When the Lights Go Out(46)

I assert, “I mean, it’s just a coincidence, right? A mistake?”

His face is impassive. He doesn’t say an emphatic yes as I’d hoped he would; he doesn’t put my mind at ease. This time, there are too many holes that don’t line up.

“I don’t know,” he admits, saying, “It’s just that it’s strange, Jessie. I mean, yesterday it was a coincidence. Yesterday it was a mistake. Yesterday someone screwed up. But now it’s like it isn’t so much an accident as it is someone intentionally trying to keep you off the radar. You have no birth certificate, you can’t find your social security card and the social security number you think is yours matches up with that of a dead girl. One who might just have the same name as you.”

The expression on his face says it all. Something sordid is going on here. Something bad.

“It’s just hard to believe that she’s not you,” he says while motioning to the photograph in the article, but when I look at the child’s face, I see nothing but a stranger looking back at me. I’ve never seen this girl before.

“But it’s not me,” I argue, voice trembling. “She doesn’t look a thing like me. Look at the shape of her eyes, her nose. It’s all different,” I allege, rising to my feet. “It’s all wrong.”

“I didn’t mean that,” he says, his voice gentle. “That’s not what I meant, Jessie. I just mean,” he says. “I just mean that I think it’s possible there’s something going on here, some sort of identity theft.”

“What do you mean, identity theft?” I ask, except I know what he means. What he’s suggesting is not that my identity has been stolen, but that I’ve stolen the identity of someone else—unpremeditated on my part, but still identity theft.

“Jessie,” he starts, but I shake my head and he stops.

At first there’s nothing but silence. I drop back down into my chair. I think it through. “You think my mother changed my name, gave me a phony identity and passed me off as a dead girl?” I ask, the words themselves unthinkable. Not something that could possibly be real. For a second I feel like I might vomit. The Coke gathers in my stomach, burning the lining of it. There’s hardly any food inside me, which, when coupled with everything else, doesn’t sit well. The pain starts somewhere around my navel and creeps up my chest. An agonizing lump that plunks itself behind the breastbone.

“But no,” I say decisively, rising to my feet again and beginning to pace. Why would Mom do that? Why in the world would Mom steal the identity of a girl who had died and give it to me? “Why?” I ask out loud, though the answer slowly dawns on me, that if Mom went around passing me off as a dead girl, then no one would know she had stolen another child’s identity. Because that child was dead.

I watch as Liam grabs for a laptop on the coffee table and types quick, harried words into it. He moves from his chair and comes to me and together we stare at the words on the screen. There’s a whole word for it, he tells me. “Ghosting. Thieves open bank accounts and credit cards using a dead person’s social security number,” he says. “They pore over obituaries to see who’s died, and then rack up thousands of dollars of debt in some stiff’s name.”

“But why?” I ask dumbly, though I’m not that dumb. I just can’t wrap my head around it. People do this kind of thing for financial gain, but Mom and I were never rich. We weren’t living a life of riches. We lived paycheck to paycheck.

Besides, Mom would never do anything to harm someone; she would never steal.

There has to be more to it than that.

If—and that’s a big if—she took the identity of a dead child and gave it to me, then it was for some other reason than financial gain. But what? I can’t even begin to guess.

I swallow the last of my Coke. It’s like rubbing salt in an open wound. The pain in my chest gets worse so that I cough and, as I do, all I can think of is corroded pipes, the lining of my esophagus plugged up and rusty.

I let an idea dwell for a short time, and then quickly expunge it from my mind.

Find yourself, Mom told me. One of two wishes she had for me before she died.

Maybe she didn’t mean for me to apply to college. Maybe it was far less esoteric than that. Maybe it was quite literal.

Find yourself, she said, because Jessie Sloane isn’t you.





eden

May 28, 1997 Egg Harbor

As spring ripens into summer, tourists reappear. The town comes to life with a certain vivacity that was missing during the dismal days of winter. Trees burgeon, flowers bloom.

Miranda and her three boys appear like magic at my front door each day that I’m not working—and often, I’d venture to guess, when I am—toting blueberry loaves and apple pies.

As the boys play in the tree swing (that by now was meant to hold my own child, the two of us nestled snugly together, he or she on the seat of my lap, weightless and grinning as we lift off from the ground and take flight), Miranda and I sip lemonade. As always she sells short the joys of marriage and motherhood, while little Carter crawls on the lawn before us on all fours, eating dirt. She complains about everything from what a jerk her husband, Joe, can be—coming home late from work, missing dinner, not helping with the boys’ bedtime routine—to the monotony of her days, to the amount of food three growing boys consume. She can never keep the cabinets fully stocked, she tells me, because the minute she buys it they eat it all, which leads into an onslaught on the difficulties of grocery shopping with three boys, and she describes it for me: the poking and the prodding of each other, the name-calling—birdbrain, imbecile, idiot—the running off headlong down the market’s aisles, bumping into strangers, begging and crying for things that Miranda has already said no to, trying to sneak it past her and into the basket, screaming and calling her names when she snatches it out of their dirty hands and returns it to the store shelf.