The Longing

You never liked your little brother's ex-wife and she knows it. You didn't like her when they dated, and you didn't like her when they married, and you didn't like her when they split up. You think she's a bad influence, a drifter. You always worried about your little brother because even when he was a kid he always seemed dreamy and unsure of himself—the opposite of you—and when he came back from Vietnam he was so sad, and then he chose the absolute wrong person for a bride. She knows how you blame her, what you think about her. Why wouldn't she?

Everyone knows what you think. You have never been good at keeping your feelings to yourself, or keeping secrets, except for one big feeling, one big secret.

When you were younger, you drifted some. You were unsure of yourself. But that was before you started running, before you began finding your way. Making your way. You're Suzi Cope, trail-running legend. When you want something, you go after it. When you're feeling pissy, you let people know. When you're not sure exactly where you are, you move forward. Bad things happen, and you deal, and you keep going, and if that bothers someone, well, it's not your problem. "I didn't do thirty-four 100-mile races because I was cherry-picking" is what you say when trying to explain the time you found yourself hallucinating on a mountaintop, sick to your stomach, with blistered feet...trying to make someone understand why you refused to give up, and instead kept going. You might as well be explaining how you kept your secret for so long, what it did to you, how you have kept going since. "I did it because I was a pretty good Boy Scout," you tell people.

A pretty good Boy Scout. By that you mean you're tough, you don't quit. After the difficult time when you were just a teenager, you could have spent a lot of time thinking about things. You could have spent a lot of time wondering how things might have turned out differently. Instead, you move forward, and you put it behind you, and that is that. Life is sometimes hard, and there is no use worrying.

Instead, you run. You run through financial hardship, and divorce, and illness, and loss. It suits you—the forward progress, the constant movement, the way that even the secret from long ago doesn't seem so heavy when you are putting one foot in front of the other. You run until you are one of ultrarunning's first great female champions, the first woman to complete the Grand Slam of Ultrarunning, which involves four 100-milers (Wasatch, Leadville, Western States, and the Vermont 100) in a single racing season. You run the Hard Rock 100, considered one of the most difficult 100-mile runs in North America, and the Barkley Marathon, considered the most insane.

You run until you become known in the ultrarunning community as the Barf Queen. Nancy Hamilton, one of the most accomplished female ultrarunners in the world, puts you "among the toughest women 100-mile runners" ever. Sometimes you show up at races wearing a T-shirt that says "Beyond Bitch" and that seems about right, because you are direct and profane and you tell people what you think and let them know how you feel and a lot of those people think they know you, but they don't.

They don't know your secret. They don't know about your little brother. They don't know a lot of things. And now it's Christmastime 1986, and your phone is ringing, and it's your little brother's ex-wife, and it's the middle of the night, and you just woke up in Auburn, California, where you're living with your second husband, and she's calling you from Alaska, and she's telling you something that doesn't make sense. She's telling you that your little brother is dead.
You're 39 years old, a wife, a runner, a worker, and that night, you start thinking about what you're not, about the thing you have kept hidden. You do what you never do, which is to start dwelling on the past. You worry about the future. You imagine a young man receiving a telephone call in the middle of the night and a stranger telling him that the woman who gave him life, whom he never knew, is someone he will never know. You imagine how hard it might be for a young man who never knew you to learn of your death. You think of what you are, and what you're not, and what you might become.

That's the night you decide to let go of your secret. That's the night you decide to look for your baby.

—
You have a pug named Sam and a German shepherd named Shadow and loving parents and the beach is just 15 minutes away from your home in Downey, California. It's 1963, in Southern California, and life is just about perfect. Sometimes your little brother, Stevie, nags you until you agree to drive him to the beach. You get the keys and he slides his surfboard into the dark green, wood-paneled '54 Ford station wagon with the stick shift on the steering column and the two of you take off, and while he surfs, you swim. Your father is an Eagle Scout and deacon of the Presbyterian church you all attend. You are a lively, athletic teenager who has been modeling since you were barely 2 years old, and life is good, but never better than the last day of school because that's when your parents drive you up to your grandparents' house in the hills above Santa Cruz, to a green, redwood-carpeted part of the world aptly named Bonny Doon.

