I could summarize what I knew about them on a single page. Both of them had lost their parents years ago, but I wasn’t sure exactly when. To explain why their parents were gone even though they were still so young, they told me their parents had married late in their lives. They made it sound as if their mothers had them at the very last possible minute.
They both said they had lived in Massachusetts all their lives. My father was from Boston, my mother from Salem. My mother was an only child, so there were no aunts or uncles on her side, but my father had a younger brother, Wade, who fascinated me. He was a professional magician who went under the stage name the Amazing Healy. He lived in New York City, but he traveled a great deal because of his performances, not only in America but also in Europe and even Asia, and he always managed to visit us when he was anywhere nearby.
Uncle Wade had a reason for not answering my questions about himself, a reason I could accept and understand.
“A good magician never reveals the secrets of his tricks, Sage, nor should he tell too much about himself. He must guard the mystery as he would guard his life. One can’t be separated from the other when you’re a magician. There’s an aura about you that enables you to say, ‘Now you see it; now you don’t.’ And people are hooked, amazed, and fascinated. That’s how I earn a living. You wouldn’t want to hurt my doing that, right?”
His eyes twinkled when he said it. Of course, I wanted to ask why I had to be like everyone else. Wasn’t I a little special? I could keep secrets so locked up that they’d gather dust in my head. We didn’t have a blood relationship, but I was his niece. I should be trusted.
When I muttered something about this to my parents, my mother said, “Even we don’t know all that much about Wade. He wants it that way, and you should respect his wishes. Don’t go poking that nose full of curiosity into everything and everyone you meet. Some people want their privacy respected.” Her words were sharp and hard.
I didn’t argue with her. I never would. I certainly didn’t want to do anything to upset Uncle Wade. I just wanted him to like me, to love me at least like any uncle loved a niece. I thought he could. He didn’t seem as uptight about everything I said and did. There was always an amused twinkle in his eyes when he was with me. Shorter than my father and just a little stouter, he had light brown hair and vividly electric blue eyes. He never visited us without amazing me with the way he could make things disappear, move them from one place to another just by staring at them, or change colors and shapes and make things float by moving his hands a certain way.
Supposedly, he was also a great hypnotist, but he could never hypnotize me. I loved the soft sound of his voice, and I did see twirling snowballs and multicolored drops fall out of a rainbow, but I never lost awareness. He laughed at his failure, claiming I had too strong a mind, but I did notice that when he looked at my parents afterward, they would all seem to nod and agree about something—something else they would never tell me, of course. That list of secrets seemed to grow as I did. If it continued, I was sure I’d be covered in mysteries as thick as tar.
So because of this and so many other things, I sensed that we weren’t alone in the house, that living alongside us were gobs of secrets caught like flies in a spider’s web, struggling to break free to reveal themselves. I dreamed of sleepwalking through them, shattering them, and releasing them all. The secrets fluttered about me, whispering the answers to one mystery after another in my ears until I knew everything I should know about myself and my parents.
I suppose that was why I was so excited, one afternoon when I was fourteen, to discover the dark gray filing cabinet in my father’s office slightly opened, a cabinet that I had never seen unlocked. Like everything else that was locked, it was surely full of answers. But I was forbidden ever to enter his office without him present and especially warned not to touch anything, move any papers, or look in any drawers. When I was little, my mother had convinced me that if I did try to open a forbidden drawer anywhere in the house, the handle would burn my fingers.
Sometimes I would tempt myself. When neither of them was looking, I would bring my fingers inches from a forbidden drawer handle. Almost always, I felt some heat and pulled my fingers back quickly. What would I do if I did burn my fingers and my mother saw it? She would know I had disobeyed a very strict order. It wouldn’t be pleasant. She could lose her temper over lesser things and go into a small rant if I decided to wear something other than what she had put out for me, pummeling me with questions. Why had I chosen that? Why did I want to wear that color today? What made me decide? Did I look into a mirror and see something unusual? Before I could answer, she would rattle off, “What? What?” Even if I swore there was nothing, she would look at me suspiciously. It got so I was nervous about turning left when I thought she might want me to turn right.
Now here I was with a chance to disobey again, but in a much bigger way. And I was fourteen, so I couldn’t fall back on the excuse that I was too young to know better, not that that excuse ever worked for me. It was as if my parents expected me to be ages older mentally than I was chronologically. When they said, “You should know better,” they meant it, even when I was only five or six.
I looked back to the front door with trepidation but also with excitement. If someone came through the entryway and didn’t walk into our living room on the right, he or she would reach my father’s office on the left before turning the corner to get to the dining room and the kitchen. The bottom of the stairway was just between the living room and my father’s office. The office door was rarely open when he was away. This particular Saturday afternoon, it was, and no one but me was home.
