“No, of course I can. Just give me a minute. I’ll be right with you.”
He disappeared for a few minutes, and when he returned he led me to a desk and offered me a seat. I handed him the birth certificate and the form I’d filled out.
“You’re a Bunting,” he said as he looked over the form. “I thought you all had red hair.” Strawberry-blond, I mentally corrected.
“The miracles of Lady Clairol,” I said with a smile.
He smiled back at me. He looked at the birth certificate again, and then his smile froze. He squinted at the print on the certificate as if he was trying to make out some detail.
“This can’t be right,” he said.
I’d only glanced at the birth certificate, which Annie had dug out for me the night before. I didn’t want to look at it. No matter what the exact circumstances of my birth were, and I honestly didn’t have a clue, I knew that it wasn’t a happy occasion.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. Perhaps it listed the age of the mother on the birth certificate. If Annie had given birth to me at some horribly young age, it would look all wrong to a police officer.
“The doctor that signed the form,” he said. He held the birth certificate up for me to see and pointed toward a scribbled signature. Was he criticizing the doctor’s penmanship? I shook my head, not seeing whatever it was that he saw. “Dr. Hantz,” he said. “My father.”
“It’s a small world.” I mentally breathed a sigh of relief. There wasn’t anything wrong, just an interesting coincidence. My relief was short-lived.
“He died two days before you were born. In a car accident.”
Did no one in this town have a living father?
“I’m sorry,” I said, because it’s what you say when someone tells you his father died, even if it was seventeen years ago.
But how could his signature be on my birth certificate if he was already dead? My mind began to churn through possible explanations. Someone forged his signature. No, why would they do that? The date on my birth certificate was wrong. Maybe whoever had typed it up had been off by a week, or their fingers slipped or something. It could happen, right? But weren’t these things triple-checked?
It became suddenly clear. Someone had doctored the date on my birth certificate. There would be little benefit in changing the month or the day—so what they had to have changed was the year. How old was I really? Only sixteen? Fifteen? I had been robbed, cheated, and for what? To preserve some messed-up sense of normalcy? Like anyone had ever considered the Buntings normal.
“You know,” Officer Hantz said, “this doesn’t even really look like his signature. Maybe one of the nurses signed it. He delivered a lot of babies there. It was probably just out of habit or something.”
“I guess,” I said, but I was too stunned to pay much attention.
Officer Hantz went ahead with processing my paperwork while I zoned out, thinking about the irregularities of my birth certificate and what it meant. All those times I’d felt like I was completely behind my other classmates, all those times I had felt immature—it all made sense. I wasn’t young for my age, I was just young—well, younger than I ever thought I was, anyway.
I was so distracted, I almost forgot the real reason I’d come down to the police station.
“Remember you told us about that website we should look up?” I said. “The Megan’s Law site?”
“Sure,” Hantz said.
“Well, I was wondering, is there some way to find out why someone might be on the Megan’s Law site? I mean, it doesn’t really give any specific information.”
“Is there something you were concerned about?” he asked.
“No. Not really. But, I mean, if someone was on there it would be because they have a record, right? You could tell me what they did and when they did it?”
“I can’t freely dispense that information,” he said. The seriousness of his tone frightened me a little. “Did something happen?” I took in his look of concern, and realized that he thought I was there because I wanted to report an incident.
“No,” I said. My suddenly high and squeaky voice must have made my words sound like a lie.
“It’s not something you have to be embarrassed about. If something happened, it’s not your fault.” He looked at me with that serious and concerned face of his and I made some attempt to laugh the whole thing off, which only made me sound like a complete lunatic. I realized he must know who I was talking about. There was only one sex offender in Shallow Pond.
The anger broiled inside me as I walked home. I had visions of storming in the front door, marching right up to Annie, and demanding she tell me the truth for once in her life, but Annie wasn’t in the living room when I got home. She was in the kitchen. So was Gracie. Annie was heating up the leftovers we were eating for dinner while Gracie set the table. I hadn’t really counted on Gracie being there, or the fact that both of them greeted me in warm, friendly tones as if they were genuinely happy to see me. I played the obedient girl and sat down. I’d waited this long; what was another hour or so? I could corner Annie later and force her to be straight with me. It was a good plan … but I’d kept all of my questions locked inside of me for too long.
“You’re my mother, aren’t you?” I said.
I stared at Annie as I spoke. She dropped her fork on her plate. Gracie looked up in surprise.
“What?” Gracie said. “Are you completely insane?”
“I don’t know where you got that notion,” Annie said. She sighed, then forced a smile. I could see she was trying to shrug the whole thing off, but she was trying too hard.
“She’s only twenty-six,” Gracie added. “How could she possibly be your mother?”
“And how old am I?” I asked.
“Weirdo, what are you talking about?” Gracie said.
“Somebody doctored the date on my birth certificate.”
Annie had given up on dinner. She pushed her chair a few inches back from the table and folded her hands neatly in her lap. She looked scared and a little sad, and I knew that I’d figured it out. She’d been keeping secrets from me for years. Gracie, though, was still clueless.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Gracie asked.
