by Lael Littke
The first time I'd read that letter I'd wondered why I had thought my name was Mickey. Now I knew. It was a three-year-old's version of Micaela.
I'd never really been Jean Ellen, which was apparently what my kidnappers put on the phony birth certificate. It had nothing to do with me, not then and not now. It was all I could handle being Micaela and Selene. I didn't need to think about being Jean Ellen, too.
Or did I? If I could remember who'd given me that name, I might know who had kidnapped me.
“Wow,” Keith breathed in my ear. He was reading over my shoulder. “These letters are interesting.”
Before I could answer, he pointed to the top of a page and said, “There's my name!”
“I hope,” the letter said, “that we can come out this summer so Selene can get acquainted with Keith and Tyler and Naomi. She'd probably love to help take care of Keith. She likes babies, although she's not much for dolls. The only toy she brought with her from the agency was a little china doll in a white dress, which is curious since she doesn't play with it. In fact, she keeps it shut up in a box in her closet. What do you make of that?”
I didn't want to read any more of the letters.
“Keith,” I said, “how about a game of Beyond the Moon on the computer?”
• • •
The lesson in my Laurel class on Sunday seemed very appropriate. For a moment I wondered if Sister Blake had prepared it especially for me. But she didn't know the circumstances of my going away. All I'd told her and the other girls was that I was going to St. Paul for a week to visit relatives. Only Abby knew the whole story.
The subject of the lesson was loving others and treating them with respect. To demonstrate how love expands, Sister Blake had three girls stand inside a large elastic band that seemed just big enough to go around the three of them. Then she had them invite two more girls to come into the circle, stretching the band to include them. Then two more girls, until our whole class was inside the band.
“That's the way it is with love,” Sister Blake said. “It expands to include all those you invite in. There is always room for more.”
My eyes filled with tears as I looked around at my good friends enclosed there in that circle of love. I wouldn't be able to leave if I thought I wouldn't see them again.
The class gave me a gift after the lesson. Abby presented it, and I suspected it had been her suggestion.
After asking me to come stand beside her, she cleared her throat and said, “Inasmuch as you are venturing out into the world far away from our little town, we, the Laurels of Stone Creek Ward, present you this going-away gift with the request that you not forget us and above all, remember who you are.”
With a grin she thrust a small, wrapped package toward me.
My hands trembled a little as I removed the paper and saw that the gift was a small round purse mirror. It had a clear plastic back, and the girls had inserted a picture of our class, taken in the church kitchen on an activity night when we were learning how to make focaccia. We were hamming it up, waving a rolling pin, dangling lengths of dough, pretending to spray one another with Pam.
I looked out at the expectant faces and totally lost it, bursting into blubbery tears and bawling.
Abby wrapped her arms around me. The other girls came up to surround me, patting my back, touching my arm. There was no way I would ever stay in St. Paul. My life was here.
• • •
Dad and Mom and Keith took me to Salt Lake City that afternoon since my flight was at 7:30 on Monday morning. I was to fly to Chicago, where I would change planes and fly on to St. Paul. I would arrive there late in the afternoon. I would return on Friday. Dad and Mom had spoken at length with the Russos, getting all these plans set up.
We stayed with one of Mom's cousins Sunday night. Before going to bed we went to Temple Square, joined by Tyler, who was on his way back to Provo. Looking at the brightly lit temple and tabernacle, the symbols of my faith and my whole way of life, helped me to stamp in my mind who I was (a child of God), what I believed (the thirteen Articles of Faith), what I hoped for the future (college degree, career, mission maybe, marriage, kids). Surely the visit to St. Paul could not change any of those things.
The next morning was hectic—getting my suitcase closed, stacking everyone in the car, driving to the airport where we saw waiting airplanes crouched on the runway.
“They look like monster grasshoppers,” Keith said. “From an alien planet.” He drew in a breath. “I can't wait till I get to go somewhere on an airplane.”
I hoped it would be for a happier reason than why I was going.
