by Isobel Bird
Cooper shook her head. “I’ll call her,” she said.
They went outside and Cooper shut the door behind her. She threw her stuff into the Nash’s small storage space and then got in and started it up. Giving the house a last, sad look, she pulled away.
“Where are you going to go?” asked Jane as they drove.
“I’m not sure,” answered Cooper. “Maybe Annie’s house. I just need to be away from there.”
Jane was silent. Cooper glanced over at her and saw her looking out the window pensively.
“I know what I’m doing seems like I’m abandoning her,” said Cooper.
“Oh, no,” said Jane emphatically. “I wasn’t thinking that at all. I was thinking how sad she looked. She looked the way I felt when I took those pills, like she wants it all to just go away.”
“Do you think she’ll do what you—” Cooper began, then stopped.
“Do what I did?” Jane finished. “I think she kind of already is, isn’t she? She’s trying to make herself disappear. If I’d really wanted to kill myself, I would have done it. But I didn’t. I just wanted to not feel anything, if only for a few hours.”
“I feel like I’m just leaving her there,” Cooper said. “But something tells me that I have to.” She paused, thinking. “One thing this year of studying Wicca has shown me is that sometimes being responsible means taking care of yourself first, and sometimes helping people means letting them fall down.”
She thought about Kate and Annie, and the failed spell that had brought them together. They had all learned a lot from that experience, even though it was often painful. And she had learned even more from her ordeal in the woods on Midsummer Eve and her subsequent temporary abandonment of witchcraft. Maybe, she told herself, what her mother was going through right now was similar.
“If it helps any, I think you’re doing the right thing,” Jane said after a while.
Cooper looked over at her. “Thanks,” she said. “It does help.”
They arrived at the restaurant where the girls had decided to have dinner out, a Japanese place that Annie had suggested. Cooper parked and she and Jane went inside. They found the other girls gathered around a low wooden table in the corner, seated on cushions on the floor.
“Hey there,” Annie said when she saw them. “Sit down. We thought it would be fun to do this the traditional way.”
Jane sat next to Sasha, while Cooper squeezed in beside Kate. The others were picking at a plate of something with their chopsticks. Cooper peered at the contents of the plate curiously.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Octopus,” Kate informed her, popping a piece of the squiggly stuff into her mouth. “Try it. It’s different.”
Cooper picked up her chopsticks and deftly pinched a piece of octopus between the ends. Before she could really think about it too much, she put it in her mouth and chewed. To her surprise, it was good.
“Not bad,” she said. “Jane? Are you going to try it?”
Jane eyed the octopus doubtfully. “I think I prefer my food without suckers on it,” she said, making the rest of them laugh.
“We decided that we’re going to try something new once a month,” Annie explained to Jane. “This month it’s sushi. I mean, we’ve all had sushi, but not all the different kinds of sushi. So tonight we’re experimenting.”
“In that case,” Jane said, poking at the dish, “I can’t be the only one not trying it.” She managed to wedge a piece of the octopus between her two chopsticks and dragged it to her mouth. She dropped it in and chewed, the others watching her face. When she finally swallowed, they all clapped.
“Now can I order something without suckers?” Jane asked hopefully.
Annie handed her a list of the different kinds of sushi. “You can pick anything you want,” she said. “As long as it’s raw.”
As Jane and Cooper looked over the menu, the others chatted. “So,” Sasha said, “has anything exciting happened to anyone this week?”
Kate and Annie looked at each other, then at the others. Suddenly they each seemed fascinated by the pink slivers of pickled ginger that sat on the plate of octopus. They pushed it around, picking up pieces and then putting them back down.
“No,” Annie said. “Nothing exciting.”
“Nope,” added Kate. “Nothing here, either.”
Cooper couldn’t help but notice that her friends were acting suspicious, as if they were hiding something from the rest of the group. She looked from one to the other, trying to read the expressions on their faces. But both of them had on their best poker faces, and Cooper couldn’t get any clues from looking at them. Still, she had a pretty good idea that they weren’t exactly telling the truth. Whatever it is, she thought, they want to keep it to themselves for now. She knew that they would tell her when they were ready, and she could wait. Besides, it was time to tell them her own news.
“I left home today,” she said dramatically. She enjoyed the startled expressions on her friends’ faces for a moment before adding, “Not for good or anything.”
She then proceeded to tell them the whole story about her mother and her drinking. When she was done she said, “So I think it’s a good idea if I stay away for a couple of days.” She looked around the table. “I don’t suppose I can shack up with any of you, can I?” she asked.
“Kyle went back to school,” Kate said. “You could stay at my house if you want to. I’m sure my parents would be okay with it.”
“And you can always stay with us,” said Annie.
“I know Thea wouldn’t mind at all,” added Sasha. “And we have an extra room.”
“Hmm,” Cooper said. “Decisions, decisions.” She was joking, but it really did feel good to know that she had such good friends to help her out when she needed it.