“The doctor who signed my birth certificate died two days before I was born.”
“But then, if the date was changed, that would mean you’re older, not younger,” Gracie said.
She was right, of course. How had I missed that when my airheaded sister had picked up on it?
“Maybe the whole birth certificate is a fake.” I spat the words out in anger, feeling for some reason like a cornered animal. I glared at Gracie. “How come you can’t remember Mom, if she didn’t die until I was born? How come there aren’t any pictures of her with you when you were a baby? Mom’s not my mother!”
I shot to my feet, and my chair toppled over. My anger had turned to sadness. All I wanted to do was cry, but I didn’t want to do it there. I needed to get out of there. I needed to be alone.
I had my hand on the front doorknob when Annie finally spoke.
“She’s not your mother,” Annie said. Her voice was so quiet and faint I could barely be sure I heard her.
“What?” Gracie said.
“She’s not your mother,” Annie repeated. “She’s not the mother of any of us.”
Twenty-One
Gracie didn’t say anything. She got up from the table, went into the living room, and returned carrying the photo from the mantel. She held it up beside her face.
“We look just like her,” Gracie said.
“Exactly,” Annie said.
I was confused. This wasn’t making any sense. I thought I had everything figured out, but now nothing seemed to fit.
“She died before any of us breathed our first breaths,” Annie said. “We’re her clones.”
Gracie started laughing, like this was all some big joke. It was too early for April Fools’, though. And Annie looked deadly serious.
“Clones,” I said in a whisper. I felt like I was trapped in a nightmare, but I didn’t think I was going to be able to wake up and shake this off like a normal sort of nightmare.
“She’s obviously just messing with us,” Gracie said. “You’re just messing with us, right?”
Annie shook her head. The overhead light sparkled on the tear tracks running down her face.
No, no, no, no, no. This was not the answer I’d wanted. I wanted to rewind the conversation. Annie would make her big grand admission, but it would be something trivial and mundane. She would confess to secretly being my mother. She’d gotten pregnant in her teens and given birth to me, but the decision had been to raise me as her sister. A birth certificate had been fabricated to preserve the illusion. I would have given anything in the world to be just your garden-variety illegitimate child. It was so simple and neat. I wouldn’t even be mad at Annie for keeping the secret all these years. After all, it wouldn’t really matter.
“It’s not possible,” Gracie stated.
“He was a brilliant scientist,” Annie said. It took me a moment to realize that she was talking about our father. “One of the best in the world.”
“Nobody goes around cloning people,” Gracie said.
“It’s not legal,” Annie said, “but it is possible.”
“What else don’t I know about?” Gracie asked. “Did he have conversations with space aliens? Did he build a time machine?”
I wish he had built a time machine, because right now all I wanted to do was go back in time and undo everything. I wanted things to go back to the way they were before I started asking all my questions. I wanted to just be a teenage girl from a slightly eccentric family living in some middle-of-nowhere Pennsylvania town. I wanted to go back to being me.
“But we’re different from each other,” I said. My voice was choked with tears. “We look alike, but it’s not like we act alike.” I felt sure I’d proven Annie wrong. Clones were all the same person, but we weren’t all the same. We weren’t anything alike. How could Gracie and I possibly be the same person?
“We’ve got the same DNA,” Annie explained.
“That just makes us sisters,” I said.
“The same exact DNA,” Annie said.
“Does this have something to do with the medicine you’re on?” Gracie asked. “You’re hallucinating, right?”
“I’m not hallucinating,” Annie said. Her voice was flat and weak.
“No, you are,” Gracie insisted. “Because if what you’re saying is even remotely true, then we’re freaks. We’re nothing but some crazy science experiment, and I don’t know about you, but I am not cool with that. Not one bit.” She punctuated her sentence by slamming the framed picture she was still holding on the edge of the table. I heard a tinkling noise as the glass over the picture shattered. A spiderweb of cracks now distorted the familiar face that looked out of the frame, the face that I’d always thought belonged to our mother, but it was the face that actually belonged to each of us. Our face.
“I didn’t plan on telling you like this,” Annie said. She still sat there in her chair with her hands neatly folded.
“How long have you known?” I asked. She didn’t answer right away. I stared at her as a few lonely tears slid down her face.
“Awhile,” she said after several seconds. I didn’t know what that meant. Had she known her whole life? Why
was it that she knew and we were in the dark? I wished I was still in the dark. It would have been easier than knowing. Knowing made everything different.
I leaned my head against the door, resting my cheek on one of the cool glass panels. My whole life flashed through my mind, and it was all a lie. Everything that I thought I knew had been wrong. My whole life I’d been pretending to be a real person, a unique person, but I wasn’t. I was a clone of some woman I’d never met. I was a freak. We were all freaks.
The door rattled suddenly, and I jumped. I spun around and saw Cameron Schaeffer standing on the other side.
