Stranger With My Face

  And Dad and Mom were my parents.

  So we slipped back into what Dad had referred to as “our normal lives.” We didn’t speak again about my adoption. The only two people I told about it were Gordon and Helen. Gordon didn’t say very much, but, then, what was there that he could say? He mumbled something about its being “a really crazy thing to find out about yourself ” and switched the subject as though it embarrassed him.

  Helen reacted with no surprise at all.

  “I thought that might be it,” she said. “Especially after I met your family and saw how blond they were. I even guessed about the Native American heritage. You’re lighter-complexioned than the kids I went to school with, but your eyes and those cheekbones are very Navajo.”

  “I can’t think of myself as part Navajo,” I said.

  “Of course you can’t, because you haven’t been raised as one. You feel like a Stratton. But, Lia—who knows about her? She could have been adopted by—well, by anyone. She might live here in New England or in California or Florida or anywhere.”

  “Or even in some foreign country if her adoptive parents were diplomats or something,” I said, intrigued by the idea.

  “Or she might still be in New Mexico,” Helen continued. “The location doesn’t make any difference. If she can project herself, she can do it from any place she is.”

  “But how would she know how?” I asked. “I’d never even heard of astral projection until you explained it to me. How would Lia know about it? And how could she have learned to do it?”

  “There’s one person who can answer that,” Helen said.

  “And there’s no way to ask her. She hasn’t come to me since that night you saw her. Maybe she got scared when she found a stranger in the bed she thought was mine. Maybe she’s not coming back.”

  “I hope that’s true,” Helen said.

  “I don’t!” The words burst from me without conscious thought, and I was as startled by them as Helen was.

  “But I thought you wanted her gone,” she said in surprise.

  “I did, but now—” I let the sentence trail off, unsure of how to finish it.

  “She’s evil, Laurie. She’s out to hurt you.”

  “You don’t know that,” I countered.

  “I saw it in her eyes that night. I told you—”

  “It was dark, and you were half-asleep,” I said. “She scared you, appearing that way. She didn’t do anything to you, though, did she? And she’s never hurt me either. She just visits, like she wants to know about my life. Why shouldn’t she, when she’s my sister?”

  “You used to be scared of her,” Helen said.

  “That was before.” We floated together in the same sea before birth. I hadn’t understood then, but now I did. We are the two sides of a coin. Suddenly I was filled with a terrible sense of loss. “I want to know about her too. There must be some way of locating her. Don’t you think the adoption agency kept records?”

  “Probably,” Helen said. “But I don’t think they’d give them out. Besides, you don’t know what agency handled the adoptions.”

  “My parents do.”

  “You can’t ask them,” Helen said. “You know they’re not going to tell you. You said your mother freaked out over the thought that you might want to track down your other parents.”

  “I don’t have to ask them,” I told her. “I know where to look for what I need.”

  The information was in the steel filing cabinet in my father’s office. It wasn’t difficult to find. And, since Dad had already accused me of having “gone through the file,” I didn’t feel any special guilt about living up to the accusation. I went into the office on a Saturday morning when Dad was still asleep and Mom and Neal were upstairs painting, pulled out the sliding drawers, and riffled through the alphabetically arranged contents.

  There were book and movie contracts, business correspondence, bank and royalty statements and packets of research material. There were also folders on each of us children. Ignoring the ones on Neal and Meg, I pulled out the one marked “Laurie.” In it I was surprised to find my old grammar school report cards, as well as a collection of hand-drawn birthday and Father’s Day cards dating back to kindergarten days. There was also a set of formal papers, proclaiming me legally the child of James and Shelly Stratton, and photocopies of several short letters to a “Mrs. Margaret Hastings, Director of Hastings Adoption Agency” in Gallup, New Mexico.

  The letters revealed nothing of personal interest; they were confirmations of appointments that had apparently been over the phone. They did, however, contain the address of the agency. I copied it down, returned the folder to the file, and went up to my room to write the letter. Fifteen minutes later I was on my bike, headed for the post office in the village to put it into the mail. The return address I gave was Helen’s, since I didn’t want my parents finding an envelope with an agency letterhead in our post office box.

  As it turned out, I didn’t have to worry about it. An answer to my letter didn’t arrive until the first week of November, and when it did come, it was on the personal stationery of a “Mrs. Thomas Kelsey.”

  In the meantime, autumn moved in upon us. The air became crisp and then chill, and the trees on the mainland turned gold and red. On the island the grasses and sea oats browned. The little scrub oaks lost their leaves, and the poison ivy in the thickets along the sides of the road blazed a brilliant crimson.

  By mid-October the prams—rowboats—had been removed from the water, and the only boats to be seen on the horizon were those of commercial fishermen. The souvenir shops and the art gallery closed, and the streets of the village were void of tourists. The waves curled high on the deserted beaches, and blue days alternated with gray.

  Autumn doesn’t last long on Brighton Island. It serves only as a brief prelude to winter.

  I wasn’t seeing much of Gordon anymore. There were reasons. He and Blane had decided to go out for the basketball team, which meant they had to stay after school for practices and take a later ferry to the island. On weekends he worked with his father doing repair work on some of the summer cottages. The Ahearns owned a group of these on the southern end of the island.

