Page 11 of Songs of Summer

And Maggie May Wheeler’s birth mother.

It didn’t say that last part, but on closer inspection of the thumbnail photo, it may as well have—they shared the same beautiful smile.

Maggie took a screenshot of Beatrix’s picture and spent the next ten minutes zooming in and out, concentrating oneach feature of the woman’s face and comparing it to her own. There was no doubt that their coloring was the same, aside from their eyes—Maggie’s were violet-blue, Beatrix’s brown. Maggie had always wondered where her olive skin tone originated—though she never imagined it to be from the Arabian Peninsula. She studied Beatrix’s nose, her eyes, the texture of her hair. She guessed people called her Bea. Beatrix was a mouthful.

She wondered about her nature. Her own mother was the most loving woman that Maggie had ever met. Being the beneficiary of her warmth on the daily had been a beautiful thing. Maggie never felt she was a particularly warm person herself, and she often wondered, growing up, if it was hereditary. When she’d first decided to take the test, it was about learning the facts. Learning more about herself and where she came from. Learning what her mother looked like (check), learning that she wasn’t in jail (check), and maybe learning the genetic markers that she hadn’t even looked at yet.

Even with all those checks, she was surprised to find that she suddenly desperately wanted to catch at least a glimpse of her birth mother. She wasn’t sure whether she wanted to formally introduce herself, or ask some of the big questions that plagued her: Did you hold me when I was born or turn your head? Did you grieve for me or never look back? But she wanted to see her in the flesh.

“Let’s go!” Maggie shouted, standing up and pouring Jason’s hot coffee down the sink. “Let’s go to Kenyon. Let’s find her.”

Jason walked over to her, resting his hands on her shoulders. “It’s Sunday. Let’s take the day. Google her a bit. Andgo tomorrow. We’ll have a better chance of finding her on campus on a weekday.”

Maggie watched the last of Jason’s coffee make its way down the drain.

“I’m sorry I dumped your coffee.” She burst into misdirected tears. Jason tried to comfort her, pulling her into him, but she stiffened. Maggie had never been good at letting anyone perform that role.

When Jason had previously called her out on this behavior, she’d defended it casually with, “I’m just not a hugger,” chalking it up to only child syndrome. But sometimes she thought it went deeper than that. She hated to blame her parents for anything, especially since they were gone, but she wished she’d known she’d been adopted from the get-go. Not finding out until second grade fueled a distrust toward others that made her feel she could only count on herself.

“I think I want to be alone for a little,” she sighed, ignoring his dejected expression.

She took her computer downstairs to the store, where the sun shone through the front window, reminding her of her dad and their early mornings together. It was funny, she noted, how she never even thought of looking for her biological father. When she thought of her mother,a local college girl, as her parents had described her, she pictured her carrying Maggie in her womb, going to classes with a secret in her belly. She wondered if she would reach down under her desk and rest her hand lovingly over the place where her baby girl was growing inside her, or if she never thought of her as anything but a disaster—the worst thing that had ever happened to her. Her gut told her it was the latter. That’s how Maggieherself would have felt in that situation at least. As for her biological father, she considered him as not much more than an accidental sperm donor. There’s a reason they call it birth mother and biological father. Her birth mother carried her. The guy just ejaculated. He may not even know of her existence.

By the end of the day, Maggie knew all the internet had to offer on Beatrix Silver. For starters, Beatrix was the only one (besides Maggie) in her immediate family who had had their DNA analyzed by 23andMe, though other family members may have opted out of the DNA Relative feature, like Maggie intended to do as soon as she finished reading her lackluster report. Aside from a first cousin in LA she found only distant relatives. She did a general Google search. Beatrix Silver had donated to Kamala Harris’s campaign for president and to the annual fundraiser for BalletMet of Columbus, whose website showed a photo of her at their fall gala dressed in a white pantsuit and heels. She looked shorter than Maggie and bustier. She didn’t seem to have any social media presence, which Maggie knew was common among professors who didn’t want to share personal info with students. Thinking of academics and their privacy reminded her of her favorite website in college:Rate My Professors, a platform inviting student feedback on a scale of 1 to 5 and including a brutally honest comment section. She never signed up for a class in college without checking it first.

Maggie held her breath as she typed in “Beatrix Silver, Kenyon College.” Giving her baby up for adoption she could forgive, but there was little Maggie despised more than an unforgiving, C+ grading professor.

Beatrix Silver, Kenyon College

Grade: 4.7

Pretty great!

100 percent would take her class again.

Get ready to read.

Caring.

Tough grader.

Participation matters.

Thoughtful. Engaging.

Love her popular cultural references, especially her literary analysis of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Returns emails quickly.

Maggie felt comfortable around academics from her time hanging out with Jason and his colleagues. Sometimes she found them a bit pompous, throwing big words into every sentence and ready to debate anything and everything, though Jason was the least pretentious person she knew. Maggie was intelligent and always did well in school, but she wasn’t as cerebral as that crew.

Maybe she should send Professor Silver an email.

Dear Mom,

I’ll get right to the point—oops, I already did.

The sound of her laughter was drowned out by the jingling of the reindeer bells that her mother had attached to the front door before her final Christmas. Maggie had never taken them down.

---