If You Could See Me Now. Michael Mewshaw

to marry her.Where does he fit in? Why did she tell him she was pregnant?"

      "I never knew about him before."

      "She was full of surprises,wasn't she? Is that what attracted you to her?"

      I conceded that I would have settled for fewer surprises.

      "Then what was her great appeal?" Amy asked. "Tell me about my mother."

      "I'd rather let her tell you about herself."

      "Where is she? How can I reach her?"

      I hesitated, unable to guess whether the truth would do more harm than good. Although I hadn't spoken to Amy's birth mother in over thirty years, I feared that she wouldn't welcome contact with her daughter. I feared that both of them might emerge from any meeting bruised and resentful. I also had some residual anger and hurt of my own, and I didn't care to inflict it on anybody. But as I tried to unpack my motives, I couldn't make up my mind which would hurt less—for Amy to meet her birth mother or to remain in the dark.And what would be less hurtful to the woman I used to love—being reunited with her daughter or remaining in ignorance?

      Only in retrospect did it occur to me that I didn't need to make any choice. Never married to her mother and with no biological link to Amy, I was under no obligation. I could have hung up, cutting the connection. Fathers did it to their own children every day—disappeared without a backward glance. No support, no explanation. In a phrase I've never understood, they "got over it." Did that mean they forgot? Or just no longer cared?

      Whatever the answer, I couldn't do that to Amy any more than I had to her mother. Call it a compulsion, call it an unhealthy curiosity, call it a persistent wish that someone would do the same for me. I'll admit to all of these.

      Yet for a moment I did entertain the idea that I could simply give Amy a name and tell her to keep her eyes on the newspapers, cable television and magazine covers. Sooner or later she'd see her birth mother. In the end, though, I decided that she deserved to hear the whole story. As Mrs. Woodson put it, no third party, regardless of how well intentioned, has the right to contract away a person's life history. So I recounted it piecemeal to Amy during a dozen transatlantic calls.