He smiled at me through the glass. I stared at him as if he was a ghost. It seemed like a million years ago that I’d spent the afternoon with him, convinced he was my father. My father? I didn’t even have a father. No wonder the man who I’d always assumed was my father was so distant from me. He was probably repulsed by our very presence, the monsters that he’d created—living, breathing monsters.
Cameron’s brow furrowed when I didn’t open the door right away. I thought of the Megan’s Law site, the mug shot that was there. He was a sex offender. I knew this should make me feel something, but it didn’t. It didn’t seem to matter anymore. Nothing mattered.
I opened the door, and Cameron stepped into the kit-
chen. His eyes swept the room, taking in the mostly uneaten dinner, the smashed picture frame, Annie so sad and serene in her chair, and Gracie looking about ready to jump out of her skin. Unless he was a complete idiot, he must have realized that something was seriously amiss.
“Hello, Cameron,” Annie said in a voice that tried too hard to be casual and friendly.
“I think maybe I’ve caught you at a bad time,” he said.
“You could say that again,” Gracie said.
“I’m sorry,” Cameron said. “I should have called. It’s rude to just show up unannounced. I should probably go.”
“No!” Gracie screamed. “I mean, I was just about to go out too. Just let me go grab my jacket.”
“If you were in the middle of—” He looked around, as if the appropriate word might be sitting on a shelf somewhere. “Dinner, or whatever, I can wait for you in the car.”
“We’re done,” Gracie said. She turned and looked at Annie with narrowed eyes, then ran out of the room to grab her coat.
“So, Babie, how’re things going?” Cameron asked as he stood there awkwardly waiting for Gracie. I stared at him in confusion. How were things? I didn’t even know where to begin with that question. Thankfully, Gracie swept back into the room and grabbed Cameron by the arm to steer him past me and out the door. She didn’t look back at us or even say goodbye.
I didn’t watch them as they walked out of the house, but Annie did. The look on her face said it all. She looked wistful and heartsick. It was the look of lost dreams and unrequited love, and I thought for the first time in my entire life that I finally understood Annie.
Everything I’d thought I knew about her had been wrong, but now, with the information I’d been lacking for so many years, I could finally piece together the mystery that was Annie. All these years, I’d blamed the fact that Annie had never left Shallow Pond on Cameron and her foolish love for him, but now I could see the true explanation. It wasn’t love that had kept her from living her life, but shock—and a knowledge that she didn’t know how to deal with. How do you go forward with your life when you find out you aren’t even a real person? What is the point of anything if your whole life has been some sort of cruel lie? She didn’t go to college, and she broke up with Cameron, because college and Cameron were things that belonged to the real world, a world that she no longer belonged to. My sister had dealt with the knowledge that her whole existence was some cruel science experiment by becoming a recluse, a response that seemed pretty rational to me.
I turned to look out the window, but Gracie and Cameron had already disappeared from view. I looked back to Annie. She was staring out into the darkness with that wistful look on her face.
“There never was anyone else, was there?” I asked. That had only been a lie to appease Cameron, because telling him the truth was out of the question.
“No. There was someone else.”
I didn’t believe her. For some reason, it was easier for me to believe that we were the clones of some woman we’d been t
old was our mother than for me to believe that Annie had ever had another boyfriend.
“Does it ever get easier?” I asked. She looked at me and smiled that warm smile of hers.
“It does,” she said. “I know it’s a lot to take in at once. I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“I didn’t mean to tell you so suddenly like that, but it’s best that you know.”
I nodded, though I didn’t entirely agree. Why was it best to know?
“I think I’m going to head up to bed,” Annie said. “Do you mind cleaning up the dishes?”
She was going to bed? Now? She dropped a bomb like that on me, and then she was just abandoning me?
I told her I didn’t mind. I began to clean up the dishes with slow, methodical movements like some sort of robot, even though I wasn’t a robot. I was a clone. Well, at least there was that. I mean, being a robot? That would really suck, right?
Twenty-Two
I awoke suddenly. I felt my heart racing. It was dark, so I rolled over to look at my alarm clock. It was only a few minutes after five. Too early, way too early. I knew I should try to get some more sleep, but my racing heart thought otherwise. There was something I was forgetting. A nightmare, I told myself—that was the nagging feeling that was keeping me awake at this hour. But the nagging feeling refused to go away. After I’d tossed and turned for another minute or so, it came back to me. Last night. Annie’s announcement. I wanted for it to have all been a nightmare, but I knew it wasn’t.
I sat up and hugged my knees to my chest in the dark. I’d slept in this room my whole life, and it had always seemed like such a warm, welcoming space. Now, in the darkness of early morning, there was something menacing about it. I felt like I didn’t belong. Maybe I didn’t. After all, she (my mother, for lack of a better word) had not grown up in Shallow Pond. I belonged to a different time and a different place. I was an interloper here. I could never be anything but.
All I’d wanted for as long as I could remember was to get the hell out of Shallow Pond. I’d always thought this was because it was some crappy small town where dreams went to die, but what if that wasn’t the reason at all? What if the only reason I longed so desperately to get out was because my body instinctively knew it wasn’t supposed to be there?
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