  We did go to the Halloween dance at the high school, triple-dating with Blane and Darlene, and Tommy and a girl named Crystal. It should have been fun. The gym had been decorated with pumpkins and corn husks, and there was a witch on a broomstick silhouetted against a full moon over the dance floor. There was a good DJ, and even the teachers were dancing. I just couldn’t get myself into the spirit of the evening. I did all the expected things. I danced and laughed and made party chitchat and gulped the punch that Blane had spiked liberally with vodka from a flask he’d brought in a bag marked “Tricks and Treats.”

  But something was missing. I felt it, and so did Gordon.

  When he brought me home he asked me, “Did you have a nice time?”

  “Fantastic,” I said. “Did you?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Great.”

  It was as though if we kept reassuring ourselves long enough and enthusiastically enough, the words would become true.

  On the ferry in the mornings I still rode with Gordon and his crowd, but on the return trips I climbed to the top deck and sat alone or with Neal. The wind there was strong and cold, and I huddled in my ski jacket and kept a scarf pulled across the lower half of my face. Sometimes Jeff was there, hunched over a book, a gloved hand cupped against the bad side of his face to protect it from the wind. When he was, I sat beside him, neither of us talking much. I found his silent company more to my liking than the incessant chatter of the group below.

  At school I continued to share lunch with Helen, and one Friday I went home with her to spend the weekend. It was the first time I’d had the opportunity to meet her parents. They were a lot like I had expected, pleasant people who obviously adored their daughter.

  “We’re concerned about whether we did the right thing by moving here,” Mrs. Tuttle confided at
dinner. “The cost of living is so much higher, and while my husband was able to find a teaching job, I wasn’t, so I’m just substituting. But we thought it would be good for Helen to be exposed to another sort of life. She’s such an outgoing girl, we never thought for a moment that she’d have problems making friends.”

  “Helen has friends,” I assured her while Helen groaned in embarrassment.

  “Oh, I know, but except for you they’re such casual ones. She never gets asked to parties or to people’s houses. Maybe it just takes time. We’ve all heard stories about that famous New England reserve.”

  “The boy with the scarred face comes over sometimes,” Mr. Tuttle interjected.

  “Jeff ?” I turned to Helen in surprise. “You didn’t tell me that.”

  “There’s nothing to tell,” Helen said. “He’s been over a few times, and one night we went to the movies. It’s no big deal.”

  “He’s a strange young man,” her mother said. “It’s tragic what happened to him, and I’m very sorry about it, but it can’t do much for Helen’s reputation to be seen with him. I’d hate for people to start thinking they were romantically involved.”

  “I’m not exactly the world’s most glamorous creature myself, Mom,” Helen said lightly. “Who cares what people think? Besides, I like Jeff. His looks don’t bother me. He’s lonely, and I—” She didn’t complete the sentence. To cover the unspoken words, she gave a bright, natural-sounding laugh and shoved her chair back from the table. “Great dinner, Mom! Laurie, do you want to go watch a movie?”

  There was a lot of pride in Helen Tuttle. She’d never admit to anyone that her life was not exactly as she would have it, and that she, too, was lonely.

  The evening was relaxed and uneventful. We watched some DVDs and read magazines (how quiet it was in a house without little kids!), and by eleven we were in our pajamas. Once settled into the twin bed across from Helen’s, I found that I wasn’t sleepy at all. The rattle of traffic in the street outside the Tuttles’ two-story town house was an alien sound. I pictured the surf breaking against the rocks beneath the windows of Cliff House and tried to transform the city noises into the roar of waves. The kids would be asleep now, and so would Mom. Dad would be settled in his office at the computer. My own room would be empty.

  Or—would it?

  What if Lia has come? I asked myself. What if she’s there now, looking for me?

  Instantly, I could see her on the screen of my closed lids as she had been that first night, reflected in the glass of the balcony doors. My face. My hair. My features. But the mouth with corners lifted in a secret smile that had not been mine. Myself, yet not myself. The other half of me. Was she now at Cliff House? Somehow, I was sure she was. For so many nights I had lain awake waiting for her; it was fate that it would be on this night that I wasn’t there to receive her that she would come.

  Lia! I called silently. Lia, don’t leave again!

  I reached out for her with my mind, willing my thoughts in her direction. Mentally, I saw myself entering Cliff House and moving up the stairs—past the kitchen—past the darkened living room—past the children’s room and my parents’—to my own bedroom door. I stretched out my hand and rested it on the knob. She was there. I could feel her on the far side, resting quietly, waiting. I knew it, but I was powerless to reach her. The knob would not turn.

  “Helen?” I whispered. “Are you awake?”

  “Mmmmmm.” There was the sound of her body shifting beneath the blankets in the bed across from me.

  “I need to ask you something.” I hoisted myself up onto my elbow. “Helen, do you think I could do it too?”

  “Do what?” The urgency in my voice must have gotten through to her, because she no longer sounded sleepy. “What is it you’re thinking of doing?”