“Why don’t you do it by lottery?” suggested Jane. “You can each pick a number between one and twenty. Then Cooper will write a number down. Whoever is closest to her number wins.”
“I like it,” Kate said. “Cooper is a prize.”
“As if you didn’t already know that,” scoffed Cooper.
“Okay,” said Jane. She handed Cooper a pencil and a sheet of paper from the little pile of sushi order forms that sat on the table. “Write down a number.”
Cooper thought for a moment and then jotted her number down. She folded the paper in half and handed it to Jane.
“Now you three each pick a number,” Jane told the other girls. “We’ll start with Kate.”
“Seven,” Kate said.
“Nineteen,” Annie declared.
“And I’ll take thirteen,” said Sasha when it was her turn.
Jane opened the paper Cooper had given her. “Fifteen,” she read. “Sasha is the winner.”
“Who says thirteen isn’t a lucky number?” crowed Sasha triumphantly. “I win.”
“Congratulations,” said Jane. “You’ve just won yourself your very own houseguest. As for the rest of you, we have this lovely octopus as a consolation prize.”
“I think I’d rather have Rice-A-Roni,” Kate joked as the waitress arrived to take their orders and found the girls all laughing so loudly that they couldn’t even begin to tell her what they wanted.
CHAPTER 17
Annie picked up the phone for the sixth time. She held it in her hand, looking from it to the letter sitting on her lap. She’d been doing it ever since she’d gotten home from school that afternoon. It was Monday, and Aunt Sarah and Meg were out doing some shopping. Annie had the house to herself. Feeling a little bit guilty about it, she was glad that Cooper was staying with Thea and Sasha. She wouldn’t be able to keep her secret much longer if Cooper was around. Her friend had a way of finding out everything. It had been hard enough not telling the other girls about her missing sister. She knew she would tell them, she just didn’t know when.
Right now she was trying to make up her mind about calling the adoption agency. She kept reading the letter she’d found, hoping it would help he
r decide. “Loving Arms Adoption Center,” she read, trying out how it sounded. “Call us at 555-298-1547.” They were just numbers, but when she read them out loud Annie felt almost as if she were doing a spell. Those numbers might hold the key to unlocking a great mystery in her life. But could she dial them? Could she actually talk to someone on the other end of the line and explain that she was looking for a baby her mother had given up more than twenty years earlier?
“There’s only one way to find out,” she told herself, and dialed.
The phone rang. Once. Twice. Three times. Annie heard the sound of someone picking up. She almost hung up, but then she heard the unmistakable sound of the telephone company’s recorded message—three atonal beeps followed by a dull mechanical voice intoning, “You have reached a number that has been disconnected or is not in service. Please check the number and try your call again.”
She listened to the voice repeat the message two more times before she hung up. Part of her felt relieved, but another part felt intensely sad. The one lead she had had turned out to be a dead end. The adoption center had gone out of business. She put the phone back and sat on her bed, staring at the letter.
“I guess I’ll never know who you are now,” she said, thinking of the baby her mother had given up. And suddenly she was overcome with emotion. She started to cry. Something inside of her wanted more than anything else to know the sister she’d just discovered she had. It wasn’t fair that she should find out about her, only to have her snatched away again. There had to be a reason that she’d found out about the baby. But what was it?
She looked around her room and her gaze settled on the painting her mother had done that hung on the wall across from her bed. It depicted Annie as a baby, being held by her mother as the two of them looked out at a moon with a woman’s face. Looking at it always made Annie feel better about whatever it was that was bothering her. This time, though, it made her even sadder. Her mother had never gotten the chance to hold her sister that way. She’d had to give her to someone else, someone who might not have held her up to look at the moon as it shone down on them with the face of the Goddess.
The moon in the picture had always seemed very protective to Annie. Looking at it, it reminded her that the Goddess was always out there, looking out for her, ready to help her if she needed it. All she had to do was ask.
That’s it, she thought. I’ll ask for help.
Still holding the letter, she went over to her altar and knelt in front of it. She lit the white candle that sat in the center of the altar. It cast a small ring of light around the Goddess statue that occupied the front part of the little table Annie had covered with a blue cloth and arranged her magical items on.
Annie closed her eyes and imagined herself in the ring of trees she often visited in her private meditations. She imagined herself sitting there, surrounded by the circle of towering trees. Overhead a bright moon looked down, bathing everything in pure, silver light.
“Mother,” Annie said, using her favorite word for the Goddess, “I need some help here.” She clutched the letter from the adoption agency in her hand. “I know I found this letter for a reason. I know I found out about my sister for a reason. But I don’t know what it is, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I’d really appreciate it if you could give me a hint. Just a small one. Nothing too big. I know I’m supposed to work this thing out on my own, whatever it is. But where do I start?”
She paused expectantly, as if she expected to hear a voice come out of nowhere and give her the answer she was searching for. She knew well enough that was probably not going to happen, but she waited anyway, in case she was wrong. She wasn’t. There were no voices. No mystical figure appeared to her to tell her what to do. Instead, all she heard was the wind in the branches of the trees that encircled her.
