I was the queen of water, even if no one knew. Ten years old, teeming with secrets
I was called innocent and little and cute. I was called weird. I was called an old soul. My teacher explained the concept of “tiny” by displaying me in front of the class. See me in the fifth grade group photo, at the very end of the front row? There I am, dwarfed by the others, in aqua corduroy pants sewed by my mother and a faded unicorn T-shirt.
During recess, two friends and I played a game. Each of us was a queen commanding an element: earth, air, or water. The more we played, the more we believed that ordinary events—heavy fog, the creek flooding, dandelions overtaking the lawn—were manifestations of our magic.
It was northern California in the 1980s, our town rural but rapidly developing. A town named for elk who no longer roamed. Each house similar to the others, each strip mall formerly an orchard. The smell of cow manure rising on hot days. Streets named for nature that had been eaten up by tractors and excavators. Park Meadow. Emerald Crest.
I was the queen of water. Its creatures swore fealty to me. I sank beneath its depths for safety.
My friends and I trusted our power even as we knew that our belief in it wasn’t rational, knew that we would have to give it up. After school, I sat high in my backyard willow tree and whispered my plans and my secrets to the drainage ditch that ran behind my childhood home, a fetid gash in the tidy order of the suburbs. That water flowed out to the river, carrying my future with it.
***
My birth mother gave me up when I was born. According to the stories, she arrived at the hospital with her water breaking. I was born on an elevator, betwixt and between. Up for grabs. They say she had no plan for me and another child at home to gobble up all of her love.
She has a name like waves lapping against the walls of a cave. A murmuration. Lora Zimmerman, Lora Zimmerman. Long before I knew those syllables, I floated in the waters of her body. I nested inside her, a replica. A woman whose blood laps in my veins, sloshing through my heart and into every fingertip, blooming in my cheeks.
If I cut myself, her blood wells up. If I lick the wound, I taste her.
***
Now, as an adult, I have built a family unrecognizable to some: two women, two gender-expansive children whose pronouns trip people up, each of us genetically related to someone in the group, and all of us belonging to one another. We are proof that family is chosen or created through will and imagination and defiance.
Robin and I married each other three times: once before it was legal, and twice more in an attempt to secure protection and whatever recognition, whatever guarantee, we could.
Between weddings two and three, we had children. When the children were babies, people constantly asked us, “Which one of you is the mom?” Sometimes it was a gentle, bewildered question. A stranger tilting her head, squinting as if to bring us into focus. Other times it was a challenge. Which one of you is real? Which one of you has a claim on this child?
***
My birth mother grew up in Western New York, near Lake Ontario, a fact I learn only when I am an adult who is also living, by coincidence if you believe in such things, in New York state.
“Maybe we could go to her hometown,” I say to Robin and the kids. I present it as a vacation, a chance to see one of the Great Lakes. Robin agrees immediately, chooses dates, books a cottage on the lake. For weeks leading up to the trip, our 11-year-old, Chet, asks questions. What do I already know? What am I hoping to find?
I answer carefully, aware that the child asking me about why I am seeking my biological roots also knows they are not related to me by blood. I’ve spent years defending our family to strangers and relatives alike, saying that biology doesn’t equal family. Now I feel pulled toward my birth mother’s home. How can those facts coexist?
Chet is unconcerned. They enjoy being part of my wife’s lineage, having the broad shoulders and booming voice of their forebears. They like hearing predictions that they will someday be as tall as their uncle or as bald as their grandfather, and they like knowing that their donor was Russian and Polish.
The featureless void of my origin fascinates Chet, and they want to help me fill it.
The drive is four hours long and brings us along country roads, through lushly green hills whose picturesque beauty is overlaid with decaying infrastructure. The closer we get to the lake and cottage, the more desperate and disembodied I feel. Every street name—Preemption Road, Lasher Road— feels both insignificant and like a portent to be studied. Why should this place I’ve never seen matter?
The view unfolds gradually, curve layered upon curve, dotted here and there with a dilapidated gas station, a mailbox, a Trump sign, a roadside farmstand (“1 doz eggs $6 - farm fresh!!”), until it opens up all at once into a broad vista: cherry orchards, fields of corn, a single red barn with a metal roof glinting in the sun.
***
When I was very young, before my breasts appeared, before my hips widened and my body softened, I stared at my naked self in the mirror often. After my showers, I clutched the faux-marble countertop of my parents’ bathroom vanity and gazed into my own eyes. The mirror gave me back my reflection: odd child who came from elsewhere. Child of elbows and eyes, standing with the towel arranged on her head like a crown, child of saying the wrong thing. Changeling.