They live in a redwood house that your grandfather designed and built, surrounded by acres and acres of farmland, where two dozen Hereford steers munch the tall grass. Your grandfather, who had arrived here from Australia when he was a young man, and through sheer force of will and a strong, God-fearing character had built a fortune and a life, rides tractors and backhoes all day. Your grandmother, who had come over from Germany when she was a young girl, in 1919, putters in her beds of irises and daffodils and narcissus and petunias, which are what she loves best, and that bloom most fragrantly and explosively under her hands. You idolize your grandparents—your mother does, too—and they return the love. The first summer you remember spending time at the farm, there is a Shetland pony named Billy. Your grandfather has bought him especially for you. Billy is blind in one eye, and when any of the neighbors' kids run over from their farms and get on Billy, he bucks them off. You are the only one he lets ride him, and even then, he gallops under the low branches of apple trees, heavy with fruit in the late summer, and tries to knock you off, too, but he never does. The summer after Billy, there is a pinto called Sweetheart, and the summer after that, a palomino named Golden Nugget.

By the time you are in junior high school, you are in love—with your dogs and horses and with the cattle at your grandparents' paradise in the redwoods. By the time you are in high school you decide to be a veterinarian. You will use your modeling money to pay for college and vet school, and then you will marry someone strong and principled like your grandfather and life will be good.

But you have discovered something else by then: boys. You like boys. You like them the same way you like swimming in the ocean and playing with your dogs and riding horses. You like them wildly, impulsively. And one of the boys likes you back. He's not really a boy. He's a Marine named Bob, the older brother of one of your best girlfriends. You and Bob spend time together, including one early spring afternoon at his mother's house. She's divorced, and one day when she's not home, you and Bob are hanging out in the backyard, by the pool, and one thing leads to another.

You don't see Bob much after that day—he's back at Camp Pendleton, about to go to Vietnam—and while you talk to him on the phone a few times, your future is in front of you, your life as a veterinarian. Then one afternoon your mother is driving you in the dark green Ford station wagon to Cal Poly Pomona, where you're planning to go to school the next fall, and on the way, you don't feel well. You ask your mother to pull over and she does and you throw up. Your mother looks at you, her little girl, grown up so fast. She knows before you do.

She drives you to a doctor who belongs to your church, a father of nine. She asks him about options. What options? He tells you and your mother that you're three months pregnant, and that there is only one option. That doesn't make sense to you, because the afternoon by the pool was just a month or so ago, but you're only 17, and you don't feel well, and you have already brought shame on everyone, and even as your visions of college and vet school and a life in the country with horses and dogs slips into the distance, you keep your mouth shut. It feels wrong, because you're not someone who has ever hidden her feelings. But you have never felt so ashamed, either. So you keep your mouth shut when the doctor and your mother talk about where you will go, and how no one will know, and how it will be all right. Your mother asks what you want to do. Do you want to get married? She is tough, but she loves you. She wants you to have choices. But do you really have a choice?

—
From National Champion to the United Nations, because the gown hides your bulge. You tell your friends that you are spending the summer at Bonny Doon. You tell your grandparents that you are spending the summer at Cal Poly Pomona. Your grandparents cannot know. No one can know—your mother is crystal clear on that, but especially her parents. They had already suffered the ignominy of a pregnant daughter, your mother tells you. Her sister had married her boyfriend when she was barely out of high school, because she had to! Your mother doesn't want to disappoint her father again. He could never know that his daughter had raised a child who had done something like you had done. She couldn't do that to him. The people in the community could not learn your secret, either. Your neighbors could not know. The church could not know. What would they think?
Your parents drive you 30 minutes to downtown Los Angeles, to a crumbling three-story mansion, the Florence Crittenton Home, where you live with 50 other single pregnant teenagers. The youngest is 15, the oldest 19, and none of you is allowed to tell the others your real name. It's 1965 and you call yourself Bobby, after the Marine. You're 17 years old. You sleep three to a room. You are not allowed outside the decrepit mansion, except on special trips, like the one to The Salvation Army home for unwed mothers down the street, where 150 pregnant teenagers live, and where you realize how good you have it, because they live in rooms of 10 to 15. You take a shorthand course at The Salvation Army, because what else is there to do? There is knitting and embroidery and games of hearts. There is relentlessly studying the giant Peg-Board in the dark, shadowy living room. The Peg-Board is where the little round cardboard pieces of paper with the fake names move from the bottom of the chart, where they start when a new girl arrives, to the top, which is where they perch on her big day. To a bored teenager, even a turtle race would provide a thrill, so all the girls check out the board many times a day, to see who's arrived, but much more importantly, who's on top. Because your doctor miscalculated your due date, the "Bobby" cardboard circle stays at the bottom forever.

