“You can keep that. I copied it.” She looks over at the chair, like she can’t decide if she should sit or if the conversation is over, and she ends up half-hovering over me, stooped and nervous, like a Bryant Park pigeon.
“If Evelyn had known, she would have taken us both,” I say confidently. “Why didn’t she know?” Evelyn was the most maternal person I’d ever met. Her need to nurture was a constant presence in my childhood, every twisted ankle tended to as though she were a wartime nurse. Every cut and scrape thoroughly scoured with alcohol. Despite being woefully unprepared and hopelessly scattered, she’d make up for her lack of preparedness in fret time alone. Her concern was never limited to me. Any lone wolf, lost child, homeless puppy. She was a natural adopter of all misplaced things.
When I was sixteen, I broke my wrist, just a hairline fracture. I’d been helping her clean the faculty office buildings at Berkeley after school, one of her many patchwork jobs. We’d take the train down from Richmond to the UC campus, moving in and out of the administration building, quiet as mice. I’d stood on a chair, trying to dust a light fixture hanging from a conference room ceiling. When I fell, she screamed louder than I did.
In the emergency room, I alternated between reading and daydreaming, trying to distract myself from the pain. Evelyn was quiet, mostly concerned with the bill, her mind running constant stream of co-pays and deductibles against account balances and paychecks. She processed numbers like a ticker tape. A young girl, about my age, paced along the far wall. Hours later, with my arm set and casted in a thick, white plaster, I emerged through the big double doors back into the lobby and the girl was still there. She sat on the floor, her back pushed up against the wall, mascara streaks down her face. Evelyn squared her jaw, marched right over to her, and after a short, whispered conversation, brought the girl over. This is Rachel and she’s coming home with us for dinner. She said it so matter-of-factly, neither Rachel nor I dared argue, despite the fact Evelyn and I had eaten hot dogs and baked beans three nights running. Eat what? I didn’t have the gall to ask. We ate whatever meat Evelyn could find, white and mysterious in the freezer, chopped up with canned vegetables, and then she drove Rachel home. When she returned, her eyes were red-rimmed from crying, but she never explained why. When I pressed her, she just hugged me and called us lucky. This, mystery meat surprise and all. We’re lucky.
The idea that Evelyn could know about another baby and reject her? Impossible.
“She had no idea there were two babies. She wouldn’t have taken you. She couldn’t afford both of you, there was no way. If she would have known, she would have backed out.” She runs her palm along her forehead, as though massaging a headache. “It sounds awful now, I know. At the time, it was just . . . survival. The whole thing was a mess, but I was in too bad a place to care. Mother found someone else interested in adoption and she took your sister. It was all done privately, through an agency.” She finally sits on the edge of the chair, crossing her legs, all knobby knees and pencil calves. “Mother kept tabs on both of you for a long time. Then Joan came to see me.”
The implication is obvious: Caroline did not keep tabs on us.
“So everyone knew I had a sister but Evelyn and me? She knows. You knew. We’re the only ones who didn’t know?” I set my water down on the glass-top end table with force.
“Well, you can’t understand unless you’re in the situation. Then later, I just think Joan wanted to find you in her own time. Or maybe she tried and couldn’t?”
Yes, that made sense. Hilary Lawlor became Zoe Swanson, then Whittaker. An amateur sleuth might lose that link.
“But you didn’t try? To help her, I mean?”
“She didn’t ask. I gave her what I knew, which wasn’t much.” She presses the pad of her thumb along the arm of the chair, avoiding my gaze.
I say nothing.
“Zoe, there’s something you should know.” She reaches around me, parting the window curtain and for a second I can smell her shampoo, her shower soap. She’s so close I could lean over and kiss her cheek. “I shouldn’t tell you this but someone called me.” Her voice is low. “I think it was a man, it was hard to tell. But someone is watching me, or maybe you.” She touched me then, her hand cold on my shoulder. “He threatened me. He said to leave you alone.”
“Who was it? Who called you?” I’m so confused.