“Our doctor was worried you might have suffered brain damage,” whispered my mother. (My mother. I suppose I’ll have to start being more specific. My mother, meaning Frannie Cashion. The woman in the room with me now.) She shook her head. “I knew he was wrong. I could look in your eyes and see that you were bright. Really bright. You just needed time.”
“And we think that you might still have been in pain,” Dad added. (Dad. By whom I mean, Thomas Cashion. The dad I had grown up with. God, this was strange.) “You had been badly wounded. They told us you’d had two surgeries, that you’d barely . . . barely made it. But none of the medical records we received ever indicated that it might still be in your neck. We just”—he glanced helplessly at my mother—“we assumed that the bullet had been removed during one of those operations.”
“But I don’t have a scar.” It was the first time I’d spoken in nearly an hour.
“You did. You used to have a scar.” My mother leaned forward and touched the base of my skull, half an inch to the left of the raised ridge of my spine. “We could see it through your hair. But your hair grew in thicker every year. And you got sick with chicken pox when you were six, and after that you had scars everywhere. I lost track of which were which. Then they all faded. Even this one.” For a moment her finger pressed hard against my skull, then she drew back and clasped her hands tightly on her lap.
I turned to Dad. “It’s bizarre that the doctors didn’t tell you they left the bullet in. I mean, wouldn’t that be pertinent information to know, about a child you were adopting?”
“It’s outrageous,” he said. “Both from a medical and a legal standpoint. But, Caroline, you were under Georgia state protective custody. Your records—they—everything was sealed. Because of the criminal investigation. We were never allowed to meet your surgeons. Maybe they were calculating that the bullet didn’t pose an urgent threat to your health by the time we were signing the adoption papers, so we didn’t need to know. And after that—I don’t know. Maybe it fell between the cracks, when Georgia handed off your files to DC.”
“I suppose we could have lodged an appeal to get your medical chart,” said Mom. “Especially once the investigation quieted down. But . . . Dad’s right. Months went by, and then years, and you were happy here. Thriving. You seemed fully healed. We weren’t focused on digging around for old charts.”
It was too much to take in. I couldn’t absorb it. Instead I found myself latching onto small, concrete details. Such as my lack of a scar. Or the name of a city.
“Atlanta,” I heard myself say. “I’ve never even been there.” The name conjured up scenes from Gone with the Wind, Scarlett O’Hara flouncing around in a hoopskirt made from curtains. What else? Coca-Cola. Coke corporate headquarters were there. And the Olympics. Atlanta had hosted the Olympics, back when I was in college. I remembered the US team dominating, Michael Johnson sprinting off with two golds. But I had no mental picture of the city. Apparently, though, I had indeed been to Atlanta. I had lived there, for several years, and then forgotten every second of them.
Martin seemed to read my thoughts. “You don’t remember any of this? About your . . . about the Smiths? Or about coming to live with us?”
No, I didn’t.
“It would be remarkable if she did,” Dad put in. “We did some research on this. Few children remember anything from before age four. If they do, it’s often not a real memory, but a narrative they’ve created for themselves, from being shown photographs or told stories about a place or a person. And we deliberately never talked about anything that happened before Caroline came to us. We certainly didn’t have photos to show.”
“On top of that, you’d been through such trauma.” Mom looked at me. “Even an older child might have blocked it out.”
I nodded. That sounded reasonable. They both sounded just like their usual reasonable and reassuring selves, if you set aside the sheer insanity of this scene. The insanity of the entirely rewritten life history that I had been handed, a history that included a double homicide and two sets of parents and a bullet burrowed beneath my skin. Mom was right: I should have so many questions. But at that moment they eluded me. My wrist ached, more sharply than usual. All I wanted was to lie down and close my eyes.
“Dad.” The word seemed to charge the room, like a lie that we were all waiting for someone to challenge. I forced myself to repeat it. “Dad, would it be all right if I slept here tonight?”
“Well, of course, darling.”
I walked over and kissed the top of his head. Then I kissed my mother and stretched my lips into a weak smile at my brothers. They would all start talking about me the minute I left the room. I didn’t care. I turned and climbed the stairs to my old bedroom, cradling my wrist in my good hand.
Six
* * *
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2013
Remarkably, I slept. It is a small mercy that the body is capable of overriding the brain, forcing it to shut down in times of crisis. I slept for five obliterating hours before my eyes snapped open. I have never been one to wake up disoriented, and now, even in the predawn darkness, I knew exactly where I was and why.
Of the many questions that must have percolated while I was asleep, the one that woke me up was this: Was my name really Caroline?
I crept downstairs.
In the kitchen, looking as though they had not fared so well in the sleep department, stood my mother and Tony. Mom wore a blue flannel nightgown and robe. Tony had changed into stretched-out, gray sweats emblazoned with the logo of his high school wrestling team. He must have found them folded in the back of a dresser drawer, forgotten for the twenty-odd years since he’d last shambled in from practice and dropped them, stained and sweaty, in a hamper for our mother to wash.
They stopped talking when they saw me in the doorway.
“What’s my real name?” I asked without preamble.
“Your real name?” my mother repeated.
“Is my name really Caroline?”
“Oh, I see. Yes. Yes, it is.”