Your mother and father and little brother visit. Even then, even with everything you're thinking about, you worry a little about Stevie. He's so quiet, and so kind. And you know what a hard time he is having. He is still in school, and he has to answer the questions from his classmates. "How's Suzi? How's she liking college? How come she never comes home on weekends? How come we don't see her around?"

At the decrepit mansion, where the "Bobby" piece of cardboard ascends slowly, one day melts into another and Southern California summer turns to fall and you turn 18—there's no celebration—and then it's the holiday season and you knit slippers for everybody, for Christmas. For Stevie, though, you want to make something special. You trace a picture from a cartoon book, and then you draw the tracing on a pillowcase, and then you get to work. You embroider a skinny teenager with long blond hair and bright yellow baggy shorts. He's on a long board, riding big, curling waves. For your brother, the surfer, a Murph the Surf pillowcase. You play hearts and checkers and chess until you are sick of them. You wait. You wait and wait. It takes you six months. It costs a lot and you're paying. You have decided that because you have brought this trouble, you will pay for it. So you use all the money you have saved for college and for vet school and you give it all to the Florence Crittenton Home. By the time "Bobby" is at the top of the Peg-Board, by the time you are ready to have a baby, you have spent $9,000.

Mr. and Mrs. Dundee—the husband and wife who run the house and who have been unfriendly to you since the morning you arrived—drive you to the hospital on December 7, 1965. You had always been a little thing, 5'4", a compact dynamo, but now you are up to 144 pounds, enormous, a swollen beast, the result of no exercise and a lot of starchy food. And you're in terrible pain, you know your baby is going to be big, and Mrs. Dundee hears you moaning and she turns around in the backseat and looks at you. Is she finally going to say something nice? Something tender? "Well," she says, biting off each word, "you never did get very big." You marvel that someone can be so mean.

Having your baby isn't as hard, or as scary, as carrying him, and afterward, a nurse walks into your hospital room and asks if you want to hold your son. You say okay, but you don't know if it's allowed, if you are breaking the rules, if you are doing something else bad, if it's a good thing or a bad thing, if you're going to get in trouble, if you might accidentally hurt the baby. You have never touched a baby, certainly never held one, except for baby Stevie, when you were just a kid yourself, and you barely remember that. You're terrified. You don't know what to do. The nurse looks at you. She seems to understand and you're so grateful you don't know what to say. "Well," the nurse says, "if you don't want him, forget it." She leaves you alone in the room, weeping.

A week later, at Los Angeles Children's Home Society of California, another woman—another stranger—takes you into a room where you look into a crib at a happy little boy. Can babies smile? You wonder, but just for a second. Your baby is definitely smiling at you. Sean Robert, that's the name you and the Marine had agreed on. Would you like to take some pictures of him, the nice lady asks, and you say yes, that would be great, and you take pictures with the camera she produces out of nowhere and then she tells you that if you sign the papers, Baby Sean will go to a man who is an engineer and a woman who is a teacher; Baby Sean will live with a family with dogs and a horse and a summer house on Big Bear Lake, and what she doesn't say but which you know is if you don't sign the papers, the alternative is a cold, drafty orphanage and are you ready to sign the papers or do you want to spend a little more time with the smiling baby?

You want to spend a lot more time with the baby but you know you can't. It's too hard. You walk with the nice lady into the office and you sign the papers and then you get into the car to go back to the Florence Crittenton Home and you think about things and you realize you didn't hold your baby—not once, and that you never will—and you cry the entire way.

A couple of days later, someone—you can't remember whom—hands you the pictures of the baby. You hold on to those pictures for a long, long time.
—
It's late and it's dark and you're cold. You're on a mountain, you're running up a mountain in the middle of the night, and you're lonely and the baby pictures are gone. Your mother told you to get rid of them the minute she saw them, but you didn't. You hid them, and you kept them for 20 years, but then in one of your moves—you have moved a lot since your carefree teenage years—you tossed them. Why hold on anymore? It's 1985 and you are 38 years old and up here, on the trail, away from parents and friends and marriage and all the things that fill up a woman's life, time folds in on itself and sometimes, without meaning to, you look back at your life. You have run up a lot of mountains. You have already finished seven 50-mile trail runs. You like the rhythm, the effort. You like the pain, how when you're huffing up a mountain in the middle of the night, the rest of the world—the rest of your life—fades away. And then there is another person ahead of you and you catch up with her and time folds in on both of you.

