So I sat there numbly while they stuck a swab in my mouth—again—wondering what my life would become if this was really true. It was too scary to think about.
Mom and I were silent for most of the trip home. I pressed my face against the car window and watched the scenery of Route 28 pass us by without really seeing it. If I wasn’t really the daughter of Evelyn and Michael Hayden, who was I?
As we crossed the I-66 junction I muttered, “Am I adopted?”
Mom glanced at me. She said nothing. A few hundred feet later there was a wide enough shoulder for her to pull off onto, and she did so, putting the car in park. Then she turned to me and took my face in both her hands.
“You are my daughter,” she told me sternly. “I gave birth to you in Manassas Hospital, with your father present. They took you out of my body and cleaned you up and wrapped you in a towel and put you in my arms, and then your dad came and touched your hand, and your little fingers curled around his fingertip—”
I could see tears brimming in her eyes, which made tears come to mine.
“I have a birth certificate with your name on it. You can look at it if you want to. Jessica Anne Drake-Hayden. My daughter.”
“Are we going to tell Dad about this?” I whispered.
I could see a flicker of fear in her eyes. It had been ten years since he’d left us, and she was still afraid of him.
She turned back to the road, turned her left signal on, and put the car in drive.
“When we have to,” she said.
• • •
Mom didn’t tell Tommy about the tests results, just that there had been a problem with the original procedure, and it had to be repeated. He was a smart kid, though, and he could probably tell from our expressions that something was seriously wrong. But Mom had decided to spare him the truth—at least until the test results were confirmed—and I went along with that. Later, when Tommy would normally have grilled me for more information privately, he surprised me by not asking questions. Maybe he sensed that if I tried to talk about what had happened at the lab I would break down in tears, or put my fist through a wall while I screamed curses at the heavens, or … something. Like I said, he was a smart kid.
Sample contamination. That’s what Mom told him. The original samples had gotten contaminated, so we’d been asked to provide new ones. Now we had to wait for new results. Ten days.
Dad would be back by then.
• • •
Midnight. I couldn’t sleep.
No, that wasn’t accurate. I wasn’t willing to sleep. Because this was the kind of night when I usually had weird dreams, and right now I just wasn’t up to dealing with them.
I read in bed for awhile, my body positioned between the lamp and the door so that Mom wouldn’t realize I was still awake. Then, come midnight, when I figured everyone else had fallen asleep, I turned off the lamp, left my room, and sneaked quietly downstairs.
The “office” was actually a walk-in pantry, which Mom had outfitted with a computer desk and a few filing cabinets. The files themselves were pretty well organized, so it didn’t take me long to find my birth certificate, along with all the other paperwork that had accompanied my entry into this world. I even found a form with a pair of tiny footprints on it, and for a moment I was tempted to ink up my fully grown feet and see if they matched. But what would that tell me? If two babies had been switched at the hospital, it could have happened before those prints were made.
I put everything back where I’d found it and started back to my room.
On the way I passed Tommy’s door. And I stopped. After a moment, I opened it quietly and slipped inside. The room was dark, but the slatted blinds hadn’t been shut completely, so thin bands of moonlight fell across the bed, illuminating a mound of blankets, toys, and Tommy.
As I stared down at him I felt a mixture of love and confusion so strong that I didn’t know how to handle it.
You’re not really my brother.
I formed the words in my mind, testing them, but they had no real substance. No reality.
For thirteen years this crazy kid had been part of my life. I’d hated him and loved him and resented him and needed him—sometimes all of those things at once. I’d tormented him when he was learning to walk and comforted him when he fell off his bike, and climbed into Mom’s bed with him the night that Dad left us, so that the three of us could cry quietly in the darkness together. Which bonded us together in ways no words could ever capture. Since then I had been like a second mother to him, filling in for Mom while she struggled to make ends meet.
Now, after all that, five simple words threatened to come between us: You’re not really my brother.
What did those words mean, really? That a couple of genes weren’t arranged the way they should be? So what? That didn’t change who I was, did it? Or dictate who I was allowed to love?
Maybe the lab really had screwed up the test, I thought. Maybe they would call us in a few days to tell us that, and then everything would go back to normal. But as much as I hoped that would happen, deep in my gut I didn’t really believe it. Ever since childhood I’d felt as if something in my life was out of kilter. There was nothing concrete that I could ever point to and complain about, just an indefinable sense of wrongness that had always haunted me. Now, at last, that feeling had a name. Things with names didn’t just go away.
I recalled a Law and Order episode I saw once, in which a nine-year-old boy learned that he’d been kidnapped from his birth-parents back when he was just an infant. Years later they found him and applied for legal custody. The judge ruled in their favor, and so they took that happy kid away from the family who had raised him, the only family he’d ever known. DNA trumps love. I still remembered the look on his face when that ruling was announced. Like his whole world had been destroyed.
