Taken at two. A surname changed with no court, no adoption.

My name is the one thing about me I should have been sure of, and it turned out to be the one thing that was a lie. I was taken when I was two years old. I don't remember it. Nobody remembers being two. So I grew up answering to a name that was never mine, signing it on every paper a life asks you to sign, and not one cell of me knew that the name on the pencil belonged to the man who raised me, not the man I came from.

Here's the part that's hard to explain to people who always knew who they were. When the lie gets installed that early, it doesn't feel like a lie. It feels like the floor. The man whose name I should have carried got scrubbed out of the house before I could talk. I never heard it spoken. Not once. You can erase a man so completely from a kid's world that the kid grows up with a hole the exact shape of a father and no idea there's supposed to be anything standing in it.

I was a teenager when the floor cracked. Standing in a kitchen, sixteen years old, telling the man who raised me you are not my real dad, and realizing in the same breath that I didn't even know my own name well enough to go looking for the man who was. I want to tell you what it's like to be sixteen and have to go find out what you were actually born as. And I want to tell you what I found, and the one thing I would not find out for thirty more years.

Figuring it out was its own small horror. I couldn't just look my father up, because the name I'd be looking under wasn't his. I had to work backward to my own beginning like a stranger doing research on somebody else. The name I came into the world with was White. That was supposed to be me. I had to learn it the way you learn a fact in a file, except the person in the file was me, and I was sixteen, and I remember sitting there thinking, so I'm not even who I've been signing my homework as. There's no word for what that does to a kid who's already standing on nothing.

Senior year I finally tracked down a number in Arkansas, and I called it. An old woman answered, my grandmother, somebody I had never once heard breathe, and I told her who I was, and there was this pause, and then she told me my father was dead. She didn't say how. She didn't say when. I stood there in the pantry holding a phone that had gone slack in my hand, seventeen years old, and just like that the man I'd spent a year working backward to find was already gone. I hung up holding a dead father I had never gotten to meet. I carried him like that, dead and faceless, for over thirty years.