I imagined that I was royalty from another world and that I had been placed here, in an ordinary tract home in an unremarkable suburb, for my own safety. Somewhere beyond the looking glass, an entire family of people looked like me. An entire family of people mourned my loss.
Having heard whispers that my birth mother had a child before me, I invented a brother on the other side of the glass. I gave him the name Stephen. My brother looked into a mirror of his own—or maybe into a wishing well or a bowl of water blessed by a fairy—and saw me looking back. Stephen watched over me through any reflective surface I passed, even a drop of water.
Don’t worry, Stephen said. Some day, you will come home to us.
I let his reassurance wash over me. I couldn't always see him, but he was as real to me as the green shag carpeting beneath my feet. Maybe if I reached carefully, I’d breach the surface between us as simply as a person plunging her fingers into a lake.
Instead, I straightened my bony shoulders and stared into the pools of my eyes, which I have come to know were also my birth mother’s eyes. I reached up to touch the brow that was also her brow, tracing it like the highway on a map, a line that might lead me home.
***
Now, grown, I sit on a crumbling concrete wall beside Lake Ontario as my wife and children settle into the rental cottage behind me. I hear plates clanking, someone’s voice raised in question, someone answering.
This is the water she looked upon, I tell myself.
The lake is vast, limitless, not quite beautiful. I wait to feel her presence, or her absence. She touched these waves—maybe. I think about how water collects and disperses endlessly, changing shape, then about how matter cannot be created or destroyed. I think about wind. This water could be from anywhere. My gaze softens until the waves ripple dully. I dangle my feet above the filthy beach, littered with seaweed and bottle caps. She is near and far. This is the sand she touched.
Soft footsteps come through the grass. My teenager Quinn, whose face is an echo of mine, pauses beside me.
“How’s the thinking going?” They lower themselves to the ground a few feet away, and I feel their concern settle around me. We often communicate with a touch, a nudge of feet under the table, a look. Sometimes the lines between us feel permeable, like we’re watercolors bleeding together. Other times, Quinn is inscrutably teen-aged. Off limits.
“Emotional,” I say.
“Yeah.” We sit in silence for a few minutes. “It’s okay to be sad.”
I take a deep breath. We are so much alike, my eldest child and me. A friend asked, when Quinn was only a toddler, “How does it feel to be raising yourself?” It feels joyful. It feels painful. When Quinn was cut from my body and held upside down like the Hanging Man from the Tarot, when I saw their face for the first time, I felt such profound recognition that I sobbed. Quinn, like me, is sensitive to beauty and pain, resonating with the emotions of others like a struck bell. Even with the home Robin and I have built, even with the love we wrap them in, they will always be the kind of person who thinks deep, existential thoughts at bedtime, when they should be falling asleep.
“I feel like I’m not even who I am,” they said one night at 5 years old, gripping the bedcovers. “I feel like I’m being pulled into a black hole and spaghettified.”
I had begged Robin to let me have our first child so that I could resemble someone, finally. I wanted to see myself reflected in another face, and I got it. Those cheeks sucked steadily at my breast, taking me in. They stared at me with eyes that were mine. What did it mean?
Lora’s blood sloshing in me, my blood sloshing in this teenager who leans closer now, folding me in their arms.
***
My wife carried our second child, Chet, who was created with donor sperm, which means that Chet and I share no DNA. I watched them being born. Their head advanced and retreated in slow surges, making the path the way a river carves a canyon. They slid out at last, after 37 hours of labor, and my body said, Oh, it’s you. You’re here.
I held them. Their tiny body felt impossibly heavy in my hands. Like Quinn, they belonged to me and didn’t. I stared into their wrinkled, stern face. They grasped my finger and let go. Grasped it. Let go.
***
I did have a brother. Those stories were true. He was two years old when I was born, too young to remember or understand my arrival or my departure. He grew up not knowing I existed.
I was in my 20s when a member of my adoptive family unexpectedly told me my brother’s name. I began typing it into search engines. I was like a child staring into a mirror, whispering spells that bounced back. I found nothing. My brother wasn’t looking for me, because no one had told him I was born. No one would for another twenty years. Then our mother died, followed by his father, and only then did someone whisper in his ear, you have a sister.
***
I was a dreamy child who lived inside stories.
