by Lael Littke
Suddenly I giggled. I couldn't believe we were standing there mouthing such bad dialogue. It could have come right out of The Rent Is Due at Six, the melodrama Lex and I had been in the previous summer at the Worm Creek Opera House in Prentice, the nearby town where we shopped and went to school.
“I don't know what it's about,” I said. “I just know it's something I don't want to know.”
The dialogue was getting worse.
Mom reached out to touch me. “Oh, honey, we didn't want to know, either. But it's something we have to face.” She looked down at the envelope in her hand.
“Let me read it myself,” I said.
I took the envelope in both hands, my eyes skimming over the return address. Kinney, McClardy, O'Houlihan, and Russo, with a street number and name in St. Paul, Minnesota.
It had the sound of a TV comedy team.
Or a law firm.
“It's just a letter,” I said as my mind began its familiar evasive action. We believe in being honest, true, chaste, benevolent… Joshua, Judges, Ruth, First Samuel…
“Selene,” Mom said.
She and Dad stood there like two ponderous grandfather clocks, ticking off the seconds of eternity.
“I'm okay, Mom.” I slid one of my stick-on finger-nails under the flap of the envelope even though it was already slit open at the top. It was addressed to Mom and Dad, so of course they had opened it.
Taking out two stiff sheets of paper, I unfolded them and read:
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Swensen:
My name is Henry Russo. My wife, Louisa, and I have good reason to believe that your adopted daughter, Selene, is in fact our natural-born daughter Micaela, who was kidnapped thirteen years ago when she was a child of three.
There was more in the letter, but I looked away, examining my stick-on nails, noticing how one of them was coming loose. Abby and I had each gotten a set of nails the week before to wear to the prom. I'd gone with Lex and Abby had gone with Raymond Lucas Frame. The guys spent the entire evening pretending to be impaled on our nails, like a couple of juvenile twelve-year-olds.
“Selene,” Mom said, as if she were prompting somebody on stage.
I wanted to answer, to run to Mom, to scream that I was her daughter, hers and Dad's, but I was frozen. My mind continued to seek an escape route: Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea… Boil one chicken until tender, then add onions and carrots and celery, cut in small pieces…
Dad came over and put his arm around me. “What it says, honey, is that Micaela Russo was kidnapped outside of a supermarket where she and her older sister, Heather, were playing while the mother ran inside for a moment to get something. The Russo family has had a private investigator searching for her all these years, and he's found clues that lead to you. Remember when you were fingerprinted for that child protection program a few years ago? It seems that they traced you through those prints.”
The Woman with the Big Black Hat was oozing out of the closet, and all those unnamed little terrors that hung in there with her were leaking out like water. There was the memory of a voice repeating, “Bad, bad, bad.” Over and over and over again.
My heart hammered as my mind raced through its words of refuge. I pledge allegiance to the flag… Rock of ages, cleft for me; Let me hide myself…
“They want to get in touch,” Mom said. “They want to talk to us. To you.” Her voice trembled, and she came to me, hugging me close. Dad's rough farmer's hands smoothed my hair, the calluses snagging on individual strands.
“I always knew she'd catch up with me,” I murmured.
“Who?” Lex stood tensely, a tall, gaunt knight ready to slay dragons, if someone would just point them out to him.
“I don't want to talk to them,” I said. My body felt unfamiliar. Cold. Clammy.
Dad nodded. “Then we'll talk to them. We'll have to talk to them.”
“Talk to who?” Lex asked.
We were getting back to melodrama dialogue again.
“I can't pay the rent today,” I said.
They all stared at me. Lex said, “Maybe I better go.”
Nobody said anything to him, so he stayed.
“Let's all have a piece of cake,” Mom said. “We'll feel better after we've had a bite to eat.”
A bite to eat was Mom's prescription for everything.
But how can you feel better when you've just found that you're not who you think you are? That you're somebody named Micaela Russo, total stranger?Down in the meadow where the green grass grows, there sat Micaela as pretty as a rose… No. Not Micaela. Who then?Come, come ye Saints; no toil nor labor fear…
“ I'll have a piece of that cake,” Lex said.
