Suddenly, I heard the slam of a filing-cabinet drawer. My eyes popped open. I listened carefully. Had my parents come home and one of them discovered that the drawer had been left open? I didn’t hear their voices or their footsteps in the hallway, so I rose slowly and peered out toward my father’s office. There was no one, no other sounds.
Gingerly, I walked back to the office. The door was still open. I peeked in carefully and saw there was no one there, but what shocked me was that the cabinet drawer I had searched was closed. How could that be? I had left it the way it had been, hadn’t I? I was sure of that. I listened again and then approached it and tried to open it, but it was locked, just the way it usually was. For a moment, I just stood there amazed. Could I have imagined I had left it open but really have closed it? After all, my dreams were usually so vivid that it was impossible sometimes to distinguish them from what was real. I was the first to admit that. This could be the most frightening instance of all, because it could mean that now I could not be sure of what I had or hadn’t done.
I backed away and started to flee the office but then stopped in the doorway and looked back at the filing cabinet. No, there was no doubt. I was sure I hadn’t imagined leaving it open. After all, that was how I had found it. How could this be? Obviously, I couldn’t tell my parents anything about this. I couldn’t mention any of the things I had seen in the drawer.
My heart was pounding with both fear and excitement. There was another possibility. When I pictured the drawer closed, had it closed? Had I really done that? Had I willed that cabinet closed? That was something Uncle Wade could do in his magic act. Even if he had some sort of magical power, I couldn’t have inherited it. I wasn’t blood-related to him. I shook my head. This was all too confusing. There had to be a sensible explanation. Either I had closed it without realizing it or the drawer had just rolled closed and automatically locked. Maybe there was a very small earthquake, or a large truck had rumbled by and shaken the ground enough.
I hurried up to my room and sat at my vanity table, staring at myself in the mirror. Sage, I told myself, you must erase the memory of what you did and saw today, all of it. Push it so far back in your mind that it will be thinner than a distant childhood memory, and no one, especially your parents, will be able to read your face and see your sense of guilt. I concentrated on my eyes and willed it to be true.
I didn’t break out of the concentration until I heard footsteps on the stairway and my mother called to me. When I looked at my watch, I realized I had been sitting at the vanity table for nearly half an hour. I must have hypnotized myself or something, I thought. The next time he came, I’d have to ask Uncle Wade if that was even possible. Although he would think it was a strange question to ask, he might still answer it. Of course, I wouldn’t dare ask my mother or father. It would lead to another severe cross-examination.
“Yes?” I called back.
She stepped into my doorway. “What were you doing while we were shopping?” she asked. As was too often the case, her voice was full of accusations.
“Just my homework,” I said. “I had a lot to do this time. All our teachers gave us more than usual for the weekend. Everyone in my class is complaining.”
She continued to stare at me so intensely that I felt uncomfortable.
“What?”
“Did you go into your father’s office and snoop?” My father must have remembered that he hadn’t closed and locked the filing cabinet, and they had found it closed and locked.
“No,” I said. “I’ve been up here practically the whole time you were away. Why?”
She stepped in and narrowed her eyelids. Whenever she looked at me this hard, I felt more than naked; I felt as if she could explore my very bones and nerves, maybe even examine my brain. “Children shouldn’t spy on their parents and snoop in their things,” she said. “And they should never lie to their parents.”
I waited as she gave my face more of her usual close study. Apparently, nothing popped out at her.
“You had better be telling me the truth. Eventually, I’ll know if you’re not. You know that.”
“Yes, I do, Mother,” I said.
“And if that happens, you’ll be severely punished. You understand?”
“I do, Mother.”
She relaxed a little. I breathed in relief. For the first time ever, she really wasn’t sure whether I was telling the truth. Whatever I had done in my self-hypnosis had worked. She put a bag on my bed and took out a new sweater.
“I thought this would look nice on you,” she said. “Violet is your color. You have violet eyes,” she added.
“Thank you.” I was really surprised. It was not that often that she bought something for me spontaneously.
“Try it on,” she said.
I rose, took off the blouse I was wearing, and put on the violet sweater. I looked at myself in the mirror. She came up behind me and put her hands on my shoulders as she looked at me in the mirror. For a long moment, she was silent. I could feel the heat in her fingers penetrate my neck and shoulders.
“How does that make you feel?” she asked in a voice that was almost a whisper, a voice I didn’t recognize.
“It’s very nice. Thank you.”
“How do you feel when you see yourself in this color, Sage?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you feel any different wearing violet?”
I studied myself again. Still looking in the mirror, I gazed at her standing behind me, waiting for some significant reaction. She looked anxious. What was she expecting me to say? “It fits well,” I offered.
I couldn’t tell whether she was relieved or disappointed. “Yes, I’m glad it’s the right size. I want you to wear it for the rest of the day, and I want you to tell me if you have any new feelings about yourself,” she said.
“Okay, but how should I feel?”
