When The Lights Go Out. Mary Kubica
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How it must have fallen from my wallet on the way in. How it was there, but now it’s gone.
I press the urn to my chest, hoping the woman’s mercy will prevail and she’ll pocket the extra fifteen bucks and get me what I need. She stares at the money for a minute and then asks whether I have any other form of ID. An insurance card or voter registration, but I shake my head and tell her no. I don’t have either of these things. Mom had health insurance. A rock-bottom plan that helped pay for cancer treatment, though I’m still in the hole more than I care to think about. But Mom never added me to her insurance plan because she said it wasn’t something I needed. I was young and healthy and the rare trip to the clinic could be paid for with cash. Those required school vaccines I got at the Department of Public Health because they were cheap.
“Got any mail with your name on it?” the woman wants to know, but I shrug my shoulders and tell her no. She gives me a look. Disbelief, I think. I’m as much of a skeptic as the next guy; I know how this sounds.
“Please, ma’am,” I beg. I’m tired and I don’t know what else to do. My eyes feel heavy, threatening to close. There’s the greatest desire to lie down on the floor and sleep. Except that it’s only a tease, my body playing tricks on me. Even if I lie outstretched on the linoleum tiles, I still wouldn’t sleep.
“I really need that birth certificate, ma’am,” I say, shuffling in place, and it must be something about the way my voice cracks or the tears that well in my eyes that makes her lean forward and snatch the money from the countertop. She gathers the bills into her hand, counting them one at a time. Her eyes take a quick poll of the room to see if anyone else is watching, listening, before she whispers, “How about this. How about I see if I can find anything first. Then we’ll figure out what to do about the ID.”
I say okay.
She takes the form and begins typing information onto the rows of keys.
My heart pounds inside my chest. My hands sweat. In just a few short minutes, I’ll know who my father is. I start thinking about his name. Whether he’s still alive. And if he is, if he thinks about me the way I think about him.
By now, there are at least twenty people in line behind me. The room isn’t large by any means. It’s stodgy and drab, and everyone is looking at everyone else like they’re a common criminal. Ladies clutch their purses to their sides. A kid in line screams that he has to pee. As he yells, I glance over my shoulder to see this poor kid, maybe four years old, hand pressed to his groin, eyes wide and ready to burst, his mother reading him the riot act for nature’s call.
“There were no records found,” the woman says to me then. Not at all the words I expected to hear. My face falls flat; my mouth parts. For a second I’m confused, unable to produce coherent thoughts or words.
I fight to find my voice, asking, “Are you sure you spelled it correctly?” imagining her hunting and pecking for the letters, clipping the corner edge of some surplus letter by mistake, misspelling my name.
But her face remains motionless. She doesn’t attempt another search, as I’d hoped she’d do. She doesn’t glance down at the computer or check her work.
“I’m sure,” she says, raising a hand into the air to beckon for the next customer.
“But wait,” I say, stopping her. Not willing to give up just yet.
“There were no records found, miss,” she tells me again, and I ask, feeling incredulous, “What does that mean then, no records found?” because what I’m suddenly realizing is that, instead of being dead, the crux of the matter is that there is no birth record on file for me.
I can’t be dead because I haven’t yet been born.
The Bureau of Vital Records doesn’t even know I exist.
“Of course you must have found something,” I argue, not waiting for a reply. My voice elevates. “How can there be no birth certificate for me when clearly I’m alive?”
And then I pinch a fold of skin on my arm, watching as it swells and turns red before shriveling back down to size. I do it so that she and I can both see I’m alive.
“Ma’am,” she says, and there’s a shift in posture, her empathy quickly giving way to aggravation. I’ve become a pest. “You left half this form blank,” she says.
I argue that she told me I could. That she was the one who said I didn’t have to fill it all out. She ignores me, continues to speak. “Who’s to say you were even born in Illinois? Were you born in Illinois?” she asks, challenging me, calling my bluff, and I realize that I don’t know. I don’t know where I was born. All my life, I only assumed. Because Mom never told me otherwise and I never thought to ask.
“No records found means that I couldn’t locate a birth certificate based on the information you gave me. You want to find your birth certificate, you need to fill in the rest of these blanks,” she tells me, slipping the request form back to me as I stare down helplessly at all the missing information, name of father, place of birth, wondering if what I filled in was even correct to begin with.
Was Mom always a Sloane like me? That I’d also assumed. But if she was married when I was born, then maybe she had a different last name, one she ditched at some point over the last twenty years for some reason I don’t know?
“And next time,” the employee tacks on as I back dismally away, losing hope, running blindly into another woman in line, “be sure and bring your ID.”
I make my way out the door, climbing back up to the first floor two steps at a time. The building’s stairwell is industrial and dark, a flash of gray that comes at me quickly. It spirals upward in circles for thirty floors or more. When I arrive on the first floor, slipping through the stairwell door, crowds flood the lobby of the Daley Center. I’m grateful for this, for the anonymity of it all. I camouflage myself among the wayward teens who’ve been summoned here for court, those with purple-dyed hair and heads hidden beneath sweatshirt hoods. I make my way back outside, nowhere closer to finding my father or proving my identity.
As far as the world is concerned, I’m still dead.
September 14, 1996 Egg Harbor
The town was mobbed with people today as it always is on Saturdays, vacationers trying hard to take advantage of the last few warm days before fall arrives. It’s September now, days shy of the equinox, and as September eventually bleeds into October, the seas of people will finally leave. They come for the hundreds of miles of shorelines, the extensive gift shops, the food. But by December, this far north into Wisconsin, the temperatures will hurtle to twenty or thirty degrees, mounds of snow will obstruct the streets, and the skies will be endlessly gray. And then no one will want to be here, least of all me. Aaron and I will spend the Midwest winter as we always do, imagining the warm places in the world we hope to one day go, places where cold and snow don’t exist. St. Lucia, Fiji, Belize.
Places we will never go.
I spent the day while Aaron was at work wandering the town’s streets, simulating a tourist. I visited gift shops; I bought a T-shirt and ice cream, a book on sailing. I rode the Washington Island Ferry through Death’s Door, spending the late-afternoon hours exploring the crystal clear waters and the polished white stones of Schoolhouse Beach, trying to skip rocks out over the lake, and like getting pregnant, failing at that too.
Back in town I watched families wander from store to store, mothers with buggies, fathers with toddlers perched on their backs. I stared at them as afternoon blended into evening, seated on a bench at Beach View Park, watching as families laid out blankets, staking their claim to a patch of land for the night’s sunset display.
The children were everywhere, and I started to wonder why something in so much abundance could ever be hard to achieve.
October 8, 1996 Egg Harbor