“Wow.” Sadie ran her fingers across the boxes. “Your grandmother would have been epic at Tetris.”
“She once told me that there were ledgers up here dating to the turn of the twentieth century.” Riley sought among the boxes for her grandmother’s round Palmer-method handwriting. “She said they were part of the camp’s history and refused to throw them away, so she shoved them farther back to make room for more. I keep meaning to go through them myself, but I can’t seem to find the time.” Riley paused and tapped a lower box. “That’s my grandmother’s writing. The ledgers in this box date back to the nineteen forties.”
“We shouldn’t go back more than fifteen years.”
“Just so you know,” Riley said, as she tugged one box out to eyeball the dates on the one behind it, “my grandmother wasn’t the gossiping type. She wouldn’t record if someone was pregnant. She just kept lists of names, the numbers of adults and kids, and what rooms or cabins they were in.”
Sadie tapped a box close to her. “This one is marked photos.”
“Oh, wow, I remember those. For a while I made photo albums for every summer.” Riley shoved one box aside, still looking for the ledger box labeled with the right span of years. “What a lot of work that was. It’s not like now, when you can go online and click and drag and make a photo album in an instant. We had to take pictures, get them developed, pin them in, label them by hand, and add cute scrapbooky things. It was a serious project. But everyone loved paging through them so much that, after I left, Grandma hired a teenager to be Camp Kwenback’s official summer photographer.”
“Photo albums are awesome.” Sadie’s voice went high with excitement. “This box covers the right dates.”
Sadie hauled the box down and tugged the top open, flicking away dust-heavy strands of old spiderwebs. Inside were ten photo albums made of faux leather, the earliest over twenty years old.
Settling cross-legged on the floorboards, Sadie cracked one open. Riley caught sight of the first picture and stuttered, “Oh, lord.”
Sadie’s mouth dropped open. “That’s you?”
“Yup, braces, skinny legs, bad hair, and all.”
“Love the shorts.”
“Hey, pleated fronts were all the rage back then.” Riley reached over and flipped the page. “You want to see funky shorts? Get a load of those. Those are my grandparents holding court by the bonfire on opening day.”
“Seriously?”
“They’re wearing lederhosen,” Riley explained. “This camp came down through my maternal grandmother’s side. She was German through and through. She could cook pastry like nobody’s business.”
“She’s round.”
“And short. Grandpa sometimes called her ‘dumpling.’”
“And your grandfather was so tall. Knobby knees!”
“Yeah, he was a bit of a giraffe. Apparently my grandmother’s parents never liked him. He was Episcopalian, you know.”
Sadie said, “You talk about them as if you’re German, too. As if they were your own birth grandparents.”
Riley didn’t comment right away. She pulled a box off the pile and settled it in the alley between them, using the exertion as an excuse. The pine resin scent of this attic reminded her of when she used to climb here with her grandmother to haul down the holiday decorations, her grandmother batting at the dust with a dishtowel, muttering now and again in German. She remembered sprinkling the butcher-block table downstairs with flour as Grandma made dough. She remembered sleeping in a cot in the laundry room during the busy season, the scent of humid air and clean sheets, the thwump-thwump of the drier white noise to snooze by. Whenever Riley felt like an oversize cowbird in the nest of tiny Crosses, she would retreat to this camp where, for reasons unknown, she always felt like she belonged.
“They helped raise me,” she said, debating how to sit comfortably in the narrow alleyway. “They were my grandparents. The only ones I ever knew.”
“But you found your birth parents, right?”
Riley’s sneaker caught on one of the uneven boards and she sat down clumsily, hitting the attic floor with a force that she knew would leave a bruise.
She should have known Sadie would ask her this question sooner or later.
“Eventually I did.” Riley reached into the ledger box and pulled up one of the books. “Do you want to start on one of these?”
“Are they dead?”
Riley settled the book on her lap and wiped the dust off the cover. “No.”
“Did you meet them?”
