just to give me the birth certificate, she would have asked me to meet her somewhere. But she said she wants totalk. That’s promising, isn’t it?”
“Definitely promising,” Luca agrees, his face softening. “You’ve been imagining this moment for a long time, haven’t you?”
I set the card on the coffee table and take another sip of my wine. “When I was a kid, my dad used to take me out of school so we could go to festivals—Burning Man, the Ren Faire—anywhere that he could perform and connect with the circus crowd. Ihatedit. It wasn’t the juggling and circus tricks—for a kid, that stuff was fun—it was the complete chaos.” I remember the desert dust getting into everything, the pushing and shoving as I waded through crowds, the anxiety about what I was missing in school.
“I never knew where we’d end up sleeping that night. And then, back at home, I’d discover that Dad forgot to buy groceries or worse—pay the bills—so it got to where I didn’treally know where I’d end up sleeping,ever.” I look up to find Luca watching me over his glass of wine.
“Dad could completely go with the flow. He said it didn’t matter if I missed tests; life experience was more important than rote memorization. And he wasn’t attached to material possessions—like our apartment, for example—so if we had to move out, we’d just find another.
“So, sitting there in the desert, I’d build this whole fantasy about my mom. Not only would she have some sort of really important job, but she’d have her life together. She’d be organized, responsible, and always pay her bills on time. And someday we’d meet, and she’d see how well I turned out. She’d see that I had my life together, and that I was good enough.”
Luca sets his glass on the table—no coaster, not that I’m paying attention—and slides closer to me. “Catherine, whatever the reason your mom left, it had nothing to do with whether you weregood enough. I hope you know that.”
“Mmmm,” I say faintly. If I was good enough, then why did she leave me? If I was good enough, then how did she live down the road for thirty years and never reach out?