At sixteen, I was past the age when such a thing was likely to happen to me. At worst, a couple of strangers calling themselves my “real mother and father” might visit, and we’d all try to be polite to one another as we joked bitterly about the lousy security in the hospital where Mom had given birth. And then they would go back to their house, and I would stay in mine, and we’d all try to put the pieces of our lives back together again, as if nothing had ever happened.
Yes, I thought stubbornly. That’s how it will be.
Looking down at my brother, I felt a sudden wave of tenderness and fear come over me, so powerful it brought tears to my eyes. I will always be your sister, I promised him silently. No one will ever be allowed to come between us. I swear it.
Then I sneaked out of his room as quietly as I could, leaving him to dreams that were sure to be more peaceful than mine.
3
MANASSAS
VIRGINIA
Dear Ms. Drake,
In response to your question, it is the policy of our hospital to record the footprint of each newborn during the post-delivery examination. This takes place by the side of the mother and in her full view, immediately after childbirth. Babies and mothers are also tagged with matching bracelets at that time, which they wear until they leave the hospital.
These procedures have been in place since 1992.
Please let me know any further questions you may have.
Sincerely,
Janeen Dover
Director of Risk Management
Manassas Hospital
• • •
Two footprints. One tiny but clean, rendered with professional precision. The other somewhat messy, the kind of mark you’d expect if a teenager swabbed her foot with calligraphy ink and tried to then roll it onto a sheet of printer paper. It was hard to make out its loops and whorls even where the impression was good, and in most places it wasn’t good. Only the ridges on the big toe could be examined with any certainty. But those appeared to match my own.
That should have been good enough, shouldn’t it? Jessica Anne Drake-Hayden had been carried straight from her mother’s womb to the ink pad, a journey witnes
sed by both of her parents and half a dozen delivery room staff. Her ridge patterns matched my own. I was indisputably that child.
So the DNA lab must have made a mistake. They’d switched samples somewhere along the line, or else confused the reports. The new test would sort that all out.
Right?
Only the lab we’d gone to wasn’t one of those fly-by-night outfits in which quality control took a back seat to sales quotas. This facility was hardcore, as befit a business whose findings had the power to destroy marriages, resolve million-dollar lawsuits, or even send people to jail. The smallest weak link in its chain of protocols would have brought the whole thing crashing down long ago. So the likelihood of them mixing up our samples wasn’t zero percent—nothing in the universe was zero percent—but it was low enough that you’d need scientific notation to write it down. So where did that leave me?
A chimera, I thought soberly. Right on the outside and wrong on the inside. A creature that should not exist.
Great stuff for a science fiction movie. Sucks for real life.
• • •
The sign outside the school library said, SO YOU THINK YOU CAN PAINT? Which had to be the lamest title for an art display ever. But the artwork itself wasn’t bad. Our teacher Mrs. Fletcher encouraged us to embrace our craziest ideas and to mix media without inhibition, which sometimes produced interesting results. The school liked to put them on display, which I figured was kind of like a parent putting his kids’ drawings on the refrigerator. Visitors to the school seemed to find it impressive, which I’d been told had significance in fundraising circles.
Three of my paintings were in the show. At first glance they appeared to be nothing more than geometric designs with a bit of a crazy edge to them (less crazy if you were familiar with fractal art) but in reality they were much more than that. Each line, dot, and fractal squiggle meant something. If you read my paintings right they revealed all sorts of things about human relationships, patterns of behavior, and sometimes my own hopes and fears. And they told you about my dreams, as well. Because every painting of mine was based on something I’d seen in a dream. If you stared at one of them long enough it was like getting inside my head.
No one outside of my family knew anything about that.
Now, looking up at my work, I felt grounded again. I’d been walking about in a daze for the last day or so, disconnected from the world around me. Like I was a stranger in Jessica Drake’s body, and if anyone looked at me closely enough they might detect the masquerade. But whoever I really was—whatever I really was—these paintings were uniquely mine. They were reflections of Jessica Drake’s true soul, and seeing them on canvas like that helped anchor me to that identity.
“Jessica?” The voice from behind broke into my reverie. “Oh, I’m so glad I ran into you!”
I turned around to see Mrs. Fletcher standing there: a short, plump woman with rosy cheeks, who looked like she should be off baking apple pies for a county fair somewhere. Her button-up smock was criss-crossed with streaks of paint and dye that would probably never wash out. They were marks of honor for her, much as facial scars were for a Prussian duelist.
“There’s someone who wants to buy one of your paintings,” she told me, her blue eyes crinkling from excitement. “She said they were as good as anything she’s seen in a gallery, and she wants one to hang in her home! She asked if she could come by after school tomorrow and talk to you about it. Are you free then?”
I blinked. “Uh, yeah.”
Something about my expression must have seemed odd to her; she cocked her head and asked, “That’s good, isn’t it?”
“Of course it’s good.” Truth be told I wasn’t sure that it was, but clearly that was the response she expected.
“You don’t have to sell something to her if you don’t want to,” she assured me. “It’s perfectly reasonable for you to want to hold onto your work at this stage in your life.”
“I know.”
“But it’s flattering, yes?”
I nodded. “Very flattering.”
