I almost burst into tears.
Was this what we'd come to—stilted conversation between strangers? For twenty-two years this man had been my rock, my skinned-knee-kisser, my Little League coach, my fellow sports-car enthusiast, my teacher, and—although I knew I'd never been the most ambitious daughter—I hoped he counted me among his pride and joys. He'd lost a daughter and I'd lost a sister; couldn't we manage to comfort each other somehow?
I fidgeted with the phone cord, hoping he'd wind down but he didn't, and finally, I could wait no longer. I wasn't going to get anywhere with him. "Dad, can I talk to Mom?" I interrupted.
I got his canned reply: She was sleeping and he didn't want to disturb her because she so rarely did anything but toss and turn, despite all the medication she was on, and the doctor had said only time and rest could help her heal, and he wanted his wife back, and didn't I want my mother? So we should both let her rest.
"I need to talk to Mom," I insisted.
There was no budging him. I think I get my stubbornness from him. We both dig our heels in and sprout roots if somebody tries to push us. "Is something wrong with her that you're not telling me?" I asked.
He sighed and it was such a sad, deeply exhausted sound that I suddenly knew if I saw him right now, he would look like he'd aged ten years in the two weeks since I'd left. "She's a little out of her head with grief, Mac. She blames herself for what happened to Alina and there's no reasoning with her about it," he said.
I
"How could she possibly blame herself for Alina's death?" I exclaimed.
"Because she let her go to Ireland in the first place," he said tiredly, and I could tell it was a conversation he'd had with her a dozen times but made no headway. Maybe I get my stubbornness from both sides. Mom digs in, too.
"That's ridiculous. That's like saying if I decided to take a cab somewhere and the cab wrecked, it was your fault. It was my choice to take the cab. You couldn't know something would go wrong and neither could Mom."
"Unless somebody warned us in the first place," he said in a voice so low that I nearly missed it, and then I wasn't sure I'd heard him right.
"Huh?" I said. "What did you say? Did somebody tell you not to let Alina go to Ireland? Oh, Dad, people are always full of gloom and doom! Everybody's a prophet in retrospect. You can't listen to them!" Though I love Ashford, we have our share of busybodies, and I could just see some of the nosier and less-kind inhabitants of the town gossiping in the grocery store, and not quietly, when my parents went by. Saying snide things like, Well, what did they expect—sending their daughter four thousand miles away by herself, anyway?
Right on cue, Dad said, "What kind of parents let their daughter go four thousand miles away from home by herself?"
"All kinds of parents let their kids study abroad," I protested. "You can't blame yourselves."
"And now you're gone, too. Come home, Mac. Don't you like it here? Wasn't it good? We always thought you and your sister were happy here," he said.
"We were!" I exclaimed. "I was! Then Alina got killed!"
There was a weighty silence that I spent most of wishing I'd kept my big, fat mouth shut, then he said, "Let it go, Mac. fust walk away. Let it go."
"What?" I was stunned. How could he say that? "You mean, come home and let the monster who did this to Alina just get away with it? Go on walking around out there to kill someone else's daughter next?"
"I don't give a grand, glorious shit about anyone else's daughter!"
I flinched. In my entire life, I'd never heard my father cuss. If he did so at all, he did it in private, or beneath his breath.
"I care about mine. Alina is dead. You're not. Your mother needs you. I need you. Get on a plane. Pack up right now and come home, Mac!"
I swear, I prefaced it a thousand different ways in my head; from a several sentence buildup, to a five-minute explanation and apology for what I was about to ask, but none of it came out. I opened my mouth, it stayed open, and I merely managed to breathe into the phone as I thought about all the things I could or should say, including just shutting up and never asking.
