I'll Be You(29)

My mother suddenly looked less at ease. “Oh. Right. I suppose so. I don’t really know that much about the adoption industry.”

It was beginning to dawn on me that my mother and Elli hadn’t been as close as I thought, that my mother had not been my sister’s confidante after all. My mother’s lack of curiosity was infuriating. “You suppose? Did you not talk at all about where Charlotte came from?”

“We just never got into the logistics.” The wine in my mother’s glass had vanished at an alarming rate. She poured herself another. “And honestly we didn’t see Elli a lot this spring. Once Chuck left she spent a lot of time by herself. We babysat for her one or two evenings a week so that she could have time to herself. But we didn’t chat a lot. She was always going to her meetings. So, no. I did not get into the nitty-gritty with her.” She gave me a funny look. “I’m not sure why this is important?”

“I’m just wondering—if Charlotte came from foster care, is there some agency that’s supposed to be checking in on her? Is someone going to be worried if they can’t get in touch with Elli? Is it possible Elli was just fostering her, and she isn’t formally adopted yet?”

My mother stared into the wine in her glass. “I don’t know.”

“Nana.” We both turned to see Charlotte standing in the doorway of the house, one thumb in her mouth, the other hand clutching a filthy stuffed rabbit to her chest. Dark curls tumbled around her head, stuck in the sleep-sweat on her temples.

My mother stood. “Now how on earth did you get out of that crib by yourself?” she tutted, as she knelt down and swept Charlotte into her arms. She buried her face in the little girl’s neck.

“Mom,” I said gently. “I’m going to go to Elli’s house and look around a little. Just to be sure.”

“If you think that’s necessary.” She lifted Charlotte up with a grunt, stumbling a little under the girl’s weight. Charlotte looked at me, a little alarmed, and reached her arms out for me to take her. I could see how much this hurt my mother, so I took a small step back and shook my head at Charlotte, even though she couldn’t possibly understand the peculiar sensitivities of adults. We spend our lives saying no to our mothers, rejecting their love when it’s inconvenient, but that doesn’t mean the sting ever gets less sharp.



* * *



—

After dinner, I drove back to my sister’s house to see if I could find Charlotte’s adoption paperwork, but also, secretly, to get another look at my sister’s GenFem binder. I’d left the binder exactly where I’d found it by the side of my sister’s bed, imagining Elli coming home and missing it and blaming me and the whole thing driving a deeper wedge between us. Now I was willing to take that chance, and I wanted to examine the binder more closely. Those pages, with all their inscrutable psychobabble, were presumably a map that could explain what kind of lunacy, exactly, GenFem was feeding my sister.

It wasn’t until I pulled into the empty driveway to park that I noticed the For Sale sign hanging off the front gate. It hadn’t been there before. I wondered why my mother hadn’t told me that Elli was putting her house up for sale.

Maybe she didn’t know.

It crossed my mind for the first time to wonder who was taking care of Elli’s floral shop while she was gone. Was my sister getting texts from furious brides missing their bouquets while bins of flowers rotted in her warehouse? Or had she sold her business, too? I thought of those past-due invoices sitting in a pile in the kitchen, which my sister had left unsent, as if she’d just given up entirely.

I had the uncomfortable feeling that my sister was purging her life in Santa Barbara altogether.



* * *



—

A house too long unoccupied starts to feel like a tomb, a space taken out of time, lifeless. It had been only a few days since Charlotte and I were inside Elli’s house, but now the feeling of the still air inside my sister’s living room gave me goosebumps. I felt eyes on me, as if there were ghosts in the woodwork, watching.

I didn’t linger downstairs but headed straight up to my sister’s bedroom. The curtains were still closed, the bed still unmade, the robe still abandoned on the floor, but the binder that I’d left by the side of her bed was gone.

I stared at the empty surface of the side table: Was it possible that I’d put the binder somewhere else? But I remembered setting it carefully where I’d found it, squaring it neatly with the edges of the table, the way my sister would. Someone else had been in the house and taken it.

Was there something in it that I wasn’t supposed to see?

My sister kept her files in the desk in the upstairs office, a room that had always been Chuck’s domain. I headed down the hall and peered inside. The office had apparently been untouched since Chuck left. The bookshelves were still carefully dressed with his college sports trophies and books by James Patterson and paperweights from his business trips to China and Germany. The desk itself was a big wooden boat that reeked of male vanity, far too outsized for a home office. A half dozen framed photos lined one edge of the desk.

I picked one of these up—their wedding photo—and then another, surprised to see my own face alongside Elli’s. It was a photo shoot from our teenage years, not long after we got our Nickelodeon show. Two blond heads pressed against each other, our hair intermingling, our smiles identical; although I could tell from the faint curve of a lip, a slight baring of another tooth, that the one on the right was me. I put it back and examined the rest—they were all of Elli and Chuck. There were no photos of Charlotte at all.