Isabella

I recognized her immediately. Which was impossible but true. I felt my heart pounding in my chest, and my hands started to tremble so badly that I had to stuff them into my pockets.

This wasn’t how this was supposed to happen. I felt dizzy and I tried to remember if I’d eaten anything for breakfast that morning. I would have to try to scarf someting down on the plane.

She was seated in a chair near the gate, a carry-on bag resting on her lap. I noticed that her eyes kept drifting up toward the arrival desk. I wondered if she was an anxious traveller, if she had trouble relaxing until she was buckled into her seat, ready to gaze out at the clouds for the hour-long flight.

I wondered so many things about her, but not her name. It was Isabella, and I’d thought of her every day since the moment I learned she existed.

*****

I grew up in a suburb of New York City, wishing desperately for an older brother.

“Not gonna happen,” my mother would say briskly, smiling down at me. I never understood why.

My desperation grew worse when my father collapsed at work one day when I was thirteen years old. He was dead before Mom and I could get to him at the hospital.

The days and weeks following Dad’s death were agony. My mom had always been anxious, but she now was unrecognizable - white-faced and panicked, speaking only in one-word sentences. I went through the motions of my life as a high school freshman - studying, soccer practice, running for class president - and waited for my mother to return to the warm-hearted person she’d been before our world crashed down around us.

One day, it happened. I got home from soccer and she was there, smiling and cooking me dinner. No boxed mac and cheese for me that night. The smell of roasted chicken and sauteed mushrooms filled the air.

We sat down at the table. I was about to put the first taste of my mom’s roast chicken in months in my mouth when she spoke.

“Nathaniel,” she said quietly. “I have something I need to tell you.”

*****

I wasn’t a pro at the internet, but from my limited research, I knew that Isabella was an alumni of a small college in Boston called Emerson and that she’d been helping to organize an alumni event taking place the next day on the urban campus. I assumed she was still local to Boston.

What was she doing on the flight I was about to take from JFK? Did she live in New York?

Was it possible I’d gone to incredible lengths to put myself in the same room as her when she was only a few subway stops away?

I considered sitting down beside her, chatting her up, attempting to discover some new details about her. I was standing about twenty feet away from her, and there were a dozen other passengers between us, scrolling on their phones and waiting for the same flight as Isabella and me.

I took a half-step forward. Before I could move any further, I watched as a tall man with brown skin and broad shoulders came to sit beside Isabella, kissing her on the cheek. I retreated. For the conversation I needed to have with Isabella Monroe, she had to be alone.

*****

My parents had always planned on telling me, my mother said. They were planning to do it when I was little, but then everything changed when I was three years old.

We were driving home from a family party when we were slammed into by a drunk driver. Mom was driving - Dad had a few beers at the party - and our side of the car took the most impact. My father and I were in the hospital for weeks. Dad said that was when Mom started to be so nervous. “She was terrified of losing us both,” he told me one day, when I expressed frustration with Mom’s nerves and overprotectiveness.

Each of us underwent multiple surgeries following the accident, and one of my dad’s was an open heart procedure. When he died of a heart attack, the doctors couldn’t say with certainty if complications from the accident were what led to his death, but it didn’t matter; my mother blamed herself.

I don’t remember any of it, but I know I was in and out of the hospital for years dealing with complications from the accident. I know that was hard on my parents. I guess it also got in the way of them telling me what they should have told me every day since the day I was born.

*****

For five years, I’ve looked for information about Isabella on the internet. I learned that she was twenty-three years old, five years older than me, and had attended Emerson College.

That was it. She didn’t use social media; she must have been one of those people who try to minimize their digital footprint. I liked that. I didn’t love my generation’s obsession with their phones. It pleased me that Isabella had a book open on the seat beside her; maybe she’d been reading it before the man sat beside her.

The man. He looked a little older than her, and he held her hand while she spoke. I ached when I saw the way he looked at her.

Not because I felt any attraction to Isabella Monroe. God, no. But I had something I needed to ask her, and having a second person around - someone who cared about her deeply - was not going to help my situation at all.

“Excuse me?”

Without realizing it, I’d taken several steps, cutting the distance between myself and Isabella and her boyfriend in half. Which made the fact that I’d been staring at them obvious. He was glaring at me, looking like he might jump up and knock me out if I took a step closer to his girlfriend. Did I have anyone in my life who would come to my defense like that?

