We wanted to elope over Thanksgiving break. Richard had the week off from his copy-writing job, and I had the week off from teaching at The New School. But we didn’t plan ahead—Brooklyn City Hall had no appointments available. As I refreshed the screen next to Richard in his Greenpoint apartment while he worked, I saw that a man followed me on Twitter. I recognised the name immediately from a decade of privately searching for my biological family on AncestryDNA.
Hi, I’ve seen your name on ancestry dna before.
How did you find me?
I told Richard: my biological family found me. I had been passively searching for ten years. I had spit in the tube and waited six weeks, then got a shifting, colour-blocked map of ethnicity and a list of strangers who were my blood relatives. I had emailed the close ones and asked if anybody knew of a baby boy given up for adoption near Longview, Texas. The three people who responded had no idea.
I didn’t know exactly what I wanted out of finding my biological family. I was adopted by my parents when I was less than a year old, and they supported and loved me, and I had a fulfilling life in New York. I did look very different from them, which had been pointed out my whole life. I knew I wanted a picture of my biological parents. I wanted to know what I may see in the future, and I wanted proof that I did not originate from some grand experiment in loneliness, which was what I felt like growing up. I wanted evidence that I was like everyone else, and to maybe experience a familiar mannerism—a look, a twitch, like what I noticed when I saw Richard and his mother talk. Sometimes the likeness estranged me so quickly from conversations that I needed to stop to point it out.
I checked AncestryDNA and found a message from Mark: Hi Kyle! My name is Mark and I live in TX and Mexico. We share a lot of DNA; enough to make us 2nd or 3rd cousins. However, it looks like we share DNA from both my father's family and my mother's family which makes things more difficult. Ponderous! I don't recognize any names in your family tree. It would be interesting to figure out our connections. Maybe we need to go back another generation or two. Are you interested in trying to figure it out? BTW, are you an author? Feel free to call me. Thanks! Mark.
After I read this to Richard, he told me to be careful. The author line made me nervous, too. I’d seen what happened to my friends after their books were published: long-distant family members surfaced to ask for money, friends reappeared from ghostings, and some people who you thought would be the same friend they’d always been treated you differently. Still, I gave Mark my number and waited for him to call.
When I picked up the phone, he said, “Hey, cuz.”
We exchanged staggered niceties for a few minutes. Mark was jovial and talkative, but I could hardly be myself. He lived in Mexico, worked in tech, and spent his free time investigating the lost connections in his family. Ancestry was his passion. He liked the puzzle of trying to figure out how everyone was related, which tracked with the nearly thousand personal connections I had seen on his profile. He wanted to know how we were related. I told him that I didn’t know—I was adopted.
There was barely any information about my birth. I was born on April 1st in Longview, Texas. No hospital listed. The agency had handed me over to my parents, and the only thing they told them was that my biological mother was very young. Even that, when I asked them about it, they couldn’t recall if it was true or if it was something they themselves believed.
Mark wanted to help me find my birth parents. He had already connected a few lost cousins with their biological family. The family was huge, and a few kids seem to have been given up for adoption. He asked if I was comfortable giving him my AncestryDNA password. Obviously, I said no. I wondered if I was getting scammed. He explained that a lot of the people on the website were older and not technologically savvy, so he managed accounts for some of them. Then he told me that I could make him a manager of the DNA profile, which would allow him access to my DNA matches, and he could figure out who to contact. He walked me through how to set this up, and then he asked, “So you have a book coming out?”
I said, “I do.”
Just like that. He wanted me to tell him more. The Lookback Window was going to come out in August. He asked what it was about, even though he already knew. He had obviously Googled my name, clicked on what came up about me, and followed me on Twitter to get my attention. He had to have known I was gay, that I lived in New York, that I worked as a lecturer at The New School.
The conversation exhausted me. He asked if I would be comfortable with him reaching out to people in the family to gain information. I gave him my permission. He said he’d move carefully; this was a sensitive subject, and people may wonder why I was entering their lives and what I wanted. They might be scared that I was in it for something.
I was nervous about the same thing. Why was it that only now that I had something coming out in the world, something that made people want to claim my name, that I was finally contacted? I had been on AncestryDNA for a decade, had messaged the same people, but nobody cared. Why look for me now? Was it simply that I was easier to search for? Or was it that you didn’t want just anybody joining your family—you wanted somebody? As for me, all I wanted was a picture of my biological family. Mark said he would call me in a couple weeks after he had done some digging. I thanked him, ended the call, and lay back on the white comforter.