  “Projecting. I’m identical to Lia. Isn’t it logical that whatever mind power she has would be available to me? A moment ago I was thinking about Cliff House, and I had this feeling that if I tried hard enough, if I could just figure out how to direct myself, I could will myself there!”

  “No!” Helen said sharply. “You should never try!”

  “Why not?” I was becoming more and more excited by the idea. “Think what it could mean! If I could free myself from my body the way Lia does, I could do anything! I could travel anywhere!”

  “Don’t talk that way, Laurie. I don’t want to hear it.”

  “But why?” I asked reasonably.

  “Because it’s unnatural.”

  “In the Navajo world it isn’t. You told me that yourself.”

  “You’re not in the Navajo world,” Helen said. “It’s not about your heritage. You haven’t been trained in this. You’d be messing around with something you don’t know how to handle.” There was a note of real panic in her voice. “It’s dangerous. You have no idea what might end up happening. I want you to promise you won’t even try.”

  “Then you believe it would be possible that I could learn?”

  “I guess it’s possible,” Helen said reluctantly. “But if you do, I just know that you’ll regret it.”

  “I don’t understand why you’re so scared by the idea.” I settled back on the pillow. My heart was pounding. “You talked about it so matter-of-factly when it was Luis’s father. If he could project himself to watch the birth of his son, why shouldn’t I do the same thing to find my sister? She’s somewhere in the world, a living person, not just a mirror girl. I could go to her the same way she has to me.”

  “There are better ways,” Helen said. “You’ve written to the adoption agency. Any day now you’re going to hear from them. Maybe they’ll send you an address. Then you could write or call her.”

  “I don’t think they’re going to answer,” I told her. “It’s been almost a month now. And if they do, you said yourself they might not be willing to tell me anything.”

  “Give them a chance,” Helen pleaded. “Give them a little more time. They might come through. We can’t be sure. Please, believe me, it would be so much better that way.” She paused, and when I didn’t respond she continued, “Promise me, Laurie. I want to hear you say it.”

  “All right,” I agreed reluctantly. “I promise. I’ll wait a little longer.”

  The letter arrived three days later. Helen brought it to school, and I read it standing in a stall in the girls’ restroom. It was the only privacy I could find.

  The writer, Mrs. Kelsey, was the daughter of Margaret Hastings.

  “Your letter was forwarded here to Phoenix,” she wrote me. “The agency was closed after my mother’s death. The records are sealed and have been placed in storage. I do recollect that there was once a case in which there were twins to place. It was an unusual enough occurrence that my mother used to talk about it. She was disappointed that they could not have been placed together. One child was adopted, and the other was reclaimed by her mother. Some years later the mother died, and the child was again brought to the agency. I believe she was placed in a foster home.

  “I’d advise you not to concern yourself further with this matter. I’m sure you have a good home. Let the past stay buried, and enjoy your present. I am sure that is what your sister is doing.”

  But I knew better. I folded the letter and placed it in my purse.

  The following week, Lia returned to Brighton Island. But not to me.

  I learned about her presence from Jeff.

  “You shouldn’t go walking around out on those rocks by your house,” he told me. “They’re slippery as hell.”

  We were standing at the railing on the top deck of the ferry with Neal wedged between us, and the wind whipped the words from his mouth as soon as they were spoken. I was not sure he had said what I thought he had.

  “I never walk there,” I told him across the top of my brother’s head.

  “You did yesterday,” Jeff insisted. “I saw you.”

  “We never walk out there,” said Neal, echoing my words. “Not any of us. It’s dangerous. I fell
once when I was little and almost died.”

  “You’re damn right, it’s dangerous,” Jeff said. “Those rocks have crevices between them. One little slip, and you’re done.”

  My mind had stopped several sentences back, at the words “I saw you.” It was like a replay of the scene with Natalie and Gordon on the day after Nat’s party. There was no way Jeff could have seen me on the rocks by Cliff House. I hadn’t been there.

  I gazed out across the water at the dark shape of Brighton Island growing larger and larger as we approached it. The girl on the rocks had been Lia. About that there was no question in my mind. Somewhere up ahead, on the rocks or beaches or cliffs, or even more likely in the quiet sanctuary of Cliff House itself, she was waiting. Soon now I would find her.

  But it didn’t happen. I went to bed early that night, tense with anticipation, and lay awake until dawn. When the outline of the bedroom furniture became visible, and the sky beyond the glass doors went from black to gray and softened into pink, I finally closed my eyes. Disappointment accentuated my exhaustion, and I slept like a dead thing for the hour that was left before Meg was sent to wake me.

  She’s gone again, I told myself. But once more I was wrong. That afternoon when Neal returned from his usual after-school wanderings he seemed surprised to find me in the living room reading.

  “I thought I saw you out on the dunes,” he said. “I was riding my bike down Star Point Road toward the cranberry bogs, and there was this girl up at the top of one of the sandhills. The sun was behind her, but I was sure it was you.”

  Meg, who was occupied in leading a group of stuffed animals through a third-grade spelling lesson, glanced up with interest.

  “I bet it was Laurie’s ghosty again,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” Neal asked.

  “There’s this ghost thing that goes around peeking at people. I see her all the time. At first I thought it was Laurie, but now I know better.”