I was in sixth grade when I learned about things like brown eyes and blue eyes, about dominant and recessive genes and what kind of parents make what kind of babies and then went home that night to look really hard at my mom and dad. I'd said nothing because Alina had green eyes just like me, so we were obviously family, and I've always had ostrich-tendencies; if I can wedge my head far enough down into the sand that I can't see whatever's staring at me, then it can't see me, either, and no matter how people try to dispute it, perception is reality. It's what you choose to believe that makes you the person you are. Eleven years ago, I chose to be a happy daughter in a happy family. I chose to fit, to belong, to feel safe and cherished right down to my deep, strong, proud southern roots. I chose to believe DNA theory was wrong. I chose to believe teachers didn't always know what they were talking about and scientists might never understand all there was to know about the complexities of human physiology. I'd never discussed it with anyone. I'd never had to. I knew what I thought and that was enough. I'd barely squeaked by with a D in my high-school science requirement and I'd never taken another biology course since.
"Dad, was I adopted?" I said.
There was a soft explosion of air on the other end of the line, as if someone had hit Jack Lane in the stomach with a baseball bat.
Say no, Daddy, say no, Daddy, say no.
The silence stretched.
I squeezed my eyes shut against the burn of tears. "Please, say something."
There was another long, terrible silence, punctuated by a bone-deep sigh. "Mac, I can't leave your mother right now. She can't be alone. She's too heavily medicated and unstable. After you left for Dublin, she… well, she just… fell apart. The best thing you can do right now for all of us is come home. Now. Tonight." He paused, then said carefully, "Baby, you are our daughter in every way."
"Really?" My voice was kind of squeaky in the back of my throat. "Like birth? Am I your daughter that way too, Daddy?" I opened my eyes but they wouldn't focus properly.
"Stop it, Mac! I don't know where this came from! What are you doing, bringing something like this up now? Come home!"
"It doesn't matter where it came from. It matters where it's going. Tell me Alina and I weren't adopted, Daddy," I insisted.
"Tell me that. Say it! Just say those words and we can end this conversation. That's all you need to say. Alina and I weren't adopted. Say it. Unless you can't."
There was another of those horrid, horrid silences. Then he said, "Mac, baby, we love you. Come home." His deep, usually strong baritone cracked on the last word. He cleared his throat and when he spoke again he was using his in-control tax-attorney voice that conveyed years of expertise coupled with the bone-deep assurance that you could trust him to know what was best. Calm, confident, powerful, backed by six feet two inches of self-assured, strong southern man, it used to work on me. "Look, I'm booking a flight for you the second we hang up, Mac. Go pack your bags right now and get yourself to the airport. I don't want you to do or think about anything. Don't even check out. I'll take care of any bills you have over the phone. Do you hear me? I'm going to call you back and tell you what flight you're on. Pack and go. Do you hear me?"
I stared out the window. It had begun to rain. There it was: the lie he refused to speak. If we hadn't been adopted, Dad would have told me that without hesitation. He would have laughed and said, "Of course you weren't adopted, you goon." And we would both think it was funny that I could be so stupid. But he wouldn't say it, because he couldn't. "God, Daddy, who am I?" It was my turn for my voice to crack.
"My daughter," he said fiercely into the phone. "That's who you are! Rainey and Jack Lane's baby girl!"
But I wasn't, really. Not by birth. And we both knew it. And I guess some part of me had sort of known it all along.
1. Fairies exist.
2. Vampires are real.
3.
A mobster and fifteen of his henchmen are dead because of me.
4. I'm adopted.
I stared down at the journal that would soon be full, ignoring the wet splash of tears that was making the ink run on the page.
Of the four things I'd listed, only one of them had the power to cut me off at the knees. I could wrap my brain around any weirdness, realign myself to any new reality, except for one.
I'm adopted.
I could deal with fairies and vampires and I could live with blood on my hands, so long as I could stand and proudly say, I'm MacKayla Lane, you know, from the Frye-Lanes in Ashford, Georgia? And I follow the same genetic recipe as everyone else in my family. We're yellow cake with chocolate frosting, all of us, from great-grandparent down to the tiniest tot. I fit with them. I belong somewhere.
You have no idea how important that is, how deeply reassuring, until you lose it. All my life, up until that moment, I'd had a warm, protective blanket wrapped around me, knitted of aunts and uncles, purled of first and second and third cousins, knot-tied with grandmas and grandpas and greats.