The spine of the ledger cracked as she pressed it open. Riley stared blindly at the pages in front of her, realizing she was tracing the old ink with a hand that had begun to tremble.
This shouldn’t matter anymore.
“I’m on this website for adoptees,” Sadie ventured into the growing silence. “We share stories. Most are adoptees who want to find their birth mother but we’re too young to go through the process or we’re having trouble opening the records. Some of the kids manage to break through the roadblocks, one way or another.” Sadie shifted her seat. “But sometimes the mother doesn’t want to be found. Sometimes she doesn’t answer the phone or letters.”
“Everyone’s experience is different.” Riley gave the ledger a little lift. “Why don’t we just focus on yours?”
It had all gone very still in the room. No noises from downstairs. The air conditioning generator in the corner of the attic hadn’t yet kicked on. All she could hear were the pops and creaks of an old wooden house and a rustling outside, of birds coming in and out of nests tucked in the nooks of the roof.
And Sadie, perched across from her like a curious little starling, canting forward, her clear green gaze bright.
Riley sighed and watched the movement of tiny dust motes through the light pouring through the small window. “My husband started the search.”
“Husband?”
“Ex. Soon to be.” Riley raised her left hand and wiggled her fingers, the pale swath across the ring finger evidence of the band she once wore. “He wanted to start a family. Before we did, he thought it would be smart to contact my biological parents and get all the medical history, like some kind of…prescreening.”
When Declan had first badgered her about this, she’d put in a phone call to her old friend Nicole. They’d been on the softball team together in high school. With Nicole as the pitcher and Riley as the catcher, they’d made an unbeatable team that had won the regional finals for the first time in Pine Lake history. Nicole went on to graduate school in psychology and ultimately ended up working as a life coach. She’d seemed the right person to call for such a serious issue. Nicole had assured Riley that her feelings were absolutely valid. She should seek her biological parents only when she was ready.
If only Declan hadn’t been so insistent. If only Riley hadn’t been such a shy little wood thrush.
“Declan hired one of those firms,” Riley said. “The ones you pay to unseal the adoption records or else find the biological parents some other way? I think he sensed that if he left the search to me, I wouldn’t do it at all.”
“Why not?”
“Sadie, if your adoptive parents were still alive, how do you think they’d react if you told them you were searching for your biological parents?”
Sadie’s avid gaze faltered. She flipped over a page. Her jaw worked like she wanted to say something but thought better of it.
Riley said, “I love my parents, though they can be meddling and annoying. My mother tugged out my loose teeth, she took care of me when I had the flu, and she got me through Algebra Two.” Riley looked down at the ledger, swallowing hard. “She’s blood and bone to me now. Outwardly they’d support me, of course, but in some part of my mother’s heart, she’d always wonder if I were looking because she hadn’t been good enough for me. I didn’t want to hurt her that way.”
That was my initial excuse, anyway.
“Izzy’s like that.” Sadie sucked in a little breath as if s
he wished she could suck the name back. “Izzy’s a friend of mine. She was adopted, too. She says she doesn’t want to know the woman who gave her up. She says she has a mother and a father and that’s enough. But I think it’s something more though.” Sadie’s knee beneath the photo album bobbed. “I think Izzy is afraid her biological mother wouldn’t want to see her at all.”
“And who wants to be rejected twice,” Riley murmured, “by the one person who should love you most?”
This shouldn’t matter anymore.
Riley ran her fingers down the ledger page, glancing at the names, Tom & Lisa Sibelius Room 8, kids Caitlin, Molly, and Maeve in Room 1. She remembered the whole family playing a fierce, noisy, fast-paced card game—Gnome Toss—in the main lodge every night.
“Back then closed adoptions were more the norm than they are today,” Riley said, “so it was almost impossible to unseal the records. The people my husband hired had to find my birth mother through back channels.” She shrugged, but the movement ached. “Eventually they succeeded.”