At twelve, I was obsessed with the television show “Moonlighting.” I pretended that the leading actress, Cybil Shepherd, was my mother and that she had to give me up to keep her career. I wrote her letters of forgiveness. Other times, I imagined that I was born of a teen girl who desperately wanted to keep me. Her parents had ripped me from her arms. I walked through grocery stores looking for my mother in the faces of strangers. I imagined that seeing her would be like brushing against an electric fence: a hot zap of knowing.
Everything I imagined was wrong. The following account is as true as I can make it.
Lora was 29 and divorced. She held me in her body and told no one. Not her sister. Not her coworkers. Not a doctor. She cared for her son and went to work, where she concealed her pregnancy with caftans, and she felt me move inside of her. She went to the hospital alone and left with her arms empty. No one currently living can tell me how she made her decision. No one can tell me what she was feeling, leaving one child behind to go home to the other.
I peer into the paperwork for answers, smoothing the blue paper with my hands. Religion? Next of kin? Ethnicity? Question after question, and the same response neatly typed: UNKNOWN, UNKNOWN, UNKNOWN.
My brother and I grew up separately, as only children. He lived in the city with our mother; I lived in the nearest suburb with my two parents. In the Sacramento Valley, a place fertile with the leavings of three rivers, we breathed air thick with smoke from rice fields being burned after the harvest. A few miles apart, we opened Christmas presents and sat on Santa’s lap and celebrated summer birthdays at Mickey Grove Park, near the zoo. We ate at the same restaurants. Attended rival high schools.
In photographs, my mother and brother cling to one another against a backdrop of browns and oranges: shag carpets, corduroy couches, wood paneling. Our homes could have been from the same movie set, they were so alike. It was the mirror magic reversed: my brother close but impossible to see or know.
***
Eventually, my friends and I grew too old for the queens game. We laughed about the fact that we had ever believed. Instead we talked about the meaning of the lyrics in the song “Push It,” by Salt ‘n’ Pepa, or who had the new George Michael cassette. We talked about other people’s crushes and when our parents would let us wear make-up.
Still, I held on to the power of water. The rain gilding the sidewalks was a mirror Stephen could look through to check that I was safe. Perched in my backyard willow tree, I listened to the dirty creek murmuring reassurances. On family trips to the Marin Headlands or Half-Moon Bay or the craggy Oregon coast, I looked at the ocean and I thought, this is mine. Even if no one knows. Even if I can’t tell anyone.
In the bath, I closed my eyes and held my rapidly changing body carefully still so that it wouldn’t touch the sides as I floated. I barely fit. Surrounded by water, feeling my hair spread out around me, I let myself be held.
***
Stephen never came, but my biological brother searched until he found me. A DNA test led him to my name, because I had taken a similar test years earlier and found very little besides the fact that I was probably mostly Irish. Then he went to social media. As soon as he saw a picture of me, he said, he knew. I looked so much like her.
He watched a video of me playing with my kids and choked up at the sound of my voice.
I ignored his messages at first, afraid he was a scammer, afraid he wasn’t real, afraid he might be homophobic and say something hateful when I came out to him, afraid of what in my life might change if I made space for him in it. Finally, I relented and wrote back. He wrote to me that our mother had died a year earlier.
I read those words and staggered. Multiple times I had considered contacting her using an address and phone number I’d acquired, but each time I held myself back. I didn’t want her to be able to reject me or judge my family. Now I moved through days made of dark sludge, one sentence on a loop: my mother is dead.
My brother drove across the country to meet me. He pulled into my driveway and unfolded his body from the front seat of his car, standing stiffly. He was tall, with a soft beard and kind eyes. His cheeks were my cheeks, his forehead was mine. His teenage son, my nephew, stood beside him. I walked toward two faces that looked like my face.
“Can I hug you?” I asked.
“Of course.”
I reached toward the mirror, broke the surface. We held each other. I pressed my cheek to his chest.
Did Lora hold me? I want to imagine that she did. In the photographs, holding my brother, she looks tired and defiant. She looks like a woman who would make the same choice again if she had to. She didn’t name me, or perhaps the name washed off as easily as vernix under the harsh hospital soap. On paper, I was Baby Girl Zimmerman. Then that name too was washed away.
***
I drive my family to the Huron-Evergreen Cemetery, near Lora’s hometown, and we all pile out of the car. “This won’t be fun for you,” I say to them. “I’m sorry for bringing you all along.”
“We’re here to be with you,” Robin says. “This is important.”
I feel foolish as we walk among the graves together, searching. I have a family already. Parents, cousins, grandparents who are now dead. As a child, I corrected anyone who referred to my birth mother as my “real mother.” As an adult, I told anyone who asked that Robin and I were both “the real mom” to our children. Family is chosen, created. Now I’m dragging them along on a quest that is about belonging by blood, by lineage.