You talk about yourself, about your childhood, and how your dreams of being a veterinarian never worked out. You talk about training. You talk about the course, and other courses. You talk because it helps you to pass the time and because you're a talker and because time has folded in on itself, and up here in the cold and the dark you're looking down at a smiling infant and the baby is gone from you, out in the world, and you never got to hold him, and your brother isn't a kid anymore, he's a soldier in Vietnam, and then he's a war veteran back in the United States, and then he's a free spirit, or maybe he's lost. The two of you are back at the beach, Huntington Beach, the place you used to chauffeur him to in that old dark green station wagon with the stick shift on the steering column, but this time he drives you in his blue VW van. It's 1972 and he says he's going to drive his van to Alaska to find peace, and you look in back and there it is, what you made him when you were both just kids, the Murph the Surf pillowcase.

The woman next to you on the trail is quiet. You know what she's thinking. She's wondering how anyone could do something like what you did. You know it. You know that she's judging you. You know that she's thinking, How could a woman give away her own child?

What to Do Before, During, and After Your Long Run.

—
It's 1966 and you're 18 years old, a college freshman with a secret. You study veterinary science at Cal Poly, but every other quarter you take off and work, because you blew all your college funds on the Florence Crittenton Home. You work at a dairy replacement heifer operation. Your job is to take care of the 360 calves, all somewhere between one and 30 days old. The operation is losing 60 percent of the calves before they hire you. The manager of the place tells you that he's looking for "a good mother" to nurse the animals four times a day. You cut the death rate to six percent.
Weekends you stay at your apartment near campus. You could go home, but you don't want to. You don't want to see your mother. After taking care of the calves, you take a job at a veterinary clinic, and there you meet another student by the name of Jim, and before long, he has an idea. He wants you to move up north with him, near Davis, where he will go to vet school. The two of you can get married, and you can work at a clinic there, and put him through school, because you can't both go to school, that wouldn't be practical. He is tall, and filled with infectious enthusiasm, and you always liked boys, no doubt about that, so you say sure, and suddenly you're a 21-year-old newlywed.

Before you move north, a neighbor asks one day if you want to take a ride with him on a motorcycle he has borrowed, and off you roar to Puddingstone Lake, where a woman in a Chevy Impala has attempted a wide turn and blocked the road. Your neighbor can't stop. The motorcycle hits the car, and your left knee smashes into one of the Impala's headlights. It fractures your tibia and severs your extensor tendon and there are shards of glass buried deep in your joint.

The doctors take three hours to operate—you get a shot of Demerol and a local anesthetic—and then they wheel you out and send you home. You wear a cast for eight weeks, and afterward it hurts to walk. You and your husband move to Davis and it's a good life, with hard work and horses and soon you'll have kids. That's the plan, anyway. But it doesn't happen. He has bad hypertension and one of the side effects of the disease is impotence. His doctor tells him he needs to cut down on his drinking, but that is out of the question. He is 27, a good-time guy. Instead, he takes up running. You watch him a few times, and you watch him meet up with his best friend, who doesn't live too far away, and you watch him run a couple of 5-Ks and come home all sweaty and smiling and you call your best friend, who is his best friend's wife.

"That looks like fun," you say. "I bet I could do that."

The next day, your first as an ultrarunning legend, you walk a mile in the flat farmland of Northern California's Sacramento Valley. Afterward, your bad knee swells to nearly the size of a basketball. You can barely sit on the toilet. The next day you walk a mile again and your knee balloons up again and God, it hurts. This time you feel slivers of glass moving around in your skin. You pick them out with your fingers.

Two days later you try again. You walk another mile. You keep moving. You keep walking, and the swelling and pain lessen a bit. You keep going, because that's what you do. For three months you walk until finally the day comes and you start jogging. It's 1979 and you're almost 32 years old. You have a 14-year-old son named Sean Robert out in the world and you try not to think about him. You succeed for the most part, except for one day a year. Every December 7 you avoid people, because you don't want anyone to see you crying.

