by May, W. J.
“Should I be worried?” I hadn’t thought about Michael’s safety. My focus had been on finding answers about my past. Guilt washed over me. I’d been so selfish.
“No. We’re just being cautious.” He grabbed the keys and tossed them to me. “You know where to go?”
I nodded.
Michael opened the room door. As we headed down to the car, he made an effort to distract me. “Sarah told me we have to go to Fort George and see Fort Niagara as well. She was here when they were built.”
“She fought in the war of 1812?” Impressive.
“She actually helped the Canadians,” Michael tapped his forehead. “I think he was actually English. Brock. His name was something Brock.”
“Sir Isaac Brock?” I asked, my mouth gapping open.
“Yeah, that’s it.” Michael tried to hide a smile. He was obviously enjoying my disbelief.
I laughed as we got into the Jeep. “I’m so asking Sarah the details when we get back.” I started the engine and pulled out of the parking lot. Twenty minutes later we were in front of the familiar Foster Care – Children Services building. I parked the Jeep in the visitors parking. We walked together into the building, Michael’s warm hand holding mine. I gave my name to the secretary at the front desk and we sat in the chairs waiting for Mrs. Hawthorn to call me in.
Nothing had changed; the paint, the chairs, the pictures. Nothing here had changed, but to me, nothing looked the same.
Mrs. Hawthorn came out of her office, folder in hand. She looked up from her bifocals and called my name.
“Rouge dear, how are you? Oh, I see that you have brought a friend.” She looked at Michael and began fanning her face with her hand. “What a lovely, handsome friend you have!” She shook her head, as if trying to figure if she had said the words aloud or in her head.
I smiled and tried not to laugh – I had the same feeling every day.
The three of us walked into her office, she still had files piled everywhere. She moved files from a chair and plopped them onto the floor by the wall. She sat down behind her desk and pointed to the pair of chairs for us to sit in. Michael held the first chair out for me and then sat himself down. Mrs. Hawthorn gave him a winning smile.
“Thanks for seeing me, Mrs. Hawthorn. Mrs. Hawthorn?” It took me calling her name twice to turn her attention back to me.
“Sorry Rouge.” She folded her small hands together. “Why did you want to see me?”
“I was wondering if you would be able to give me a copy of my birth certificate from the hospital and any other information that might help me find my biological parents.”
She tutted. “Oh dear, let me see.” She opened the file in front of her and shuffled through the pages. “You turned eighteen back in January. So you are entitled to any information we might have about your birth. Let me what we have on file with our secretary. She’ll be able to get a copy of what we do have.” She stood and slipped out of the office leaving the door slightly open behind her.
As soon as she left, Michael was instantly behind her desk looking through my case file. I hadn’t even seem him move.
“Michael! What’re you doing?” I whispered.
“Just making sure sweet-ol’ Mrs. Hawthorn doesn’t leave anything out. Don’t worry; she won’t even know I looked.” He flipped through each page at lightning speed. How he could read anything that fast was beyond me.
He was sitting down beside me before Mrs. Hawthorn even came back into the room.
“Rouge, here are the forms to apply for the original copy of your birth certificate. We only have a copy. Here also are the hospital papers when we retrieved you.” Mrs. Hawthorn handed me a small stack of papers.
Retrieved me? What was that supposed to me?
Michael cleared his throat but Mrs. Hawthorn continued before he could speak.
“If you turn to the third page of the hospital notes and look on the left hand side, about mid-way down… you’ll see that you were born six and a half, nearly seven weeks, prematurely and weighed just over 4lbs. You were actually born in Utica, New York.” She skimmed through the photocopy on her desk, pushing her reading glasses up the bridge of her nose. “It’s a little confusing. Doctor reports show you being here, but the birth was down there.” She set the papers down. “Because you were so tiny, you were kept at the hospital in Utica for two and half months before being released.”