“I checked my suitcase in and we went to the place where I had to continue on alone. Mom thrust a small paper bag into my hands. Inside was a little jar.
“Chokecherry jelly,” she whispered as she hugged me. “To give the Russos a taste of the mountains.”
There were hugs and corny jokes and tears and good-byes, and then I was on board the airplane and it was lifting off. I was alone for the first time in my life.
Yeah, right. Alone, with about 250 other people. But alone, without family support, with no loving hand to reach for in case of a bumpy ride. I was going to have to handle this whole thing alone, with nothing familiar to help me except a mirror from my friends and a jar of chokecherry jelly from the hills of home.
And the little doll in the white dress, wrapped in a sock in my suitcase.
Chapter 12
I reverted back to my old method of dealing with tension as I walked down the long corridor that connected the airplane with the terminal at the Twin Cities airport. Genesis, Exodus, I whispered to myself, hoping nobody would notice my lips moving. We believe in being honest, true, chaste, benevolent…
They were all there waiting for me at the end of the corridor—Mr. and Mrs. Russo, Heather, Brittany, Kenyon, and Chelsea. Oh say, can you see, by the dawn's early light…
I recognized them from the pictures they'd sent. Besides which, they looked like me. Anybody watching us would have guessed I was a traveling daughter returning to my family. They would never have guessed, however, how far I'd traveled.
The family members who greeted me were all dark haired, olive skinned, brown eyed. Mr. Russo's smile showed the same slightly overlapping front teeth as mine. I had the same nose as Mrs. Russo and Heather and Kenyon.
We were a family, yet not a family. I was not really a part of it.
All of this I observed in the last few feet of my journey, just before Mrs. Russo launched herself at me, hugging me so hard I was sure my face turned blue and drenching my shoulder with tears.
She couldn't speak.
Neither could I.
Mr. Russo wrapped his long arms around both Mrs. Russo and me, and Brittany, Chelsea, and Kenyon attached on wherever they could. Only Heather stood apart, watching.
I tried to get hold of what was happening, to maintain some kind of control. But it totally skidded away from me. My mind couldn't deal with it. This was the family from whence I'd sprung. I couldn't recall where that phrase had come from, but I think it was from a poem we'd read in English class. Part of me stood apart, like Heather, watching.
I shared so much with these people—their coloring, their blood, their genes. This woman holding me so tightly, weeping as if she would never stop, was my mother.
But what about my other mother? She was the one who had always been there. This woman here had merely given birth to me.
But I remembered her perfume.
I read somewhere that smell evokes memories of the past more than any of the other senses. I breathed in my mother's scent and wept like the child I'd been when I'd last seen her.
It was Kenyon who broke the tension. Jiggling my arm to get my attention, he asked, “Did you save the barf bag from the airplane, Micaela? I collect them.”
I had, in fact, saved the barf bag because I'd scribbled on it some notations of things I wanted to remember to check out. Ch. doll, I'd written. Kid. place. Sel.
Mar. The list stood for china doll, kidnapping place, and Selena Marie. The last item was total fantasy because there was little possibility I'd find anything of her in St. Paul. But her family had lived in Chicago. If she'd gone there after she'd run away from Grandpa, wasn't it a little bit possible that I might run on to some clue of her here in the Midwest?
Don't hold your breath, I told myself. I'd written it down because I'd been nervous on the airplane and the writing had helped me handle it.
I gave the barf bag to Kenyon on the way home in the Russos’ minivan. Mr. Russo and Chelsea rode in front. (“I throw up in back,” she confided to me.) Mrs. Russo and I were on the middle seat, and the others on the far back seat. There was an awkward moment once we'd all gotten settled, and that's when I passed the bag back to Kenyon.
He took it gingerly, holding it by thumb and fore-finger. “Did you use it?” he asked.
“Only for writing on,” I said.
He squinted at the scribbled notes. “What does it all mean?”
