All Over the Map

2. Chapter Two

Chapter Two

The email comes three weeks later when I’m sitting in front of Judge Jackie on a Friday afternoon . It’s a terrible show. I love it with all my heart. I wish she was my grandma. I bet she lectures her adult kids on the evils of sugar and then feeds her grandkids candy when their parents aren’t looking.

My phone vibrates as the defendant tries to explain why he shouldn’t have to pay for his chihuahua knocking up his neighbor’s dachshund.

Congratulations, Kendall Barrows! Your RootsDNA results are in!

I sit up straight and mute the TV, then stare at the subject line on my screen. Your RootsDNA results are in!

I expect there to be more to this moment somehow. A marching band, maybe. Or the Jeopardy! countdown song. But not silence, and the email just . . . sitting there.

My thumb hovers over it.

Instead of opening the email, I text Mia. I broke down and told her two weeks ago when I sent the test in.

DNA test results came back.

::wow face emoji:: ::heart emoji:: ::car emoji:: ::donut emoji::

Mia will be here in twenty minutes with donuts, but I don’t know if there are enough donuts in the world for this.

I look at the email subject line again. It doesn’t say, “We found you some family!” Maybe it’ll just be boring genealogy stuff like, “You had ancestors in Ireland two hundred years ago.”

My grandparents died when I was little, and Mom has one sister we don’t see much. And I’ve never had a dad. Mom had a one-night stand on a college graduation trip in Germany. She got pregnant. She didn’t know how to find the guy. But she says it cured her of flings ever again. An impulsive one-night stand? So not Mom. She’s made up for the spontaneity by being the most organized, regimented person in Adobe ever since.

Anyway, I already know all the family there is to know on her side. That was the whole point of taking the test: maybe my bio father has aunts and uncles out there. Maybe I could find relatives.

What if it’s all fifth cousins two million times removed, so distant it means nothing?

What if I have a bunch of close relatives?

What if my bio dad himself is in the system?

I want that.

Right?

Yes.

Maybe.

Your RootsDNA results are in!

My stomach hurts.

I keep watching the door, waiting for Mia to burst through it but also hoping she doesn’t.

Finally, but also way too soon, Mia walks in. She hasn’t rung the doorbell in ten years. She drops on the couch beside me and sets a small white paper bag in my lap.

“What kind of donut do I get for uncovering my heritage?” I ask.

“Jelly-filled, duh. You don’t know what you’re going to get until you dig in.”

“Appropriate.” I pick it up and take a bite. “Raspberry. What does that mean?”

“It’s sour and sweet, but either way, it’s all good.”

“That’s corny.” Mia is the queen of the donut metaphor. But it makes me feel better. A little. I pick at the donut and she eats hers in silence, although her leg bounces the whole time. I put a hand on her knee. “You’re shaking the couch.” She stops, but it’s not in Mia to be still. Her fingers begin a fast tap on her leg. I doubt she knows she’s doing it.

When I put the donut back in the bag, unable to eat, she moves it to the coffee table. “Are you going to open the email?”

After a long pause, I shake my head. “I don’t know.”

“But I thought this is what you wanted.”

I shake my head again. “It might be I want it until I open it and find out something sad or horrifying, and then I’ll be sorry.”

She looks at me like I look at my pre-calc homework, like she’s trying but failing to understand. “Either way it’s a gamble, right? You could be giving up information that will hurt you or information that could be awesome. Which way do you want to go?”

I drop my face into my hands and make a weird squeak-moan.

She digs into her pocket and pulls out a quarter, slapping it on the table. “Flip it like my dad said. Let it decide.”

I eye it. “Doing that got me into this mess.”

“Is sitting here frozen making you feel better?”

I scowl at her. “What if he’s wrong? What if I don’t feel the answer when you toss it?”

“Then you let it decide.” She scoops it up. “Heads you look, tails you delete it. Deal?”

I pluck at my lip which is dry and scaly from me biting it.

“Kendall . . .”

“Flip it.” The words burst out of me.

It spins up then down again toward her waiting palm so fast, but it feels like I’m watching in slow-motion, and this time Dr. Sandoval is wrong: I still don’t know which way I want the coin to land.

Mia tilts her hand so I can see the quarter. Heads.

George Washington stares into the distance, steadfastly ignoring me and the fact that he’s just turned my life upside down.

I open the email and scan the welcome message, stopping at the link to my results on the RootsDNA website. I click it, and the faster the loading bar goes for the new page, the further my stomach drops.