“Your mother should be there for this. Can she make it?”
I shook my head. “Working. Sorry.”
“Ah, well. She really should approve any sale, but I guess you could at least get the details and talk to her later.”
The bell rang suddenly, startling us both.
“Come by my office after school tomorrow,” she said backing away quickly. “This is so exciting!” Then she turned and trotted toward her classroom.
Yes, by all human measure it should have been exciting. It was the kind of thing that high school artists dreamed about. The kind of thing I had dreamed about, once.
But now, as I looked up at my paintings, I wondered if I could bring myself to sell one of them to a stranger. If you poured your soul into a painting and then gave that painting away, would that part of your soul be lost forever?
Then the second bell rang, and I sprinted down the hallway, existential questions driven out of my brain by the looming abomination called Trigonometry.
• • •
I had the door dream again that night. Only this time all the doors were locked, and try as I might I couldn’t open any of them. I knew there was a key that I was supposed to have, but I couldn’t find it. Had I owned it once, but lost it? Or never possessed it in the first place? The question seemed to matter, but I had no way to answer it.
I wandered the black plain for a long time before the dream finally faded.
• • •
Noise. In the distance. Subtle sound, barely above the threshold of hearing. Enough to wake you up only if your nerves were already stretched to the breaking point.
I sat up in bed and focused all my senses on the noise. It seemed to be coming from downstairs. The subtle rustling of fabric in motion. The creak of a wary footstep on wooden floors. Someone was moving around as carefully as possible, not wanting to be heard.
Heart pounding, I eased myself out of bed. Part of me wanted to hide from the unseen threat, or perhaps call for help, while the other part of me wanted to investigate, so that I would know what was going on before I woke up the whole family. Because if it turned out there wasn’t really anything wrong, I would look pretty stupid shouting an alarm.
The latter instinct won out by just a hair, and so I eased my bedroom door open and slipped into the hallway, my bare feet silent on the carpeted floor.
Now I could see that there was a light on downstairs, somewhere at the far end of the house. A burglar would use a flashlight, I told myself, not turn on the light like that. It was mildly reassuring.
I worked my way slowly down the stairs, trying to avoid the spots that I knew would creak the loudest. Once I got to the first floor I could see that the light was coming from the office. The door was half closed so I couldn’t see who was inside, but I assumed it was someone who belonged here. Like I said: flashlight.
I walked to the door and pushed it open slightly. Just enough to see inside, not enough to draw attention.
It was Mom.
She was sitting at the desk with her back to the door, staring at a piece of paper. One of the file cabinet drawers was open, and I could see where a manila folder had been removed. A lump formed in my throat as I realized what folder it was.
I came up behind her, no longer trying to hide my presence. If she heard me, she gave no sign of it.
In her hand was the hospital document with my footprint on it. She was just staring at it. Not moving, hardly even breathing. Just staring. And I knew what she was thinking, as if I were inside her head. I could compare Jesse’s footprint to this one. We’d know the truth, then. But what if she thinks I’m doing that because I don’t really believe she’s my daughter? That could hurt her in ways no DNA test would ever fix.
“Hey,” I whispered.
“Hey,” she whispered back.
I put my hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay, Mom.”
She nodded. “I know.”
?
??No. Seriously. I mean, it’s okay.”
Leaning on her for balance, I lifted up my right foot so she would look at it. And okay, call me an idiot for grabbing the bottle of indelible ink last night, when I was reaching for the washable stuff. What can I say? It was dark, and I was upset, and the labels were really small. But maybe God does have a purpose in everything, because when she looked down at the blue stain on the sole of my foot I could feel some of the tension go out of her body, and that wouldn’t have happened if I’d been able to clean all the ink off.
“I take it you’re my real kid,” she said.
“Yeah.” No need to share all my paranoid fantasies at this point; it wasn’t that kind of moment. “Looks like it.”
The corner of her mouth twitched as she shook her head: almost a smile. “And here I thought I could get rid of you at last.”
I shook my head. “Not gonna be that easy, Mom.”
We laughed a little, in a strange way that was almost like crying, and then she hugged me and said I should go back to sleep, because I had school in the morning. So I headed back up the stairs as she closed up the office, and as I entered my room I could see the light downstairs go out, leaving the house in darkness.
I was halfway to my bed before I realized someone was sitting on it. I jumped backward, startled, and felt a scream well up in my throat. But the figure was too small to be a burglar, and after a second my brain shifted into the proper gear, and I realized who it was.
“So,” Tommy said, “You gonna tell me what’s going on? Or do I have to keep spying on you and figure it out for myself?”
4
MANASSAS
VIRGINIA
I WOUND UP TELLING Tommy everything. Not just because I hungered to talk to someone who wouldn’t think my fears were totally crazy—though there was that—but because I’d seen him go into spying mode before, and I didn’t want to have to sweep my room for hidden cameras every night before I went to bed.
Try the internet, he suggested. As if every mystery in the universe could be reduced to a single web page, and all you had to do to gain spiritual enlightenment was plug the right search term into Google.