Somewhere Out There(94)
They can have each other, she thought as she climbed into her car and slammed the door. Her mother and her sister would probably get along just fine. Natalie didn’t have the memories that Brooke carried; she didn’t feel like a piece of the woman’s discarded trash. The two of them would probably have some irritating, Hallmark-moment family reunion, and Brooke would be where she always ended up. Completely on her own.
Natalie
Dazed, Natalie turned around and reentered the house, gripping the box her sister had been hiding from her for weeks. Her regret that Brooke had seen the background check Kyle had run was overwhelmed by her shock that her sister had known where their birth mother was all this time and never said a word. She understood that Brooke was still in pain about their mother’s decision to give them up, but had she really not trusted Natalie to the point of keeping her whereabouts from her? Natalie had asked her, point-blank, if Brooke knew where their mother was, and her sister had said no. What else had Brooke said to her that was a lie? Were the more tender moments they’d shared simply an act on her older sister’s part? Natalie had no way to know. All she knew was that suddenly, the relationship she’d hoped to have with Brooke seemed to be over before it had truly had a chance to begin.
Back in the kitchen, Natalie made a cup of coffee and then sat down at the table with the box in front of her. She wondered if she should wait to go through its contents until later, so Kyle would be there for moral support, but decided that she’d waited long enough.
She pulled the thick stack of papers from the box, her eyes immediately landing on several pages of Child Protective Services reports, all of which detailed instances of Jennifer Walker’s errant behavior. Natalie read how her birth mother had left her two-year-old daughter, Brooke, alone in a car, then failed to show up for the parenting skills classes that were required of her. She read the description of the night their mother was arrested at a grocery store for petty theft and for child endangerment and neglect. She read through Gina Ortiz’s reports of her meetings with Jennifer, whom she characterized as an emotionally unstable young woman with no family or friend support system to help her in raising her two young girls. She discovered that her biological grandmother wanted nothing to do with Jennifer or her two girls. She saw her birth mother’s shaky, black signature on the papers that signed away her rights as their mother. She pored over the accounts of her birth mother’s first year in prison, written by someone named Myer; she began to cry when, to her horror, she found the police reports describing how, only a week after she’d been released from her initial sentence, her birth mother had snatched a little girl from a playground and run away with her into the woods. She read the judge’s decision to send Jennifer Walker back to prison, this time for a decade, and how, when she was there, she began an antirecidivism work-release program that allowed her to train service dogs and eventually earn her GED and a degree as a veterinary technician. There was a prison medical form, detailing how her birth mother had suffered through a severe beating by another inmate, as well as the parole board hearing notes that had allowed her to be released three years early, after the glowing testimony of her employer, Randy Stewart, and several other employees with whom she worked.
After going through all of the official paperwork, Natalie found a page of handwritten notes made on yellow legal paper—jotted down by Brooke, Natalie assumed—listing three addresses in Mt. Vernon, one that appeared to be the clinic where her birth mother worked. The notes also included the name of a college from which Jennifer Richmond had earned her doctorate in veterinary medicine, as well as the location of her husband Evan’s automotive repair business.
The last scrap in the file was a newspaper article dated almost twelve years ago that described how Dr. Richmond was responsible for enlarging the same work-release program in which she’d participated, bringing on three other veterinarian clinics so that several female inmates could participate at a time. “I was a broken person when I landed back in prison,” her birth mom was quoted as saying. “The opportunity I was given to get out of myself and learn how to care for something other than what I wanted was the most important gift of my life. If it’s possible for me pass that gift on to other women who are suffering the same way I did, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
Natalie finished reading the article and leaned back against her chair, closing her eyes. She wondered how Brooke could have read all of this and not wanted to talk with their mother about everything she’d been through. What Natalie saw in learning about their birth mom was a woman who’d fought her way through some extremely difficult, painful experiences and found a way to channel all of that into contributing something good to the world. She imagined it was possible that their birth mom’s guilt over giving up her daughters may have prevented her from looking for them—that she didn’t want to disrupt their lives. There was a copy of her marriage certificate in the file, but no birth certificates, so Natalie assumed that what Brooke had said was correct—Jennifer Richmond had had no other children. She had turned fifty-five years old last June.
“Mom?” Hailey’s voice snapped Natalie out of her daze. Her daughter had entered the kitchen unnoticed.
“What is it, honey?” Natalie said. She sniffed and used a paper napkin to wipe the dampness from her cheeks.
Hailey gave her a puckered, doubtful look. “How come you’re crying?”