“Oh.” Natalie felt a little disappointed. We’re half sisters, then, she thought. But sisters, nonetheless. “Do you know anything about mine?”
“Only that your mother didn’t know his name,” Gina said, not unkindly, but the words still stung. Natalie’s father was some random stranger, a person she’d never know anything about. She wasn’t planned, she wasn’t wanted. No wonder her birth mother gave her up. Natalie swallowed hard and tried to focus.
“Do you have any suggestions of where I should look for my sister?” she asked, after she’d had a moment to compose her thoughts.
“Online adoption registries are your best bet. Social media, too. Facebook and the like. You could petition the court to open the files to your case, but that could take years and would be very expensive.”
Natalie thought back to when she was eighteen, when she let her father talk her out of putting her name on an adoption registry list in case her birth mother came looking for her. If she had defied him and done it anyway, maybe she could have found her sister almost twenty years ago. They could have found their birth mother together after that. The frustration she’d felt toward her mother earlier that morning melted into something harder, something with teeth, gnawing at Natalie’s insides. She knew her mother had been traumatized by the ectopic pregnancy and subsequent hysterectomy, but keeping a secret as significant as Natalie having a sister seemed extreme. Natalie wondered if there was more behind her parents’ decision than they’d said.
“Did you know our birth mother very well?” Natalie asked, unable to keep the tremor from her voice. Integrating this new information about her past into the person she’d always believed herself to be felt as though she were trying to knit a ball of yarn into an already perfectly stitched blanket. There were suddenly gaping holes in the fabric of who she was. The world she was living in now was not the one she had woken up to that morning.
Gina stared at her a moment, then nodded.
“Is there anything you can tell me about her? Anything at all?” A few more tears escaped Natalie’s eyes.
“She loved you,” Gina said, softly. “Both of you.”
“Then why didn’t she keep us?” Natalie asked, unable to keep the aching desperation from her words.
“I’m sorry,” Gina said, and Natalie knew there was nothing more the older woman could tell her. The only thing left to do was find Brooke, and see if her sister could fill in the blanks.
Brooke
“No! I won’t go!” Brooke insisted as Gina took her hand and attempted to pull her from the car. It was 1984 and Brooke was eight years old. This was the fourth foster home Gina had taken her to in as many years.
“Come on now,” Gina said, wrapping her arm around Brooke’s shoulders. “The Martins are expecting you. They already have a daughter about your age. Her name is Lily. I promise, you’re going to like it here.”
“No!” Brooke yelled, literally digging her heels into the grassy parking strip. “Take me back! I need to be where my mom can find me!”
“Sweetie, we’ve talked about this . . .”
“She’s coming to get me!” Brooke said, trying to keep from crying. Since she’d been brought to live at Hillcrest, her head had been filled with all sorts of stories about what kept her mother away—a long illness. A car accident that had put her in a coma. Maybe she had amnesia. Maybe she didn’t remember who she was. Brooke felt as though she were trapped inside a bubble, holding her breath, waiting for her mother to return. Each time she was called to the front office, Brooke would rush down the hall, positive that this time, her mother would be there. When she wasn’t, it was as though Brooke had lost her all over again.
Now, undeterred by Brooke’s resistance, Gina managed to get her and the black plastic bag filled with the few changes of clothes she owned inside the Martins’ house, where she introduced Brooke to a blond woman with bangs that stood straight like a wall from her forehead. The rest of her hair was crimped, and she wore a pair of acid-wash jeans and a light pink polo shirt with the collar turned up around her neck. Her lipstick matched her shirt.
“This is Jessica,” Gina told her.