Aristeo folds light-filled particles like dough until a perfect slot machine takes shape. Smirking, he pulls an imagined token from a pretend pocket. Nearby birds tweet casino noises. Others dip their beaks into clouds, drawing a mix of cherries and lucky 7s or three cherries to snap a win for Aristeo. “I shoulda stopped taking insulin sooner,” he chuckles, creating a ray of light that reaches me, an earth-bound adoptee who imagines his heavenly play.

In reunion with many blood relatives, I, an adoptee, attempt to stitch missing relatives into my life story. The timeline, ethereal and suspended, with people, places, and things that materialize like a haze, is hard to put a needle through. But some artifacts make the needle dance.

In a sepia-toned photo Aristeo wears an Air Force uniform. After I text this photo to my dad, he replies, “That’s a lot of fruit salad,” using military slang for medals. Aristeo is a stranger to Dad and me. Dad is mine through adoption. Aristeo is my maternal grandfather. His daughter is my birth mother; we’ve never met.

I am her first, and the only child with her high-school sweetheart. With the help of a private investigator, I found and contacted her in the fall of 2005 when I was 34. Over the next two years, she sent a few vague emails in reply to mine. Her last, and final, email was an invective in which she declined any further communication. With my needle and the material I have collected from our brief exchange, I deftly patch my story together, no longer worried about drawing blood.

I found my birth mother’s third child, if I am counted as her first, in 2007. She is the heart of my search for blood relatives, and has unraveled new threads, both maternal and paternal.

My birth mother escaped the town of my conception and enrolled in college, where she met her now ex-husband. Seven years after my birth, she bore a son and four years later, a daughter (the one I found in 2007). Eight years after, twins arrived: a boy and a girl. The last daughter, now in her thirties, lives with my birth mother.

Following a year of emails, texts, and phone calls, my sister and I first met in 2008. We discover we sound alike, share the same-shaped face, and laugh a lot. My sister’s husband and daughter are amazed, and playfully annoyed, when she and I, masters of friendly banter, strike up conversations with strangers. We’ve lived near each other for the last eight years. We often refer to each other as “hermana,” and prefer “sister” over “half-sister.”

My sister reveals our mother can say my name, assuring me she doesn’t respond angrily at the mention of me. A small change of heart, though she remains silent, and doesn’t consider me family, despite the photos and reunions that suggest otherwise.

“I think we know who to thank for our eyebrows,” my sister responds after I text her Aristeo’s photo.

She has Aristeo’s sparkling blue eyes. His smile reminds me of my own—my most noticeable feature. His warm face makes me long for a hug from him.

Aristeo is a discovered secret, not the Irishman passed off as my birth mother’s father by her mother, my maternal grandmother—the presumptive architect of my adoption. How I received Aristeo’s photo is a long, complicated tapestry, but how I learned of him, a quick hem.

Ten years into my reunion with my sister, I spoke with her older brother/my younger maternal brother for the first time. The phone call lasted over two hours. The familiarity of his voice and candor heightened the phone’s warmth against my ear. Like my sister and me, he held his own in conversation, and also connects with me. “If it makes you feel any better, I always felt different like I didn’t fit in,” he shared. 

After that first call, we spoke and texted on and off. One day, he called bursting with news. “Hey, Carrie Anne, you know how you and I tan quickly? It’s not because we’re dark Irish. It’s because we’re Mexican!” My looks—that match my Italian-American adoptive family—are finally explained. 

Over time, my countries of origin have grown to include: Italy, Britain, Germany, Ireland, and Spain, from which my Sephardic Jewish ancestors fled first to Portugal, then to Mexico, and, eventually, to Texas. Anchored by many cultures and ethnicities, and with an abundance of ancestors in view, I am more settled with who I am.

I wonder if my birth mom ever got to meet Aristeo, a kept secret like me. I wonder if, like me, she patched him into the swath of her life’s sky.