The Birthday in the Booklet

I brought up another browser window and entered the school district’s family site. After typing Mom’s email, I paused. My palms had gone damp, and my fingers kept sliding over the trackpad. Then I entered the password.

The page opened on Eleanor Miller’s account.

I chose her profile and found a folder called Student Documents. Two names appeared: Maya’s and mine. When I selected mine, a long inventory of scanned forms filled the screen, beginning with my first year of kindergarten. Permission forms, eye-test results, emergency contacts.

I moved down through the newer records until I reached the oldest one. It was dated August 12, six years earlier: my kindergarten enrollment packet.

A little PDF symbol sat beside the form. I clicked it and waited while the file appeared. Mom had written the answers in her familiar, angled script. Everything seemed ordinary until page two, beneath a heading about earlier schooling or care.

Most children had a nearby preschool recorded there. Mom had marked that I had never attended a district pre-kindergarten program. Below her answer, in a box meant for school officials, a secretary had entered several brief statements.

My age had been confirmed against my original birth certificate. The student’s date of birth was listed as May 14.

Then came a note about custody. The temporary guardianship from Oakhaven County had been ended and dissolved; physical and legal care had been confirmed as belonging to my biological parents.

I kept staring until the letters seemed to swim.

Temporary guardianship.

I knew the word guardian from social studies. A guardian was an adult who looked after a child when the parents weren’t able to. But Mom and Dad were together. We had a house. We had Maya. Why would anybody else have needed to take care of me?

Then there was Oakhaven. Sarah lived there, hours away. It was also the town written on the immunization record from when I was a baby.

The pieces I had been collecting began to fit, but the picture they made was nothing like the one I’d grown up with. I hadn’t simply spent time at my aunt’s house. A school record said someone in Oakhaven had once been my legal guardian.

I shut the document, erased the browsing history with unsteady hands, and closed the Chromebook. For the rest of the day, the official words about the guardianship ending kept repeating in my mind.

That afternoon the bus left me at the end of our street. The cold autumn air didn’t loosen the knot in my thoughts. I walked up the drive and saw that the garage was open. Dad stood at his workbench, trying to put new line into a weed trimmer. The bright plastic cord had twisted around itself in his hands.

He was careful and practical, an engineer who trusted measurements and things that could be repaired. “Hey, buddy,” he said when I dropped my backpack near the doorway. “How was school?”

“Fine.” I went to the bench and picked up a small wrench. Its metal felt cold against my palm.

Dad wasn’t like Mom. She could be composed and deliberate; he was plainspoken, and he disliked arguments. Mom could seem impossible to get through to. Dad was easier to approach, if I chose my moment.

“Dad?” I kept looking at the wrench.

“Yeah?” He cut the tangled cord with pliers.

“When I was a baby, before my first Thanksgiving, did I stay with Aunt Sarah in Oakhaven?”

The pliers dropped from his hand. The spool sprang loose, and orange line bounced across the concrete. Dad didn’t bend to gather it. He stood still, hands suspended over the bench, while the quiet in the garage seemed to thicken around us.

He looked at me, and the ease left his face. Weariness settled into it, the same expression Maya had worn when she spoke to me in the closet the night before.

“Who told you that, Caleb?” he asked softly.

“Nobody. I found a shot record in the kitchen. Mom said it belonged to Leo, but the first letter was C. It said Oakhaven, too. I know I was born in May, Dad. I saw the bracelet from the hospital.”

He shut his eyes and stayed that way for a moment. Then he braced both hands against the workbench and drew a slow breath. When he faced me again, there was no anger in his expression. Only sadness.

“Your mother…” He stopped. He took a rag and rubbed his hands, as if he needed a little time. “Your mom loves you so much, Caleb. You need to know that. Everything that happened was because we loved you.”

“Why did I live with Aunt Sarah?” I moved closer. I didn’t want another answer about love. I wanted to know what had happened.

He dropped the rag on the bench. “After you were born, things became very difficult. Your mother became ill—not with a fever or a cold, but in another way. She had severe postpartum depression. She couldn’t sleep, she couldn’t eat, and looking after herself was more than she could manage, let alone caring for a baby. I was away on work trips, trying to keep us afloat. We couldn’t handle everything.”

He paused, looking down at the tangled orange cord. I waited for him to go on. Then he began to explain what had happened during the crisis that brought Sarah to our door.