It’s funny—all night I’ve wanted nothing more than to dig into my mom’s file, and now that it’s time . . . I want to be ready, but I feel like . . . I feel exactly like handsome forensic pathologist Miles Faye in A Bitter Taste, the fourth book in Dad’s series. Miles is investigating the death of a grade school buddy, a guy he hasn’t seen in ages. Just before he opens the postmortem report, where he’ll find massive amounts of illegal drugs in the blood panel, he sees this clear picture of him and his friend lying around in the scruff of the overgrown ball field by their childhood homes. He sees the bare blue sky and the sun streaming pink through his closed eyelids, and he feels the warm dust under him thirty years later, and his own breathlessness from the race they’ve just run across the field. Idyllic, right? As Miles picks up the report, he knows that what he’s holding has the power to tarnish that snapshot, so he’ll never again call it to mind and remember being so young and warm without feeling the cold breath of time on them both.
Not that I think my mom’s file will tell me she’s a drug addict or anything. Besides, it’s seventeen years old, so the info won’t exactly be current. It’s just that I’ve been imagining her for so long, and this is the end of imagining and the start of knowing. It’s kind of terrifying.
But I stare into my own brown eyes in the bathroom mirror and grit out, “Don’t be an asshole. You’re doing this for Dad.”
I make myself march to the bedroom, where I sit cross-legged on Jessa’s floral bedspread and pull the manila folder out of my bag. Avoiding Jessa’s eyes as she eases onto the bed beside me, I touch the stone heart in my front pocket.
I open the folder.
Inside are maybe a dozen slightly yellowed papers, crisp with age. The first is a maternity preregistration form, stamped with the shepherd’s crook logo of Good Shepherd Hospital. It’s dizzying how much is here. I read through the patient information section greedily.
Patient’s name exactly as it appears on ID: Faye, Sidonie Gene
Date of birth: 1/22/1977
Pausing to do the math, I realize my mother is fourteen years younger than my father, who’ll be fifty-two this year. When I was born, she was only four years older than I am.
Expected date of delivery: 4/9/1998
Race: Caucasian
Marital status: Single
I stop, reread. That can’t be right. When her file showed up under “Faye,” I figured Mom had pulled a Dr. Van Tassel and kept her name. My parents were married. Dad told me so, and he told Lindy . . . except even as I think it, I wonder if Lindy’s ever seen the divorce papers. It’s possible he lied to both of us. I can feel myself start to sink, because if Dad lied about this, then everything I thought I knew becomes a little less certain, and the few facts I’ve accumulated in my life aren’t stone, but sand.
But I can’t start doubting my dad. He always told me the truth, even the few times when I wished he wouldn’t. So this must mean something. It’s what Miles Faye would call an “inconsistency in the story,” and inconsistencies are valuable. They’re the smoke that warns of fire. It tells me there has to be something here.
“Find anything?” Jessa asks.
I shake my head, keep reading.
Patient’s home address: 42 Cedar Lane, Sugarbrook, MA 01703
Patient’s current employer: Boston Museum of Fine Arts
Patient’s occupation: Assistant to the curator of prints and drawings
To think, all the school trips we’ve taken to the MFA over the years. What if Sidonie Faye was somewhere in those halls, in one of the offices, grabbing an overpriced lunch in the cafeteria? Finding her can’t be as easy as a trip to the museum, and it has been seventeen years. She can’t still be there. But it might be worth a visit.
I skip past her social security number—I know it would be useful if I was actually a detective, but alas—down a few unhelpful lines to Emergency contact. I expect it will be my dad, but it isn’t.
Emergency contact: Lillian Ward
Home number: 978-555-8761
Relationship: Cousin
That’s something I can use. Everything else on the form is under Insurance information and some category called a Guarantor. That last one is my dad, and none of it is new info.
Next in the folder are a lot of notes from her admittance to Good Shepherd. How many weeks pregnant, date of last menstruation, para and gravida births (zero and zero, whatever that means), vital signs, dilation and effacing (ugh). Contractions, CBC results. I skip through most of it, until—
Is the patient on any prescribed medication? Nortriptyline (Pamelor)
“Hey, can I look something up on your—”
“What do you need?” Jessa asks, browser up on her phone, thumbs at the ready.
“Um. Can you find out what Pamelor’s for? It’s a—”
“A second-generation tri . . . tri-cyc-lic? Antidepressant used in the treatment of major depression, and for childhood nocturnal ensu . . . ensur-esis? Whatever, bed-wetting.”
I grind my bottom lip between my teeth. “I’m guessing she wasn’t a bed wetter.” Flipping ahead through the pages, most everything else is about my birth. Something called an Apgar score. A copy of my tiny, inky footprints. PKU results. When and how I breastfed, baby’s first pee and poo. Yikes, it’s thorough. There’s a note at the very bottom of the last page that catches my eye:
Patient is bonding with infant.
I put the papers away and close the folder gently, then pull my legs up and hug my knees, breathing in and out.