“That isn’t helping,” she said unhappily.
In her mind she looked up at the sky stretching out over her magical grove. It was clear and black, and the stars twinkled gaily over her head. But instead of thinking that they were beautiful, Annie found herself resenting them. It was stars that had gotten her into this in the first place. “So why don’t you guys get me out of it?” she asked angrily. “If you know so much about my life, how come you can’t help me figure this out?”
She opened her eyes and stared at the candle on her altar. She was frustrated. Clearly meditation was not the answer. But if that wasn’t it, then what was? She had pretty much run out of things to try.
Once again she looked over at the picture on the wall. But this time her eye was drawn down to the desk below it, and particularly to the computer that sat there. Looking at it, she suddenly had an idea.
She got up and went over to her desk. Pulling out the chair, she sat down and clicked the icon that connected her to the Internet. When the program was loaded, she went to a search engine and typed in “adoption agency searches.” She hit the search button and waited while the computer hummed for a few seconds. Then the screen flashed a list of the various matches it had come up with. Annie scanned the list, looking for anything that might help her.
She found it at the bottom of the second page. “Northern Star Adoption Searches,” she read. “Northern Star is a database of active and inactive adoption agencies throughout the United States. Search our records for information pertaining to yourself or others.”
Annie clicked on the link to Northern Star and waited impatiently for it to load. She didn’t know if it would be any help to her at all, but somehow it seemed like a good chance. Finally the page loaded, and Annie read more about the agency.
“Northern Star was founded as a nonprofit organization dedicated to maintaining adoption records for the purposes of providing those interested in locating relatives, birth parents, or children placed for adoption with the means of locating one another. We maintain a collection of adoption records from state agencies, as well as private agencies who are part of our program. Our database contains a large number of records from agencies no longer in operation. Click here for a list of agencies whose records we have acquired.”
Annie clicked on the link and held her breath. Would Loving Arms Adoption Center be one of the agencies, or had she hit another dead end? Her fingers drummed anxiously on the desk as she waited for the list to appear. When it did, she scrolled down the names until she reached the L’s. And there it was: Loving Arms Adoption Agency. A notation beside the name informed Annie that the agency had gone out of business about ten years earlier, but that Northern Star was in possession of all of the company’s records for the time it was in operation.
“So far, so good,” Annie said. “Now what?”
There was a button on the page to click for information on doing a search for someone through Northern Star. Annie clicked on it and read the instructions that appeared. There was a standard form to fill out, asking for whatever information she had about the adoption in question. That part was easy. She knew her father’s name and mother’s maiden name, and the approximate date of the birth. She filled that all in.
Then she came to part of the form that asked her to write a statement saying why she wanted to find the person she was looking for. “This information, along with your contact information, will be sent to the person if she or he has also registered with Northern Star,” she read. “If she or he wishes to contact you, you will hear from her or him directly.”
Annie felt her hopes crash. Not only did she have to write something, but she had to hope that her sister had also found the Northern Star website and registered with them. What were the chances of that? She probably didn’t even know she had a sister out there somewhere. And even if she somehow thought that she might, why would she find the same website? The chances were one in a million.
Annie was about to sign off when she looked up at the picture above her desk again. The Goddess’s face looked down at her, and it seemed to say, “You found Kate and Cooper, didn’t you?”
“That was different,” Annie said
out loud. But maybe it wasn’t. She really believed that she, Kate, and Cooper had been meant to find one another. And all kinds of things had worked together to bring her aunt and Grayson Dunning together. Now she had been given the information about her missing sister. That couldn’t be an accident or a coincidence.
“Okay,” she said, sighing. “What have I got to lose?”
She looked at the form on her screen and thought. What was she going to say? If she could talk to her sister, what would she tell her? She thought some more. And then she began typing.
Twenty-three years ago my mother and father had to give a baby up for adoption. That baby was my sister. My other sister. I have a younger sister—Meg. But there’s an older sister out there I’ve never met, and I would really like the chance to get to know her. Maybe she’s wondering why our parents gave her up. Maybe she’s wondering what our mother and father were like. Maybe she’s wondering if she has any other brothers or sisters. I’d like to have the chance to answer all of those questions. And I’d like to ask her what she’s like, and what her life has been like. I’ve always been an older sister. Only recently did I discover that I have an older sister. Meg says that it’s really a pain sometimes having an older sister who tells you what to do. I’d like the chance to find out.
She read the letter over several times. Did it sound okay? If she were adopted and received such a letter, would she answer it? The questions tormented her. Finally she just hit the send button on the form and watched the letter to her sister turn into an electronic file.
“Thank you for submitting your request,” read the screen that popped up next. “If we have contact information for the person you’re looking for, we will forward your letter and your information.”
That was it. Annie had sort of thought there would be more to it. After all, finding someone you’d been looking for all your life—or even for a few days, as she had—was such a big deal. But ultimately it was reduced to an electronic message. All she could do now, she supposed, was wait.