“So I was just left there?” I tried sorting through the papers but couldn’t seem to make heads or tails out of the doctor’s notes and other pages. A few slipped out and drifted to the floor.
Michael leaned down to pick them up.
“Your pediatrician check-ups from three months to somewhere around thirty-six months are in Niagara Falls.”
That made sense. If FACS picked me up then everything would have been done here. “Did my mother stick around to at least put her name on my birth certificate?”
“Stick around?” Mrs. Hawthorn’s eyebrows rose. “I’m sorry, I thought you knew.”
“Knew what?” Michael straightened beside me.
“Your mother left you at the hospital just after you were born and then came back when you were released.”
“What?” I was sure I had never been told that. I definitely would have remembered it.
“She picked you up,” Mrs. Hawthorn flipped to the front of my file. “The day FACS came, she showed up just before us and said she had changed her mind. She picked you up.”
My heart stuttered and its beat pounded inside my ears. “Really?” I whispered.
“Yes. She had you till you were about three and then brought you back to Utica Hospital. She signed you over again to us… and this time she didn’t come back.”
Michael reached for my hand and held it tight in his.
“I thought I was with the system since I was born.”
“Well, in a sense you were. You’ve been on file since your birth.”
“What’s my mother’s name?” I stood and looked over Mrs. Hawthorn’s file. “Do you have that?”
She leaned back against her chair, maybe surprised at my sudden movement. “She requested it not be released. When she handed you over the second time, she left written notice not to release her name.” Mrs. Hawthorn smiled sadly. “I’m sorry. I don’t have it.”
We’d come all this way for nothing then.
“So,” Michael said as he rose from his seat and stood beside me. “All you have for Rouge are the forms and what you’ve photocopied for her? Can’t you give her your file?”
Mrs. Hawthorn’s mouth dropped. “The file is state property! I can’t do that.”
“Psych evaluations, notes on her foster homes and all that crap is her business. Not the states.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “Why don’t you make photocopies and give Rouge the originals?”
Mrs. Hawthorn pointed a tiny finger at Michael. She obviously didn’t take bullying from anyone. “You listen to me, young man! I’ve been here a long time. If I could do that I would. Rouge doesn’t need what’s in this file. She needs to focus on moving forward with her life.” She slapped the file shut and pounded her fist on top of it. “Let her do that.”
I put my hand on Michael’s to stop him. “Let’s just go.” I couldn’t erase the image of what I had expected my mother to look like, fitting her into my internal fantasy, sitting, rocking me as a small baby and singing me to sleep. She had wanted me – at least for a little while. That would have to be enough… for now. “Thanks Mrs. Hawthorn.”
She stood and walked with us to the lobby.
Michael felt the back pocket of his shorts. “Shoot! My wallet must have fallen out when I picked up the papers for you. I’ll be right.” He jogged back to Mrs. Hawthorn’s office and disappeared. He was back a moment later, holding his wallet in the air. “Found it!”
We said good-bye and headed to the Jeep. I gave Michael the keys to drive. “Can we head back to the hotel?” I just wanted to sleep. I suddenly felt exhausted.<
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Michael pulled out of the parking lot and onto the main road. He leaned forward, close to the steering wheel.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Untuck my shirt will you?”
As I pulled it out of his shorts, I felt something hard on his back. “What the…?” His shirt came free and a manila envelope appeared.
“I figured this belongs to you.”
I pulled the envelope out all the way, simply unable to believe what I found. “You stole my file?”
Chapter 11
I glanced behind us in the back window, expecting Mrs. Hawthorn to be chasing us with some flashing light taped to the top of her car. She probably drove some kind of car from the seventies, some huge hunker that she had to sit on a phone book just so she could see over the steering wheel. “I can’t believe you stole it!”
“The information belongs to you. Do you want me to take it back?” Michael asked, glancing in the rear view mirror.
I turned around. “No!” It felt weirdly exhilarating and scary at the same time. I opened the file on my lap, but left it there, unable to look down.
