Chapter 69 2019
The first time I held my daughter, I could not believe how much I loved her, and at the same time, how terrified I was.
I wanted to breathe her in and never let her go.
I wondered where this person had come from.
She did not seem real. Ten fingers, ten toes, and perfect, flawless skin, except the tiniest smile of a birthmark on her hip, the piece of me that was missing.
I named her Ivy Andrea in honor of the two people who I knew would have loved her as much as I did and who would never have the chance.
Boodo and Tiny doted on us, and never was a baby so loved.
But the day after my twenty-second birthday, when Ivy was a little over four months old, we said goodbye to our Somalian family.
Things in Somalia had again grown violent, and a white woman with a white baby was too attractive a target, so with a tearful farewell, we boarded a plane and flew to my other family, Heinrich and Esma, in Germany.
“We are shamelessly happy to exploit your celebrity for our own personal gain,” Heinrich said as he carried my suitcase toward the parking lot of the Cologne Bonn Airport. Esma carried Ivy, and she’d made it clear that she didn’t plan on giving her up anytime soon.
They were in the process of opening an ice-skating academy and were halfway through construction.
The school would be similar to the International Institute of Figure Skating but more affordable and would also have a public rink as well as a hockey arena.
Making money was not the primary objective.
Netflix’s stock had grown at an average of 86 percent a year for the past ten years, making all of us wealthy beyond our wildest expectations.
The reason for the school was, as Esma said, threefold.
“First, Heinrich and I need something to do. Second, Germany needs more ice-skating and better ice-skating. Third, we need a viable business to provide jobs for all the Albanians I want to bring over from Kosovo.”
It was the third reason that drove them.
Already they’d managed to bring over Esma’s immediate family—her mother, father, and brother—along with her mother’s sister’s family, ten people ranging in age from six to sixty.
And they were working on getting visas for dozens of others.
Esma had always said that someday skating would save her family, and she was making good on that promise.
Which was how Ivy and I found ourselves, once again, surrounded by a large circle of loving, caring people eager to help.
COVID shut the world down in March of 2020, a year after we moved to Germany. The Bonn Ice Academy, still in its infancy, closed its doors, and Ivy and I flew to Minnesota to ride out the pandemic with Meryl so she wouldn’t be alone. Elwood had gone to Florida to be near his kids and ailing mother.
It was my first time being home since Profe had died six years before.
It felt like a lifetime ago. It also felt like yesterday.
It was a place of ghosts—Mother, Profe, Bart, and Dylan—and returning meant facing those hauntings as well as risking the spotlight shining on me again.
Since the Olympics, thanks to living in Somalia and then Germany, I’d managed to mostly avoid my fame.
Our intention was to only stay until the worst of the pandemic was over.
Dr. Fauci, the country’s foremost expert on COVID, was hopeful that, if everyone complied with the lockdowns, it would only take a few weeks.
Which meant Ivy and I could return to Germany by summer.
The plan was to get in and get out, hopefully without anyone realizing I’d returned at all.