My world shifted back into focus. Good old bumbling Lex, solid and unchanging and everlastingly hungry.
I took a deep breath. “I'll have some, too.”
At least now I knew the reason for the cake, that special-occasion-three-story-mahogany-cake-with-cooked-Brownstone-Front-frosting.
• • •
The letter was not totally unexpected. I'd suspected for some time that there was something fishy about my first adoption. This is the way it was: Before I had come to live with Mom and Dad, I'd been adopted by Mom's sister, Dorothy, and her husband, who'd lived in Chicago. They gave me the name Selene because Dorothy had always been fascinated by the story of Grandpa's lost love, Selena Marie. Then, just a few months after they'd gotten me, they'd both been killed in a hideous car accident. You know, the kind that happens in books when the author wants to get rid of a person's parents. But this was no book. This was my life.
Dad and Mom told me years later how they'd flown to Chicago for the funeral and brought me back to Stone Creek with them, along with my adoption papers. They'd told me, too, that the only toy that I seemed concerned about bringing with me was a small china doll, about four inches high. The funny thing was that as soon as I'd gotten settled, I had wrapped the doll in one of my old dresses and put it into a shoe box, which I'd then hidden in the darkest corner of my closet.
It was still there. I never looked at it. I didn't know why, but it made me uneasy just to think about it.
Later Mom and Dad had officially adopted me, and I had become Selene Swensen. I scarcely remembered a thing from the years before that, except for the Woman with the Big Black Hat and the other fragments that I flashed on occasionally.
Four years ago, when I was twelve, I wanted to find out something about my birth parents, so Mom wrote to the agency listed on my first adoption papers they'd brought back from Chicago. The agency had closed down or something because the letter came back stamped “No such address.” They couldn't find out anything about it. Dad wanted to hire somebody to look into the whole thing, but Mom said we should just drop it. I think she'd suspected there was something not right about that first adoption, and she wasn't anxious to find out what it was.
For a while after that, my nightmares about the Woman with the Big Black Hat were even more vivid. All I could remember was being afraid of someone who wore a wide-brimmed black hat that shaded her face. Dad asked once how I could be sure it was a woman, but I couldn't tell him except to say that's what was in my memory bank.
I didn't want to know who that woman was. Nor did I want to be contacted by the people who'd written the letter. The Russos. They would just dig around until old tombs were opened and more terrors released. Besides, if that mother, Mrs. Russo, had been so dumb as to leave two little girls alone in front of a supermarket, she didn't deserve to have children.
I wasn't going to talk to them. No. Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah…
Mom sliced off big slabs of the moist, brown cake and put them on plates. Lex carried the plates to the kitchen table, pushing aside Mom's family history sheets to make room for them. Dad got forks from the silverware drawer. I stood there holding the letter that had just blown me apart from the only family I remembered. To make dumplings, heat one cup milk to boiling. Add one cup flour, one egg, one teaspoon salt. Beat until your arm falls
off. That's what Grandma told me. Beat until your arm falls off.
Lex pulled me over to the table, eager to get his teeth into that cake.
I sat down, listening to the old kitchen clock tocking to itself on the shelf over the daybed. Sunlight streamed in through the window, past Mom's enthusiastic geraniums, bright and happy on the sill.
“Look,” I said. “There's no way I want anything to do with that Russo family. Maybe I was Micaela Russo once, but now I'm Selene Swensen. They can't make me talk to them, can they?” I looked toward Dad.
He jabbed his fork into his wedge of cake. “I don't know, honey. I don't know much about this legal stuff. Apparently your birth father is a lawyer. I don't know what rights they have, but I imagine you're going to have to go see them. What do you think, Phyllis?”
“We've got adoption papers,” Mom said. “You belong to us.”
I cut off a piece of cake with my fork and put it into my mouth. It was sweet and familiar and comforting. Consoling.
“The papers could be phony,” I whispered. “Besides, if I was kidnapped, they probably don't mean a thing.”
The old clock bonged five times. Outside, Hoover barked.
