The dance student leaves my studio after a private class and I turn my cell phone back on. It rings instantly. A man’s baritone voice queries, “Are you the daughter of Maxine Baker?”

“Why, yes, I am.”

I had not been in touch with Maxine for several months. She had begun to call me in the middle of the night, buzzed on something, and would “share” convoluted secrets. Such as, “I think my mother was a prostitute.” This particular secret was delivered late at night on the eve of my birthday and I thought, “It’s time to take a break and not see her for awhile.” I knew it was probably more of a belated drunken confession on her part than anything to do with her own mother.

The man on the other end of the phone line coughs and continues, “She is unconscious and dying at the convalescent home where I’m the chaplain—my name is Aaron. She has lived many, many days longer than the doctor expected. He can’t understand what is keeping her alive. Is there a prayer you would like me to say to her from you?  A goodbye of sorts? It might make it easier for her to let go.”

I realize that maybe she doesn’t want to pass until she sees me one last time. I am her love child. Living proof of a broken heart many years ago.

“I’ll be there in two hours.”

I hop in my car and zoom from my studio in Marin County up to Woodland, a dusty, Central Valley nowhere agricultural backwater town. The convalescent home is surrounded by gnarled, sprawling oak trees. It is one-hundred degrees in the shade. The sidewalk is sizzling hot. Down a dimly lit corridor, past half-open doors leading to rooms that radiate a pulsing, underwater-blue glow quietly pregnant with the hushed murmurings of daytime TV, I find her small, linoleum-tiled room. Alone, on the polyester beige-sheeted bed, lies Maxine Baker. Eighty-six years old, hovering on the borderline of death. She is unconscious.  I place my hand on her narrow wrist. Under translucent tissue paper skin, her pulse is beating stronger than mine.

After spending time in silent dialogue with Maxine, my half-sister, Vicki, walks in. This is the first time we have met.

I was adopted at birth and never met my siblings. Vicki is warm and friendly and gives me a hug. We like each other immediately. Stories start to spill out as we hold hands over Maxine’s still body. I notice an imperceptible twitching in Maxine’s fingertips. Perhaps she is uncomfortable that truths are finally coming to light. Little dust ball secrets she swept into dark corners of her life.

Two more half-sisters, Carole and Cynthia, both drably dressed in faded pink sweatpants, enter and the stories build and mount and shock and relieve. We all have snippets of our history that the others do not know. We stitch them together—ah ha’s escaping our inherited thin lips as the panorama of our mother’s alcohol-fueled roller coaster ride through life comes into focus. Maxine was a pretty good secret keeper and a true Wild Woman. Or should I say, Wild Wanton Woman. She paid bills with her body—the PG&E man, the lawyer, the grocer. The sisters chuckle knowingly in unison.

They do not know that I have a full-blood brother who was also given away in adoption. This tidbit was accidentally revealed to me one time when I was visiting her and she gave the wrong date for my birth.

“I was not born in 1950!” I exclaimed.

Before she caught herself, she blurted, “Oh that was the other baby.”

“What other baby?”

“You have a brother.”

The sisters are shocked. Just how many children had their mother given birth to? They tell me how she had danced with Fred Astaire. Maxine never  told me this, even though she knew I’m a dance teacher. The sisters remember seeing her twirl around the dance studios with him. She was his northern California dance partner. More chuckles and suggestive winks. I thought he was gay….

So that’s where I got the dance bug. I show them a brochure of my dance workshops around the world. The cover photograph is me at Burning Man in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, dancing with my arm gracefully arcing upward to the sky. They say in unison, “’That is the exact pose Maxine would do right before she would pass out drunk.” Vicki continues, “Yeah Little Chicken Bone, that was the signal she was going to keel over, so one of us would try and catch her when that arm would raise elegantly skyward. One time, before I could get her, she went right over the balcony.”

During our dialog, Vicki continues to call me “Little Chicken Bone.”

I’m mystified and ask, “Why are you calling me that?”

“Because until today, that was my secret name for you. I was there when you were born. I remember being in bed with Maxine when she went into labor with you. I was four years old and woke up one night soaked in blood. She had rented a room in a boarding house in San Francisco and we slept in the same bed. Until the blood was spreading everywhere, including on me, nobody had any idea Mom was pregnant.”

Vicki continues, “I ran downstairs and found the landlady, who called for help and then Maxine disappeared in an ambulance. I was told she had a chicken bone stuck in her throat.”

After a very dangerous delivery (years later, I interviewed the doctor and he remembers my legs being bent and deformed, and that my head was the shape of a zucchini because of the forceps delivery), I was born at Children’s Hospital in San Francisco on December 9^th, 1953. Maxine walked out and never even took a look at me. My birth certificate says my name is Baby Girl Baker (capital B, capital G, Baker). She vanished up to a trailer in the Sierra and the sisters didn’t see her for five years. They were raised by relatives and neighbors. I was adopted privately by a family who’s doctor had met Maxine’s lawyer at a roller skating rink during her pregnancy….

Vicki then motions me into the hallway for a secret powwow. She leans over conspiratorially and whispers, “I think we have the same father.” I’m studying her closely; a short, tubby, brown-haired, brown-eyed woman.

“Really? Why?”

She answers unblinkingly, “We look exactly alike.”

News to blonde, blue-eyed, me as I tower a good five inches above her head.

We then re-join the others over Maxine’s body. The eldest of the sisters catches my eye and says, “Do you know her spiritual beliefs?”

Reflecting on my first phone conversation with Maxine fourteen years ago, I say, “Why, yes I do. That was the primary topic we discussed when I contacted her after searching for ten years. We share the same idea that god is everywhere and in everything. Our liberal political beliefs are also the same. Weird! I didn’t know those were genetic.”

Carole peers at the others and nods to them while asking me, “Would you lead the memorial service?”

I gasp, “I barely knew her. How could I do that? She raised you all. Sort of. Why don’t you have Aaron, the chaplain who works here, do it? He seemed really nice.”

They look flustered. “Who is this guy, Aaron? The chaplain is a woman.”

“I don’t think so. It was a man that called me today to let me know Maxine was dying. Not a woman. His voice was really low.”

They look quizzically at each other and Vicki thoughtfully adds, “Well, she did have a really broad back.”

Leave it to Maxine to have the chaplain who was a man in the middle of a sex change.

We sat around Maxine’s deathwatch and told stories, mending and hemming the torn mysteries that had kept us apart for forty-nine years. Not many adoptees get to be at their biological mother’s deathbed, or meet siblings who are so open, accepting and forgiving.

Right before she died that night, she rose to the surface of consciousness long enough to utter one last word, “Ed.” My biological father’s name.  A man she hadn’t seen in forty-nine years. Maxine once told me that Ed was the love of her life but he wouldn’t leave his wife even though Maxine had walked away from her marriage for him. Finally, she had slammed the door in his face when she was seven months pregnant with me. “I never want to see you again,” were her last words to him.   And she didn’t.

But I am still here at her deathbed. Half him and half her. Both wild, both gone, both alive in me.

This story is in Exotic Life: Travel Tales of an Adventurous Woman