Bonus: Inheritance

a result of a DNA test. Get ready for the exact moment that I discover the truth of my own genetic identity, the truth my parents had never wanted me to know, the truth they took to the grave with them. This excerpt is Curtis See of Penguin Random House Audio from the audiobook of my memoir Inheritance. Michael came over

to the bed and sat next to me. It had been thirty six hours since we had sat side by side on the chaise in my office, since I had discovered that my father hadn't been my father, Doctor Benjamin Walden. I entered his name my fingers cold and shaking. Benjamin Walden ben Walden, Doctor ben Walden. There was no part of me that believed this was happening, even as it unfolded with a sense of inevitability so profound that I will later come to think of it as a kind

of fate. On the page for a medical website. Doctor ben Walden is a thoracic surgeon who retired from active practice in two thousand three. He is a well respected speaker on the subject of medical ethics. He is a graduate of the Medical School at the University of Pennsylvania. In the months to come, indeed, I suspect for the rest of my life, I will hear stories. Friends will send me links to news items. Experts will share their experience. I'll be told of people who have searched for their

sperm donors, their biological fathers, all their lives. When these searches have been unsuccessful, some have had their anonymous donors identification numbers tattooed on their bodies, a way of marking themselves with their only clue. I've seen photos of arms, ankles, shoulders inked with stark series of numbers, and with each story of a dead end a locked door. I am stunned anew A favorite poem Otherwise by Jane Kenyon, begins like this, I got out of bed on two strong legs.

It might have been otherwise. I ate cereal, sweet milk, ripe, flawless peach. It might have been otherwise. The poet goes on to regard ways in which the bounty of her daily life contained within it the shadow of a darker possibility. My daughter was conceived in Philadelphia, my mother had said that long ago evening, not a pretty story. When pressed

the word institute, her language was precise. The thing she never planned to say that slipped out on the second anniversary of my father's death, and only because I introduced her to my friend from Philadelphia was an enormous piece of luck. What if that friend had been from Detroit. What if I hadn't brought my mother to the graduate student reading that night. A seam ripped open in my mother that night that allowed me access to a vital clue, though I didn't know it at the time. A moment,

a split second, and then it closed up again. If she hadn't said those exact words, but if everything else had remained the same when I got the results from ancestry nearly thirty years later, I would have discovered that my father wasn't my biological father, but known nothing more, I would have come to the conclusion that my mother must have had an affair. I would have supplied yet another false narrative to the story of my life. What if Adam Thomas hadn't shown up on my ancestry page?

What then all would have been a yawning, cavernous emptiness, devoid of possibility, like the baby bird that fell from its nest. I might have wandered through the world, never knowing where I came from. I would have been left with a hole inside me in the shape of a father, or rather two fathers, the father who raised me, who died too young, too sad, too lost, and the anonymous man I came from but would never be able to identify. Five. Instead of a false narrative, there would be an infinity

of narratives. Michael kicked off his sneakers and sat in bed next to me. My laptop was balanced between us as we waited for a YouTube ad to finish. Doctor Benjamin Walden five syllables seven. If you included the prefix A nice molifluous name. He had a website. It took three clicks to get there. It was a simple site, a repository of blog posts and essays he had written about medical ethics, along with links to a couple of videos. The screen went black, and then his name, in white

sam seraph type appeared. Dr ben Walden speaking at Reed College, Portland, Oregon. An old man with white hair and blue eyes was standing at a lectern. My God, I whispered. Time slowed to a near stand still. I could compute what I was seeing, or rather who I was seeing. The man was wearing khakis, a blue button down shirt, and a fleece vest. He had a pale complexion, but his cheeks

were pink. His color high, my exact coloring somewhere in the background the comments I had fielded just about every day for fifty four years. Are you sure you're Jewish? There's no way you're Jewish? Did your mother have an affair with the Swedish milkman? I saw my jaw, my nose, my forehead, and eyes. I heard something familiar in the timbre of his voice. It wasn't merely a resemblance. It was a quality. The way he held himself his pattern of speech. He was recommending a book to the audience

at toll Gowande's Being Mortal. He referenced an article in the Onion. I had the bizarre thought that he had good literary taste. I ran my hands down the length of my legs. Who was I? What was I? I felt as if I might disintegrate right there in that hotel room, floating high above the city. This wasn't what I wanted to see, But now that I had seen it, I would never be able to unsee it. Dr ben Walden, his name, continued to appear beneath the lectern, the glint

of eyeglasses a wedding ring. Michael raised the volume. The man's voice moved through me and around me, like something invisible stitched into the air. In just a moment, I'll open it up to questions, Jesus, Michael was saying, Jesus Christ. Now ben Walden was gesticulating. He held both his hands in front of him, as if bracketing the air in parentheses,

a gesture that I suddenly recognized as my own. I knew, in a place beyond thought, that I was seeing the truth, the answer to the unanswerable questions I had been exploring all my life. The audience in Portland was now raising their hands. He called on someone in the back row, then nodded, smiling slightly as he listened. Do you see that, I asked Michael, the way he's he even runs a