You attend all your husband's races, and at one, The Apple Hill Harvest Run, an 8.5-miler, you take your girlfriend aside and you repeat what you had said earlier, but with more feeling: "I could do this!"
The next year you enter. You beat your husband, and you beat his best friend. You are the third woman to finish the race and you win an apple pie and you call your parents in Downey to brag. You tell your mother what happened, how you beat your husband and his best friend.

Running Shoes & Gear.

"Susan," your mother says. She doesn't usually call you Susan. "Susan," she says, "that wasn't smart."

But you don't care so much what your mother thinks. You don't care so much what your husband thinks. The biggest thing you ever did in your life was because you worried about what other people thought, because they worried about what other people thought. But now, running is yours. All yours. You run more. You enter some 10-Ks, but there's a problem. Every race, just when you're getting going, you get sick to your stomach, and you have to stop and puke. Another friend asks you to run on some mountain trails one day, and the pace is slower, and more relaxed, and for some reason, you don't puke. That's when you decide you'll do longer trail runs.

You and your husband take out a loan and open a veterinary clinic. You have a pickup truck and a horse trailer and you both work a lot, and run a lot, and when you tell him your secret, it's not a problem, he doesn't judge. One day, you come back from a run and he tells you that someone had called you. He says it was a teenage boy, and the funny thing was, he asked for you by your maiden name. Did he leave a number? Did he leave a name? No, just a teenage boy asking for Suzi Parker. That's hard. December 7 is hard, too, but you get through it. You get through a bunch of December 7ths. You keep moving, keep running.

Your husband is a great guy, great looking. People love him. But there's a problem. He can't stop drinking. You love him, but you don't quite trust him. You have felt the consequences of love before. Not anymore. You get your tubes tied. The marriage lasts until 1981. You think about that phone call from time to time, wonder about the teenage boy. You keep running.

You love the long mountain runs. Now you're puking in the mountains, too, but it's okay, because the races are so long that losing a little time to puke doesn't really matter. Plus, you always feel better after. You run through hunger and thirst and pain, you even run through strange visions, ghost possums with phantom babies clinging to their backs, gift-wrapped boxes of chocolate that turn out to be rocks. In 1984, you run in the Nugget and the San Juan Trail, both 50-milers. In 1985, you run in the Jed Smith Ultra Classic, the American River 50-miler, the California 50, the Nugget and the San Juan Trail again. That's the year you do your first 100-miler, the Western States. The next year you do it again, as well as a handful of 50-milers.

You meet another runner, a nice guy, and fit, and he has a wonderful daughter by his first wife, but still, marriage again? You say no, and he proposes again. This time you say yes.

You tell Gene, your new husband, your secret, but no one else. You don't plan to tell anyone else your secret. You tried once, right after your grandfather died in the early 1970s. Your parents had looked through the tracks of his life that he had left, the various birth certificates and business ledgers and wedding licenses, and your father had noticed that something didn't add up. Your grandparents' wedding certificate was dated differently than the date they had always claimed was their anniversary. Your parents asked your grandmother for an explanation. She told them simply, "We were playing house."

When your parents later told you this, you assumed your grandparents had married because they had to, and so you thought your grandmother might understand your situation. So you confessed to her. You told her what had happened to you, about the baby who was now a little boy, but your grandmother shushed you. She didn't want to hear such a story. She said some things were best kept secret. She lived another 27 years, into her 90s, and you never brought the subject up with her again.

You keep running. You run at least 50 miles a week, in addition to all the races. Life is good. Your husband's daughter, your stepdaughter, who is 10, asks you things and she tells you things. You love her. She tells you secrets she doesn't tell her father. You know about secrets. You know about how people judge. You keep moving. Life is about moving forward. And then late one night, in 1986, just a week or so after Christmas, you get a telephone call.

—
What's your brother's ex-wife doing calling at this hour? You think of your last conversation with Stevie. He had called you, about a year ago, right after you had finished your first 100-miler. He was excited for you. And he had an idea. With your running prowess, and strength, and love for and knowledge of animals, you would be perfect for the Iditarod! Steve was a bush pilot in Alaska, a big bearded guy most at home in nature. You had invited him to visit you many times, but he always had a reason not to come. What does his ex-wife want?

She's saying something, but you don't understand it. "What?" you say. "What?"

"Steve is dead," the woman you have never liked says. "He shot himself."

