“Ah, yes. Sibling antics,” I said, thinking back to all the shit Zach and I did to each other as kids. Okay, and as adults. Kind of hard to get over your rivalry when you’re both professional athletes in the same sport.
Fuck, I missed him.
“Jacob is hard to tease,” Ella said. “He’s too serious by half sometimes. Typical oldest child. He and Dad are both doctors. He started as some fancy surgeon in Boston, but as Dad’s gotten older and Jacob started a family, he had the urge to move home and take over Dad’s family practice when he retires.”
“What do your other siblings do?” I asked. Her family was fascinating to me. What were the dynamics like when you had that many brothers and sisters?
“Megan is the deputy director of a non-profit in Boston that works with LGBTQ+ teens and adolescents,” she said. “Her wife is a social worker. They met when Stacey brought one of the children she was working with into the center. Theirs is a very symbiotic relationship. Stacey smooths out all of Megan’s rougher edges, where Megan is there to lift Stacey up and stick up for her when Stacey is too quiet or reserved to do it herself. And they both understand the highs and lows of each other’s jobs.”
“They sound like perfect teammates,” I said, reminded of how cohesive the last offensive line I played on was.
“Exactly. They’re relationship goals in that way,” she said. “Jane and Dave are both journalists. They met at UMF.”
“UMF?”
“It’s a college about halfway down Maine. Dave writes for the political section of the Maine Journal and Jane freelances. She’s been published in a few national press outlets this past year, mostly for taking a unique line on current events. Annabel is still in high school, and Charlie is pursuing his bachelors in molecular biology and will probably go for his doctorate before he’s done.”
“Sounds like a smart kid.”
“He is smart, but its more that he just…loves school. In a way that not many people do. He’s one of the few of us who has found his birth mother. Or record of her, at least. She was from Herat, a city in northwestern Afghanistan. The adoption agency wasn’t able to locate her, likely because the war displaced so many people, but they knew from the paperwork that she was working class and illiterate. It’s driven him to learn as much as humanly possible.”
“Makes sense,” I said. “Does his experience finding her play a part in why you haven’t searched for your birth parents?”
She looked at me.
“Tell me to shut up if you don’t want to answer that,” I said.
She shook her head. “It’s fine. Like I said that first night, I get being curious. And yeah, it is, in part. Me, Charlie, and Jacob all come from war-torn countries. The agency Jacob was adopted from doesn’t even exist anymore, and the records have all disappeared. The resulting chaos of war makes it damn near impossible to find people. Charlie was lucky just to track down those few details about his mother. He doesn’t know anything about his father.”
She fell silent for a second, worrying her lower lip in a way that I now recognized was her tell for mulling something heavy over. “Honestly, I’m more worried about what I might find instead of what I might not.”
I took a sip of my beer. “What do you mean?”
“The Bosnian War was…ugly. Not that all wars aren’t.” She turned to look at the fire. “What if I find my parents only to learn that they were killed in the Albanian ethnic cleansing? Or worse, that they were the ones doing said cleansing?”
“Jesus.” I took another deep swig of my beer.
She looked back at me. “And while my skin has olive tones in it, I have bright red hair and blue eyes. That’s not a common set of genes from the area. There were outside forces supporting the war. Something like twelve to twenty thousand women were raped by the latest estimates. I’ve always worried I’m the product of one.”
I rubbed a hand over my face. “I am so sorry I brought all this up.”
“It’s okay,” she told me. “Talking about it is better than internalizing it, right? Sorry if it makes you uncomfortable. My family is really open, and I tend to overshare.”
“It’s fine. I can handle heavy topics.”
She nodded. “I figured. I think it’s really good what you’re doing, by the way. How you bring attention to so many issues that we, as a society, really need to start talking about.”
“Thank you.”
She picked up the cards and shuffled, and I tensed a little, waiting for her to ask about my family. About Zach. It would only be fair after she just told me so much. Instead, she looked perfectly content to hold such a one-sided conversation. Like she wasn’t bursting with questions.
“Have you been to Boston to visit your oldest sister much?” I asked.
“Yup. I go a couple of times a year. Whenever I need a reminder of what civilization is like.”
“What do you think of the city?”
“A lot of cool history. Good food. Loud people.” She started dealing the cards. “The last time I was there, a cabbie almost hit a pedestrian right in front of me and they both screamed ‘Fuck your mother’ at each other, which probably shouldn’t have made me laugh as hard as I did, in retrospect.”