The Diaz-Martins, Harry and Lexus, Room 4. Grandchildren, Ashley and Jennifer, 3 and 5, Room 6.
“I knew they’d found her because, well, I saw a picture of her online.” Riley tugged her bright, chin-length curly red hair. “There’s no hiding this, or the freckles, though hers were lighter, like they’d been bleached. From what I could tell from her Facebook page, she was married and lived in a big house outside Tucson. They gave me her address and phone number.”
“Did you call?”
“Not at first. I went old-school and sent a letter.” She’d agonized over every word before Declan finally took the paper from her, read it, and then stuffed it in the envelope. He’d hugged her afterward when all she wanted to do was to run back to the post office and yank the letter out of the mail slot. “I thought it might be easier that way, to give her some space to think about things.”
“And?”
“We waited four weeks but never got a letter or a call.”
Sadie asked, “You sent another?”
“Two.” Riley’s heart began a skittering little skip beat. “After that Declan insisted that I call.”
Her fingers shook over the numbers.
Schroen residence, Peg speaking.
“I introduced myself.” Riley’s ribs tightened. “I actually wrote down the words I needed to say. I was that nervous.”
Riley remembered the sudden hush on the end of the line. She remembered the sound of footsteps, a hurried rustle, and the click of a closing door.
Most of all she remembered the furious whisper.
How the fuck did you get this number? You’re after money, right? That’s what this is all about? You’ll never see a penny from me. And if I see you on my doorstep, I’m calling the police, do you hear me? Don’t send me any more fucking letters. I’ll just burn them. I don’t have a daughter. I’ve never had a daughter.
You are not my daughter.
The words were like fangs full of venom, rendering her so numb that she hadn’t been able to feel her fingers as the phone fell out of her hand, clattered to the hardwood floor, to the scream of the dial tone.
A sharp pain brought Riley back to the attic. She realized she was digging her fingernails into her biceps. She let her arms go and took a deep breath of the scent of pine resin, old books, and warm paper.
“She didn’t want to talk to you.” Sadie’s eyes were round and disbelieving. “She didn’t want to meet you.”
Riley’s throat closed to words. She considered which was worse: divulging the terrible truth or letting Sadie continue on in blissful ignorance. Some calmer, more rational part of herself—a consciousness hovering over her shoulder, separated from the memory of pain—realized that this was one of those moments a parent must encounter all the time. Do you tell the vulnerable child the harsh truth? Or do you instead make up some cotton-wrapped version of it so she’s not made bloody by the sharp edges?
“Sadie,” she heard herself say, “are you absolutely sure you need to find your birth mother?”
Sadie ducked her head so that Riley got a good look at the part in her hair and the springy curls around it that wouldn’t be confined. Sadie riffled the corners of the black photo album pages as her leg continued to bob, bob, bob. A filmy spiderweb floated down from the rafters and drifted over her shoulder until she reached up and brushed it away.
“If everything were perfect,” Sadie said, talking into the photo album, “I’d want to get to know my birth mother before I met her, and I’d want to do it on my own time. I’d want to know how old she was when she had me, where she lived, whether she’s married now or single or has other kids or lives with her parents.” Sadie tilted her head, like she was just stretching it, to one side and then the other. “I’d want to see a picture of her. I’d want to know what she does all day. Whether she likes to read. Whether she has a lot of friends or just a few.” She breathed hard, her nostrils flaring. “That’s kind of what I was doing in the woods, before you found me in the rainstorm.”
When you thought I was your mother. Riley felt a pang in her heart that burrowed deeper than she thought possible.
Sadie continued, “I’d be pretty mad if my birth mother was an alcoholic or a drug addict or something. It would totally suck to have come all this way just to find out she didn’t care about anything but her next fix. That she didn’t want anything to do with me. Maybe didn’t even remember me. Your birth mother is an idiot, by the way.”