You don't say anything. What is there to say? You think of the little lost boy and the kind young man who used to sit with you in the Florence Crittenton Home for unwed mothers and you think of that Murph the Surf pillowcase and you wonder where it is now. And then you think of your baby. You wonder if he's looking for you. You wonder what will happen if you die before he has a chance to find you. You are 39 years old and that's when you decide to find him.

You want to look, but you can't, not while your parents are still alive. You know they gave you a choice, but what kind of choice did you have? Why had they been so ashamed? Why hadn't your grandmother listened to you? Why had everyone been so ashamed? No, you can't start looking until your family is gone. You won't start looking. It takes 20 years.

You only talk about your child to the men and women in the dark, in the mountains and the valleys. You talk about your plan to runners. You share your secret in the middle of the night and at dawn. You do it as you're clambering up snowy peaks and as you're wading through icy rivers. In the two years after that middle-of-the-night phone call, you run eight 50-mile races, from Virginia to California, and four 100-milers. From the beginning of 1989 until the end of 1991, you run twelve 50-milers and ten 100-milers.

In 1991, your father develops Alzheimer's and you keep running. You run while your second marriage breaks up, and you are running when you meet your third husband in 1995, and you get him to run, too. He persuades you to leave California and move with him to Texas, and there aren't as many trails there, and you and he are busy traveling, and you're getting older, and slowing down, and cutting back on your longer races. But you're still a runner. You'll always be a runner.

It's 2005 now, and you visit your mother in the hospice where she lives, where she's dying from cancer, and your baby would be 40 and even though you thought that maybe his birthday would have become easier to take, this one is the hardest of all. Your father, still alive, in many ways has been gone a long time, and you know this is the last holiday season your mother will be alive. The bad day comes again—December 7, 2005—and that's the day you go home and you turn on your computer and you start looking for people who will find adopted children. You don't tell your mother. This is your secret. Yours.

Your mother dies in January, and your father dies in April of the same year, 2006. You have located your baby, and in the second week of August, you sit down at your computer again to type a letter.

"I hardly know where to begin, or how," you write. You are 59 years old and you never held your child. "Since you and I have only met once, I don't know...."

Four years earlier, in May 2002, you ran your 34th and last 100-miler. (You had already run seventy-six 50-milers). You had been running competitively for 23 years, ultras for 18. You picked out your lucky bandanna from your collection of more than 100, and then, early on a Saturday morning, at the Massanutten Mountain Trails 100-Mile Run in Virginia's George Washington National Forest, you started running.

You thought about your life, and the many races, and the friends you had made. You thought about all the steep, dusty trails. You thought about how the hours before the dawn had always been the hardest, how you had spent many hours asleep on your feet, how one time you shined a flashlight in your eyes to wake yourself, and that alarmed your pacer. You thought about the secret you had kept for so long, and the secrets others had kept. So many secrets, so much shame, and for what?

You thought about your son and the letter you would one day write. You thought about the strength running had given you. You hoped it had given you enough.

You're not moving. You're sitting still, or as still as you can sit. You're having a Red Stripe beer at a restaurant called Tickles, which sits at the Crown Bay Marina on the island of St. Thomas. Why not have a beer? You're 61 years old and you have been on the boat for almost three weeks, and you're not returning to your home on the mainland for another few weeks, and you don't always have to be on the run, do you?

At one end of the table is a 9-year-old boy named Clay, who is coloring a piece of paper. His parents are trying to get him interested in something—maybe motocross, or music—because they know kids need a passion, or they can end up lost. Next to Clay is an 11-year-old girl named Claire, all blond hair and big teeth and blue eyes. She's an athlete, on a traveling softball team. She's fidgeting and moving and people in the restaurant have a hard time taking their eyes off her, she's so full of life. She reminds you of the little girl you used to be, and you worry about what might happen when she and boys discover each other. On one side of you is Michael, your third husband, your rock, the man who gave you the support you never had and always wanted, the guy who let you slow down, who encouraged it. On another side is Liz, Clay and Claire's mother, another blond.
You drink your beer and you reflect on what brought you here, what brought you through three marriages and two careers, how you have changed, and about the secret you kept for so long and how keeping secrets can exhaust a person, and you look across the table at the handsome husband of Liz, father of Clay and Claire, the 43-year-old with the wide-set eyes and the big, toothy smile.

His name is Tom Kirksey. His parents are named Bob and Nancy Kirksey. They adopted him when he was a baby, when his name was Sean Robert, and they like to tell people he "has always been on the move—very active." They say he is "not very cautious—it was a standing joke that we had a charge account at the emergency hospital. We made numerous visits for stitches and casts." When you hear that description, you smile. It sounds like someone you know.

