Page 74 of Wish I Were Here
Dante and Luca stare back at me, poker-faced.
I sigh. If I don’t have time for juggling and dancing, I definitely don’t have time for ghosts. Especially made-up ones. “Okay.” I turn to head across the gym. “I’ll just take the stairs.”
My mother lives in a modern downtown condo building complete with tall windows, white leather couches in the lobby, and a doorman. When Luca and I enter, the doorman greets us from his perch at the front desk and calls up to Melanie for approval to let us in. I wring my purse strap in my hands. She could still say no and tell the doorman to send us packing. What would I do about my birth certificate then?
And how would I handle being rejected by my mom again?
Luca must sense my apprehension, because he reaches for my hand.
After a moment, the doorman hangs up the phone and gives us a nod. “You can take elevator two.”
We enter the elevator, and Luca pushes the button with his elbow since he’s still holding on to me with one hand, and his other is occupied by the flowers he’s brought for Melanie. Sometime after I left him at the community center, he picked up a bouquet of brightly colored sunflowers, zinnias, and snapdragons, which is just the most charming, mostLucathing to do. Especially because I can’t help but notice that the riot of colors matches his arms. He even arranged themin a mason jar so Melanie wouldn’t have to deal with finding a vase when we arrived. My heart melts at his thoughtfulness. I was too preoccupied to think of bringing anything but a list of questions.
On Melanie’s floor, we turn left down a hallway painted a soothing gray and find the nondescript door to her condo. This isn’t the kind of building where people clutter up their entrances with welcome mats or wreaths, like the DeGreco. It’s a place that leans into order and clean lines.
Melanie swings the door open, and at the sight of her, my breath catches. Since my dad has dark hair and eyes, I’d always assumed I got my blond hair and blue eyes from my mom, but it’s still jarring to see the person I’ve been picturing for thirty years standing in front of me. She’s wearing a wrap dress, eerily similar to the one I’m wearing except hers is black and white and mine is dark green.
We enter the condo into a loftlike main room with tall ceilings. A modern kitchen takes up one side of the room, the crisp lines of shiny white cabinets along the far wall unbroken by appliances. Melanie must have had them covered by the same material as the cabinets so it all matches perfectly. Across from the cabinet, a marble counter stretches the length of the kitchen, completely devoid of fruit baskets, junk mail, or other detritus, like a desert island in the middle of the ocean without the shade of a single palm tree. On the other side of the space is a living room with a sectional, coffee table, and throw rug, all in shades of ivory, cream, and alabaster.
Like the hallway outside, there is not a single hint of clutter or chaos in this condominium, and I immediately feelmy heart rate slow like I’ve stepped into a meditation tent instead of my long-lost mother’s home.
“Please, have a seat,” Melanie instructs.
As I round the couch into the living area, I pass a desk built into the—also white—living room cabinetry with a single notepad on it. The wordsTo Doare printed across the top with boxes down the side. Half the boxes are checked off. I make out the wordsCatherine’s birth certificateat the very bottom of the list. Its box sits empty, waiting for someone to pick up the pen and draw a neatXthrough it.
“These are for you.” Luca stops to hand Melanie the flowers.
“Oh.” Melanie takes the mason jar and sets it gingerly on the kitchen island. “Thank you.” She stares at the bouquet for a long beat, and then reaches out to nudge it to the left and then to the right. But no amount of arranging is going to make a mason jar of wildflowers fit into her modern, lily-white decor, so eventually she picks it up and moves it to the desk, out of the middle of the room.
I feel a little pang for Luca, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He crosses the room and drops down on the couch next to me. Melanie’s sectional is formal and firm, not really a stretch-out-and-take-a-nap type of couch, so his shoulders rock and he breathes out a little “oof” when he lands a bit too hard.
Melanie pulls open the tallest white cabinet in the kitchen, revealing a hidden refrigerator. From inside, she takes out a plate and a bottle of wine. Back in the living room, she sets the plate in front of us, and I stare down at an equilateral triangle of cheese and a parallelogram of crackers. Fat greenolives sit in a bowl next to the cheese, and they’re so perfectly oval that they look like polished stones. Even if I had an appetite, I’d hate to disturb the symmetry.
Luca has no such qualms. He pops an olive into his mouth.
Melanie opens the wine—white, of course—and hands us each a glass. “I apologize that I couldn’t speak more freely with you yesterday. I knew my colleague, Dr. Kohler, could be stopping in at any moment. I don’t like to mix my career and personal life.”
“Of course. I completely understand.” I remember running into Dad on the university lawn while I was walking with Dr. Gupta. I guess I don’t like to mix my career and personal life, either. Some things are too hard to explain to people at work. “I’m sorry we took your time away from your patients. We wouldn’t have done that if we’d known another way to track you down.”
“That reminds me, you’re here for your birth certificate,” she says, clasping her hands together. “I have it right here in my files.”
Melanie crosses the room to the desk. Pulling open a drawer, she reveals neat rows of documents that I can see from my perch at the edge of the couch are in color-coded files with printed labels. I let out an involuntary sigh of pleasure, and Luca turns to look at me with an amused smile.
Melanie reaches into the green section, pulls out a file, and flips it open. She gives a curt nod, closes the file, and crosses the room to give it to me. “Here it is.”
I open it and stare at the single sheet of paper. My original birth certificate. Or at least I think it’s the original. I haven’t exactly had the best track record with birth certificatesthis week. It doesn’t look thirty years old—the condition is perfect—but it probably hasn’t been shuffled from apartment to apartment in damp cardboard boxes like the rest of my things from childhood. An official-looking raised seal is stamped in one corner. And then, beneath it, are the names.
I trace a finger across my father’s name, Andrew John Lipton.
“I suppose you’re wondering why you were given an altered copy,” Melanie says.
My gaze shifts to my mother’s name.Melanie Anne Jankowski.“I spent my whole life believing your name was Michelle Jones.”
“What has your father told you?” Melanie sinks down on the chair across from me.
“Absolutely nothing.” I stare at her across the room. “He promised you he wouldn’t tell me anything, and he kept that promise. I never would have known any of it, but there was a weird glitch in the government’s system when I went to do my employment paperwork.”
“The truth is—” Melanie hesitates, as if she’s debating what to say. “The truth is, I asked your father to hide my identity because I didn’t want anyone to come looking for me.”
