The Call I Almost Didn’t Answer

My phone rang three times before I found the nerve to answer it, and by the time I hung up, forty-one years had folded down into about ten minutes.

A few weeks earlier, a small team of volunteers called Search Angels had gone looking for my birth family and turned up something nobody expected instead: a phone number for the couple who fostered me as a baby. My adoptive mother answered first and hung up, certain it was a scam. My adoptive father hung up too — until the caller mentioned a real adoption registry, a detail a scammer wouldn’t have bothered getting right. That one detail snagged him. He called me and told me to try the number myself.

So I did. A woman answered. I asked if she’d fostered a baby girl in 1980. There was a pause I still can’t fully describe, and then she asked me to send a photo — the one from my adoption paperwork, her and her husband, young, holding an infant they’d once called April.

I found it, screenshotted it, and sent it before I could talk myself out of it.

What came back wasn’t words at first. It was crying, and then a scream I could hear clearly through the phone: “It’s April! I found April!” Her husband got on and asked me exactly one question before anything else — not where I’d been, not why it took so long. He wanted to know if I’d had a good life.

We FaceTimed that same afternoon and started talking about maybe meeting in June. She called back four minutes later. She couldn’t wait until June. Neither could I.

The following weekend, they were standing in my driveway.

I still don’t fully understand what it’s like to hold onto someone for forty-one years with no evidence they’d ever call back. But I was about to find out exactly what that kind of holding had cost — and given — two people I hadn’t met since I was seven months old.