Page 9 of In Every Lifetime
Fai
Faizal,
I don’t even know where to begin. Honestly, I’m not sure what words are right for this, so I’ll just say it plainly. I’m your brother… well, technically, your half-brother. Our mom, Mariana, used to tell me stories about you all the time. From what I understand, you're about eight years older than me. It was just the two of us, but she spoke of you constantly, wondering about the life you were building, the person you had become. She always hoped you had found peace and happiness wherever you ended up. After she passed a few years back, I felt this pull to find you. I couldn’t let the chance to meet you slip away. With the help of a private investigator, I finally tracked you down, found you and your wife. I would love for us to connect, to meet each other, and I would be even more thrilled if you and your wife could visit me here in Montana. I realize you must have a flood of questions, probably more than I do, but I hope we can start figuring it all out together. I hope to hear from you soon.
Gabriel
In the days since I first opened it, I had read through the letter at least a dozen times, poring over each word, trying to make myself believe it. It was from a man claiming to be my brother. His name was Gabriel. While the letter was typed, he had signed his name at the bottom in a looping hand, the G confident, the rest of it hesitant.
For some people, a letter from a brother would be unremarkable. It might even be routine, just another piece of mail filed away and forgotten until it surfaced five years later during a deep clean.
For me, it was something else entirely. It was nearly impossible. I hadn't known I had a brother. I didn't even know my parents' names.
From the little I did know, my parents had been teenagers when my mother became pregnant. She gave birth to me, named me, and gave me up to the state. She was fifteen, a child herself. I told myself it hadn't been her choice, a fragile shield I used to soften the sting. But even as I clung to that thought, a quiet, gnawing part of me could never fully dismiss the possibility that it hadn't been circumstance. That maybe, in some painful and irrevocable way, I had simply been unwanted.
By the time I got my hands on my birth certificate, my mother's name had been worn away, the document damaged from years in a government storage office while I moved through the foster system. From what remained, I knew my mother was Colombian, and I assumed my father was Indian from my lastname, Acharya. I could have requested a clean copy from the state years ago, but when I first turned eighteen I hadn't had the money for it, and with time, I hadn't wanted it. I had made peace with the idea of not having a family and didn't want to face the people who had given me up.
I did have one photo of my parents and myself, taken the day I was born. It was the only thing I had kept from my childhood. You couldn’t make either of my parents' faces out, as they were looking down at me. The man I assumed was my father looked to be a teenager and was faced away from the camera. He was tall, and I had always assumed he was where I got my height. His hood was pulled over his head, his hand resting on me, covering most of my small body. My mother lay in a hospital bed, looking down at a bundled baby. Me. Her dark brown hair was piled on her head in a bun, and she looked so young, too young to have a child.
I didn’t know their names, I didn’t know their stories. I didn’t know why they gave me up, only that they had.
When I was a kid, packed away in another overcrowded foster home in Chicago, I would daydream of them coming to save me. They would pull up in a minivan and take me to their home, where I would have a room all to myself, a bed of my own, and a place that felt safe. In those dreams there was always a fireplace roaring and cookies in the oven. It was the musings of a child desperate for love and belonging.
The dreams died when I was thirteen and was passed up for adoption… again. No one wanted the kid from the rough side of town who was flunking out of middle school and spent more time daydreaming than studying. The ones who passed me over this time had been an older couple who had wanted a child for years with no luck. We were in the middle stages of the adoption process when she found out she was pregnant. I had been living with them for six months at this time but was promptly returnedto the system like a shirt that didn’t fit being returned to the store.
Though, it would have been harder to return a shirt. I didn’t even need a receipt.
They didn’t explain it to me. They hadn’t even told me what was happening. They dropped me off at a police station, and it was an officer who finally told me I was being taken back to a group home, only after they had already left.
That was my first memory of experiencing pure anger. I couldn’t understand why so many cruel people existed in this world. It was also the first time I drank. At thirteen years old, I snuck out of the group home with some of the older kids, and they gave me my first beer. It tasted like absolute shit, but the drinking never stopped after that day. I wasn’t a full-blown alcoholic at age thirteen, but by the time I was eighteen and moved to Oregon, I was drinking almost daily.
I stopped dreaming about my parents that day, sitting in the police station and staring at my falling-apart Converse, unable to meet the pitying eyes of those around me. I accepted that no one was coming to save me. Only I could do that.
I hadn’t wondered about my biological parents over the years. I had all but forgotten about them… and then the letter arrived.
Gabriel Gomez. My supposed brother, or so his letter claimed. He explained that he was my younger half-brother by eight years, which meant my mother would have been twenty-three when she had him. He had been raised by her, it seemed, as a single mother. He had always known about me, she had spoken of me often, weaving me into stories and quiet speculations. According to the letter, she had always hoped I had found peace and happiness, wherever I had ended up.
I read over it once more before sighing, tucking the letter back into its envelope and setting it on top of my desk, the white paper a stark contrast to the deep wood tones. There was too muchinformation to process at once. So many answers contained in a single page, answers to questions I had carried my entire life, including my mother's name.
Mariana Gomez.
The young woman who had given birth to me and subsequently given me up to the system. I had so many questions for her, about her, and so few answers.
Part of me couldn't fathom that it was real, that she was real. The cynic in me wanted proof before it would believe any of it. Though I had almost none.
I stood and crossed to the wall of shelves on the other side of my office, searching for my birth certificate. I had filed it away when I first moved into the building and hadn't seen it since. I knew it was in here somewhere, but I had over a decade of documents stored in the room.
The office had been my second home for many years. I had spent months hunting down the right building for what would become my life's work.
It had all started during my sophomore year of college, in a broadcast journalism class I hated. My major was applied mathematics, but I needed a journalism course to fulfill my general education requirements, and the only section with open seats was broadcast journalism. It met at eight in the morning, filled with freshmen who either didn't want to be there or harbored dreams of becoming the next big name in the industry. Most days it bored me to tears. But one particular morning, the professor shared the story ofThe War of the Worldsbroadcast.
It was a radio drama depicting an alien invasion. The trouble was that listeners who tuned in too late missed the disclaimer. People flooded the streets in a panic, convinced the world was ending. There was mass hysteria, some people taking their own lives out of fear, all because of a broadcast that had been misunderstood.
That class sent me down a rabbit hole of sensationalized stories, pieces where facts had been molded into fiction. The journalists responsible hadn't cared about the truth; they had cared about their own fame. From that, the idea for Fibonacci Files was born.
A journal devoted to unraveling the fiction behind sensationalized stories and restoring their facts. While I finished my degree, I built a business plan and saved aggressively. By the time I was handed my diploma, I wanted to be ready to make this place a reality. The problem was that I wasn't a writer or a journalist. I knew it was a skill I could learn, but I wanted to bring in someone who could hit the ground running while I worked to get the journal off the ground.
That someone was Oliver, the first journalist I ever hired. When we met he was still in college, but he had a talent I hadn't encountered before, and a willingness to dive in headfirst. The first issue of Fibonacci Files ran two articles, both written by Oliver. One uncovered the truth behind an accidental death that had been widely framed as a ritualistic murder. The second shone a light on the indigenous tribe of the local area.