Richard wanted to know how I felt. So did I. I already had a family, which meant I wasn’t chasing after something I never had. I had no control over any of this other than to reject Mark, so I couldn’t spend too much time thinking about it. I was reluctantly hopeful that this would lead to a person, a picture, a conversation. But this was more profound than just that. The situation felt a little too close to revealing the Great Mystery, as if I shouldn’t be peeking into the workings of life before it became mine and certainly not into the life that never became mine. The pressure on the simple existence of my adopted life made me feel like it was all false, as if I were concealing something, as if being adopted made me a lie, and this person had come to deliver me into the truth, although as the days passed, the opposite felt truer.
With one exception: I was explicitly hiding what happened to me as a teenager, which inspired my novel. A man messaged me on MySpace when I was fourteen. I went to his house. He told me he was going to marry me, and over a period of three years, from fourteen to seventeen, he drugged me, raped me, and posted ads on Craigslist to find old men who would rape me for cash and drugs. He was violent and has been in and out of jail ever since. After I turned twenty-three, I went to the police, but the statute of limitations had passed. I stupidly got married to my first husband. Then New York passed the Child Victims Act, which created a one-year lookback window, where survivors had a year to decide whether or not to bring a civil case against their abusers. I thankfully got divorced. Figured out what justice meant for me. Attended NYU grad school. Tracked down the men who raped me to record their confessions. Nearly killed myself with drugs. Survived. Spent years in treatment at the Crime Victims Treatment Center. Lived a long time in the afters, where I learned to live in the truth of what happened, which is to be honest and keep myself safe, and ever since, I’ve been pretty happy. Essentially: I’ve spent my adult life trying to heal from this and attend to the resulting C-PTSD.
I didn’t want to tell Mark about my novel because I didn’t want him to question my life. He had no claim on it. He wouldn’t understand. One moment of bad luck can easily multiply, and then a decade has passed. I didn’t want him to hint that he wished I was never adopted. I could not stomach the idea that he thought I should have had another life. I could never wish away what I had now, the people I loved who cared for me. So: I didn’t tell him about the book.
Mark called the next day. I hadn’t expected to hear from him for a while, but he told me that when he checked my profile, he found that my closest DNA match was his aunt. He called to talk to her, and she revealed that there was somebody in the family who could be my potential father. Most of the family lived in a town between Houston and Longview; he would have been a teenager around the time I was born, which would match with the only information my parents had about my biological family. Mark said he needed to approach the potential father tactfully. He had his own family, a wife and kids, and Mark didn’t know how he would react to the question or the news. Mark wanted to talk to this man in person because Mark himself was only his cousin, and they had never really spoken. Mark planned to talk with him privately at Christmas, and then we would go from there. Mark reiterated that his family may wonder what it was I wanted out of them, and I assured him nothing, other than an answer to the lifelong question of who I was. What he did say was that it was clear: I was part of his family. He used his own last name, the last name of many strangers on my AncestryDNA. I was one of them, he said. I was one of us.
Later that day, when I checked Project Cupid (Brooklyn City Hall’s name for the wedding bureau), I saw an appointment for the following morning at 9:30 A.M. I texted my best friends to see if Jane or Cosima could come to City Hall to be our witness, and Cosima told me that she could meet us there. It was the World Cup that day and she had planned to be up early to catch the games. Richard undid his whole closet looking for what to wear. He knew what I wanted to wear—if you were meeting me at Macri Park, our favourite home bar, you would find me in a navy and red Nascar racing jacket, a green Celtics jersey, and my silver chain with a nameplate that read badboy. That was what I wore. I wanted to look like myself. Richard wore a grey suit with a white undershirt and a silver chain. That morning, we took the G to City Hall and waited for Cosima, who showed up in a striped navy suit and heels. We waited with our masks on to be called into a room where Richard and I would hold hands in front of a stained glass window. We didn’t have rings, so I placed one of his own rings on him, and he placed an Aries ring onto my pinky finger, because that was the only place where it fit.
When the ceremony ended, I cried on the walk to a restaurant in Carroll Gardens, where we met Jane and drank bottomless mimosas until we walked back to her house and watched the World Cup for a few hours, then drunkenly took a cab back to Richard’s. This was the happiest day of my life. Later that night, we met the rest of our friends at Macri Park and drank to our semi-secret, as we were planning an actual wedding for the following year when the rest of our families could be there. But we wanted to have our own world first, and not have to worry or wait for the future. We were in love, and now we were family.