“You’ll tell me,” she said.
“I think it’s pretty,” I offered. “It looks nice on me.”
As if I had said something obvious and simple, she smirked with disappointment. “You would look good in any color, Sage. You are a very attractive young girl. But different colors have different effects on us, and in a way, how we react to them tells us something about ourselves.”
So that was what she was still doing, I thought, trying to discover who I really was again. I looked at myself. Was there something about this color that would be more revealing? Would I discover that, too?
She stared for a moment more and then left my room. I continued to study myself in the mirror. Violet was my color, she had said. Choosing colors revealed something about us. Did she mean something more than just complementing my complexion and my eyes?
I turned on my computer and searched the meanings of colors. Violet was associated with the crown chakra, I read, which linked the individual and the universal. It symbolized magic and mystery and also royalty. The advice was to put some violet in your life when you wanted to use your imagination to its fullest and remove obstacles.
Surely, then, this gift from my mother was another test of some sort. But really, how did the color make me feel? Did I feel more powerful, with an imagination that knew no boundaries? At first, maybe because I was trying so hard to feel something, anything, I felt nothing. And then, suddenly, I did feel wiser, older, and even stronger. Was this something else I was imagining? As I studied myself, I thought I saw myself mature physically. My breasts looked slightly larger and shapelier, my face seemed to lose all its youthful chubbiness, and my eyes were filled with wisdom beyond my age. It was as if the new sweater had the power to make me fully aware of my developing figure, helping me envision where it would take me. I had been aware of the changes in my body, of course, but I suddenly felt even more mature. My face flushed a little. Should I, could I, dare think of myself as beautiful? I imagined the admiration of boys and the envy of other girls as I walked through the school halls wearing this sweater.
It was as if I had leaped years a
head and a curtain had been opened. I can’t tell my mother this, I thought. Can I?
But something told me this was just what she wanted to know.
When she asked me again that day, I shrugged and said, “I think I look nice in it, and it’s comfortable. Thank you, Mother.”
“Nothing else?”
“No,” I told her. “What else should I feel?”
She looked at my father. He smiled, but she looked at me suspiciously. Did she realize I wasn’t telling the truth? Was there a reason she wasn’t revealing that, or had I grown stronger, better at hiding something from her? Upstairs, I had gotten away with lying about the cabinet drawer, and I didn’t feel as guilty about it as I’d thought I might. After all, there was so much they were hiding from me. That wasn’t fair, was it? Why were they afraid to tell the truth about me? Why did they hide the picture I had drawn of my birth mother? When would I know the reason for all this mystery about myself?
And when I did finally find out, would it frighten me as much as it seemed to frighten them?
2
I was always suspicious about my birthdays, even before I had seen my birth certificate and wondered if there was another, an original one. Despite what rights adopted children supposedly had when they reached a certain age, I suspected that in order to keep me from discovering my birth mother, my actual birthdate was different from the one my parents celebrated with me. It could easily have been my birth mother’s decision that her identity never be made known to me. Maybe I was younger or older than my parents told me I was, or they really didn’t know themselves. There was only one person who was certain about my age, and that was my birth mother.
When I once asked to see my birth certificate, my parents told me they couldn’t find it. They thought it was just misplaced. They promised that if they didn’t find it, they would help me get a new one. I had never questioned that, but now I knew that my birth certificate had been in my father’s filing cabinet all this time. They had to know that. Why all these lies and secrets? It made every corner of the house seem darker and every whisper even more forbidden.
Unlike other children, I didn’t look forward to my birthdays. Whenever I had one, my parents studied me even more intently, analyzing with more intensity every word I said and everything I did. What were they watching for as I grew older? Every birthday since I was ten made me aware that they were looking for some sign, something to confirm a suspicion or a fear. Age was slowly uncovering what was inside me and who I really was. I felt like some bird emerging out of a shell.
Because of the way they acted, I would wake up the morning of my birthday and immediately look in the mirror to see if my face had changed in any way. Were my eyes a different color, a different shape? Did my hair, my ears, my mouth, any part of me, look so unlike the Sage Healy who had gone to sleep the night before? I even talked out loud to myself to see if the sound of my voice was different. Then, when I rose, I checked my body, not for the small, subtle differences every young girl might find as time passed but for changes so dramatic that I might have trouble fitting into the clothes I owned, as if I had suddenly returned to the body I was supposed to have.
There was one terrifying thought that gave me a nightmare even my soothing voices couldn’t stop, and that was my looking into a mirror one day and seeing an entirely different person. In the nightmare, as time passed, I would not only look different, but I would act differently, and soon I would forget who I had been. My adoptive parents wouldn’t know who I was, either, and I’d be out on my own, a stranger even to myself, wandering about, looking for some nest to crawl into like an orphaned bird whose mother had cast her out.
