There was another of those horrid, horrid silences. Then he said, "Mac, baby, we love you. Come home." His deep, usually strong baritone cracked on the last word. He cleared his throat and when he spoke again he was using his in-control tax-attorney voice that conveyed years of expertise coupled with the bone-deep assurance that you could trust him to know what was best. Calm, confident, powerful, backed by six feet two inches of self-assured, strong southern man, it used to work on me. "Look, I'm booking a flight for you the second we hang up, Mac. Go pack your bags right now and get yourself to the airport. I don't want you to do or think about anything. Don't even check out. I'll take care of any bills you have over the phone. Do you hear me? I'm going to call you back and tell you what flight you're on. Pack and go. Do you hear me?"
I stared out the window. It had begun to rain. There it was: the lie he refused to speak. If we hadn't been adopted, Dad would have told me that without hesitation. He would have laughed and said, "Of course you weren't adopted, you goon." And we would both think it was funny that I could be so stupid. But he wouldn't say it, because he couldn't. "God, Daddy, who am I?" It was my turn for my voice to crack.
"My daughter," he said fiercely into the phone. "That's who you are! Rainey and Jack Lane
's baby girl!"
But I wasn't, really. Not by birth. And we both knew it. And I guess some part of me had sort of known it all along.
1. Fairies exist.
2. Vampires are real.
3. A mobster and fifteen of his henchmen are dead because of me.
4. I'm adopted.
I stared down at the journal that would soon be full, ignoring the wet splash of tears that was making the ink run on the page.
Of the four things I'd listed, only one of them had the power to cut me off at the knees. I could wrap my brain around any weirdness, realign myself to any new reality, except for one.
I'm adopted.
I could deal with fairies and vampires and I could live with blood on my hands, so long as I could stand and proudly say, I'm MacKayla Lane
, you know, from the Frye-Lanes in Ashford, Georgia? And I follow the same genetic recipe as everyone else in my family. We're yellow cake with chocolate frosting, all of us, from great-grandparent down to the tiniest tot. I fit with them. I belong somewhere.
You have no idea how important that is, how deeply reassuring, until you lose it. All my life, up until that moment, I'd had a warm, protective blanket wrapped around me, knitted of aunts and uncles, purled of first and second and third cousins, knot-tied with grandmas and grandpas and greats.
That blanket had just dropped from my shoulders. I felt cold, lost and alone.
O'Connor, the old woman had called me. She'd said I had their skin and eyes. She'd mentioned a name, an odd name: Patrona. Was I an O'Connor? Did I have relatives somewhere in Ireland? Why hadn't I been kept? Why had Alina and I been given up? Where had Mom and Dad gotten us? When? And how had all my talkative, chatty, gossipy aunts, uncles, and grandparents kept such a conspiracy silent? Not one of them had ever slipped. How young had we been when we were adopted? I must have barely been born, because I had no memories of any other life, nor had Alina ever mentioned a thing. Since she was two years older than me, it stood to reason she would have been the one with anachronistic recall. Or would her memories of another life and place simply have blurred into our new life and merged seamlessly over time?
I'm adopted. The thought had me whirling, rootless, in a tornado, and still that wasn't quite the worst of it.
The part that really bit, the part that had its teeth in me and wouldn't let go, was that the only person I knew for a fact I'd been related to was dead. My sister. Alina. My only blood relative in the world, and she was gone.
I was stricken by an awful thought: Had she known? Had she found out we were adopted and not told me? Was this one of the things she'd meant by, There are so many things I should have told you ?
Had she been here in Dublin, like me right now, feeling this confused and disconnected?
"Oh God," I said, and my tears turned to great shuddering, hurtful sobs. I wept for me, for my sister, for things I couldn't even begin to put into words, and might never be able to explain. But it felt something like this: I used to walk on my feet. Now all I knew how to do was crawl. And I wasn't sure how long it was going to take for me to get up off my knees and regain my balance, but I suspected that when I did, I would never walk the same way again.
I don't know how long I sat there and cried, but eventually my head was pounding too hard for me to weep anymore.
I told you back at the beginning of this story that Alina's body had turned up miles away from The Clarin House, in a trash-filled alley on the opposite side of The River Liffey. That I knew exactly where because I'd seen the crime-scene photos, and that before I left Ireland I would end up in that alley myself, saying good-bye to her.
I dragged myself up off the couch, went to my borrowed bedroom, stuffed money and my passport in my jeans pocket so nothing would interfere with a swift extraction of the contents of my purse, slung it over my shoulder, yanked a ball cap down over my eyes, jammed on sunglasses, and went outside to flag down a cab.
It was time to go to that alley. But not to say good-bye—to say hello to a sister I'd never known and never would: the Alina that was my only true kin, the one who'd been tempered in Dublin's forge, who'd learned hard lessons and made hard choices. If, after all her months here, she'd stumbled across even half of what I had, I understood why she'd done everything she'd done.
I remember that Mom and Dad had tried to visit Alina on two occasions. Both times, she'd refused. The first time she'd said she was sick and terribly behind on classes. The second time she'd used a punishing round of exams as an excuse. She'd never once invited me to fly over, and the one time I'd talked about trying to save up the money, she'd instantly told me not to waste it, but to spend it on pretty clothes and new music and go out dancing for her—a thing we used to love to do together—while she studied, and before I knew it she'd be home.
I understood now what those words must have cost her.
Knowing what I knew was out there stalking and slithering along Dublin's streets, would I have permitted anyone I loved to come over here and see me?
Never. I'd have lied through my teeth to keep them away.
If I'd had a baby sister that was my only blood relative, safe at home, would I have told her about any of this and risked dragging her into it? No. I would have done exactly what Alina had done: protected her to my dying breath. Kept her happy and whole as long as I could.
I'd always looked up to my sister, but now I had a whole new appreciation for her. Gripped by it, I needed to be somewhere I knew she'd been. Some place imprinted by her, and her apartment didn't fit the bill. Aside from the scent of peaches and Beautiful perfume, I'd never gotten a very strong sense of her there, as if she'd not spent much time in it, except when talking to me on the phone or sleeping. I'd gotten no real feeling for her on campus, either, but I could think of one place I knew I'd feel her intensely.
I needed to go where she'd been run to ground, four hours after she'd called me. I needed to confront the final awful grief of standing in the same spot on the cobbled pavement where my sister had drawn her last breath and closed her eyes forever.
Morbid, maybe, but you lose a sister and find out you're adopted and see what you feel compelled to do. Don't accuse me of being morbid when I'm merely the product of a culture that buries the bones of the ones they love in pretty, manicured flower gardens so they can keep them nearby and go talk to them whenever they feel troubled or depressed. That's morbid. Not to mention bizarre. Dogs bury bones, too.