A few days later, we took what should have been a thirty minute car ride to my parents’ house in New Rochelle, but with holiday traffic, it took two hours. We kept what we had done secret because we didn’t want my parents to feel upset that we hadn’t told them, and I didn’t want to have a conversation where it could have been implied that I had made a mistake when I knew I hadn’t. I had made many mistakes, and I had hurt myself endlessly by avoiding my own feelings, and nothing but time could prove what I knew. I protected myself, and Richard protected me too.
A week later, I heard from Mark unexpectedly around 9:00 P.M. When I picked up the phone, I heard a group of people talking and laughing as if he were at a party. Mark told me that he was with my cousins and my aunt. They called out from the background. They were drinking, or maybe on a boat. I couldn’t hear him clearly, but he put me on speaker and I softly, awkwardly said hi to four people who welcomed me to their family and told me that they were excited to meet me. They said they had looked up my novel and asked me what it was about; I half-lied to them in their revelry, saying that the book was about gays in New York and how to heal from violent trauma. They asked me how I even got a book deal, and I told them about grad school at NYU and getting an agent, and they told me they wanted to order copies and get their books signed and asked if I could do that for them. They said there was a bookstore near where they lived in Houston, Brazos Bookstore, and I told them that I would tell my publicist that I should go there in order to meet them. They said they couldn’t wait to get it and have me sign it. I told them I had to go, that I was going to a rave and couldn’t talk any longer—but I did have more time to talk. I had nothing more I could think to say. It was nice to talk to you. I have to go.
My husband fixed us drinks in the kitchen. I just didn’t want to talk to those strangers, I didn’t really know why they wanted to talk to me, and I knew if they had looked up my novel, they knew what it was about. I said as much to Richard, and we both agreed they were hoping it was somehow different, that when people say they don’t understand something sometimes that was their way of saying that they wished it were something else. The novel’s premise is easy to understand, but I think it was hard for these strangers to accept that this new member of their family cared so much about recovering from violent trauma and childhood sexual abuse. I believe their asking meant they were hoping I would confess that the book had nothing to do with me—that my life had been blue skies forever.
I borrowed my father’s car to drive up to Richard’s mother’s house in Connecticut for Christmas. I drove and Richard showed me the houses his family had lived in, where his father had died, his old Catholic middle school, all the haunts of his youth. He took me to an Olive Garden for the first time, and to a dying mall, too. At home, we slept on a twin bed under many blankets to keep warm during a frigid spell, the coldest I can ever remember feeling, while I wore my father’s red skiing jacket from the eighties. I hadn’t bought a coat that year. I’m not the type of person to buy something unless I love it, and the only coat I liked was this one. I would rather have frozen than withstood the feeling of not seeing myself how I wanted.
We drove back and spent New Year’s Eve at Richard’s best friend’s house in Williamsburg, taking pictures of each other kissing, lost in splendour, vodka, and friendships. I spoke to people about my biological family a little, sketching what had happened, but I didn’t like to think about it too much. Mark said I could check in with him, but I knew that would only make me focus more on something I couldn’t control. The time passed swiftly between his calls.
I heard from Mark a week into the new year. Mark had spoken with the man he thought was my biological father. He said, “If you saw a picture of him, you would know he’s your father.” When Mark showed him my picture, this man agreed—“he looks more like me than my own children.” The man’s wife agreed. I looked so much like his son, too. They gave him a DNA test and were waiting on the results. The man wanted to talk to me. He wanted to right the wrongs of the past. He wanted to learn about my parents here in New York. He wanted to know everything, to see pictures of me as a baby, to place me in his life somehow, to know enough to make me real. I sent Mark one more picture of me, then I didn’t hear from him until two months later.
Here’s what I learned: the DNA results came back to show that this man was not my father, but he was my uncle, or half-uncle. This didn’t make sense. The man didn’t have a brother. Mark called the half-uncle’s aunt, who said that the half-uncle’s father had a terrible, allegedly abusive first marriage to a woman who left him shortly after she got pregnant. The rumour was that she gave up that child for adoption, and that child was supposed to be a baby boy, who would have been my biological father. My half-uncle had asked his own father, my grandfather, about this, but the grandfather pretended like it didn’t exist (like I didn’t exist). The grandfather was tough to grow up around, and I got the sense from my conversations with Mark that he abused his wife and children. I heard a story about someone getting whipped with a belt repeatedly. Mark told me it was good I didn’t grow up in that family.