That blanket had just dropped from my shoulders. I felt cold, lost and alone.
O'Connor, the old woman had called me. She'd said I had their skin and eyes. She'd mentioned a name, an odd name: Patrona. Was I an O'Connor? Did I have relatives somewhere in Ireland? Why hadn't I been kept? Why had Alina and I been given up? Where had Mom and Dad gotten us? When? And how had all my talkative, chatty, gossipy aunts, uncles, and grandparents kept such a conspiracy silent? Not one of them had ever slipped. How young had we been when we were adopted? I must have barely been born, because I had no memories of any other life, nor had Alina ever mentioned a thing. Since she was two years older than me, it stood to reason she would have been the one with anachronistic recall. Or would her memories of another life and place simply have blurred into our new life and merged seamlessly over time?
I'm adopted. The thought had me whirling, rootless, in a tornado, and still that wasn't quite the worst of it.
The part that really bit, the part that had its teeth in me and wouldn't let go, was that the only person I knew for a fact I'd been related to was dead. My sister. Alina. My only blood relative in the world, and she was gone.
I was stricken by an awful thought: Had she known? Had she found out we were adopted and not told me? Was this one of the things she'd meant by, There are so many things I should have told you?
Had she been here in Dublin, like me right now, feeling this confused and disconnected?
"Oh God," I said, and my tears turned to great shuddering, hurtful sobs. I wept for me, for my sister, for things I couldn't even begin to put into words, and might never be able to explain. But it felt something like this: I used to walk on my feet. Now all I knew how to do was crawl. And I wasn't sure how long it was going to take for me to get up off my knees and regain my balance, but I suspected that when I did, I would never walk the same way again.
I don't know how long I sat there and cried, but eventually my head was pounding too hard for me to weep anymore.
I told you back at the beginning of this story that Alina's body had turned up miles away from The Clarin House, in a trash-filled alley on the opposite side of The River Liffey. That I knew exactly where because I'd seen the crime-scene photos, and that before I left Ireland I would end up in that alley myself, saying good-bye to her.
I dragged myself up off the couch, went to my borrowed bedroom, stuffed money and my passport in my jeans pocket so nothing would interfere with a swift extraction of the contents of my purse, slung it over my shoulder, yanked a ball cap down over my eyes, jammed on sunglasses, and went outside to flag down a cab.
It was time to go to that alley. But not to say good-bye—to say hello to a sister I'd never known and never would: the Alina that was my only true kin, the one who'd been tempered in Dublin's forge, who'd learned hard lessons and made hard choices. If, after all her months here, she'd stumbled across even half of what I had, I understood why she'd done everything she'd done.
I remember that Mom and Dad had tried to visit Alina on two occasions. Both times, she'd refused. The first time she'd said she was sick and terribly behind on classes. The second time she'd used a punishing round of exams as an excuse. She'd never once invited me to fly over, and the one time I'd talked about trying to save up the money, she'd instantly told me not to waste it, but to spend it on pretty clothes and new music and go out dancing for her—a thing we used to love to do together—while she studied, and before I knew it she'd be home.
I understood now what those words must have cost her.
Knowing what I knew was out there stalking and slithering along Dublin's streets, would I have permitted anyone I loved to come over here and see me?
Never. I'd have lied through my teeth to keep them away.
If I'd had a baby sister that was my only blood relative, safe at home, would I have told her about any of this and risked dragging her into it? No. I would have done exactly what Alina had done: protected her to my dying breath. Kept her happy and whole as long as I could.
I'd always looked up to my sister, but now I had a whole new appreciation for her. Gripped by it, I needed to be somewhere I knew she'd been. Some place imprinted by her, and her apartment didn't fit the bill. Aside from the scent of peaches and Beautiful perfume, I'd never gotten a very strong sense of her there, as if she'd not spent much time in it, except when talking to me on the phone or sleeping. I'd gotten no real feeling for her on campus, either, but I could think of one place I knew I'd feel her intensely.