“I’m sorry,” I said quickly, my eyes shifting back and forth between Isabella and her boyfriend. Her face didn’t look like his. She looked curious, and not in a scared way. Could she see it, in my face? Could she tell why I was here?

*****

My parents tried to have a baby for two years before they contacted an adoption agency. They completed a home study and then waited a year before they got a call that a woman in D.C. was pregant and trying to find an adoptive family for her child.

“We met you the day you were born,” my mother said that day, speaking carefully, as if she were worried she were going to activate a bomb right there at her kitchen table.

It was a legitimate fear. I was furious. I jumped up from the table and started pacing the room.

“I’m sorry, Nathaniel,” my mother said.

“Why now?” I asked her, not pausing from my pacing.

“Because we were about to do it, Nathaniel,” she said, now starting to sob. “We knew we should have done it a long time ago - told you that we adopted you. We were getting ready to tell you when -”

“When Dad died,” I finished. “Died a liar.”

“Nathaniel!”

I didn’t take it back, and I didn’t apologize. My parents had both lied to me for my entire life. I didn’t know which situation was more devastating - that my dad had died having never gotten the chance to tell me the truth and apologize, or that my mom bore the brunt of every bit of my anger, because she was the only one left living to take it.

*****

“Do you want to sit down with us?” Isabella asked me gently. Her boyfriend shot her a look. “I’m Izzy, and this is my boyfriend, Keion.”

The nickname hit me straight in the heart. She had always been Isabella to me - but, of course, I wasn’t in her life. I wasn’t someone to whom she ever would have said Call me Izzy, everyone does.

I sat down in a seat across from Isabella and Keion. “I’m sorry - I didn’t mean to stare. You - you look like someone I from my high school.”

“I look like a lot of people,” Isabella said kindly. “Are you on the flight to Boston?”

I nodded. “Sorry for being weird,” I said, looking at Keion now, who seemed to have decided I wasn’t a threat. “I’ve never flown by myself before.”

“Are you visiting colleges?” he asked me. I nodded. I wasn’t, of course, but my original plan had been to pretend to be a prospective freshman visiting colleges - a great cover story for when I purposefully crossed paths with Isabella at the Emerson alumni event.

They asked me additional questions, and I answered. Nothing I said was untrue, but I kept it brief. I hoped that eventually I’d have longer conversations with Isabella - deeper, more honest conversations than I’d ever had with anyone. But I didn’t know Keion at all.

You don’t know Isabella either.

“Do you have brothers and sisters at home?” Isabella asked me. Did she always speak like this to strangers - so warm and kind? Or was I someone special, the exception to the rule? “Is that why you’re travelling alone?”

“I’m adopted,” I blurted without thinking.

Then I waited to see what my biological sister would say.

*****

Mom told me about Isabella the day she told me I was adopted. We spent hours at that kitchen table, where she, Dad, and I had once dined so happily, talking about everything I’d never been told before.

“We believe she was adopted into another family, five years before you were born,” Mom said quietly.

A sister. An older sister. I’d wished repeatedly for a brother, never understanding why my mother and father couldn’t give me one. I asked her why they never adopted a second child, and she told me they were on a wait list for another baby when the accident happened.

She didn’t have to say much more. I knew that I’d nearly died - that I had two surgeries in ten days, and that my mother never left my side. I survived, but with health issues that followed me for years. The second surgery had been to repair my right leg, which was broken. I still walked with a limp, fifteen years later. The first surgery had been to repair one kidney and remove the second, which had been damaged beyond repair.

All of those procedures meant medical bills that ate up the money that my parents had set aside for a second adoption. It was saving my life or adopting a new child, and they did what any parent would do. They sacrificed for me.

*****

My sister.

I saw similarities - the shape of her eyes, the shade of her skin, her wide smile. Was it possible she didn’t see them?

After I blurted out that I was adopted, I waited for her to say what I'd been expecting - me too.

She didn’t.

After a sideways glance at Keion, she looked at me and smiled sympathetically. “That’s a complicated thing,” she said.

It wasn’t the answer I expected, but it still brought warmth to my chest. It was complicated. I could love Mom and Dad and still being a child who was adopted could be complicated. Isabella understood that.

“One of my good friends from college is adopted. Tanya - you met her,” Isabella said, indicating Keion. “She used to talk to me about it.”

Whatever warmth I’d felt left my body. Suddenly I felt cold, like I was about to start trembling.

One of my good friends.

