All My Children Have Come Home

I was staring into a well of memories, not seeing where I was. Then, vaguely, I became aware of someone sitting next to me on the bench. My brother snapped me out of my reverie, saying, "Come sit with the rest of us."

I looked up to see our sisters nearby. They had unconsciously arranged themselves in order of their ages, just as our mother had always done; Mathilde, Grace, Felicia, and Dani. Behind them stood our brother Patrice. He was explaining to his two young children: This was a funeral service. They were in a church. They had to be on their best behavior.

"Hey Leon," I finally managed, acknowledging my brother's invitation. "Sure. Thanks. I'll come and sit with you all on your bench."

Leon half smiled. "It's called a pew," he reminded me.

"Pew. Bench. Whatever," I mumbled. "The last time I was in church, Michelangelo was painting the ceiling of the Sistine chapel." That was an exaggeration, of course, but it didn't feel that way.

Seeing me start to rise, Leon put a restraining hand on my forearm. "Did she ask you?" he murmured.

There have been epochs in our lives when my brother and I have been intimately close; and there have been stretches when we barely seemed to know each other. Gazing at him in that moment, I felt as though he were myself and yet a stranger; I felt that I could sense the weight and recall the outline of every moment of our shared lives.

Except, I could not.

***

It was the day we celebrated my fifteenth birthday that I found out I was not who I thought I was. Leon and I had just gotten back from school, and our mother had ordered us straightaway to change our clothes and clean out the chicken pen. The chickens were her hobby, but somehow this entailed all we older kids taking turns tending to them. Later on, of course, we understood that the chickens were her way -- one of her many ways -- to impress on us the need to be responsible and reliable.

I don't recall how it came up, because what Leon said washed everything else from my awareness. I think I was griping that the party we were going to have over dinner was for me, and it was my day, and so why did I have to clean the chicken pen?

"It's not really your birthday, you know, so don't act so big," Leon told me. "It's just the anniversary of the day you showed up on the porch."
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"I'm a little too old for the story about the stork winging in to deliver a bundle of joy," I shot back.

"You're always such a smart-ass," Leon scowled. "You know what I mean."

"What, someone left me swaddled in rags and rang the doorbell?"

"No. Christ, come on! You rang the doorbell. Three years ago today."

I was already ticked off about having to tend the stupid chickens, and I didn't want to have to do this chore to the accompaniment of my brother's stupid teasing. "Shut the hell up," I snapped.

But Leon wasn't laughing or razzing. He looked perplexed. "You really don't remember?"

I felt a trickle of something cold and scary all down my backbone.

"Three years ago, you showed up on the porch and you rang the bell and asked for our mother. You don't remember this?"

Leon was still not laughing. He looked completely serious. But he couldn't have been telling the truth. I had spent every birthday in this house, every Christmas; I had lived every summer, and every winter, right here with these people. With my family.

"Bullshit," I said.

"Right," Leon replied. "So explain to me how you and Mathilde are the same age, but we celebrate your birthday in September and hers in November. What, are you twins, and she just decided to take two months longer to get here?"

It was true. Mathilde's birthday was only two months after mine. I had never thought about this before. But I also never been anywhere else but right here... had I? Casting my mind back, I recalled my birthday from the year before, and the year before that... but when I tried to conjure my twelfth birthday, three years previously... nothing.

It was enough evidence to convince my rational mind, but I still didn't believe it. I stared at my brother, searching for a rebuttal, coming up with none.

"You're adopted, Clemence," he told me.

Some sort of white panic or red rage must have engulfed me then, because all I remember about the next few moments is rushing out of the room and down the stairs in a flurry of thumping feet. I think I was screaming for my mother, or maybe just screaming blue bolts of primal distress. I'm not sure. I do recall clearly that I was in an agony of pure existential terror: If I wasn't me, the son of my parents and the brother of my siblings, then... who the hell was I?

Our mother threw down her knitting with a look of irritation as I came stamping and wailing down the stairs, Leon close behind me.

"I didn't mean to," Leon began.

"Boys!" she exclaimed in a rare burst of anger. "I told you to take care of the chicken coop, not rough house!" Then, seeing my wide eyes and the tears streaming down my face, her irritation evaporated.

"I'm not adopted, am I? Leon's just making it up, isn't he?"

"I'm sorry," Leon said behind me, in a subdued tone. Hearing him in that moment, hearing him contrite and ashamed, finally convinced me. I knew he was telling the truth, horrible as it was.

Horrible, but it made sense. All sorts of nasty inconsistencies I'd never thought much about began snapping into focus. No wonder I wasn't as tall as the others. No wonder I was... different. Somehow. In every way. Destined to be the black sheep, dad would say, destined to be the artiste, and he'd wink at me. Not like the others, because I wasn't really one of them.