Mia is crowding over my shoulder, and she gasps when a pie chart comes up.

“Eight percent Native American!”

She almost shouts it in my ear, and I flinch and turn the screen away from her. “Give me two seconds to look at this myself.”

She scoots back and her leg starts bouncing.

A colorful pie chart fills the screen in shades of blue, green, and red. The biggest section, red, is Great Britain. That’s followed by a green slice for Ireland and Scotland, then a small blue slice—the eight percent still ringing in my ears—for Native American. One more gray sliver shows five percent from other regions.

Native American? There are a few things about me I know had to come from my dad, like my height. I’m five-seven, five inches taller than my mom. And my green eyes. They’re so dark they look brown unless you’re staring right into them. Mom’s are blue. But she and I are both pale. Hilariously pale. We share the same medium-brown hair, mine straight, hers always curled and sprayed to death by 7 AM.

But there are other things besides eye color and height that I’ve wondered about, things that are so different from my mom. Inside things, looking-at-the-world things. I know what’s not hers, but I don’t know what’s my biological father’s and what’s purely mine.

Mia can’t take it anymore. “What else are you?”

“I’m still on the Native American thing. It breaks down even further.” I click and gasp. “It says Mexico! I thought it would say Cherokee or something, but I think it means any indigenous people in North America.”

“Prima!” She lunges for me and hugs my head before I push her off me. “I knew it! I knew you had to have that good Mexican blood running through you for me to love you so much. I bet we’re cousins.”

“Does eight percent mean my dad was a quarter Mexican?”

“No. Dang, you suck at math. It means one of your grandparents was. You’re one-sixteenth Mexican?” She tilts her head to study me. “I believe it with my heart but I don’t see it with my eyes. And trust me, I want to.”

I bristle, but I’m not sure why. “You can’t tell I’m half genetically British by looking either.”

“Uh, I definitely can.”

“But not twelve percent Scottish and Irish,” I say, checking the breakdown again. I sound annoyed. I’m not, exactly. It’s more like when I was little and Mom took me to visit her sister once in Denver. We drove over to see the Continental Divide, and Aunt Nora said that sometimes when the weather was right, the clouds would drop low, and you’d find yourself walking around inside one. It sounded magical. Sure enough, we ended up standing in a cloud. It was more damp than magic, but every time I would shiver and almost ask to go back to the car, my brain would whisper, But you’re in a cloud . I kept standing there, torn, because I couldn’t decide if I liked it or not, and that’s exactly how I feel now.

I look at the DNA results again. There’s a tab for DNA relatives, and I click it before I can second-guess myself anymore. This is exactly why I ordered the stupid test to begin with. A new page opens. “RootsDNA Matches for Kendall Barrows.” I swallow as I read it, trying to make sense of what I’m seeing. “There are seven pages of results.”

“Seven relatives? That’s amazing.”

“Seven. Pages. Seven pages. Of people. Who I am related to.”

Mia looks the way I felt the first time I was in her house when all her brothers were home. “That’s. Um.”

“Yeah.” Seven pages. How is this possible?

Her leg bounces again. “So, what are we talking here? Close matches or, like, twelfth cousins?”

I take a deep breath and scroll down. “It’s divided into categories. The first one is close family.”

“And?” She’s bouncing faster.

It’s showing one “likely” aunt and two “likely” uncles. I hate the phrasing. This is too massive to be defined by the word “likely.” “I might have an aunt and uncles. Maybe?”

“Maybe?”

“It says ‘likely.’ It’s confusing.” I hand her my phone and wonder what to do with these aunt and uncles. Can I message them on the site? What do I even say? My mom hooked up with your brother seventeen years ago. Hi.

Mia studies the results. She swipes some more, reads longer. Then, in the voice she uses when her second oldest brother, Adrian, is in a bad mood and she doesn’t want to set him off, she says, “I think you misread this. Look at this.” She turns the phone to face me. “It uses a measurement called centimorgans to show how much of your DNA is the same. An aunt or uncle would be under 1100. But look where these first three fall.”

All the profiles use a default pink or blue avatar with a generic head silhouette. Beneath the first one, a pink head calling herself Bg112, it says, “Shared DNA: 1824 cM across 58 segments.”

The first number catches my eye. “If an aunt typically goes up to 1100, then what does 1800 mean?”

“Click the little question mark. That’s how I figured it out.”

“Grandparent, aunt, uncle, or half-sibling,” I read. I look up at her. “So? That’s even more confusing.”

