Not all parts of Phantom Son survived the innumerable edits and tweaks necessary to bring it into the world. This is one that hit the cutting room floor only for reasons to relevance to the book and the fact, I think, that I was being asked nicely to step down from my soapbox. This is a tiny story about my brother, Mark, with whom I share the status of adopted sibling.

My Adopted Brother

Since I'd been raised with an adopted brother who intruded upon my seven-year old idyllic only-child life, I was familiar with how adoption felt from the other side. I was also adopted by the father who raised me when he married my widowed mother. I attended their wedding as a four-year-old spectator and it felt perfectly fine to have a new daddy to call daddy. Despite my parents' best efforts, I also felt separate from my original family – separate and different – spaces in my reality that just didn't include me.

In our family, adopted kids were told they were "chosen" and it was how my parents grew our family. I overheard my mother and her best friend, Martha Kennedy, speculate about the four-month old baby who appeared one day in late 1952. They believed that his beautiful curls and chubby legs meant he was a prize baby only to be given up under the most dire circumstances. I heard that the foster mother had grown "attached" to him and I remember her crying when she handed him over. As he grew, he continued to be that same sweet, but fearless, boy, minus the chubby legs and curls, The truth is, he more closely matched the coloring in our family than I, a redhead, ever would.

Decades later when that same brother and I were sitting on the floor of a bank in Arkansas, examining the stuff in our now-dead parents safety deposit box, we discovered his adoption papers. I remember his face, I think I read his mind, I certainly felt his heart.

In the wake of this discovery, he claimed his adoption papers and began to search for his birthmother. I was a decade post-search myself, so I encouraged him, even if the results were dire. At least, I said, you will know something. Men are less likely to do this kind of search, I'd learned – boy adoptees less likely than girl adoptees to search for their birthmothers, but my brother was more curious than private at that moment. He was also a cop and he had access to state records.

He began his search, at my urging, exactly where we picked him up at the Michigan Children's Aid Society. In the end, he found his birthmother through his aunt and, in so doing, discovered an entire family complete with siblings, cousins, grandparents, aunts, uncles, rattling skeletons in the closet, and a birthmother who denied him access to all of it. I felt responsible for his disappointment and sad for his birthmother's fearful denial of this wonderful man who would never know his people. Mostly I felt deeply sorry for his loss, but less sorry that he knew what he knew for whatever it was worth.