The Garden of Lost and Found by Dale Peck Read Free Book Online Page A

small mirror.
    Among the other documents that had been in my great uncle’s son’s attic was a photocopy of my birth certificate, from which I gleaned the first hint of the story I was now getting in full. In the line marked by the circled “boy” had been typed “James Ramsay” and in the line marked “mother’s name” had been typed “Virginia Ramsay” but in the line marked “father’s name” there had just been a magic marker stripe whose thick smear dominated the page like an asphalt runway in the middle of a snow-covered field. For thirteen years I’d thought a name had been crossed out by that line, but now I realized no name had in fact ever existed, and as I studied myself in the clouded glass (did my mother, I wondered, like to look at herself as she worked at this desk, or did she keep the mirror here so she could, without turning, watch the leaves flickering in the garden behind her?) my eyes finally lit on my own hair, which was not black but brown, not thick but thin, with a lazy curl to it that almost disappeared when it grew out. I pulled it from its rubber band, attempted to fluff it up with my fingers, but it hung in limp wispy brown strands because it is in fact limp and wispy and brown—just as, by all accounts, my mother’s had been—and when I finished her letter (“I always loved your black hair Jamie, it was so thick, it reminded me of your fathers”) I picked up the scissors that had waited along with mirror and letter for an entire decade, and I cut it all off.
    Well. When I found her first letter I’d reacted by tossing a lit match into the box, and the resulting fire had burned up the letter and my birth certificate and “John’s Things” and the roof of my great uncle’s son’s house, so it seemed to me I took her latest revelation rather well by comparison. Then again, I didn’t have matches handy, so maybe the scissors were just a way of making do. But something fell away with that hair. My past, I’d’ve said if you asked me in the moment, though now I realize it was something more subtle. Something like desire: the desire to know who the mother was that had haunted me my whole life, the desire to know why she’d left, and why it would have been worse if she’d stayed. You’d be surprised how easy it is to forget a woman you never knew, a woman for whom your birth and her death serve as the two major connections—I know I was, when, nearly a year later, I finally remembered her. But the letter in which my mother had decided to tell me I wasn’t just a bastard but actually fatherless contained the coda “Love Mom,” and I couldn’t follow that simple instruction. I would not, not now, not any more, not again , and instead I played Delilah to my own Samson, and I cut off all our hair.

two

    NO ONE TELLS A STORY without intention. Um, duh . But I was so shocked by my mother’s letter that it was days before I began to question why she wrote it. What could she have hoped to gain by informing me of my uncertain paternity? Was she trying to justify her decision to leave, or confess a sin of omission? Certainly if any of my relatives knew the truth they never hinted at it. Then, too, what effect did she think her letter would have on me? That’s a question I’m not sure I could answer even now. Yes, I hacked off my hair. But I did that because I was mad at my mother—not only for abandoning me, but for girting the image of her son with the features of men she’d known for perhaps an hour or two, an evening. Did she think such a revelation, however honest, would somehow free me? And if so, from what?
    The truth is, I’d never given much thought to my father. I’d always opted for one of those girl-in-trouble scenarios in which the boy is little more than a sperm donor. I imagined that boy to be blissfully ignorant of my existence, whereas my mother had stuck around for almost a year before she took off. It was her I wanted to know, not some guy who hadn’t