Plea

‘I mean, I don’t have anything against my parents. I don’t. Nobody expects to get divorced, or have all the shit that happened to them happen. I’m not here to get back at them, or anything like that. And no, I don’t blame myself, either. I mean, would this family be as fucked up as it is now if I hadn’t, like, “joined” it? I don’t know. I guess it doesn’t matter. This isn’t about that. This is something I need to do for myself.’

Q.

‘I need to know the names of my birth parents.’

Q.

‘My name is Caitlin Shelley. I’m seventeen. I was adopted from Seoul, Korea, when I was four months old, by Bob and Christine Shelley. I have two older brothers, neither of whom was adopted.’

Q.

‘Yes, I understand that there’s a policy. I’ll be eighteen in October, and I have two reasons why I need to get around that right now. One is that neither of my parents is capable of giving parental consent. The other is that I don’t know 100% for sure whether I am seventeen, do I? I won’t know until I see the situation around my birth in Korea. So, until I see my records, I can’t be sure how old I am.’

Q.

‘I haven’t seen Christine in a few months now. Last I heard she had an apartment in Grand Rapids, but I never had an address for it. She hasn’t called. As far as I know, Brian and Anthony don’t know where she is either. This is all confidential, right?’

Q.

‘Bob is at home. He’s always home. He looks the exact same when I leave for school in the morning as when I get home, except drunker. He might leave while I’m at work, sometimes, because when I get home from that, his door’s always closed, and he has a porch off his bedroom, so he could leave if he wanted. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter, though. There’s always food in the house, it’s a safe environment, et cetera. Listen, by confidential, you know I’m not telling you this to rat them out, right? You’re not going to do anything…okay. This has nothing to do with them. I’m telling you these details so you’ll understand why I need to bypass the parental-consent thing. My mom is M.I.A., and Bob is far too inebriated to sign anything and have it hold water. Plus, he is just not in a mental state to handle this.’

Q.

‘When he lost his job, he kind of lost it. Mentally, I mean. He’d been working for the city for like twenty years, he was in a really respectable position, when he got laid off. I guess it was pretty traumatizing. He did the city budget, so he was well aware of how money is allocated, what jobs are in danger, et cetera, and when the new mayor was elected four years ago, he handed him this new project, and it involved noticing that his job was being cut. It was horrible, for him. He had one kid in college and two kids at home, and a good job, and a normal marriage, at the time. Anthony was a freshman and all of a sudden we couldn’t pay tuition anymore. It was around then that Christine’s breakdowns got worse, too. She’d stopped coming home regularly even while my dad was still working, and he thought it was infidelity, so he was already on the edge, but then we found out she was…very unstable. She spent six months in a mental hospital. Yeah, in-patient. She checked herself in, and I went to see her, and my dad did too, but it was like she didn’t know me. That really hurt my dad too, I could see. Then she started accusing him of all this stuff that didn’t happen, and we got scared, both that she had all these false memories and that somebody might take them seriously, so he stopped going, and I didn’t have a way of getting there, so I did too. Stopped going, I mean. Honestly it was easier not to. I felt bad, and I would’ve gone, if she’d given any indication that she wanted me to, but she never called and asked. It was like we just didn’t exist to her. When she checked herself out, she didn’t tell us. That she was leaving or where she was going. Sometimes she calls Anthony. Somehow my dad managed to divorce her. It’s all very weird. Ten years ago I would never have thought this was possible.’

Q.

‘Anthony seems fine. I don’t really talk to him. He stopped coming home for holidays like his freshman year. It was like college became his family and he didn’t need us anymore. Brian, kind of the same thing, but he was always quieter. He was around for Dad’s…decline, but he was always quieter. He moved out a couple years ago and comes home occasionally, but he doesn’t really share. With me. I have not idea how he is.’

Q.

‘When I was little, things were normal, though. We took vacations, we ate dinner together. We have a pool and had friends over, I went to summer camp, I played soccer and took dance and violin lessons, all that stuff. I got braces and had surgery on my knee when I broke it, and they were always more than happy to pay for it. I got the same treatment as Brian and Anthony. They talked to me about being adopted, and about Korea, and told me they’d take me there someday, maybe for high school graduation. Which is now approaching, and no one’s mentioned it. I doubt Christine will make it there at all.’

Q.

‘I mean, that’s how it is, right? It’s fucked up. But that’s life.’

Q.

‘I applied to a couple places. The guidance counselor pretty much forced me to. I don’t really want to go to college. I’m definitely moving out this summer though. I work at Costco and I might be able to go fulltime after school’s out. I’m trying to save money so I can go to Korea. I might take some classes at GCC. I just don’t see the point of spending all that money, and taking out loans, when I don’t even know what I want to do.’

Q.

‘Well I know what I want, I want to find my birth parents. I want to live in Korea, at least for awhile. Maybe a year or so. And college doesn’t exactly fit into that plan.’

Q.

‘No, I haven’t told him. I don’t even know if he’d hear me over the TV. And it might just make things worse. He’s been taking Prozac for a year now but I don’t think it’s doing anything. I mean, I feel bad for him, but no wonder he can’t get a job, when he just drinks and mopes all the time. Anyway, no, I’m not going to tell him, until I know for sure that I’m going to Korea. He doesn’t need to know.’

Q.

‘I think he would have been hurt by it ten years ago, in a fatherly kind of understanding “I’ll support you whatever you do, honey” kind of way. Now, though, like I said, 180.’

Q.

‘I want to find my roots. I’ve been asking myself these questions nobody else can answer. Who am I, where do I come from. What diseases am I susceptible to. Does Alzheimer’s, or male pattern baldness, or even like low blood pressure, do those things run in my family? I need to know these things.’

Q.

‘Because what am I going to do until October? Fuck around and pretend college is right for me, or just sit and wait till I can look at my own file? Six more months of just waiting? I want to start planning my trip to Korea, do you see? And no, I’m not going to go off and so anything rash, I’m not booking my flight just yet. I’m being rather adult about this, given that no one else in my life is. I want to start learning the language, and get accustomed to the culture. But the first step is knowing my real name. Which I understand might not be in the file. But I have to know that.’

Q.

‘No, I’m not running away from anything. I’m very grateful to have been given this chance, to live here in Michigan, to grow up with brothers and loving parents and have the opportunity to go to college if I want to later in life and all that jazz. But I can’t settle here, I can’t accept all this shit that’s happened as the only life I have—when it’s like I have a whole other life, and family, in Korea, that didn’t happen, while this one, this degenerating, fallen apart, suddenly not-so-great-anymore one did, you know?’