out. Sophie.
I stopped the bike, leaning against the railing as I said hello. A pigeon flew up from the underside of the bridge. Another bicycle went by me, the rider a flash of orange-and-yellow Lycra topped with a superhero helmet. Slapped across the back of the helmet was a bumper sticker, “Keep Portland Weird.”
“Hi, Sophie,” I said loudly, trying to be heard above the roar of the traffic on the metal plates of the bridge.
She told me she had more information about the midwife in Pennsylvania that she’d told me about the day of Dad’s funeral. “It turns out she does need help,” Sophie said. I could barely hear her and began to wheel my bike with one hand. She said the woman was in legal trouble. I guessed it was one of those messy lay-midwife licensing issues and was thankful I hadn’t agreed to help the woman. I already had a lead on a traveling nurse job in Pennsylvania, and my nursing license had arrived yesterday.
“I don’t know what the issue is, exactly,” Sophie said. “I’ll let you know when I find out more. But, and this is really why I’m calling, I’m pretty sure you and Marta—the woman’s name is Marta Bayer—are related somehow. At least the mutual friend we have thinks so. I wish my mother were still alive to tell us how, exactly.”
“My parents didn’t have any relatives in Pennsylvania,” I said, but even as the words came out of my mouth, I realized what she meant. She was talking about a blood relation.
A birth relation.
“Not adoptive relatives, Lexie,” she said, confirming my thoughts.
I banged my knee as I struggled to keep my bike upright. “What did you say?”
“She’s a blood relative. Maybe a cousin. Maybe closer.”
“How close?” I whispered. When I realized she hadn’t heard me, I cleared my throat and asked again, louder this time.
“She’s young, mid-thirties, I think, so she couldn’t be your birth mother. But still…”
“Why does the mutual friend think we’re related?”
“Well, we’re not positive about this,” Sophie said, “but we think that her mother, my mother, and your biological grandmother were all childhood friends in Indiana. That’s what we gathered when we met Marta at a conference a few years ago, anyway.”
I strained to listen as Sophie talked through the connections that had generated their theory that this Pennsylvania midwife and I could be blood relatives. Soon my head began to throb inside my helmet. Finally, I asked Sophie if I could call her back.
Even as I tucked away my phone, got back on my bike, and continued across the bridge, I knew what I was going to do. In my mind, I had already rearranged my schedule. I would fly out right away, but before starting the traveling nurse position in Philadelphia, I would help Marta for a couple of weeks in Lancaster County. The timing was perfect.
Sailing downhill through the last wisps of fog, I knew that if this Marta person did indeed turn out to be a blood relative, she would be the first direct connection to my past I had ever had.
Because of privacy issues, I couldn’t show James the photos of the two babies I received that day, one being Tonya’s baby that she had, in fact, kept. Sitting in my room, I looked at the photos again as I waited for him, flipping back past them in iPhoto to the previous photos too. Baby after baby. Some asleep; some bright eyed. A few yawning; a few screaming. Some with a shock of dark hair; some with no hair. Some with curly hair; some with straight. Some with fine hair so light it was transparent; two with red hair so bright it looked like flames.
I didn’t have any baby pictures of myself. Not one. In fact, I only had a couple of photos from my childhood. One of me as a distant two-year old in the garden under the windmill. Another on my first day of school. Three with Mama the year before she died. One with Dad in the orchard when I was eight. It seemed to me that my parents only used one roll of film over a span of ten years. When I started working for Sophie, I saved up and bought a camera. It was my first big purchase.
The intercom buzzed, and I pressed the button to tell James I would be right down. As I closed my laptop and gathered my things, I thought about our relationship and my urgent