I'm good at spotting a plot twist a mile away. Sometimes, I almost feel bad watching a TV show or reading a book and see this huge turn of events, and other people look so shocked when such-and-such happens. My brain, in all of its chaos, is pretty good at running lots of possibilities and coming up with ideas and potential outcomes.
People love them, the juicy, fat plot twists that leave you staring, jaw dropped and in awe of what the hell just happened.
When the plot twist is in my own life, I somehow never see it coming.
It came in the form of a phone call from my dad on Wednesday night. I ignored the call initially; I was in a board meeting and wanted to be respectful of the board's time. When I arrived home, I checked my voicemail to find the standard message: "Hi, it's Dad. Call me when you have a chance."
I dialed Dad's number and flopped down onto my bed. My dad says, "You remember that you have a half brother?"
Of course I did. My mother had told me, although I don't know him; he was born a full 11 years before me, the result of my mother being a teenager in love and doing what teenagers do. In the 60's, keeping the child wasn't always the option that exists today for a teenage mother and her boyfriend. The boy was put up for adoption.
My dad didn't particularly pause. "He showed up on the doorstep tonight."
Beat.
Incomprehensible non-words consisting of mainly me stating that I had, "zero words. No words. Zero. For this situation. Zero. Words." For a solid minute before I finally managed to strong arm my brain around the concept.
I'd looked for him. I'm a naturally curious person - find a long lost sibling? Challenge accepted! There was to be no achievement unlocked for me, though: I wasn't operating with enough information, and short of trying to literally dig into adoption records, I kept coming up short. Even if I found the information, what would I DO with it? When you're the adoptee, chances are you can find someone in a family you'll get along with, but a random family reaching out? Who knows what would happen, and it didn't feel like it was the "order" of things.
A parallel search was occurring at the same time on the other side of the state and also coming up short due to sealed adoption records. Records that were released in the last few months. It's still not an easy thing, though, between marriages, moves, name changes, it takes time to finally track down a breakthrough.
I was the first person that they actually found. With a mother's name, they found her, but couldn't actually "find" her. It's an easy jump to finding me from there, and that's where the pieces started to fall together a couple of weeks ago. His wife, a former private investigator, found pictures of me. Something in the eyes prompted her to comment that she was fairly sure that I was his sister.
They tried to reach me initially, but there's only two numbers that were found - my home number (and it turns out the ringer was off), and the number for the nonprofit that I work with, which rings straight to voicemail.
They settled on calling my dad, because chances are he'd know about it and he's a relatively uninvolved party who could provide information. My dad is one of those guys that is very stable, extremely cool and laid back, and knows how to talk to people well (in my opinion). We couldn't have asked for a better person to break the ice and feel out this brave new world of contacting each other. He wasn't in town, but they managed to talk on the phone when my dad returned and generally got it worked out that yes, my younger brother and I knew.
While in town last week for a concert, they were driving to the place they were staying. It oddly happened to be close to my dad's house, and my older brother's wife noticed the name of the road as being the one my dad lived on. Perhaps on a crazy impulse, they decided to drop by.
It sounds so much like something that I'd do that I couldn't just help but laugh. I've had a lot of laughs, since. I get what information I can from my dad, and then we move onto other topics. We say our good nights, and I start to think on it all.
By this point, it's around 22:30. I walk back to the living room in a daze, look at my husband, and say, "You should pause your game and put down the controller for this one."
So many questions burned bright in my mind; I hardly slept, and that was only day 1.
No, I am not good with my own plot twists, apparently. Not at all.
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