Low clouds drifted over the East River, covering Greenpoint in a soft grey-blue light. I was overcome with a depression that I had never experienced before, and I don’t know if I ever will again. My fight-or-flight gets triggered from the C-PTSD, but I luckily don’t get depressed. Except on this day, where my own violent trauma was eclipsed, rendered useless and irrelevant for an older and deeper pain, and I grieved for a person I had never met and would never meet. My body was heavy, though I knew I could move it, even if I felt immobilised. I moved slowly, deliberately, against a great force, which was the realisation that I would never meet my biological father. Mark told me that some very distant, long-dead relative had adopted my father. Mark knew who his biological family was and that they had given him up; my biological father had no need to ever take a DNA test. I would probably never get a picture of him. This was as far as the search would go, and even to phrase it like that was a balm, because the search had ended. There was nothing else to look for. I had my answer.
I couldn’t find my coat and didn’t want to prolong my search, because the longer I stayed in the apartment, the more likely it would be that I wouldn’t leave. I put on my shoes and walked outside and felt the cold pinch of snow. I called my friend Sam, who I had made plans with before I got that final call, and he could hear that I was already crying. To say I cried feels inarticulate: the tears were incessant, soft, and started long before I noticed. I recapped the conversation, repeating over and over that I wanted to know the statistics, what was the likelihood that two generations had been given up for adoption, as if math, something I already found illegible and embarrassing, would soothe this impossibility. We made other plans (which meant I wouldn’t see him until my birthday in April). Sam was sick, too, having caught a parasite that wrecked his intestines. By the time we ended the call I was nearing Macri Park, waiting for the moment to say: I need to go and be alone.
I left careful grey footprints with my Air Force Ones. Sneakers that destroyed my heels, could barely sustain any weather, but I had worn them all my life as my New York uniform, even during my California years when my friends sporting Toms made fun of me. Nobody else was around, the cars drove carefully across Union, and the Kellogg’s sign was barely a green and red glow. I felt alone in the city, and by that I mean at home, really, outside of Macri Park, where I would find Chris, my friend, behind the bar. The foggy windows prevented me from seeing inside, and I looked at the bar like I would a mirror: I saw my life.
Chris always played music for me, sometimes at karaoke even singing for me, and this night was no different. He could tell I was off, so he made me a drink and let me sit in silence in the booth near a burning stick of incense, my AirPods still playing music over the music, my life resettling over the life I would never know about. I got up twice. Once to watch my drink frost out front and smoke my vape, and then again to order another. The rest of the time I waited for my husband, who was running late, then forgot his ID at home and turned around, although I told him he didn’t need it. Nobody was here. Nobody was coming. Our friend was working. I didn’t really want to be alone anymore.
I saw his outline through the window, the enormous silhouette of his oversized hood, and he walked over to me with his hands in his pockets, my father’s red skiing jacket slung through his arm. Richard didn’t know what to do, so he got us another round, closed me out, and listened to me repeat the phrase: what are the odds? He was unprepared to answer and let me buy time with the mantra. When our drinks were done, Richard asked what would make me feel better. I told him that I didn’t want to go home yet, but it was a week night, and nothing except Beats Karaoke in Williamsburg was open this late. I called them and asked if they had a room open (of course they did; it was a Monday night during a snowstorm); and we glided over the slick ground, awkwardly staking our sneakers onto the layer of snow and slipping.
At Beats, we got a room, and we each drank four weak vodka sodas over two hours. Richard ordered food. I sent pictures of myself to my close friends whom I had texted about what had happened with the phrase: Trauma Karaoke. My phone died. Our slot ended. I felt fine, back to my life, and settled the bill. The moment we left the building, the tears returned, only now I was drunker. I started wailing and collapsing onto my husband, nearly screaming, for the first time in my life, that I wanted to go home to my parents, over and over, in the snow-quiet neighbourhood in the dead of night. When I caught my breath, Richard asked me where I wanted to go, and we went back to his apartment, where I lay my head on his chest, and the thoughts of the biological family perished as I remembered who I cried out for in the snow-blanked streets, who I reached out to as my phone was dying, who held me in their arms and called me baby, baby, baby.
Kyle Dillon Hertz received an MFA in fiction at NYU, where he was the Writer in Public Schools Fellow. He lives in Brooklyn.