“Do you want me to look at it?” Michael asked quietly.
I inhaled a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I’ll do it. Just seems weird to have most of my life just sitting here.” I felt protective of it, like I did with the Wolf Book. This was mine. In my whole life, almost nothing had been mine and mine alone. This…was my history, mine in a unique way, a way that made it impossible to for anyone to take it away from me once I knew it. The problem was, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know, now that I had it all literally in my lap. I stared out the window for a moment, frozen in indecision. Wasn’t this what I had made the trip for? Didn’t I need to know this? It was mine. Mine. And yet, it wasn’t. Not yet. The good news was though, that all I had to do to claim it, was to read it. Such a simple task, but one that was almost as hard to complete as making myself read the Wolf Book.
Ultimately, it was a bump in the road that made the decision for me. Michael couldn’t avoid the pothole in the asphalt. The jeep bumped and the folder started to go flying. I had to plant my hands on my lap to keep everything from flying all over the place. It seemed like a sign. Whether it was subconscious, or a sign from On High, I didn’t know. However, it was obvious that I wanted and needed to claim my history.
Lifting the left side, I let everything fall to the right so I could start at the beginning. There were some photocopies and notes. “You know what I don’t believe?”
Michael glanced at me from the corner of his eye. “What?” He pulled down some scenic route and found a lookout point of the Niagara River. He put the Jeep in park and let the engine idle.
“I don’t believe my birth mother ever kept me.” I stared blankly at the file. “I mean, I would remember that, wouldn’t I?” I dug through my earliest memories searching for some sign of her, even just a feeling of cared for, but there was nothing. Not a warm hug, kind word or anything that would let me think I had been loved.
“I don’t know. I mean, if she left you before you were three, that’s pretty early to remember.”
“Why would she leave me in the hospital, then pick me up and then drop me off there again?” I couldn’t wrap my head around it. I flipped through the first five or six pages of the file and came to a medical page with my vaccination history. The doctor was located in Niagara Falls. “It looks like I lived here and then she dropped me off in Utica. Why drive all that way down there to get rid of me.” Only to end up back here again. “It just doesn’t make sense.”
“Maybe she thought she could keep you and then finically couldn’t afford to.”
“But she picked me up at the hospital the day I was supposed to be given away. That doesn’t get her out of the medical bills.”
“Okay. So maybe it wasn’t about the money…” His let his sentence trail off.
I scanned a few more of the medical pages but most of it didn’t make sense or simply held no importance, no key to who my mother was. “You think my father might not have wanted me?”
Michael pressed his lips together before finally speaking. “Maybe… and I am just saying maybe… maybe your mother already had a family. Maybe she met someone and had an affair.”
It didn’t sound true. I don’t know why I didn’t believe it; it was plausible after all. I just didn’t. “No. I don’t think that’s it.” My stomach churned at the next thought. “Maybe she got rid of me because I wasn’t marked. She’s probably a Grollic and came back to check if I had the birthmark by my collar bone.” I reached for the spot that was smooth and without blemish. Like a bullet going straight through my body, the exact same spot on my back burned. Maybe she had seen the mark on my back and known what it meant. Maybe she had thrown me away because of it.
“Or she was raped by a Grollic and couldn’t bear to look at you and the memory it brought back.” I looked at him with horror written all over my face. Michael squeezed my shoulder. “That sounds terrible, but something dramatic must have happened. I can’t imagine anyone giving you up.”
It soothed the awful sense of revulsion that had instantly sprouted in my heart. He was sweet; one of the reasons I loved him so much. “I guess we need to find her and ask why then.” I flipped back to the first pages looking for a name.
“It might not be that easy,” Michael said quietly. “She requested that her information not be given to you when you were legal age. That’s going to put a quite the bump in the research road.”
I didn’t hear him. I’d stop listening as I stared at the page in front of me. I tuned everything out but the words on the page. Slowly I handed it to him.
