death certificates. I’m doing some research.”
“Not you too,” she said, flipping up a square of countertop and letting me pass into her domain.
“You’ve had other requests for Monte family records?” I asked.
“No, silly,” she said, swatting my arm. “We are totally overrun with genealogy requests. I have been photocopying and mailing records all over the place. Just last week I priority-mailed twenty-three birth records to a lady in Florida. She took a genetic test and realized her dad—the man she grew up with and whose name she carries—wasn’t actually her biological father. Her mother told her the name of her real father is Joe Johnson, from Marlborough, New York, so I went through every one of these cabinets hunting down that name. There were twenty-three Joseph Johnsons born between 1899 and 1935.” Mrs. Thomas gave me a look of exhaustion. “I know I shouldn’t complain. Vital Records revenue is up by about a million percent.”
She walked back into the maze of filing cabinets. “Are you making a family tree? Everyone I know has one going on ancestry.com. Or they’re doing genetic tests from that other site. What’s it called? Two-three something. I just did a spit test and found out I’m not even African!”
“What are you, then?” I asked, surprised by this. Her skin was a dark caramel brown.
“If you ask me, I’ll tell you I’m African American. But according to my test, I’m thirty-nine percent Hispanic, forty-one percent Middle Eastern, twelve percent Irish, and eight percent African! I’m more Irish than African? I couldn’t believe it, so I took it again. I paid another hundred dollars to get the same result!”
“That is crazy,” I said. Maybe I wasn’t the only one with family secrets. “What a surprise.”
“It changes everything and nothing,” she said, shaking her head, as if she were ready for whatever life might throw at her. “I mean, I am still me, but jeez, it’s hard to get your mind around something like that.” She went to her desk and pulled out a piece of paper. “Here it is, all official.”
The words “Genetic Profile” were written across the top. Below this, there was a sequence of ancestral groups—Northwestern European, Middle Eastern, North African, Southern European, East Asian, Sub-Saharan African, Native American, and so on, with percentages next to them. There were “Maternal and Paternal Haplogroups,” a section titled “DNA Family,” and another column called “Neanderthal Variants.” A chart outlined the ancestral group results Mrs. Thomas had described.
I knew exactly what kind of test this was. Some months before, I had bought a genetic testing kit from the online company Mrs. Thomas had mentioned. The site promised to give a complete profile of my ancestry, including the countries of origin and the ethnicity of my ancestors, all for ninety-nine dollars. I had spit into a plastic tube, mailed it to a lab, and awaited my results.
That had been many months before, in the wake of the last miscarriage, when I’d been desperate to find something, anything, that might explain why I couldn’t have a child. I had seen specialists, none of whom had answers for me. The idea struck me, as I watched Mrs. Thomas search through the M filing cabinet, that it wasn’t a coincidence that I had taken a genetic test when I did. I had been in mourning. My marriage, the baby, my parents, my studies—I had lost so much in the previous years. Sadness and disappointment had subsumed me, ripping out the seams of every part of my life, even the parts I thought were tightly bound. Without Luca, I was alone in a way I had never been before. There were moments—late at night, after drinking too much—when I felt that the universe, with all its billions of life-forms, its bacteria and protozoa, its plants and animals, was broken somehow. How could the world be teeming with life when I felt so utterly alone? I wasn’t going to get into it with Mrs. Thomas, but I had needed that test. I needed to believe that a scientific breakdown of my genetic composition—a clean, color-coded pie graph that demonstrated my family heritage scientifically—would tell me something profound about who I was and why I was floating untethered, no family to steady me.
As it turned out, my test results never came back. I guessed they had been lost in the mail, and sent an email to the site’s customer service address, asking for information. But then things came to a head with Luca, and I