Is This Nancy?

It was almost lunchtime on an ordinary Tuesday in April, and I had closed my office door.

I was fifty-nine years old and a vice president of accounting for a publicly traded real estate company. I spend my days analyzing numbers and putting together the stories as to why they are either different from the past or different from what was previously expected. On my phone was a photograph of my original birth certificate, the one that reads Baby Boy Zahuranic in plain black type, and two phone numbers I had bought from one of those people-search sites for ten dollars. I had sent five text messages over five days to the two numbers I thought were hers. Two delivered and unread. Two read, with no reply. The fifth — the photo of the birth certificate — sent, and never opened at all.

I had been doing the math on that silence for days, the way I do math on everything. Maybe she saw an unfamiliar number and didn’t want to know. Maybe she thought it was spam. Maybe she knew exactly who I was and had decided, sixty years ago, that this door would stay shut. Not knowing was its own kind of torture.

I told myself it was now or never.

There were two numbers. I dialed the second one first, the one tied to the read messages. It went to voicemail — a woman in her forties or fifties. Not her. So I called the first.

It rang. My heart was already going. I remember thinking that if she didn’t pick up this time either, I might not have it in me to try again.

“Hello?”

A woman’s voice. I had no real way to confirm it was her. But something told me.

“Is this Nancy?”

“Yes.”

And right there, hearing her say that one word, I felt something I can only call pure fear — fear that she was about to hang up, that I had come this far only to be turned away, that the next thing out of her mouth would end it before it started. I had maybe half a second to decide what to say, and I decided I would not give her the chance to hang up before she understood why I was calling.

“Nancy, this may be hard for you to believe, but I’m the boy you gave birth to almost sixty years ago. I’m sorry it took so long for me to call, but you’ve been really hard to find. Please know I don’t want anything from you. I just want to make sure you’re all right. And if you ever need anything from me, please let me know.”

Silence.

I kept going, because the silence frightened me more than talking did. I told her I was raised by loving parents. That I’d gone to a Lutheran grade school, then the same high school she had gone to, then the state university. That I’d worked in the same field my entire career and moved to Texas five years earlier. That it was my wife who had finally found her — hoping that might make the call feel less like an ambush and more like something she could trust.

Still silence.

So I just kept talking. Fifteen minutes of it, by my own count, before she said anything at all.

“As you can imagine, I’m a little in shock right now. Let me come in from outside and sit down.”

I told her again: I wasn’t calling because I needed anything.

“That was a dark time for me back then,” she said.

“It’s okay,” I told her. “We all go through rough patches.”

Then I asked the one question I had carried my whole life.

“Nancy, if I had one question to ask you, it would be: did you ever have any other children?”

“No,” she said. “I didn’t.”

I sat with that. Sixty years, and the answer was no. I had prepared myself for a hang-up, for anger, for a wrong number. I had not prepared for a mother who, after everything, could not quite say the word.

And then she said: “But would you like the father’s name?”

“Yes,” I said. “Let me grab a pencil.”

“Frank M. Young.”

I wrote it down — the name of a man I had never heard of, who, it turned out, had lived three blocks from the house where I grew up, though I would not learn that for weeks. We talked for forty-five minutes in all. Near the end I told her I needed to get back to work, and that I hoped it wouldn’t be another sixty years before we spoke again.

When I hung up, my hands were shaking. I sat there alone, door still closed, lunch hour technically not over, unable to process what had just happened. Six decades of not knowing, and a forty-five-minute phone call had closed most of the distance.

When I finally went to lunch, my coworkers asked why I was late.

I told them they wouldn’t believe me.

Then I said I’d been on the phone with my mother.

One of them asked how old my mom was.

“My mom died thirteen years ago,” I said.

They stared at me. “What?!”

“I was on the phone,” I said, “with my birth mother.”

I have spent a lifetime being told, in the quiet way these things get told, that I was given away. What I learned at my desk that Tuesday was that being given away and being found are not opposites. They are the same story, told from two ends. It only took me fifty-nine years to call the other end and hear a voice say yes.