Though it feels sneaky, I don’t try to hide what I’m up to. I bring it into the living room and spread everything across the coffee table for examination. “Not again, Peep,” my mother groans, knowing she’ll be the one to put it back in its hiding place and that before she does, I’ll have more questions than she can or wants to answer.

Like a junior detective, I pull off the white cardboard lid and inspect what’s inside: baby shower napkins, notes of congratulations, diaper pins, an old rubber pacifier, a pair of booties. A card with my height and weight—6 lbs. 4 oz., 19 inches—shows no date. A tiny plastic hospital bracelet with a number shows no name.

Copies of Life and Vogue, both dated January 1970, live in there too. A picture of a fuzzy green blob titled “A Living Human Egg” sits on one cover while a pretty model with long dark hair, light skin, and big eyes looks back at me from the other. Is this Vogue model the lady who had me? Was I once a green blob in her belly? I wonder if she knows where I am. And, if so, why in the world she chose this family?

* * *

At only eight years old, I was already searching. For her? I’m not sure. For truth? Definitely. Though I feigned interest in the “cool old magazines,” I longed for answers to my mystery identity. If only that white hat box could have been black, an in-flight data recorder, capturing the suspicious turn of events the day my fate careened into a foreign land.

Our first family picture, dated as developed in February 1970, also lived in that box. It confirmed the start of my timeline and proved parts of the story. Snapped in my Aunt Tweeter’s driveway, it captures the day she drove her brother and sister-in-law—my new parents—to the pickup point for their promised baby. In it, my second mother, a thirty-two-year-old, freckled, one-hundred-and-twenty-pound beauty, stands beside her thirty-four-year-old, three-hundred-pound tan Hispanic husband. Both beam from ear to ear. My new mother holds a billowy white receiving blanket that one can only assume I am swaddled inside, due to the tight clutch of her arms around it.

Mommy described my first being placed in her arms as “a moment of unparalleled joy,” and her words rang sweetly in my ears. “There in the van, when we pulled back all the bunting, we found you’d arrived with scratches on your little face and a full head of hair, except for the bald spots where your tiny fingers had pulled it out.”

Did it not occur to her that a well-cared-for baby shouldn’t have had so many scratches? That a properly swaddled infant couldn’t pull her hair or claw her face? That the child should have come with papers? That you don’t buy babies off the street? At least she never said it did . . .