I had glanced in as I was passing, and that’s when I had seen the opened filing cabinet. For a long moment, I just stood there looking with fascination and curiosity at it. I didn’t think this overwhelming attraction to an opened but forbidden file drawer was that unusual. My mother had told me people were born this way. She told me that all we had to do was read about Eve in the Garden of Eden to see it was true. Don’t do this and don’t do that only made you want to do those things more. She said most religious leaders believed that was our fatal flaw and that God put flaws in us so we would have something to overcome, some way to prove to Him that we were good and deserved a place in heaven.
“Which makes no sense to me,” my father quipped. This conversation occurred during one of those evenings when the three of us were reading in the living room together without the television on. “If God is God, why can’t he know in advance who will be bad and who will be good?”
“Maybe that’s his flaw,” my mother replied.
My father laughed. “Blasphemy,” he declared. He pointed at her and playfully twirled his right forefinger in small circles the way Uncle Wade did when he was going to make something move magically.
“Stop that,” she demanded. I saw she wasn’t kidding. “I mean it, Mark.”
His smile fell off his face, and he pulled his hand back quickly. Why was that so terrible? He wasn’t aiming a gun at her. I think I moaned, and the two of them looked at me as if they both just realized I was there. They didn’t look embarrassed so much as suddenly frightened. I quickly returned my eyes to the book I was reading.
The most intriguing thing in my life at this time was listening to them when they spoke as if I weren’t in the room. Sometimes it seemed they actually did forget I was there or, worse, wanted to ignore me. Maybe that gave them some relief. They were both so nervous and intense about every move I made and every word I said. I knew from listening to my classmates when they talked about their parents that mine were on pins and needles more than most parents. But why? What had I ever done to cause them to treat me this way? Was it simply because I was adopted? Did that really make everything so different from the way it was for my friends? Was this true for most adopted children?
I had read stories about parents who regretted adopting a child after a while or couples who would never consider it because they didn’
t know enough about the child’s family background. Maybe the child had inherited some evil tendencies or something. In a way, it made sense. The adoptive parents might not know enough about a child’s genetics. It was natural for them to be nervous about that, but if all of them were as intense about it as mine were, no one would ever be adopted. Why did my parents decide to adopt me anyway? I wondered more and more.
Why, why, why echoed in the house. It dangled off me no matter where I was, like some loose thread, but something much stronger than just curiosity was drawing me to the open cabinet that day. It was almost as if the winds that brought the whispering voices were at my back, urging me forward. My heart began to thump as I stepped deeper into my father’s office. All of the figurines he had on shelves—the owl, the eagle, and the bat in particular—seemed to turn toward me, their eyes tracking my every move. I paused. The silence in the house seemed to pound in my ears. It was as if everything in it was holding its breath. Would I dare?
I glanced at myself in the antique mirror on the wall to my left. An image flashed across my eyes. It was quick, but I couldn’t help gasping. I saw a woman, dressed in clothes from colonial America, suddenly burst into flames. Around her, men and women were all smiling. The image disappeared as quickly as it had come, but I almost turned and ran out of the office. I caught my breath, and the chill that had washed over my chest dissipated. Whenever an image like that occurred, I was frightened or shaken for a moment but always recuperated quickly.
There was no getting away from how wrong it felt to be spying on my father. However, I told myself that this wasn’t simply disobedience; it was defiance strengthened with the belief that I had a right to know everything. Why should there be such a cloak of mystery around things that others my age clearly had spread out before them, especially children who were part of the family? Cabinets weren’t supposed to be locked to keep them out. They were supposed to be locked to keep out strangers and thieves.
Determined now, I knelt beside the open cabinet and began to sift through the files in the bottom drawer, the one that had been pulled open and left that way. In front of the files was a small wooden box. I took it out slowly and set it on the floor, where I turned it around and around, because at first, I couldn’t see how it could be opened. Then I realized there were two small indentions for fingertips, one on each side. I pressed into them, and the box snapped open.
What strange contents, I thought. There were what looked like human bones, fingers and the nose portion of a small skull, maybe a child’s skull. Mixed in with them were tiny leaves of shrubs and a piece of frankincense. Why was that in there? What did it mean? I closed the lid softly and put the box back. I thought I could feel two strong hands gripping my shoulders, trying to pull me away, but I resisted and looked at the first file that seized my attention.
The file had a college logo at the top of the first page. It was a bachelor of science diploma from a liberal arts college in Boston. This was no special discovery, I first thought. I knew my father had gone to college, but I believed he had gone to a business school. I shrugged and started to put the page back into the file when I noticed the date. It made no sense.
This diploma had been issued in 1908. How could my father have been in his early twenties in 1908? Was this his grandfather’s diploma? Did his grandfather have the same name, Mark Healy? That was obviously the only answer, but why keep something like this under lock and key? Why wasn’t it framed and on his office wall? Wasn’t he proud of his grandfather?
I took out another document in the same file. It also had a university logo at the top of what was another diploma, a juris doctor degree from Cornell Law School in New York State. This, too, had the name Mark Healy, but the date was 1925. That couldn’t be my father, either, and the date was wrong for it to be his grandfather. Maybe it was his father’s, I thought.