He looked at me, eyebrows raised.
“If you look on the right side, near the bottom, you’ll see it.”
He glanced down, lifted the page and tilted his head. He flipped back to the front and glanced at me.
“Ih-Ihh…” I cleared my throat and tried again, my voice coming out in a whisper, “My mother’s signature.”
Michael’s head dropped down. “Ohhhhh… I see it.”
“Rebekah. Her name’s Rebekah Gnowee.” I shrugged. “Or however you say it. I’m guessing there won’t be too many of those in the phone book.” I tapped my finger against my thigh. The last name sounded so weird. I planned to google it when I got back to the hotel later.
Michael set the Jeep into drive and pulled back onto the road. “Let’s head back to the hotel and see what we can find.” He tossed the file back onto my lap. “Is there an address on the page when she signed you over to the state?”
I ripped open the file folder to double check.
My heart nearly stopped. “There is… Holy crap! There is!” My hands shook at the address scrawled below the signature, her name printed and an apartment number in Niagara Falls.
“Put it in the GPS. Let’s go there now.”
“Now?” My heart that had felt like it has stopped a minute ago now felt like it was racing down a giant hill on a pair of roller skates. Michael was right. This is what I came here for. I tapped the address into the GPS. “Nothing like the element of surprise.”
I was awkwardly trying to close keep pages from falling all over the place and enter the address into the GPS, when a folded sheet with hand written notes slipped out of the file. It read:
Utica Hospital
Baby Doe, aka Rouge (R), was born premature. Biological mother was in a terrible state when R was delivered. She left the hospital before being medically released and never signed the forms to hand her over to the state. Only left a note to say the infants name was to be Rouge. Then the woman up and left; disappeared. She came the day we released R to the state. Dr. Mormar was the attending physician. He asked this note be written in case baby R is returned to the state again.
“I wonder where I got the name Thomas from?” I said out loud.
“Maybe your biological mother gave you the name so it would be easier for her to find you.”
I scoffed. “Thomas isn’t that unique, you know. Gnowee would have definitely been easier to find.”
“Okay then. Maybe she gave it to you because she was trying to hide you from someone.”
“I doubt it. There’s a note here that she left a note to say my name was Rouge. No last name. The state probably gave it to me. Jones, Smith, Thomas… something simple.”
“Did you know that your name means pure?”
I have him an odd look. Had he looked it up? “Really? My last name?”
He shook his head. “Your first name.” He made a left turn, following the GPS. “Maybe there’s a reason why she named you that. Maybe she named you Rouge, in the hopes of keeping you pure from the past.” He shrugged his shoulders, “Just trying to be a little philosophical for the moment.”
I patted his shoulder and laughed. “You’re doing a great job.” I straightened and stared out the window, filled with a new sense of purpose and drive. “Okay. Let’s go find my mom.”
Chapter 12
It didn’t take nearly as long as I had though it would before we were there. I had double-checked the address in the folder to the GPS. "This has to be it." The disbelief in my voice couldn’t be missed. I wasn’t expecting much, but this?
I bent my neck to get a better view through the Jeep window at the rundown apartment building. The neighborhood matched it a little too perfectly. I shivered. If my mother kept me, this is where I would have lived.
Michael sensed my thoughts. “She might have given you up because she wanted more for you than this.” Or she was hiding here.
My head swiveled in his direction as I felt his thought. Touching the Sioghra, I had no idea if it had come from it or if I had simply made the thought sound as if it had come from Michael. “It’s starting to feel like a super-long day. Maybe we should just head back and check a phone book or something.” Michael looked at me with sympathy, understanding my urge to run away, and it made me want to be stronger.
I closed my eyes. “Sorry. It’s fine. We need to do this. I’ll be fine. I need to do this.” I was rambling, trying to build courage and hide my anxiety. You’re doing a lousy job, I told myself.