Around a mouthful of cake, Lex said, “Want to know what I think?”
Dad looked at him as if he'd just noticed he was there. “What are you doing here, Lex? This is a family discussion.”
“I better go.” Lex shoveled the remainder of his cake into his mouth and stood up.
“I want to hear what you think, Lex,” I said.
He looked at Mom and Dad as if asking permission. Dad nodded.
“I think,” Lex said, “that the Russo family must have wanted to find you pretty bad if they've had a private eye searching for you all these years. I think they must be really excited to find out you're alive. You'll have to meet them.”
I shouldn't have asked him what he thought. I should have known soft-hearted Lex, who couldn't even hurt Hoover's feelings, would be thinking about how that other family felt.
But I wasn't going to think about that. I couldn't even handle how I felt.
“See you tomorrow, Lex,” I said, and as I watched him go out and fold his skinny length into his car, I began my litany again. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus…
I cried out in my sleep that night, and Mom and Dad came running just the way they'd done when I was little. They sat on either side of my bed, patting me and talking softly, reassuring me.
“Everything's all right,” Mom crooned. “Don't worry. We're here.”
Keith came too, skinny and awkward in his too-short pajamas. His long arms jutted out like handles as he stood there in the doorway asking, “What's the matter? What happened?”
We'd told him about the letter when he had come home from studying with a friend. Mom and Dad had planned it that way, dropping Keith off at Sam Blamire's house on the way home from Prentice so they could talk to me alone. He had come home later, and we'd told him then about the letter.
“Keith,” Dad said, “come on over here, son.” He patted the quilt beside him.
Keith's eyes owled at me as he stacked his long bones on the end of my bed. His voice cracked as he asked, “Were you having bad dreams, Selene?”
I nodded.
“I had some too,” Keith said. He reached out a hand to grasp mine.
I loved Keith. Of all my siblings, I was closest to Keith. He was my friend, my confidant, as well as my brother. Maybe it was because he'd been just a baby when I came to live in Stone Creek, and Mom had told me she was glad I was there to help take care of him. He'd been someone more helpless than I, and watching over him with Mom had taken my mind off the terrors I couldn't identify.
“I'm okay now, Keithie,” I said.
I looked at us all there in the warm glow of my yellow-shaded lamp. We could have been a painting titled Family in the Night. Our hands touched, and the darkness retreated to the corners of the room.
“Selene,” Keith said, “are you going to go live with that other family?”
“No,” I said. It was unthinkable. This was my family. Here. And then there was Tyler, and Naomi and Robert and baby Jeddy. And Grandpa and his never-ending search for Selena Marie. And all those cousins. And my goofy aunts, Norma and Delma and my Aunt Crystal, who was so drop-dead perfect that if she died the undertaker could scoop her up just as she was and put her in her coffin without having to adjust so much as a hair. And there was Uncle Bry, who could wiggle his ears. And Stone Creek itself, and the high school in Prentice, and the Worm Creek Opera House. And the red brick church on the hill that was like a second home, and my Young Women class where we'd been having lectures on activity night about interpersonal relations. And all my friends. And Lex. All the things that made up my life. My good life.
“No,” I repeated. “No way am I going to live with them, Keith.”
He slid up so he could wrap his skinny arms around me. “I don't care what the letter says,” he told me. “You'll always be my sister.”
But as I returned his hug, I thought of those lawyers, or whoever they were, who were listed on the envelope from St. Paul, Minnesota. Mr. Russo was a lawyer.
It was possible that I would have no more control over whether or not I stayed here than I'd had over my kidnapping all those years before.
Chapter 3
The next day was Saturday. I woke to hear the new little roosters in the chicken yard trying out their crowing, their voices cracking the same way Keith's did. The calves in the grassy pen by the creek bawled for their breakfast, which Keith took to them in buckets after their mothers had been milked. Numbtail, our cat, was having his daily meow-off with the Nelsens’ wandering Tom somewhere in the apple trees by the barn. Hoover was barking at something real or imagined.
Everything seemed so normal.