But my father and my uncle had told me their father’s name was Evan Charles Healy. This was all very confusing. I dug deeper and found pictures, old sepia photographs that were very faded, but the first one was clear enough to reveal a young man who resembled my father enough to be his twin. I saw classic automobiles in the background, too, one that had a stick for a steering wheel.
The second picture was clearer and was so surprising that it sent me moving backward to sit on the floor. It was the same man, and a woman with a close resemblance to my mother was standing beside him. Behind them was what looked like an old farmhouse, and another very old automobile was on their right. The woman wore something around her neck. It looked familiar.
I went to my father’s desk and found his magnifying glass. It helped me see that the necklace had a pendant of what looked like seven blossoms. I thought for a moment and remembered that I had seen my mother wearing this pendant, but not for some time. Who was the woman? Was it my mother’s mother? Had she given the pendant to my mother? How could all these relatives look so much alike? Why were all these pictures locked away?
I put the picture back. There were many photos with the same two people, but as I sifted through them, the pictures got better; they were clearer, and the backgrounds were more modern, suggesting that they were taken no more than ten or fifteen years ago. The strangest thing about them was that neither the man nor the woman looked a day older in any of the pictures.
I noticed some additional pictures, one of a young boy and another of a young girl. Behind these was a picture of me when I was much younger. Who were the other two? Neither looked anything like me. The boy had much darker hair and almost coal-black eyes. The girl had light brown hair and blue eyes. Both of them looked older than what I imagined their ages really were. They had adult faces on young bodies, I thought, faces that looked troubled, pained. Why were we all in this one folder with the other pictures?
The more I discovered, the deeper I fell into confusion. I almost didn’t look at anything else, but the top of one paper looked familiar, so I dug into that file and found the picture I had drawn years ago of how I imagined my birth mother looked. I sat there staring at it, remembering the day I had shown it to my parents. So they hadn’t torn it up or thrown it out after all, I thought. I should be happy about that. Maybe they were proud of how well I drew at so early an age, but why keep it hidden away?
I couldn’t take it up to my room and keep it, because that would reveal that I had been in the forbidden cabinet. I started to put it back but stopped. There was something else in the file with my drawing. It was a photograph of a woman who looked very much like the woman I had drawn, but she looked sad, as if she was moments away from crying. There was nothing written on the backs of any of the pictures, nothing to help me identify whoever it was.
I pulled out an envelope and opened it. It contained my birth certificate. My name on the certificate was Sage Healy. My father and mother were listed as Mark and Felicia Healy. Attached to it were the adoption finalization papers. This wasn’t a surprise. When I had done some research on adopted children, I learned that a new birth certificate would be issued with the adoptive parents’ names on it. Nobody looking at a birth certificate would know if a child had been adopted.
The birthdate was correct: September 15, 1999. I was born in a clinic in Dorey, so I always had lived here. My parents told people that they didn’t adopt me until I was eight months old, so maybe the original birth certificate with my birth mother’s name on it was still somewhere. Would there ever be a possibility of my finding it and discovering her?
I paused when I saw something to the side of the files. It was a piece of dark brown leather. There was an emblem on it that looked like a family crest with three trees. Under it was the word Belladonna.
Suddenly, just like when a heavy cloud moves over the sun, the room darkened. I didn’t hear thunder, but there was a rumbling in the floor. Maybe I imagined it, but I quickly put the strip of leather back and got up. I studied the cabinet drawer to see if it looked in any way different from what it looked like before I had delved into the files. I thought it was
fine and hurried out of the office and into the living room. My mind was spinning with all sorts of questions and thoughts, and I felt a little dizzy. I sat quickly on the settee and closed my eyes.
This could be what my mother meant when she told me that a little knowledge was a dangerous thing. Too many questions and too many answers could clog your brain, but what was worse, they could upset you and make you want to know more than you could or should. What did I gain from peeking into the forbidden cabinet? Only more questions, more secrets to be caught in spiderwebs.
I knew that it was going to be very hard to keep what I had seen and done a secret. Both my parents were very good at looking at me and almost reading my thoughts. Was it because I was so revealing, no matter how hard I tried not to be, or was it because they were perceptive enough to read anyone’s dark thoughts and not just mine?
Lying to them seemed impossible. I hated the thought of having to lie to anyone. Besides, my parents were already sensitive to anything wrong or even slightly defiant that I might do or say. A lie would simply reinforce all that. Maybe it was better to simply confess what I had done. Now I wished that filing cabinet had not been left unlocked. I could almost hear my mother, her face twisted with rage, shouting, “That drawer being opened is no excuse for what you did. Why did you go in there? Don’t you know that curiosity killed the cat?”
If only this had never happened. If only my father had not left that cabinet drawer open. I sat there with my eyes still closed and wished and wished that when I had walked by the office and looked in, the filing cabinet had been closed and locked. I wouldn’t have entered the office. I wouldn’t be feeling so guilty and afraid right now. One thing I always found easy to do was create a vivid picture in my mind of anything I wanted to see, and that’s what I did now with all my might.
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