She stops bouncing and leans over to squeeze my knee. It’s a gentle touch, but it scares me, because it’s the kind of thing you do when you’re trying to comfort someone. “The first blue one has a public profile. You should look at it.”

The blue one uses the name Seth T. Bird. “Is it bad?” I ask her.

“Just . . . look.”

I open it. There’s a picture and a short bio.

He has brown hair, and when I enlarge his picture and squint, I can see dark green eyes. He looks college-aged and he’s wearing an Arizona State University shirt.

Green eyes that are almost brown.

Slightly older than me.

“‘Doodler, thing-maker, movie-watcher, run-taker. Oh, and baseball player. I have two moms who could only afford a sperm donor once, so I have no siblings, and I’m looking to see who else is out there.’”

I turn the phone to Mia. “Any chance this is my grandfather?”

“I’m thinking no.”

“And probably not an uncle?”

She hesitates and shakes her head. “Probably not.”

“So. I might have a brother.” This feels stranger than an uncle. As much as being the only girl drives Mia crazy, I’ve always wished I had brothers like hers. But I don’t want to hope. “Did my dad run around knocking up women?” Once again, I’m forced to contemplate a version of Mom I’ve never understood, someone who gets drawn into a vacation hit-it-and-quit-it with a German hottie. The guy she’s dating now is the total opposite. Robert is the human equivalent of soy milk.

There’s another long pause from Mia. This isn’t like her. I can almost feel her weighing and measuring words. “There’s another possibility.”

“They’re not my mom’s kids.” I’d bet anything on it.

She shakes her head. “This guy says he’s a sperm donor baby.” She lets the words hang there and watches me.

“And?” I’m not following, but I’m trying to.

“What if you . . .” Her eyes encourage me to fill in the blank.

“What if . . . I’m a sperm donor baby?” I wrinkle my nose at her. No. “She had a European quickie with some guy she met at a museum in Berlin. If this is my brother, wouldn’t he be in Germany? What’s he doing in an ASU shirt?”

“Think about it. It’s possible.” The gentle way she says it tells me how much she thinks this is the truth. There’s a slight cajoling mixed with sadness in her tone, inviting me to believe this bizarre new theory.

“It doesn’t make sense. Why would my mom make up a story about a fling? And honestly, we’re not even sure this guy is my half-brother.” But I look at the picture again, and it’s hard to hold on to that rationalization.

“Brothers can be cool,” she says. “Maybe he’s like Gabe.”

She says it like it’s a good thing, but it’s hard to think of Gabe that way. He’s eighteen, a college freshman in Boulder. Far away, finally. He’s her favorite brother, but he’s my least favorite person. In the world. Ever.

I run away from the subject of Gabe just like I avoid Gabe himself any time he’s around. “This pink head could be an aunt.” I say it because I’m scared to hope for a sister too. I click open the pink avatar, but her profile isn’t public. I’ll have to request contact to find out more, but we share 1800 centimorgans. The third avatar, another blue one, doesn’t give me any info either, just the same “grandparent/uncle/half-sibling” tip.

The front doorknob rattles. I panic, shoving my phone under my leg a half-second before Mom sweeps in and comes to an abrupt stop to blink at Mia as if she’s not at our house all the time. Mom always does this.

“Hi, girls.” She sets her purse on the small table by the door, slides off her high heels, and settles them in their place beneath it. “What are you up to?”

“Nothing,” we say together, immediately sounding like we’re Up To Something.

Mom is forty-two and keeps herself looking young with yoga and regular facials, but in person I can see the emerging lines and stray silver hairs that are airbrushed out of her real estate ads on bus benches and open house signs around Adobe.

“Hi, Maggie,” Mia says. “Sell any houses today?” She’s trying to distract her. I didn’t tell Mom I took the DNA test, and I need time to think before I confront her with any of this.

“Not today, but I have a deal closing this week. Come help in the kitchen and download your day for me.”

“Getting ready for Friday family dinner?” Mia asks. That’s what Mom calls our weekly meal at Robert’s house with his adult children, but there’s nothing “family” about it.

“I’m making eggplant parmesan,” Mom says. “Would you like to come?”

“No, thanks.” Mia climbs from the sofa. “Daniel’s driving from Denver. He’s bringing his girlfriend to meet us.” Daniel is Mia’s middle brother. “Text me after dinner, Kendall.” She waves and lets herself out.

And now, somehow I’m supposed to shoot the breeze with Mom as she tortures an eggplant while I wonder if she’s been lying to me my entire life.