I squeezed my eyes shut, as if that could keep out the knowledge the letter had brought the day before. Yesterday I'd awakened as Selene Swensen, ordinary girl. This morning I knew I was Micaela Russo, kidnappee.
I concentrated on listening to the noises of the world that wasn't really my world, after all. Downstairs I could hear Mom rattling pans, making our traditional Saturday breakfast of pancakes with home-grown, home-canned gooseberries on top. I'd helped pick those gooseberries. I'd cleaned them and put them in bottles. Selene had done that, not Micaela.
Dad and Keith would be coming in soon, after milking the cows. Then Grandpa would ride up the hill on his old gray horse, Vinegar, for his weekly breakfast with us. Mom was always fussing at Grandpa to come to our house at least once a day for a good, solid meal, but he held it down to once, maybe twice a week. “I ain't agonna be the kind of old fud who can't pour himself a bowl of cornflakes now and then,” he always told Mom, which made her worry even more.
“You're not getting proper nutrition,” she would insist, but Grandpa refused to change his ways.
I knew I ought to get up. I generally rose early on Saturday mornings to help Keith with the calves or maybe try out the cooking skills I'd learned from Grandma before she died. But if I went downstairs, someone was sure to talk about the letter.
So I settled down in my nest of bedclothes and counted to a hundred in Spanish, repeated the 23rd Psalm, and ran through all the verses of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Anything to keep my mind busy. I wished I had Grandpa's storehouse of memorized poems, which could have kept me going all day. Grandpa could recite anything, including “The Cremation of Sam Magee.”
Downstairs the telephone rang. There was a pause, and then Mom called out that it was for me.
For a moment my heart hammered. Was it them calling?
But even they wouldn't do that, would they? Not so soon after the letter.
I put on my robe and went to the upstairs phone in Mom and Dad's room.
It was Lex on the other end, and the first thing he said was, “I didn't tell my mom.”
Like I'd been sprouting gray hairs over that all night. To tell the truth, I had given it a thought
or two. If Lex had told his mother, it would have gone out on her early-morning phone calls to her sister Erva over in Lago and her sister-in-law Belle in Prentice and her best friend Audrey right there in Stone Creek. Lex's mother's philosophy was, “I never repeat anything that isn't good, and boy howdy, this is good!”
“Thanks, Lex,” I said. “Are you coming over today? I thought we might go out with Grandpa this morning if he wants to.”
“Can't,” Lex said. “Got to help my dad. I just called to see if you're still planning to go to the auditions this afternoon for this summer's melodrama.”
I'd forgotten about that. “Yes. Thanks for reminding me. I'd love to be in another show this summer.”
“Well.” Lex cleared his throat. “I just wondered if you'd still be here this summer.”
“Of course I'll be here. Where else would I be?”
Lex cleared his throat again. “Uh. What about your other… what about the Russo family?”
Good old tactful Lex, tromping all over my notrespassing territory.
“What time are you picking me up for the auditions?” I said, ignoring his question.
“I'll come by at 2:30. The tryouts are at 3:00.”
“I'll be ready.”
After Lex hung up, there was no way I could avoid thinking about the news that letter had brought. Mom had called my sister, Naomi, the night before, and she'd wanted to speak to me for a few minutes. She'd offered to have her friend Paula, who'd gotten a job in St. Paul and moved there amidst many jokes about Paula going to St. Paul, check out the Russo family. But I didn't see what good that would do. I didn't want to think about it anyway.
Then Mom had called my brother Tyler, who thought for sure she was phoning to say his mission call had arrived. He must have been disappointed when her reason for calling was such a minor thing as my having been kidnapped as a baby, because he didn't ask to talk to me. Tyler was all wrapped up in his own life at the moment.
I got dressed and went downstairs. When Grandpa came, I told him I'd like to go out searching for Selena Marie that morning. After breakfast, I saddled my bay gelding, Radar, and Grandpa and I rode over to Washtub Ridge. We skidded down the gully to the river, poking behind rocks and peering into small caves, looking for the gleam of the silver bracelet or the flash of the diamond he'd given to her.