What did that mean? Why didn’t Isabella just share that she was adopted? Did she feel uncomfortable sharing her personal life with some teenager she’d just met? That was perfectly fine and normal if she did. Except that it hurt that she didn’t sense that I was someone

she could trust, someone she could tell her life story to.

“Are you - are either of you adopted?” I asked quietly. I was glad I didn’t blurt it out like a maniac, but as soon as I said it, I wondered if I shouldn’t have. There would be time, for Isabella and me. We could talk later, when she knew.

Except that I didn’t have a lot of time.

*****

For the five years since Dad died, the five years since Mom told me about the adoption and the existence of Isabella, whose name she knew from the adoption agency’s records, we struggled to find a new normal for our new family - just the two of us.

I loved my mother. I worked hard to forgive her for her secrecy, to understand the complexity of the life she’d been living since I was born, since the accident, since my dad’s illness and death. The accident haunted us for years.

We didn’t speak much about Isabella. One night a few months ago, when I was googling her, my mother walked into my room and saw the computer screen before I could minimize it.

“I’m sorry,” I said automatically. I don’t know why I said it. I had nothing to be sorry about. Of course I was curious. Especially that day.

I hadn’t reached out to Isabella yet. I was nervous to do it, and it felt okay for it to be a someday thing to do.

Until the day before, when my doctor told Mom and me that if I didn’t find a kidney donor match within the next year, I was in danger of losing my life.

*****

“I’m not - neither of us are,” Keion said.

I looked at Isabella beseechingly, searching for something in her face - some hint of knowing, some sign that she would speak up and admit that she, too, was adopted.

There was nothing.

“No, we’re not,” she said warmly. “But I’m glad you shared that with us, Nathaniel. I’m glad you felt comfortable doing it.”

Everything in my head was spinning around. What was I doing? Why had I even come here?

I was planning to board a flight to Boston to accidentally bump into my biological sister at the Emerson alumni event, pretending to be a high school senior interested in attending. I was planning to lead her through skilled conversation into realizing our genetic connection.

Then, I was planning to ask her for the biggest favor I’d ever asked anyone for in my life.

None of this was going according to my plan.

Was it possible Isabella didn’t know she was adopted, as I hadn’t until I was thirteen years old?

Or - I stared at her.

Was my mother wrong? Had Isabella never been adopted? For some reason, had my biological parents kept their daughter and decided to find an adoptive family for their son?

Isabella shifted in her seat, and Keion reached out a hand to support her back. “Here,” he said, “let me take that.” He lifted her black duffel bag from her lap and set it down on the floor in front of them.

I knew you weren’t supposed to make assumptions about this kind of thing, but as my older sister ran her hands over her belly and smiled sweetly at Keion, I understood.

Isabella was pregnant.

*****

We’d been searching for a donor for months. My mother had been tested, of course, as well as a number of our family and friends. I was enrolled in the National Kidney Registry. A few of my soccer teammates had started up a community search online, begging friends of friends of friends to get tested. My blood type was a barrier, and so far no matches had been found. The doctors told us, as we knew, that the best chance for a match was a biological sibling.

I didn’t share with my mother the details of my plan, but she knew I was flying to Boston to find Isabella.

“Do you want me to come with you?” she’d said the night before as she helped me pack my overnight bag.

It had been five years since I learned of her betrayal. Five years of just us, without my dad. I was scared - of dying, of never knowing my biological family, of never truly knowing who I was. The anger I felt at my mother had melted away long ago.

I hugged her tightly. “No, but thanks,” I said.

“No matter what happens,” she whispered, “we will figure it out together.”

*****

“Nathaniel, are you all right?”

I was staring again - this time, at Isabella’s pregnant belly. She looked at Keion, her face concerned.

I stood up, slinging my overnight bag over my shoulder. “It was nice to meet you,” I said, forcing a smile.

“You’re not getting on the flight?”

I prayed that they couldn’t tell I was fighting back tears. “I’m just going to call my mom to check in,” I said quickly. With a final tight smile at Isabella, I turned to walk away.

There was nothing to be done. I’d come here because I wanted a sister - but also because I wanted to find an organ that could save my life.

But asking my sister, pregnant with my nephew, to undergo major surgery - it wasn’t something I could do.

My nephew.

I'd been lying about calling my mother, but I found myself slipping my phone out of my pocket and scrolling to find her number so we could figure out what to do next.

Together.