She’s as speechless as I am.
“I know,” I say, letting the information sink into my marrow, where it’ll live the rest of my life.
“What are you going to do now?”
Steadying my breath, I force myself to get a grip. I need to come back down to earth. I had my mini freak-out but now it’s back to reality.
Folding both papers together, I tuck them into the file cabinet folder where they belong. I wanted my answer. I got it. And someday, when the time is right, I’ll share it with my daughter—for whatever it’ll be worth at that time.
“Nothing,” I say. “There’s nothing to do. My life—our life—is staying exactly the same. Only difference is, now I can fill in the donor side of her family tree if she wants me to do that someday.”
Carina lingers in the doorway, hand on the knob as she studies me.
“I’m fine,” I insist, despite the fact that she hasn’t asked. I can read her thoughts—they’re practically broadcasting off her forehead. Glancing at the clock on my desk, I add, “Should be about time for Lucia’s afternoon nap, yeah?”
Carina closes the door on her way out, and I wake my laptop, diving back into the research I’ve been conducting on the Valdez family—a project initiated by a woman named Mimi who was adopted in the fifties as an infant. She never wanted to trace her biological roots, fearing it would offend her adoptive parents who were nothing but wonderful to her. But now that they’re gone and she’s nearing the twilight of her own life, she wants to answer the unanswered questions that have silently plagued her for the last seventy years.
In fifth grade, Mrs. Wesley assigned us each a family tree project for a social studies unit we were working on. At first, it seemed tedious and monotonous. I knew the names of my aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents and great-grandparents. By the time Mrs. Wesley made her way around the classroom and back, I’d already filled my tree in completely. Birth dates and all. So then she challenged me to take it further. To interview my family and see how far back I could go—to get as many names as I could, until the trail dried up.
So that’s what I did, tracing my father’s side all the way back to Colonial New England times and my mother’s side to the mid-1700s. My great-grandma Bianco, who was still living at the time, fished out a hat box full of old photographs from her time as a small child in northern Italy, and she spent hours telling me all about her cousins and aunts and uncles. There were scandals. And there were stories—some heartbreaking and some that made me snort chocolate milk through my nose. I took meticulous notes, typed them up and placed them in a binder later that night. Later on, I emailed copies to everyone on that side of our family. It wasn’t long before I was the designated family historian. And I did the same for my mother’s side—the French half of me. For my senior trip, my parents took us to Europe for two weeks, and we stopped at every landmark, gravesite, and still-standing home we could find that was in any way connected to our ancestors.
I was a year into college when my university came out with a new degree program, one that combined genealogy and DNA studies.
The rest is history.
As Nonna always says, everything happens for a reason.
Double-clicking on my family tree software, I create a new file for Lucia and type the name of her father next to mine. And then I lean back, taking it in for a surreal moment.
Rossi Alessandra Bianco (mother) and Fabian Catalano (father).
Lucia Evangeline Bianco (daughter).
Our own little, tiny family tree—one with enormous roots waiting to be explored.
All in due time.
I hit ‘save’ and return to Mimi Valdez’s project. I’m so close to uncovering the name of her biological mother, who gave birth to her at fifteen. There’s a chance she’s still living. Slim, of course, since she’d be in her mid-eighties. But I have hope. Logging into my Ancestry account, I send a message to a woman connected to Mimi’s DNA—a possible second cousin, it says. When I’m finished, I log out and shove my chair away from my desk … only to have second thoughts.
Biting my lip, I scoot back in, pull up Google, and hesitantly type in Fabian’s name, one reluctant keyboard peck at a time.
Despite the fact that this feels every variety of wrong, suddenly my curiosity is in the driver’s seat and she’s throwing caution to the wind in the name of personal interest.
The first result is his official website. One click of the mouse and I’m met with a shiny black page highlighted with neon accents and peppered with modern, sexy fonts. Various menu options offer up videos, articles, and ways to get in touch with his team. I click on the image gallery, soaking in the highly-edited action shots as well as a few menswear pictures that have probably graced the glossy pages of GQ and Esquire at some point.