The Silent Sister(86)

A feeling of horror began to wash over me. I remembered meeting Christine for the first time. The way she’d gripped my hands. The way she’d proclaimed, You’re so pretty, isn’t she, Mom?

“Please, no,” I said out loud. I thought of Christine’s wavy dark hair, so much like my own.

I stared at my birth certificate awhile longer, looking at my parents’ names. I desperately wanted them to be my biological parents! I had to know. I had to. I reached for my phone.





45.



Jeannie was in the middle of writing up an offer for a house buyer when I called her, but she must have caught the quaking of my voice because she said she’d be over the second she was finished. I spent the next hour shredding my father’s dated utility bills and medical records. It was blessedly mindless work and slow going, and I’d only made it through one of the trash bags by the time Jeannie pulled into the driveway.

I opened the door and walked barefoot onto the porch, watching her as she got out of her car and hurried up the sidewalk, her white blouse neon bright in the darkness.

“What’s going on?” she asked, shading her eyes against the porch light with her hand. “You sounded upset on the phone.”

Wordlessly, I sat down on the top step and she climbed up to sit next to me. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

“I found a copy of my birth certificate.” I looked at her squarely. “Tell me the truth, Jeannie. Is Christine my mother? Are you my grandmother?”

Her eyes flew open. “No!” she said. “Of course not! Why on earth would you think that?”

“Don’t lie to me!” I snapped. “I can’t handle any more … lies and deception.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I was born in Asheville,” I said. “I’d forgotten that, but I just found a copy of my birth certificate. Verniece said my parents found a baby to adopt in North Carolina. How do you explain my being born in Asheville when my family lived in Virginia?”

Jeannie looked into my dark front yard, not speaking right away. “Christine left home when she was seventeen,” she said finally. “She was living in Amsterdam when you were born, most likely so stoned she didn’t know her own name. She’s only been clean a few years, now. That’s one reason why this estate sale work is so important to her. She wants to make a career out of it. She needs that.”

“Oh,” I said quietly, aware that Jeannie had revealed something painful to me. I was too wrapped up in my own thoughts, though, to pursue it. “Then why does it say Asheville on my birth certificate?” I asked. For a fleeting moment, I thought Jeannie herself might be my birth mother.

She looked toward the street again and let out a heavy, defeated sigh. “Lisa never went away to study the violin,” she said. “She was living with me in Asheville, waiting to have her baby.” She turned toward me, her face ghostly white in the porch light. “To have you.”

It took a moment for her words to sink in. I felt queasy, the porch spinning around me, and I gripped the edge of the step to make the world hold still. “Oh, no,” I whispered. I stood up, ignoring the dizziness as I walked blindly down the steps and onto the dark lawn. The grass felt strange and cool beneath my bare feet. I took a few steps toward the street, then turned to look at the house I’d grown up in. The living room windows glowed with a golden light, and the porch light illuminated the ornate trim and a patch of peeling yellow paint. All of it blurred in front of me. I’d led a counterfeit life inside those four walls.

Jeannie’s gaze was on me and she perched half on, half off the top step as though she might need to run to my side any moment to hold me up. She was saying something, but she may as well have been in the next town. No words could make it through the buzzing in my head.

I sank onto the lawn, only vaguely aware of Jeannie rushing down the steps toward me. How could my parents have kept this from me my entire life? I’d been lied to. Whispered about. They were never going to tell me the truth.

But then I thought of Lisa, who had never had the chance to live in this house. What fear and pain she must have endured. What shame and embarrassment. And her career … No wonder her playing had suffered. There was no mystery teacher. Only a mystery child. Me.

Jeannie had reached my side. I heard her hard breathing as she sat down next to me in her crisp Realtor suit and rested a hand on my shoulder. “Are you all right?”

I looked wordlessly at the sky. The stars and moon were nothing more than a fog of light and dark.

“No one ever wanted you to know,” she said softly.

I shut my eyes, holding still until I could find my voice. “What happened?” I asked finally, looking at her. “They sent her away when she was pregnant and told everyone she was studying with another teacher?”

“That’s exactly it,” she said. “Deb—your mother—called me in tears and asked if Lisa could live with me during her pregnancy. With her being so famous in music circles, Deb and Frank were worried about her getting a lot of negative attention and ruining her career. She was already four months along when she told your parents. At first she planned to put her baby up for adoption, but as she got closer to her due date, she realized she couldn’t do it. So your parents decided to adopt the baby—adopt you—when you were born.” She raised her hand to my cheek to brush away a strand of hair. Her touch felt tender. “Lisa stayed with me a couple of months after you were born so it wouldn’t seem so obvious to the rest of the world that the baby was hers. And they told Steven and everyone that she’d decided to study with someone else for that period of time.”