Q and A like you. Michael said, the following summer, there will be a total eclipse of the sun, and Michael, Jacob and I will take turns looking at it through NASA approved glasses. But I will not trust the NASA approved glasses. I will still look at the eclipse for

only a fraction of a second at a time. This is the way I watched the YouTube video on that June morning, A glimpse, then away, another glimpse, as if the old man in the blue button down shirt and Patagonia vest who he was and what that meant might blind me forever. I slipped out of bed and walked barefoot into the bathroom. My mind and body seemed to be disconnected. My body wasn't the body I had believed it to be for fifty four years. My face wasn't my face. That's what it felt like. If my body

wasn't my body, and my face wasn't my face? Who was I? In several weeks, once I'm back East, I'll meet my best friend from college for dinner, and when I walk into her apartment, I'll realize I'm afraid that her feelings for me will have somehow changed, that I am now unknowable to her. I'll stand in her living room, tears streaming down my face, and ask, do you still see me as the same person? And she will look at me, amused, compassionate. You are the same person, She'll say.

But on that morning in Japantown, I encountered my own face in the mirror and understood for the first time that the information reflected back at me had always told a different story than the one I had believed, no more than believed known. I didn't feel like the same person. The white haired, blue eyed doctor from Portland's was now staring back at me. He had always been staring back at me, and it wasn't only a physical thing certain

common features. Watching him on YouTube, I felt, with my entire being something I could barely understand come from him. I wrapped myself in a robe and sat at the small desk where Michael had made the discovery about Bethany and Adam Thomas. Less than an hour earlier, I closed the tab for the YouTube video and opened my email two Dr Benjamin Walden from Danny Shapiro, subject important letter. It had been easy, just as everything else had been

insanely easy, to find his contact information. He had a blog, He was out there in the world, a well respected physician, a public speaker. He was a man who would probably have no reason to think his inbox would contain any huge surprises. How old was too old for a surprise. He was seventy eight. Dear doctor Walden, I'm writing to you about something that may come as a shock. My name is Danny Shapiro, and I am a fifty four year old novelist, memoirist, wife, and mother of a seventeen

year old son. I live in Litchfield County, Connecticut. I recently took a DNA test as nothing more than a lark. I have always believed my parents to be my biological parents, but now I have reason to believe that you may be my biological father. I won't write more and less. Ah, this may sense to you, and be you're willing to communicate with me about it. I so hope you're willing. I'm going to send you a link to my website so you can see something of who I am. Www

dot Danny Shapiro dot com. Thank you. Danny. Michael was in the shower. I waited, my finger hovering for a moment before I hit senned. Before she got off the phone, Jennifer Mendelssohn had asked me what I was going to do now that I had zeroed in on my biological father. She urged me to be methodical to do research. Apparently there was a right way and a wrong way to go about this. There were, she told me, templates. But I wasn't feeling careful or methodical. In fact, quite the opposite.

I was feeling wild and reckless. I needed not to sit back and cogitate, but to take any and every kind of action. As long as I was in motion, my fingers against the keyboard, the pen across the page, dressing for the day, swiping lipstick across my now unfamiliar lips, strapping on my sandals, I was able to hold onto the belief that I was propelling myself forward rather than

falling backward into the abyss. My publisher has a special offer for Family Secrets listeners off my book and a selection of other great reads when you shop from Penguin Random House. Just visit www dot Penguin Random House slash Inheritance and use the code p r H Family Secrets. Family Secrets is an I Heeart media production. Dylan Fagin is the supervising producer and Julie Douglas is the executive producer.

If you have a family secret you'd like to share, you can get in touch with us at listener mail at Family Secrets podcast dot com, and you can also find us on Instagram at Danny Writer, and Facebook at Family Secrets Pod and Twitter at fam Secrets Pod. That's fam Secrets Pod. For more about my book, Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot com.