I needed to go where she'd been run to ground, four hours after she'd called me. I needed to confront the final awful grief of standing in the same spot on the cobbled pavement where my sister had drawn her last breath and closed her eyes forever.
Morbid, maybe, but you lose a sister and find out you're adopted and see what you feel compelled to do. Don't accuse me of being morbid when I'm merely the product of a culture that buries the bones of the ones they love in pretty, manicured flower gardens so they can keep them nearby and go talk to them whenever they feel troubled or depressed. That's morbid. Not to mention bizarre. Dogs bury bones, too.
I see lines of demarcation everywhere I turn now. The River Liffey is one of them, dividing the city, not merely north and south, but socially and economically as well.
The south is the side I've been staying on, with the Temple Bar District, Trinity College, The National Museum, and Leinster House to name but a few of its many attractions, and is generally considered the affluent side: rich, snobby, and liberal.
The northside has O'Connell Street with its fine statues and monuments, the Moore Street Market, St. Mary's Pro-Cathedral, the Customs House overlooking the Liffey, and is generally held to be the home of the working-class: industrial, blue-collar, and poor.
As you'll find with most divisionary boundaries, it's not absolute. There are pockets of the opposite on each side of the river: wealth and fashion to the north, poverty and decay to the south; however, no one will argue that the overall feel of the southside is different than the northside and vice versa. It's hard to explain to someone who hasn't spent time on opposing banks of the river, heard the talk and watched the walk.
The cabbie that drove me to the northside didn't seem real happy about dropping me on Allen Street by myself, but I tipped him handsomely and he went away. I'd seen too many truly scary things lately for a rundown neighborhood to have much of an impact on me, at least not in the daytime, anyway.
The dead-end alley in which Alina's body had been found didn't have a name, was cobbled in the old way, with stone that time and weather had heaved and cracked, and stretched a good several hundred yards back from the road. Trash cans and Dumpsters were wedged between windowless brick walls of a decaying subsidized-income tenement building on the right and a boarded-up warehouse on the left. Old newspapers, cardboard boxes, beer bottles, and debris littered the alleyway. The ambience was similar to that of the a
bandoned neighborhood. I had no intention of remaining in the area long enough to find out if the streetlamps still worked.
Dad didn't know I'd seen the crime-scene photos he'd tucked beneath the blue-and-silver folder containing the financial plan he'd been working on for Ms. Myrna Taylor-Hollingsworth. In fact, I had no idea how he'd gotten them. I was under the impression the police didn't ordinarily release such things to grief-crazed parents, especially not shots so graphic and gruesome.
Identifying her body had been bad enough. I'd found those pictures the day before I'd left for Ireland, when I'd gone into his office to swipe a stash of pens.
Now, as I walked to the end of the alley, I was seeing the photos superimposed on the scene. She'd been lying just there, to my right, a dozen feet away from the twelve-foot brick wall that cut off the alley and had aborted her run. I didn't want to know if bits of her fingernails were broken off in those bricks from a frantic attempt to climb the sheer face and escape whatever had been pursuing her, so I looked away, down at the spot where she'd died. They'd found her slumped back against the brick wall. I'll spare you the details I wish I didn't know.
Driven by some awful darkness inside me, I dropped down onto the dirty cobblestones and slumped into the exact position in which my sister had been found. Unlike in the pictures, there was no blood splashing the stones and brick walls. Rain had washed away all signs of her struggle weeks ago. Here she'd taken her last breath. Here all of Alina Lane's hopes and dreams had died.
"God, I miss you so much, Alina!" I felt every bit as brittle as I sounded, and once more the tears came. I swore it would be the last time I cried. And it would be, for quite some time.
I don't know how long I sat there before I noticed the cosmetic pack Mom had given Alina for Christmas, half-buried beneath the trash. Twin to the one I'd had to abandon at Mallucé's, the tiny quilted gold bag had been badly weathered, bleached by the sun and soaked by rain. I pushed aside old newspapers, picked it up, and cradled it in my hands.
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