“Tell you later,” I said. The cramped car was not the place to bring up the things I wanted to talk about.
Kenyon smiled at me, reminding me of Keith. “I've got nine other bags,” he said. “Dad brings them to me when he takes a trip. I've got one from KLM. That's a Dutch airline.”
Barf bags weren't my idea of collectibles, but I wasn't a nine-year-old boy.
Mrs. Russo clutched my hand tightly all the way from the airport and pointed out sites of interest. I didn't pay much attention. My head hurt. I hadn't slept well the night before, and I had a sense of unreality about where I was, what was happening, what was going to happen. I'd expected an emotional reaction when I arrived, but remembering my mother's perfume had been a total surprise.
So was remembering the house.
Had it always been there in my memory somewhere? Why hadn't I been able to get to it before? If that recollection was there, then perhaps other memories lurked somewhere deep in my brain, memories of what had happened to me, who had taken me from my family, what my life had been in the seven months before I was adopted the first time. Maybe even the face of the woman in the big, wide-brimmed hat. Maybe all the clues were there, waiting to be discovered.
“I remember this,” I whispered as we piled out of the van after Mr. Russo stopped it in the driveway. “Wasn't there a dog once?”
In my memory a dog, brown with white ruff and paws, loped around the corner of the house, tail swinging, tongue flopping out in joyous welcome.
“Wilmer,” Mr. Russo said. “You're remembering Wilmer. He died just three years ago.”
Mrs. Russo burst into another round of tears. “Don't mind me,” she said through the downpour. “I rain on any occasion. It runs in the family, you know.”
No, I hadn't known. But maybe that explained my own easy tears. I would e-mail Abby right away to tell her that I came by it honestly and that she didn't need to call me “Cloudburst” anymore when I got home. “It runs in the family,” I would tell her.
Home. The word painted a landscape of mountains and aspen trees and a two-story white house in my mind.
Yet I was looking at home, this neat beige-with-brown-shutters, one-story house. There were hollyhocks and columbine and pansies (the same flowers Mom liked) in front of the large living-room window. I knew it was the living-room window because I could see the back of a flowered sofa. There would be green carpeting on the floor and a red brick fireplace in the opposite wall.
Chelsea and Brittany towed me inside, chattering about which room I would share and saying that the cat must be hiding somewhere and that we were going to have spaghetti for dinner because that was what I'd liked when I was a little girl. They seemed to know more about me than I did.
I stopped inside the front door because the living-room carpet was not green after all, and the fireplace was white, not red.
I'd been thinking of the living room at home.
I stared, feeling disoriented, out of place.
“We've redecorated since you were here last,” Mrs. Russo said.
“Did the carpeting used to be green?”
“Yes,” she said. “Do you remember it, Micaela?”
“I'm not sure.” That was the truth.
I didn't object to Mrs. Russo calling me Micaela even though she'd promised over the phone to call me Selene. It seemed natural to be Micaela there in that house. I was back in a different life. I was a different person, split off from my other self, separated like the two halves of the kitchen table at home when we opened it up to add a leaf.
It was the leaf that was missing from my life. I needed that leaf to reconnect the two parts of me.
Mr. Russo disappeared down the hall with my suitcase, and I wandered across the living room toward the kitchen. I didn't remember it at all. Probably it had been remodeled or redecorated too. It was warm and inviting, with pine cabinets and a pine table with a tiled top. A kitten slept by a plant in a greenhouse window that looked out on the front lawn.
Mrs. Russo pointed out some tooth marks on a table leg. “You made those one day when I said no to one more cookie.”
“You said you were going to bite the legs right off the table if she didn't give you another one,” Brittany said. I could tell this was an oft-told family story because Brittany hadn't been there when it happened. She hadn't even been born.
I didn't remember the incident, but the marks were there as evidence. They'd been there all those years when I'd been gone. Mrs. Russo hadn't sanded them out any more than Mom had sanded Tyler's carved initials from our table at home.