Riley tried to muster a smile, but she couldn’t control the muscles of her face when all she could think about was the same emotional wallop that she’d experienced in her early thirties transferred to a fourteen-year-old who, Riley suspected, was as soft as an unborn bird inside that sturdy shell.
“But,” Sadie said, closing the photo album, “my situation is different from yours. My parents are gone so I don’t have to worry about how they feel. My nana is in a nursing home and hardly remembers her own name, never mind me.” She rose to her knees to pull another photo album out of the ledger box. “I need to find my birth mother, because she’s really all I’ve got left. And I have to do it soon, or else I’ll be shuttling through foster homes for the next four years until I age out of the system.”
Riley admired Sadie’s conviction. It was so simple, so solid, and so very pure, and you couldn’t argue with the logic. Riley wondered how different her own life would have been if she’d possessed only a fraction of Sadie’s force of will, of Sadie’s fierce determination, of Sadie’s fearlessness.
And in any case, Riley figured there was no true harm in continuing the search like this, pawing around ledgers, looking at old photo albums. Such a search—without professional help—would likely never bear fruit. So she bent her head over the ledger, running her finger down the familiar names, turning page after page.
Then Riley sucked in a breath so fast that spit hit the back of her throat.
“I know,” Sadie said, rubbing her nose as Riley coughed and coughed. “This dust is just unbelievable.”
Riley covered her mouth and continued coughing so Sadie wouldn’t see the surprise on her face from stumbling upon an all-too familiar name in the ledger.
Chapter Twelve
Now that’s exactly how I expected to find you after all these years, Tess Hendrick. Sweaty, dirty, and spitting nails.”
Tess straightened up, letting the nails she’d been holding between her teeth drop into her hand. She looked at the woman in a cotton batik skirt coming toward her through the trees. Riley had warned her that Claire Petrenko was coming to Pine Lake for a weekend. Had Tess not known, she wasn’t sure she would have recognized her.
Well, she thought, with a strange kick in her chest, maybe I would have recognized the grin.
“Claire Petrenko.” Tess rattled the nails in her palm. “Come to save my soul after all these years?”
“Oh, I’m sure it’s too late for that.”
Claire kept striding right at her, and
Tess had that feeling that she got sometimes, driving at night on a winter-iced road in North Dakota, seeing the headlights of another truck heading at her from the opposite direction, fearing there wasn’t a damn thing she could do to stop a collision no matter how steady she kept the semi on the right side of the double yellow line. Now all she could do was brace herself as her former schoolmate zoomed in for a full-body hug.
Fortunately, with nails in one palm and the grip of a hammer in the other, there wasn’t much she could do but stand and wait it out as Claire pulled her tight, laughing, rocking her from left to right while Tess tried not to be as stiff as the boards she was nailing.
“Lord, Tess,” Claire murmured, pulling away. “The last time I saw you, you had a pink streak in your hair. I believe you were standing over a garbage can, burning your high school diploma.”
“Good to see you, too.” Tess took the opportunity to step away and toss the nails toward a box with the others. “Riley tells me you’re here for a weekend.”
“I’ve been gadding about the country again, imposing myself on friends.” Claire patted her flattened chest. “The good thing about cancer is that people open their hearts and their doors.”
“I was sorry to hear about—”
“Oh, please.” Claire waved a hand. “I’ve been milking it. Milking it?” She waved to her own missing breasts. “Get it?”
Tess had a close-up view of those dancing brown eyes, close enough that suddenly she could see past the boyishly short hair, the thin cheeks, to the vibrant, laughing teenager Tess used to hang out with, before Tess gave up one set of friends for another. The familiarity sent a strange pang through her, a jolt of unexpected loss.
“Hey,” Claire said, “don’t give me that look. It’s a bad pun, but I’m laughing. When I stop laughing, then everyone should worry. So,” Claire gazed over the construction site, “when you were raising hell in the Cannery, did you think you’d ever find yourself renovating the Camp Kwenback mini-golf?”
“It’s just a project to keep me from tormenting Officer Rodriguez.”
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