"I didn't know he wouldn't remember," Leon said, still in that same small voice.

"Leon, go take care of the chickens. Your brother will be out in a moment."

Leon trudged out, and Mother offered her hands. "Is this true? You don't remember how you came to us?"

Mute, choking on tears of panic and confusion, I shook my head no like a child.

Gently, she explained it to me. I had knocked on the door and Mathilde had answered.

"Is Greta home?" I had asked.

Mother came to the door. Whose little boy was I? Who told me to come here? How did I know Mother's name was Greta?

"All you ever told us was that an angel had instructed you to come and live as part of our family," Mother said.

Thoughts crowded and streaked through my consciousness, all of them so sharp and glaring that none of them seemed to take the form of words. They were daggers, daggers of light -- piercing me, driving through me --

"Now listen to me, young man," Mother said, arresting my inner tumult. Her words... no, rather, her voice fended off terror, held panic at bay. Her voice, the voice of my mother, salve and salvation, security at the precipice of nightmares and horrors in the darkness. "However you came to be here, I am your mother," she told me. "Your father is your father. Your brother and sisters are your siblings. We are your family. You are one of us."

"But I'm not," I almost sobbed.

"Yes you are, and that's the end of it," she said, in that way she had.

"I'm sorry," Leon said when I joined him in the chicken pen. "I wasn't trying to be mean." I gave him a half-hearted half smile, still sniffling, still baffled and reeling. I sort of hated him for months afterwards.

***

Over the years I heard more and more detail about how Mother and Father had used Father's pull with the police and the judge to secure my adoption as soon as possible. Sooner, in fact, than usually was possible. He was a well-known and well-respected lawyer, our father was, and he knew who to talk to and what to say.
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But for years, as I grew up, he would occasionally ask me about the angels. The angel who sent me; whatever other angels I might happen to know about. What were they like? Did they have other messages for him, for mother?

"I don't believe in angels, Dad," I would always say, trying to laugh it off. He would smile, but he never believed me, even once he learned that I had no memory of anything before I came to them. No memory of any angel telling me to knock on their door. No memory of being in the custody of social services for three or four days, with him and mother visiting every morning, every evening. No memory of the police questioning me, gently and repeatedly, about my origins, my parents, where I lived. They put out bulletins and feelers, and they never matched me to any known missing children. If I had parents out there, they didn't seem to be trying too hard to get me back.

I didn't know, or refused to give them, my name or birthday or any other information, so they named me Clemence and regarded September 18 -- the date I had come knocking -- as my birthday. They estimated my age as twelve years, but who knows? I might be a year older. I might be a year younger. I was thin and covered with bruises, so it's very possible that my development was slowed due to poor care and mistreatment. Maybe I am really 52 instead of an even half century. That's not such a cheering thought.

***

"Did she ask you about the angels?" Leon asked me, in the church, on the day of our mother's funeral.

Just a few days before, frail and barely able to breathe, sitting upright in bed to help keep her lungs clear, she had told me the last details. It was then that I felt I really understood: If I had been some random kid, Mother and Father would never have pursued, insisted, nagged. They would never have even considered adopting me, much less going about it with such dogged, single-minded intensity. But I wasn't just some random kid. They truly believed some divine agency had sent me to them. As it turned out, they had a reason for thinking this.

When Mathilde called Mother to the door and she smiled and asked who I was, I told her this:

I didn't have a name. The angel told me to come to her and she would name me.

The angel? she had laughed. A strict Catholic, Mother believed in angels, but she didn't yet believe one had taken charge of my destiny.

The angel told me to tell Mother that she should take me in just like others took in her first-born son. One day he would come back to her. I would be in her care even as he was in the care of others.

Patrice -- the half-brother none of us knew about until just a few years ago. The son she gave up for adoption before she met Father.

Now she was prepared to meet Father once again. "He's with the angels," she told me. "You may not remember them..."

"I don't believe in them," I began.

"...but they are with you still," she told me.

How could I deny this? I couldn't fathom it or imagine any such thing as a supernatural intervention in my early life, but here I was... here we were.

Mother held her hands out to me, and I took them. "My poor boy, my son," she murmured. One of her hands slipped away from mine and then lay across my cheek, warm and soft, brittle and weary. "Will you ever know who you are?"

I clasped her hand once again, gently, tenderly. "I'll probably never know how I came to be with you," I said. "But I know who I am. I'm the brother of my siblings. I'm the son of my father. I am your son."

"And God has rewarded me," she whispered, smiling. "All my children have come home."

I almost told Leon of this moment, this final tender exchange steeped in mystery. I decided to keep it simple.

"No," I told Leon, "I didn't have anything to tell her about angels. She told me."

My brother smiled at me, and we rose together and joined our family.

For Elizabeth