I don’t have any photographs from when I was little, except the ones Joellen sometimes took and put into my file. And I am not with the same people year after year to hear the same stories over and over, sloshing our memories around in one another’s sponges. All to say, I feel like I can safely rely on the accuracy of the memories I do have being truly mine, which for the most part move forward in long stretches of an uneventful life. A cold, slow-flowing river.

Except sometimes my memory is an ocean.

What I don’t remember, Joellen tells me, is that when I was born I was super hard to place because of the meth. But the hospital got me clean, and when I was a year old, a couple picked me up in California and brought me to Seattle. I was free to be adopted, no parental rights to fight about, and the couple told Joellen they wanted to adopt, they wanted me.

I don’t recall the move, but I remember the man and woman. I know I called them Mom and Dad and I was their only child. I remember Joellen came to visit me each week. I remember preschool and the house; I had an upstairs room with a window, and I could see water. I had a bed and stuffed animals in a wicker basket and clothes in a dresser and a closet. I remember the dad taught me to tie my shoes and the mom showed me how to lick a stamp and mail a letter, and I took baths with a toy ferry that had cars in the hull you could take out; I lined them up on the edge of the tub and stayed in the water until my fingertips wrinkled, and I remember the dad read books to me every single night.

I remember my fourth-birthday cake from Baskin-Robbins (mint chocolate chip ice cream and chocolate cake), and I remember the next day we ate leftover cake while the woman and man whom I called Mom and Dad explained to me that Joellen was coming to get me for our weekly visit, but that this time, Joellen was taking me to a new house, where I would meet lots of new siblings and new parents. They helped me pack a duffel bag of clothes, and the woman said, “Look, I got you a present. This is called a toiletry kit. It has all your soap and shampoo and your toothbrush right here all together with a nice handle—a place for everything, and everything in its place.”