Somewhere Out There(45)
“How about you work on your family tree while I work on my dessert order?” Natalie suggested as she opened up the refrigerator, pulled out six pounds of butter, two dozen eggs, and a bag of lemons, and set them on the counter. She’d get the lemon curd going first, and then make the truffle filling for the chocolate lava cakes.
“I already finished it at Ruby’s,” Hailey said.
“Wow,” Natalie said. “Can I see it?”
“Okay!” Hailey pushed her chair back and raced to the foyer, where she’d hung up her backpack along with her coat.
Henry wandered into the kitchen then and attached himself to one of Natalie’s legs, sitting on her foot. His arms held tight around her knee while she unwrapped cubes of butter and plopped them into a pan on the stove.
“I’m back!” Hailey announced when she returned, holding a large piece of white construction paper than had been folded in half, which she opened and delivered to Natalie. “It’s kinda bad,” she said. “The leaves are all crooked.”
“Very bad, that picture!” Henry said, letting go of his mother’s leg.
“Very stupid, my brother!” Hailey shot back.
“Hey. No name-calling,” Natalie said, immediately wondering if she and Brooke would have quarreled like this, if they had been raised together. Would they have been close? Would they have stayed up all night giggling about the boys they liked or gossiping about their friends? Would they have fought over clothes and makeup and whose turn it was to clean the bathroom? Would Brooke have fed her ice cream when Natalie cried over her first broken heart? There was no way she’d ever know the answers to these questions, and the thought of that, being victim of that kind of loss, made Natalie’s heart ache.
Still holding the paper Hailey had delivered, Natalie smoothed it onto the counter. Her daughter had drawn a picture of herself at the base of the tree, under the ground. Her curls were drawn in brown springs shooting out from her head, directly linked to the tree’s squiggly roots, which Natalie thought was a creative touch. There was a branch and leaves right above her for Natalie and Kyle, as well as for Kyle’s older brother, Sean, who lived in Los Angeles with his wife, Isabelle, and their two boys, Carter and Cody. Hailey had given both of her cousins their own leaves, too. Her parents’ branch was above them all, along with a branch and two leaves for Kyle’s parents, who lived in South Carolina and rarely came to visit.
“You did a beautiful job, honey,” Natalie said, and for what felt like the countless time that day, her eyes filled with tears.
“Are you crying?” Hailey asked, incredulous. “It’s so good it made you cry?”
Natalie laughed. “Yes,” she told her daughter, even though that wasn’t the reason for her tears. However much she might like to, she couldn’t tell Hailey that the project wasn’t complete. In order to be an accurate picture, a true account of their family history, the drawing needed another branch and two more leaves.
? ? ?
Natalie did her best to keep busy the next couple of days, trying not to think too much about Brooke or check her email too often to see if the adoption registry had found a match. Instead, she focused on work, fulfilling her weekly orders for the three local espresso stands who had hired her to provide them the baked goods they offered their customers. Since it was fall, she made a selection of seasonally themed muffins: cranberry-orange cornmeal, pumpkin streusel, and eggnog spiced with a hint of fresh ground nutmeg, as well as tender almond croissants and a variety of bite-size, melt-in-your-mouth scones. She met with three different contractors who gave her bids on the remodel of the garage and hired her first choice, excited that the work would soon begin.
But after a week of trying to be patient, Natalie decided she couldn’t take the waiting any longer—she needed to do something more, take some kind of action to try to find her sister. It struck her that she could visit Hillcrest, the state home where she and Brooke had stayed after their mother gave them up—where Brooke had ultimately spent most of her childhood—and see if they had anything in their records that might lead Natalie to where her sister was today. It was a long shot, but Natalie was anxious enough to do it anyway.
“Do you want me to go with you?” Kyle asked when she told him her plan. They were in the kitchen after the kids were asleep.
“I don’t think so,” Natalie said as she wiped down the counter. “But thanks for offering.” She appreciated her husband’s support, but she also felt like this was something she wanted to do alone.
The next morning, after she had dropped off both kids at school, Natalie used the map function on her iPhone to find the address for Hillcrest, then followed the GPS instructions that led her to the facility in a residential neighborhood on the outskirts of Georgetown. Her heart thumped hard behind her rib cage as she parked in the lot next to the three-story, gray-brick building and climbed out of her car, clutching her purse in a tight grip. It was a little strange, knowing that she had stayed inside these walls for a month when she was a baby; the vision she’d had of her adoption process didn’t include a place that looked as stark as this. She’d imagined something along the lines of a daycare center, a cheerful yellow building with lots of flowers in its yard, rooms filled with chubby babies waiting for their new parents to bring them home. But visiting Hillcrest wasn’t about her, it was about finding out more about Brooke.