"That still doesn't…"
"What?"
"Los Angeles isn't Redwood Point," you say. "I never heard of the place. What were my parents doing there?"
"Oh, that." Your uncle raises his thin white eyebrows. "No mystery. Redwood Point was a resort up the coast. In August, L.A. was brutally hot. As your mother came close to giving birth, your father decided she ought to be someplace where she wouldn't feel the heat, close to the sea, where the breeze would make her comfortable. So they took a sort of vacation, and you were born there."
"Yes," you say. "Perfectly logical. Nothing mysterious. Except…" You gesture toward the coffee table. "Why did my father keep this woman's adoption agreement?"
Your uncle lifts his liver-spotted hands in exasperation. "Oy vay. For all we know, he found a chance to do some legal work while he was in Redwood Point. To help pay your mother's hospital and doctor bills. When he moved back to Chicago, it might be some business papers got mixed in with his personal ones. By accident, everything to do with Redwood Point got grouped together."
"And my father never noticed the mistake no matter how many times he must have gone to his safe-deposit box? I have trouble believing…"
"Jacob, Jacob. Last month, I went to my safe-deposit box and found a treasury bond that I didn't remember even buying, let alone putting in the box. Oversights happen."
"My father was the most organized person I ever knew."
"God knows I love him, and God knows I miss him." Your uncle bites his pale lower lip, then breathes with effort, seized with emotion. "But he wasn't perfect, and life isn't tidy. We'll probably never know for sure how this document came to be with his private papers. But this much I do know. You can count on it. You're Simon and Esther's natural child. You weren't adopted."
You stare at the floor and nod. "Thank you."
"No need to thank me. Just go home, get some rest, and stop thinking so much. What happened to Simon and Esther has been a shock to all of us. We'll be a long time missing them."
"Yes," you say, "a long time."
"Rebecca? How is…"
"The same as me. She still can't believe they're dead."
Your uncle's bony fingers clutch your hand. "I haven't seen either of you since the funeral. It's important for family to stick together. Why don't both of you come over for honey cake on Rosh Hashana?"
"I'd like to, Uncle. But I'm sorry, I'll be out of town."
"Where are you going?"
"Redwood Point."
The biggest airport nearest your destination is in San Jose. You rent a car and drive south down the coast, passing Carmel and Big Sur. Preoccupied, you barely notice the dramatic scenery: the windblown pine trees, the rugged cliffs, the whitecaps hitting the shore. You ask yourself why you didn't merely phone the authorities at Redwood Point, explain that you're a lawyer in Chicago, and ask for information that you need to settle an estate. Why do you feel compelled to come all this way to a town so small that it isn't listed in your Hammond Atlas and could only be located in the Chicago library on its large map of California? For that matter, why do you feel compelled at all? Both your wife and your uncle have urged you to leave the matter alone. You're not adopted, you've been assured, and even if you were, what difference would it make?
The answers trouble you. One, you might have a brother or a sister, a twin, and now that you've lost your parents, you feel an anxious need to fill the vacuum of their loss by finding an unsuspected member of your family. Two, you suffer a form of mid-life crisis, but not in the common sense of the term. To have lived these many years and possibly never have known your birth parents makes you uncertain of your identity. Yes, you loved the parents you knew, but your present limbo of insecure uncertainty makes you desperate to discover the truth, one way or the other, so you can dismiss the possibility of your having been adopted or else adjust to the fact that you were. But this way, not being certain, is maddening, given the stress of double grief. And three, the most insistent reason, an identity crisis of frantic concern, you want to learn if after a lifetime… of having been circumsized, of Hebrew lessons, of your bar mitzvah, of Friday nights at temple, of scrupulous observance of sacred holidays… of being a Jew… if after all that, you might have been born a gentile. You tell yourself that being a Jew has nothing to do with race and genes, that it's a matter of culture and religion. But deep in your heart, you've always thought of yourself proudly as being completely a Jew, and your sense of self feels threatened. Who am I? you think.
You increase speed toward your destination and brood about your irrational stubborn refusal to let Rebecca travel here with you. Why did you insist on coming alone?
Because, you decide with grim determination.
Because I don't want anybody holding me back.
The Pacific Coast Highway pivots above a rocky cliff. In crevasses, stunted misshapen fir trees cling to shallow soil and fight for survival. A weather-beaten sign abruptly says REDWOOD POINT. With equal abruptness, you see a town below you on the right, its buildings dismal even from a distance, their unpainted listing structures spread along a bay at the center of which a half-destroyed pier projects toward the ocean. The only beauty is the glint of the afternoon sun on the white-capped waves.
Your stomach sinks. Redwood Point. A resort? Or at least that's what your uncle said. Maybe in nineteen thirty-eight, you think. But not anymore. And as you steer off the highway, tapping your brakes, weaving down the bumpy narrow road past shorter, more twisted pine trees toward the dingy town where your birth certificate says you entered the world, you feel hollow. You pass a ramshackle boarded-up hotel. On a ridge that looks over the town, you notice the charred collapsed remnant of what seems to have been another hotel and decide, discouraged, that your wife and your uncle were right. This lengthy, fatiguing journey was needless. So many years. A ghost of a town that might have been famous once. You'll never find answers here.
The dusty road levels off and leads past dilapidated buildings toward the skeleton of the pier. You stop beside a shack, get out, and inhale the salty breeze from the ocean. An old man sits slumped on a chair on the few safe boards at the front of the pier. Obeying an impulse, you approach, your footsteps crunching on seashells and gravel.
"Excuse me," you say.
The old man has his back turned, staring toward the ocean.
The odor of decay – dead fish along the shore – pinches your nostrils.
"Excuse me," you repeat.
Slowly the old man turns. He cocks his shriveled head, either in curiosity or antagonism.
You ask the question that occurred to you driving down the slope. "Why is this town called Redwood Point? This far south, there aren't any redwoods."
"You're looking at it."
"I'm not sure what…"
The old man gestures toward the ruin of the pier. "The planks are made of redwood. In its hey-day" – he sips from a beer can – "used to be lovely. The way it stuck out toward the bay, so proud." He sighs, nostalgic. "Redwood Point."
"Is there a hospital?"
"You sick?"
"Just curious."
The old man squints. "The nearest hospital's forty miles up the coast."
"What about a doctor?"
"Used to be. Say, how come you ask so many questions?"
"I told you I'm just curious. Is there a courthouse?"