How I wished I had a close friend who was also adopted so I could compare his or her life to my own. Was my parents’ behavior normal for adoptive parents, especially if they had never met their child’s biological parents, which was what my parents claimed? If that was true, I guess it was only natural for them to wonder almost daily about what their adopted child was turning into, looking like, sounding like, and behaving like.
I tried to convince myself that I shouldn’t criticize them for their anxiety about me. Yes, they were much stricter about what I could do than the parents of almost every other girl my age whom I knew. But maybe I shouldn’t dislike them for that, I told myself. Maybe I should be more understanding. After all, they had been willing to take me in and make a home and a future for me. They were willing to take risks, to invest in someone unknown. Also, I had to consider that I was, after all, an only child. I did see that parents of only children were more controlling, more nervous and concerned about everything the child did.
All of my parents’ friends and the students I knew at school who had met my parents seemed to understand. However, my school friends let me know they wouldn’t like it if their parents treated them that way. They would say things like, “Your parents are just obsessed with worrying about you. They should have had more children. My parents even forgot to ask me how I did on my recent report card. Tell them to get real!”
There was no question I was always on a tighter leash than the other girls in my class. Almost all of them had slept over at other girls’ homes. It was no major thing to meet somewhere and go to a movie or just hang out at the shopping mall. Whenever one of them was there to do actual clothes shopping, a group would be accompanying her.
But not me.
I never went shopping without my mother, who made all the decisions about styles and colors for me, and even though I was invited a few times to join some of my classmates at the mall on weekends, my mother and father didn’t approve of it.
“You’re too young yet to be in places like that without adult supervision,” my mother said, right through my fourteenth year.
Maybe my parents would grow out of their intense concern and worry about me as I grew older and became more of an adult, I hoped. When I crossed over that line into what everyone would consider adulthood, having to take more responsibility for myself, they would ease off, relax, and we’d be able to enjoy ourselves and each other more. Was that just a wish, a dream?
Meanwhile, there was a limit to how many times I would be invited and not accept. Before the end of my ninth-grade year, the girls stopped inviting me not only to join them at the mall and for movies but also to their parties. To be sure, not all of them were very upset about it. Some of the girls in my class never liked me or simply didn’t want me around, especially when they were trying to attract the attention of a boy. One of the girls, Patricia Lucas, told me they were jealous of me.
“Why?” I asked.
“You already have a body,” she said. “You’re too much competition.”
“Excuse me? We all have a body.”
“Not like yours. You have a mature figure, and you have beautiful hair and eyes, not to mention an unreal perfect complexion. I never saw you have a pimple. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed how the older boys drool over you.”
I didn’t say it, but of course I had noticed. Besides the fact that many of them approached me in school, either in the hallways or in the cafeteria, I could actually feel their eyes on me, and I could hear them whispering behind my back. Some of the things they said made me blush, and later, when one of those older boys, Shelly Roman, approached me, I drove him off the way you might swat a fly. It was easy to do. Whenever he said anything, I asked him why he had said it, which began to annoy him, and then I told him I knew something about what had really happened between him and a girl named Sidney Urban. I said I could never trust him because of that.
“What did I do?” he demanded.
“You lied to her when you told her the drink you gave her at a party recently had nothing alcoholic in it. You didn’t know she had a serious alcohol intolerance and it would affect her.”
“She had something else wrong with her, some other allergy,” he whined in self-defense.
“No. You didn’t believe her. You thought she was just afraid of drinking. You hoped she would
get drunk so you could take advantage of her.”
“Did Sidney tell you that?”
“No, she doesn’t know me,” I said.
“So who told you that?”
“No one,” I said. “I just know.”
He squinted at me and stepped back. “What are you, the school psychologist or something? Get a life,” he said, and walked off quickly. After that, every time he saw me, in a hallway or outside the building, he avoided me like the plague.
I didn’t lie to him, although I didn’t know exactly how I knew. I just knew. I had looked at Sidney after that party, and it all came to me, rolled out in my mind so vividly that it was as if I had been there. When the words came out of my mouth, however, I was just as surprised as he was. It was the first time I had ever done anything like that. It was actually a bit frightening. I felt like a small bird that had leaped into flight for the first time, full of trepidation but soon after elated. I felt like I had taken some drug that would make me high. It was as if I was rising off the floor.
A few days after I’d talked to Shelly, Sidney, who was in the tenth grade, approached me in the cafeteria. I was sitting at a table with some of my classmates. Everyone was surprised at how angry she looked. She stepped right up beside me, practically pushing me out of my seat.
“I want to talk to you,” she began.
“Here?”
“Anywhere. It doesn’t matter. Why are you spreading stories about me?” she demanded.
Sidney was a good two inches taller than I was and had reddish-blond hair cut in a bob. She had delicate facial features and striking green eyes. The only feature that detracted from her good looks was that her neck was a little longer than normal. I thought she’d look better with a longer hairstyle because of that, but I wasn’t about to suggest anything to her now or ever.
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