“You have arrived at your destination.”

Those were the words spoken by the GPS on the car as I pulled into a driveway in San Juan Bautista, California on May 15, 2008. It was the end of a journey that took me 36 years, and the beginning of an incredible new one.

It started one day when I was ten years old. After a harrowing day of sibling rivalry, my mother pulled me into her bedroom and closed the door.

“Do you feel like you are different from your sisters?” she asked me.

“Yes.”

“I need to tell you why. The man you have grown up with is not your father. Your real father was a man named Bob Reid. He played the guitar. I did not know him very long, and he does not know about you.”

She was crying. I could tell this was painful for her, but I did not have enough knowledge of how the world works to understand why. Myself, I did not know exactly what to do with this information, but it did answer for me the question of why I did not look like my fair-skinned, blue-eyed sisters.

“I thought I was adopted,” I said, and then she cried harder.

“Your father was part black and part East Indian. His mother was a model. East Indian women are the most beautiful women in the world.” (For years after that I would repeat this “fact” to my friends at school, convincing them that there was some kind of international rating system based on a scientific study which placed East Indian women right at the top of the beauty scale. I did not feel beautiful myself but mentally filed that piece of information under ‘Things to Rub in My Sisters’ Faces’.)

It was that day or soon after that my mother took aside my twelve-year-old sister, Monica, and told her the story of where I came from. I heard Monica crying in bed that night.

“I love you,” she said from her bed next to mine in the room we three sisters shared. It was the first time I remembered hearing those words from her- it is not something children often say to eachother. I could tell she felt guilty and went out of her way to be kind to me after that.

I remember thinking that this situation was painful for everyone, but I didn’t know why. Because no one ever talked about it, I assumed this was a secret not to be discussed or revealed. I loved my mother very much, and I could tell she was not proud of what she had done. I felt that her past sins were simply none of my business, and from that first day on, never brought it up to her.

I myself didn’t feel sad. I felt a certain satisfaction in having this little secret, and whenever I had a fight with my sisters, I would think to myself, “That’s OK. Someday my real Dad, the Prince of India, will come and take me to his palace far away!”

When I was 16, I got into an argument with my sister Lilly, who is 18 months younger than me.

“You’re not my real sister anyway!” I blurted out.

She was completely dumbfounded. I had no idea that she had never been told. I think she didn’t speak to my mother for a week. It never came up in our household again until after I got married and left home.

Identity Crisis

I was twenty-one. Cameron, my husband of one year, had a guitar which he played occasionally. I picked it up and asked him to show me how to play. He taught me a few chords, and after that he would come home from work to find me trying to strum along with a CD, the Indigo Girls. He seemed surprised that I was picking it up quickly, and suddenly The Conversation with my mother about my guitarist father came flooding back to me. I also remembered how, from when I was six, even before I knew, I had begged my parents for guitar lessons. It dawned on me that I had inherited this desire.

“Whose blood is this running through my veins?” I began to wonder.

At the time my Dad Neil was dying of cancer. My husband’s father, Leonard, had just suddenly and unexpectedly died of a heart aneurism at 49. It was a lot for a newly married couple to deal with at the same time, and frankly, we were at eachother’s throats. My need for a daddy was suddenly never stronger, and I was becoming deeply depressed and thought about suicide a lot.

At the dinner table one night Cameron and I got into a shouting match. It escalated, and I was delirious with rage. I picked up a steak knife from the table. Cameron thought I was going to attack him with it, but instead I attacked myself. I hacked at my left forearm and wrist until he grabbed the knife from me. My arm was badly lacerated, and the blood and sight of severed white nerves and tendons sticking out from my wrist made both of us nauseous. He wrapped my arm in a towel, put me in the car and raced me to the emergency room.

The surgery that put my nerves and tendons back together was not a complete success. I had lost almost all feeling in my left hand, and although it still functions, I realized I would probably never play the guitar again. I never did.

During my recovery I had a lot of time to think about how I had gotten to this point. There were a lot of issues I was dealing with, but the one that began to emerge as the most significant was my biological father. It was partly triggered by the death of my father-in-law and the impending death of my Dad Neil, but it was mostly the crisis all young people face as they reach adulthood, the search for who I was, and I strongly felt my biological father was the missing piece I needed to complete myself.

I began by discussing with my parents what they remembered about Bob Reid. They were separated at the time when my mom met Bob, a neighbor of hers. They had a brief fling, and when my mom realized she was pregnant, she left Oregon and never contacted Bob to tell him the baby was his.

But as for details, they both remembered almost nothing. They weren’t even sure how the name “Reid” was spelled. “He was really skinny.” “He had an Afro.” No date of birth, no address. Nothing that could lead me to him. Even private investigators told me it was a hopeless case. I didn’t have enough clues.

I began running ads in Portland, Oregon. It listed the few details I thought I knew, including the one about being East Indian. Twice I was interviewed by journalists, and the story was published in two newspapers, one of them being India Today.

One day I received a phone call from someone in Oregon. The conversation went like this:

“Hi, this is Bob Gentry. Someone said you are looking for me.”

“How did you get this number?’” I asked.

“My assistant gave it to me and said to call you.”

“But you don’t know how she got it?”

“No.”

“Well, I am looking for a man named Bob Reid. He lived in Oregon in 1971. He is part black and part East Indian. Do you know him?”

“Maybe. Why are you looking for him?”

“He’s my father.”

“That’s impossible. Bob Reid doesn’t have any children.”

“He doesn’t know about me.”

“You’re going to have to get some DNA testing done.”

“That’s not necessary. There is no one else it could be.”

“What do you look like?”

“Never mind that. Do you know where Bob Reid is?”

“I last saw him in Vancouver. He was a studio musician. Are you trying to get into modeling or acting?”

“No. But I think my grandmother was a model.”

“She was, and a fairly well-known actress. What do you do for a living?”

“I volunteer my time to teach the Bible.”

“Ohhh, you’re nothing like your father. He’s a wild man!”

“Well, do you think you could find him?”

“I’ll see what I can do. But just be prepared that he may not want to meet you.” And we hung up. He never called back.

I had a private investigator check out the phone number he had left on my answering machine. The P.I. couldn’t track him down, as he was calling from a movie set, but said that he believed that Bob Gentry was my father.

This was the first time it had ever occurred to that my father might not be happy to hear from me, would not want to be found. And the thought of him being a “wild man” scared me; maybe he was someone I didn’t want to know. Some crackhead who might show up at my house and want to sleep on my couch and borrow money.

At that point I decided it was better not to know any more. Mystery was much better than disappointment. For the next ten years I gave up the search, and didn’t pick it up again until Tuesday, May 13, 2008, when my whole world went reeling.

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