He stood there a minute, then tried again. “Sis?” The door handle rattled. The lock held. I heard him lean against the door and slide heavily down to sit on the floor of the upstairs landing.
“I would be completely freaked out, too, if I were you. For what it’s worth. This stuff coming out after all these years.”
I said nothing, focused on radiating hostility through the door. Minutes passed.
“I can sit here all night, you know. Always did like this landing. Mind you, I’ve got the whisky on this side of the door. Hear that?” A clinking sound, ice in tumblers. “I’m betting you could use some right about now.”
I began to weaken. “Go away. I don’t like whisky.”
“Fine. Pretend it’s champagne. Or Bordeaux, or Sancerre or something. Whatever you froggy Francophile types prefer to drink.”
“Please just go away.”
We sat awhile, and then he said, “You know, I think the last time I remember you locking yourself in this bathroom to sulk, it was over that loser. What was his name? The chubby one?”
“Shut up, Martin.”
“No, come on. What was that, your sophomore year? You were mad as hell because he’d cheated on you with some blonde. Josh something, wasn’t it? Or Jack?”
“Jeff Benton.” I couldn’t help myself.
“That’s right. God, what a tool. What was the deal? He bailed on taking you to prom?”
“Yeah.” A long pause. “Yeah, he did. So you and Tony slashed his tires and spelled out the word dickwad in liquid fertilizer on his front lawn.”
“Well, that’s what brothers are for.”
Brothers. My stomach twisted. I pulled the towel tighter around myself.
“Caroline. How about coming out now?”
“No.”
In the narrow gap under the door, four fingertips appeared.
“Don’t,” I warned.
The fingers wiggled farther in. “Come on. Before I get splinters all down the back of my knuckles.”
“Or I could just stomp on them.”
“Don’t do that. I have to play squash this weekend.”
This finally made me laugh. It came out more a croak than laughter, but it released something in me. “Martin?” I hesitated. “What happened to my parents? My—my real parents?”
“Your birth parents,” he corrected. “I don’t know. What I remember is being told we were getting a baby sister, and then one day there you were. Mom and Dad seemed happy about it, so we were, too. I don’t remember them ever using that word, adopted. It just seemed normal. Like . . . there had been two Cashion kids, and now there were three. Same as any other family when a third child comes along. Tony’s right, we kind of forgot about it. The circumstances of how you arrived. Honestly. It’s not like we’ve been sitting around for years gossiping behind your back.”
I wasn’t sure I believed that, but I relented. Stood up and opened the door.
Martin pulled himself to his feet.
I eyed my rail-thin, blond, blue-eyed brother. “You know, I look nothing like you.”
“This only just dawned on you?”
“No, but I mean, why didn’t it ever strike me as odd?”
“I don’t know. I have plenty of friends who look nothing like their siblings.”
“Right, but you and Tony look like twins. Aryan male models in a Brooks Brothers ad—”
“Oh, come on!”
“Whereas I . . . I look like Salma Hayek if she were a few inches taller and had better cleavage.”
He snorted. “Don’t think I’m letting you get away with that just because you’re having an atrocious day. Your girls got nothing on Salma’s cleavage.”
I punched his shoulder.
It felt like a resumption of our usual banter, yet hollow. As if something precious had been lost.
Five
* * *
The story gets worse from here.
The blackest, most terrible bits did not emerge until nearly midnight.
The five of us huddled back in the living room, my brothers installed protectively on either side of me on the sofa. My father and they had kicked back the bottle of whisky and opened a second. Mom and I nursed mugs of tea. I figured I was already a wreck, my inhibitions plenty loosened as it was without adding whisky to the equation. But there was no suitable state—drunk, sober, or anywhere in between—in which to receive the story that Dad proceeded to unleash.
He told me that I had been born in Atlanta.
My parents were a young, married couple named Boone and Sadie Rawson Smith. Boone was a pilot for Delta; Sadie Rawson stayed home to raise me. They were college sweethearts. They had moved to Atlanta from Charlotte, shortly before I was born. These details were included in the newspaper obituaries.
They died together, shot cleanly and at close range. Boone through the head, Sadie Rawson through the heart. Murdered. My parents had been murdered in the autumn of 1979. They were both twenty-six years old. Their bodies were found in the kitchen of the white brick house they owned, on a pleasant street in a neighborhood called Buckhead.
I was with them in the white brick house. I was shot, too. Shot in the neck and nearly died. When police kicked in the door, they found me blue-lipped and barely breathing on the kitchen floor. I was rushed to the hospital, given blood, stitched up. A miraculous recovery. But the case was never solved. The killer was never caught. Boone and Sadie Rawson Smith were buried, the house was sold, and I was sent to live in Washington.
“That’s pretty much all we know,” my father concluded. “When you came to us, the police investigation was still active. They wouldn’t tell us much more than what was in the papers. And then time passed . . . years passed . . . and it no longer seemed to matter so much.” He had been speaking with an air of grim determination; now his voice softened. “You were so frightened when you came to us, Caroline. You wouldn’t talk the first few weeks.”