Spirit Level (3 page)

Even so, I feel bad about excluding Mom from my plans. Maybe I’ll tell her later, when I’ve found one of my half-sibs. Maybe not. I’ve kept some stuff from her over the years. Dumb things like taking her car for an unlicensed spin while she was out of town, or drinking too many vodka coolers at a party (she probably figured that one out—I was pretty sick the next day). And she doesn’t tell me everything either. I only know the basics about her family: alcoholics, far away, not in touch, one dead brother. She won’t say why she never dates anyone for more than about six months. And I don’t ask. There’s a line you don’t cross with my mom. If you do, you can really see the tough teenage girl she used to be.

“You look better,” she says when I go back downstairs. “Less…snotty.”

“Thanks, I think.”

“Clean clothes too.”

“It was time,” I say.

“Past time,” she says. “I’m about ready to quit for the day. Shall we order Thai?”

I can’t remember the last time I was hungry—I’ve been living on smoothies for a while—but suddenly I am ravenous. I call in the order—it’s always the same—and set the table while we wait for the food to be delivered. One of Mom’s weird rules is that we can only order takeout once a week (never more), and we have to eat it off proper dishes, sip our tea from small pottery cups, use place mats and wipe our greasy fingers on cloth napkins. So I put the kettle on and set out bowls and plates and red lacquered chopsticks (we both hate the nasty wooden ones that come with the food). I put a jug of cold water on the table and turn on the oven to warm some serving dishes. I even light a couple of candles.

“What’s the occasion?” Mom asks.

“No occasion,” I reply.

“Well, maybe I should be celebrating,” she says.

“Celebrating what? The fact that I’m wearing clean clothes?”

She laughs and says, “No, but that too. You remember that girl I interviewed? Angie?”

I nod.

“She’s off the streets. One of my colleagues was able to get her a spot in a school that’s been set up specifically for street kids. She’ll be starting in September. And she’s living in a girls’ shelter and working part-time at a grocery store. I thought you’d like to know.”

Maybe I was wrong about having a voice. Maybe I’ve underestimated the power of sociologists. After all,
I’m named after one—Harriet Martineau, the first female sociologist. My mom worships her the way some women worship the Virgin Mary. Actually, I’m named after three Harriets. The other two are Harriet Tubman, the abolitionist, and Harriet the Spy, from the book. So far, I don’t show any signs of being a sociologist, an activist or a detective.

I pour boiling water over loose green tea in a white teapot with a bamboo handle. “That’s great, Mom,” I say. “Nice to have a success story.”

“So far so good,” she says. “Lots of street kids can’t cope with the structure of school or a job. They miss their street families more than they ever miss their biological ones. But we can hope for the best. Sometimes that’s all we can do. And all victories, even the small or temporary ones, deserve to be celebrated.”

“Sounds like you’ve done a lot,” I say.

“Thanks,” she says. “But the more I talk to these kids, the more I realize that you can never do enough, no matter how hard you try.”

I think that’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard. Sadder than Byron leaving. Sadder than the polar ice cap melting. I can’t bear it that my mom doesn’t think she’s doing enough.

“Verna did enough, didn’t she? For you?” I ask.

She nods and rubs the little red grooves her reading glasses make on either side of her nose. She looks tired and worried, and I realize that it’s not just about Angie.
It’s about me too. The doorbell rings before she can answer, but I say, “I’m okay, Mom” to her retreating back.

After dinner I head to my room and go online to the Donor Sibling Registry. A long time ago, Mom paid for a lifetime membership with
DSR
. I could use the service or not, she said. My choice. She wrote the sign-in information on a pink recipe card, which she stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet that says
Be the exception, not the rule
. A lot of stuff has come and gone on that fridge over the years—drawings, cartoons, appointment cards, school photos, grocery lists—but the card was always there. Until now. Now it’s sitting beside my laptop, a bit faded, kind of grubby.
Username: Dirtydog. Password: 1rainyday
. All the information Mom had about my donor is already entered on the site—donor birthday, donor id number, donor type, name of facility, et cetera. It’s up to me to make the information public. To check the little boxes and wait for a reply. It’s optional whether you reveal where you live. I decide it can’t hurt. According to the site, some people get a response almost immediately, and some people wait for years.

I consult the
FAQ
s, read a few of the success stories, stare at the happy families in the photographs. Some of the stories are amazing—one woman found out that she and a close friend had used the same donor. Their kids were
already good friends—now they know they are related! One person talked about being glad she had found her child’s half-siblings in case anybody needed “a kidney or a lung or something” in the future. I’d never thought of that. It could come in handy, although it makes a sibling sound more like an insurance policy than a human being. But let’s face it—if I needed a kidney, I’d probably be glad to have a few half-siblings to ask.