My two homes were beginning to blend together in my mind. I couldn't tell where one ended and the other began. That frightened me more than if this one had been drastically different. I didn't know why, except that it made it harder to remember who I was. If things were the same in both families, then how could I sort out which me was me?
It made my headache worse, thinking about it, so I looked around at the rest of the kitchen, at the brown-dotted wallpaper with the chicken border. I didn't remember it or the sign hanging over the table that advised, “I'm not superwoman, so adjust.” I figured that was a recent addition, since the kids had grown older. It wouldn't have been there when Heather was five and I was three. Neither one of us could have read it.
Mrs. Russo must have noticed my unease because she said, “Let's show Micaela where she'll be sleeping.”
Chelsea took my hand. “I wish you'd sleep in my room,” she said. “If Brittany would move to Heather's room, you could have her bed.”
Heather made no objection, and I wondered if she resented sharing her room with me.
“We'd better leave things the way we planned,” Mrs. Russo said.
Chelsea led me down the hall to a sunny room I had no memory of. Mrs. Russo followed. “That will be your bed,” Chelsea said, pointing to a twin bed to the left of the window. It was covered with a fringed ivory spread. The other bed, along the opposite wall, was piled with stuffed animals, books, bright pillows, and clothing. In contrast, my bed looked empty and a little forlorn.
“That's funny,” Mrs. Russo said. “I put a couple of bears on it when I made it up last night. I wonder if Heather…”
She looked around, as if she thought Heather had accompanied us to the room.
But Heather wasn't there.
“Why don't you get unpacked, Micaela?” Mrs. Russo said as she picked up a couple of stuffed animals from Heather's bed and put them on mine. “We'll have dinner, and then we'll show you some slides of when you were a baby.”
Dinner was noisy. It seemed as if they were all used to chattering at the top of their lungs as they ate. They all, except Heather, tried to tell me about family traditions and “what we always do.”
“On the Fourth of July,” Kenyon said, “we always take a picnic to the lake and watch the fireworks. And just before school starts we go to the St. Croix River and sail around all day on a big boat. You'll like that, Micaela.”
He sat next to me, my friend forever through the gift of a barf bag. Keith would understand that.
My brother Keith.
My brother Kenyon.
“I won't be here when school starts, Kenyon,” I said, wishing my head would stop aching. “I have to go home.”
Mrs. Russo looked up from her plate, and I wished I'd chosen different words.
“You just got here,” Kenyon said. “I thought you were going to stay.”
“I'm in a show,” I told him. “I have to be at a rehearsal on Saturday or they'll give my part to somebody else.”
“A show!” Mr. Russo exclaimed. “What kind of show?”
So I told them all about Hitched in January, Ditched in June, and about my dual parts of Astrid and Zorina. “It's a melodrama,” I said. “Corny but fun.”
“I was an angel in a Christmas pageant last year,” Chelsea said.
“And we all went to see our Chelsea be an angel,” Mr. Russo said. “We went to see our Heather be a basketball star in the tournament last year, and we went to see our Kenyon hit a home run in Little League. We all saw our Brittany make the winning score in soccer. It seems a shame that we can't see our Micaela be not one but two people in Hitched and Ditched. “
I stopped short on that “our Micaela.” I wasn't sure I was ready for that role yet.
Standing up, I said, “Didn't you say something about showing me some slides?”
“I've seen them,” Heather said. She got up and left the room. A few minutes later, the front door slammed.
It took a while for everybody to get settled in the family room and for Mr. Russo to set up the slide projector. Even though I was still on Mountain Time, which was an hour behind Central Time, I was so sleepy that I felt myself nodding off. To keep myself awake I looked around the family room, at the big fireplace that must be nice on winter nights, at the family pictures on the wall, at the little shelf that held a blue-robed statue. I guessed that it was a statue of the Virgin Mary, which gave me a clue that my birth family must be Catholic. I wasn't sure just how to ask them about it, and besides, Mr. Russo had the projector going by then.