Once, years ago, back home for a brief midwinter visit, Marya had asked Dave whether he ever heard news of, or rumors of, or anything at all of—and he’d interrupted her and said, No, no he hadn’t, and he didn’t want to. Marya had followed him into the kitchen so that they could speak in private but after this awkward exchange there was nothing more to say.

It wasn’t at all uncommon, Marya learned, for the “siblings” of a “rejecting mother” to go for years—for lifetimes, in fact—without alluding to the mother; without alluding to their shared circumstances. It wasn’t uncommon for them to grow away from one another, even to dislike one another. And of course they secretly nursed a lifelong resentment of “normal” people. “Existence for some of us,” said a friend of Marya’s who was himself adopted, “is fundamentally embarrassing.”

CASUALLY, BETRAYING NO emotion, as if she were merely assembling ideas and theories and “interesting” stories, Marya made inquiries about adoption—about having been abandoned, lost, given away, left, and then adopted—among people she knew. She discovered only a few men and women who admitted to having been adopted. Some were obsessed and bitter; some were merely obsessed.

What had rarely troubled them as children and even as teenagers now troubled them a great deal. Yes they thought about having been first abandoned, and then adopted, virtually all the time; no they weren’t in the habit of talking about it with anyone, certainly not with their adoptive families. Very few had located their “birth” mothers and no one at all with whom Marya spoke had located his father. The subject was painful, disagreeable, why was Marya so curious . . . ?

“I suppose because time is running out,” Marya said.

SHE TOLD HERSELF that her circumstances were entirely different. She had seen her mother, after all—she hadn’t been abandoned in a church doorway, or at the entrance of an orphanage. The great consuming mystery for all of the “abandoned children” to whom she’d spoken was: what did the mother look like? who was she? If the father was mentioned less frequently, in fact quite rarely, it was simply the case that one enormous heartbreak preceded another. It was also the case that the mother seemed more blameworthy, more unnatural.

Marya knew that her mother resembled her; which is to say, she resembled her mother. Consequently there should have been no inordinate mystery. . . . If she wanted to speculate on what her father might be now, in middle age, she had only to contemplate her uncle Everard: tall, ruddy-faced, with heavy shoulders, beefy forearms, hair receding from the crown of his head, an attractive silvery-brown. He had been a good-looking man in his youth and he was still good-looking now, in his late fifties. Marya thought, I don’t hate him any longer, do I?—for outliving my father.