I had been led to believe my mother was born an only child in Northern California. That she had led a relatively normal life until eighteen, when her parents died in a car crash on the Pacific Coast Highway. Much of how I understood my mother was based on this detail. But it was untrue. After putting her in the ground, I began the arduous task of sorting through her belongings. Old dresses, outdated jewelry, ticket stubs, resumes, tax returns and old birthday cards. In the attic, inside an old trunk, I found a weathered photograph. It was a picture of my mother, around eleven years old, smiling beside a second girl. A mirror image of herself. An identical twin? On the back was written Linnea and Annika Erickson. A lifetime of belief wouldn’t let me accept what I was seeing. Perhaps they just looked similar. I put the photo out of my mind and continued the work of organizing. Days later, when I uncovered a certified copy of my mother’s birth certificate, my world imploded. The document had been issued by the state of Maine. The town of my mother’s birth was recorded as Pairborn, in Pairborn County. Her legal first name was typed as Annika. This much I recognized. Her surname, however, was listed as Erickson. Not Anders. The names of her parents appeared as Esmée and Charlie Erickson. Not Beth and Steve. I then returned to the photograph. Who were these people? Who was my mother? Why did she lie?

The attempt to answer those questions became years of research. What I uncovered would eventually force me to reconsider not only my family history, but the assumptions upon which I had built my understanding of the world.