My cursor hovers over the little boxes underneath the question
Make Public?
I check them off one by one.
Click. Click. Click
. There’s only one step left: adding a posting to the registry. The site says it’s the most important thing of all. Once you do it, you open yourself up for what they call “mutual consent contact.” Which sounds sexual but clearly isn’t. I smile and reach for my phone to call Byron and ask him if he’d like some mutual consent contact. He’ll laugh his weird, high-pitched cackle and then we’ll talk about what I’m doing—whether it’s a good idea or not, how many siblings I might have. He knows all about the sperm-donor stuff—and he’s definitely not my half-brother. He looks exactly like his dad, who is Chinese, right down to a mole on the back of his left knee. I want to talk to him so badly I’m breaking a sweat. Then I remember. It’s over. We decided. He’s probably already dating one of the dancers in his dad’s ballet company
.
The words on the screen blur, and I save my changes, set the timer on my phone for fifteen minutes, lie down on my bed and start to cry.

THE NEXT FEW
days are torture. Limiting my crying to fifteen minutes a day frees me up to fret about whether to submit my posting on
DSR
. The possibility of hearing from hundreds of half-siblings—or none—freaks me out. I’m not sure which would be worse. I can imagine feeling either bereft or overwhelmed but nothing in between. I open my profile on the
DSR
site at least once a day, fully intending to take the next step, but I can’t make myself do it. I go to the salon for a few hours every morning, and I take the dogs out for a walk in the afternoons. Most of the dogs are rescues—a little brown mutt with a huge personality, two adorable beagles, a gigantic German shepherd-rottweiler cross who is the sweetest dog on the planet. And maybe the strongest. Thank god she’s well trained. They all get along really well, but even their antics don’t stop me pining for Byron or worrying about the donor thing.

I’ve started working for Mom again too, although I’m finding it really hard to concentrate. Sometimes it takes me ten minutes to transcribe a single sentence. Sometimes I read back what I’ve transcribed and it makes no sense at all, as if I had only heard every third word.

I finally submit my
DSR
posting on Sunday after dinner. Mom is at the youth shelter where she volunteers and does her interviews. I’ve had a good day—one of my favorite clients, a girl my age named Annabeth, showed up at the salon. She’s been coming in for a couple of years, and she volunteered to be interviewed for Mom’s book. When I typed up her transcript, I knew it was her, even though Mom gave her a fake name. Mom read me the riot act about respecting Annabeth’s privacy. I was never to discuss anything I learned from any of the transcripts with anyone, but I was to be especially mindful (Mom’s word) when I saw Annabeth at the salon. Annabeth knows I’m Mom’s transcriber, but she doesn’t seem to mind that I know a lot about her life. She even jokes about it sometimes, although there’s not much to joke about. She’s blind in one eye because her mom beat her when she was a baby, and she’s been in and out of foster care most of her life. She prefers life on the streets to having a permanent roof over her head. Most of the homes she has been in were, as she puts it, shitholes run by assholes.
She makes money singing on street corners. Old jazz standards—“Summertime,” “All of Me,” “Blue Skies.” She doesn’t do drugs or drink.

She hasn’t been to school since sixth grade, but she spends part of each day in the library, where she can’t get a library card because she doesn’t have an address. She reads biographies of singers—Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, Etta James—and then listens to YouTube clips on the library computers. Her prized possession is a set of cheap earbuds. Her dream is to go to a performing-arts school.

There’s something about Annabeth—the way she chooses her words, the lilt in her voice, her calm acceptance that life is a nightmare, her joy when she sings along to my playlists—that makes me want to bring her home, feed her, share my bedroom with her, lend her my clothes, pay for singing lessons, enroll her in a school that has a music program.

Mom says the best I can do is pamper her on Sundays. “Boundaries,” she reminds me.

“Bullshit,” I say. “Verna took you in.”

“That was different,” she says. End of discussion.

So I haven’t done anything yet other than give Annabeth a scarf I knit last winter. And lend her books. We always talk about books—we both love
To Kill a Mockingbird
and hate supernatural/paranormal romance.

Today, though, as I wash her hair, she says, “I met a guy who said he’d get me a record deal.”

“That’s awesome!”

“I think he might be a pimp though.”

“Really?”

“He offered to set me up in an apartment. What does that sound like to you?”

My experience of pimps is limited, but Shanti would know. She’s not at the salon today, but I’m sure she’ll be in soon. “What’s his name? What does he look like?” I ask.

“White, skinny, mid-forties. Little mustache. Nice clothes. Drives a white Beamer. He says his name is Brad.”

“I’ll ask around,” I say. She closes her eyes as I massage her scalp, and we both hum along to “Someone to Watch Over Me.” For the hour that she’s in the salon, I can be that someone for her.

Three long days later, I get my first communication through
DSR
.

Subject line: Hello, Harriet

I stare at the words for such a long time that they start to blur. Then I click on the message to open it and squeeze my eyes shut as the words appear on the screen. What if there’s a photo? What if I don’t like him/her? Or he/she doesn’t like me? What if he/she’s stupid or mean or super right-wing? What if he/she doesn’t
like reading? What if he/she only listens to Christian country music? What if—