You look at your baby, and he looks at you and you clink beers. You both like beer and wine and share a fondness for enchiladas. You both like sailing. You both, without having known it, have chosen the same password on your e-mail accounts—the name of the hospital where he was born. You both are talkers, risk-takers. You both are deeply, profoundly grateful to Bob and Nancy Kirksey for giving your baby what you could not. Would things have been different if your mother hadn't been so worried about disappointing her parents, if you had lived in a different time? Maybe, but you don't dwell on that anymore. Sometimes time folds in on itself and you're outside and you catch a whiff of petunias and suddenly you're a young girl, and your grandmother is digging in her flower bed and your strong, principled grandfather is off on his backhoe somewhere and Billy the blind-in-one-eye Shetland pony is waiting for you in the pasture and you haven't even discovered boys, and then you snap out of it and the past is gone. You think about the past and you think about the future, but you don't dwell on either. Life is good. Now is good.

You live in Texas, and you don't have to work long hours anymore. You live with Michael, who is rich, and you spend half of the year sailing the world's oceans in his 43-foot catamaran. Sometimes you spend time at his house—your house now—on Turks and Caicos. You have seen giant tortoises on the Galapagos and a whitetip oceanic shark in the Coral Sea, 125 miles off the Great Barrier Reef. You're still in good shape and you handle the rigging and the climbing on the boat, and Michael does the steering and maintains the equipment. You make trips to the grocery stores and he does the cooking. At sea, you tuck into lamb chops and spare ribs and his specialty, rack of lamb, and you sip wine under starlight, listening to the silence of the ocean. You're friendly with your second husband, and you mourn your brother, but you've accepted his absence. And if he hadn't died, would you have ever found the man sitting across from you?

He wasn't raised by runners, but Tom has made himself one. When you meet him, he has run eight marathons, a dozen half-marathons, and more 5-Ks and 10-Ks than he can remember. You're going to run the Grasslands Trail Run half-marathon together on March 21 near your home in Texas. You and the child you brought into the world, running together. You talk to Tom three or four times a week. He says he wasn't looking for a regular connection but that you're like a sibling. You're not sure what you're like. Whatever it is, it feels right.
Tom and Liz and the two kids have been with you and Michael on the boat for a week now, scuba diving and playing cards and swapping life stories. You have visited them in California. And now you're having dinner, talking about what led up to your meeting, about your life and theirs. You talk about the first time you met Tom, and how when you went to a restaurant near his home, in Huntington Beach, he beamed at the waitress and said, pointing at you, "That's my mom!" and she smiled wanly and said, "mmm-hmmmm," and then he added, "I just met her today."

He talks about his life in Huntington Beach, and you talk about that mysterious telephone call from the teenage boy years ago, and Tom says it wasn't him. That's another story, a mystery. You're up to the point in your story where you finally made the decision to write a letter. You walked up the stairs to your little office in the big house where you and Michael live outside Dallas and you started typing. Then you restarted. Then you restarted again. You labored over that letter and then, when you finished it, you let it sit for 24 hours. You finally mailed it on a Thursday. You enclosed your cell-phone number, and your home-phone number, and your e-mail. You decided you would not dwell on the pain if your baby didn't reply. You wanted it to be his decision. You had no right to expect a reply.

No reply came. No call Saturday, or Sunday, or Monday. When Tuesday came, you gave up and you surrendered to a future of pain, to a lifetime of tearful December 7ths.

It took me a day and a half to write it, he says.

"I had about given up," you say, recounting the story to the table at Tickles, in the Crown Bay Marina on the island of St. Thomas, bathed by the soft, balmy winter twilight.

That's when Tom speaks up. He says he wanted to make sure he said what was in his heart. He wanted to make sure that you knew how grateful he was to you for what you had done. He wanted to make sure you knew what a great act of love you had committed, and how everything had worked out, how it couldn't have worked out better. Tom had been a hard worker, and was great with people, but he was never a great student. Composition was not his strong suit.

"It took me a day and a half to write it," he says.

You look at the baby who is now a man, the child who became someone else's son, but who will always be connected to you, and you think back on everything that brought you both here. You think back on the secret you kept, the secret you're grateful you keep no longer.

"Mine took 40 years," you say.