Yet when we find the McQueen plot, which holds my maternal great-grandparents and an uncle who died in childhood, tears leak down my face. One hand scrabbles uselessly near my chest. I open and close my mouth. Quinn taps my arm until I look at them.
“I’m so proud of you. This is really hard to do.”
“Why am I crying?” I ask, resting my hand on my great-grandparents’ headstone. “Why does it matter that I’m related to these people I’ve never met?”
“Because it does,” Robin says.
We stay for a while, taking pictures.
“I’m really happy for you, Mommy,” Chet says as we walk back to the car. “I’m glad you got to do this.”
***
Lake Ontario is the smallest and most polluted of the Great Lakes. Yet its limits are impossible to perceive. Birds wheel, and the wind whips across the choppy waves.
I’d heard of the great lakes my whole life, but I couldn’t understand what I’d feel staring at one of them. I couldn’t grasp that when I saw it for the first time, I would believe against all reason that Lake Ontario was an ocean.
We treat the Great Lakes as separate from one another, but they are connected like organs in a body. Each lake gathers from its surroundings fertilizer and pesticides, eroded soil, sewage overflow, industrial waste—all the detritus of human self-regard and short-sightedness. Then, one by one, each lake releases its cargo to the body of water just beyond it. Superior to Michigan, Michigan to Huron, Huron to Erie, and then Erie into the final receptacle, Lake Ontario, where the collected refuse mingles before it flows into the Atlantic.
***
Lora’s childhood hometown is called Fair Haven. The name is so fanciful I might have made it up, but it is a real place on a real map. You can put it into GPS and drive there, so we do.
I expect an unassuming hamlet like the others that dot rural New York. Instead I find a tourist spot, aging but clinging to its charm. Sagging buildings with papered over windows are offset by crisp American flags and placards for historical sites. The Front Porch Gift Shop sells hoodies emblazoned with the words “Fair Haven.” I buy one, plus a T-shirt. I linger near a display of Christmas tree ornaments.
“How many Fair Haven things are you going to buy?” Robin asks. When I turn and look at her, she relents. “As many as you want, of course.” I add postcards to my basket.
We leave the store and walk past churches, a fire station. Here is my inner life made outer. My imaginary mother solidified into a physical person who came from a physical place, and this place is here, under my feet, and none of it is metaphor or imagination. A sidewalk, a cracked curb. We turn off Main Street onto Lake Street. Church bells clang, discordant.
The four of us stop before the house that Lora lived in until 7th grade.
Other homes on the block have cars in the driveway, cheerful shrubs. My mother’s house stands empty, with weeds growing up in front of the concrete steps. Someone has painted it recently, an imposing navy blue, and it squats heavily in the center of its lot with two symmetrical windows like blank eyes.
I look at the house, and I take a picture. It isn’t enough. I want to enter the house as a way of returning to her body. I want to pull it around me and breathe in dust made of her skin cells, inhaling her into my lungs. I want to pull particles of her into and through my branching bronchial tree, all the way to the alveoli at the very end, where they will settle and be absorbed.
I want to buy the house and own it. It would be like owning part of her. I want to have the money to buy this house and drive here whenever I wish and enter with a key and close the door behind me and lie down on the floor and press my hands to the hardwood and breathe. I want this, and I cannot have it.
Robin drives us to a nearby state park, less than a mile away, and we find the largest, nicest beach. Despite the July day, there are few cars in the beach parking lot. A child rides a bicycle in lazy circles on the empty blacktop, barely looking up as we approach. The place feels forgotten.
If she swam anywhere, it was here.
Maybe she splashed with her sister or floated on her back looking up at the sky. If nothing else, she took this landscape in with her eyes at least once. I walk to the water’s edge alone, carrying my shoes. In my long black dress, I am out of place. A child chases seabirds, laughing joyfully when they lift out of reach, shouting in triumph when they land again. A man digging in the sand with his young daughter watches me curiously. The shoreline curves, an arc of edges: sky and hills and sand and water and sky again reflected in the surface. Clouds a fleet of boats in the vast blue.
I step into the water, gasping at the cold.
The sun at my back casts my shadow ahead of me. Waves move restlessly, whipping forward, capped in white. My skirt snaps in the wind. I take a picture of my feet in the water. The next wave wraps around my ankles, then pulls back into itself, sloshing. I shiver but step forward, following it. Water flows over my shadow, submerging it but not washing it away. The wave retreats. I follow.
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