Searching for Selene

by Lael Littke

  I had the thought that maybe I should look for fragments of Selene Swensen. A faded hair ribbon, lost when I was ten. A key chain dropped there by the river just last year. Perhaps if I found enough pieces, I could prove that I wasn't, and never had been, Micaela Russo.

  We didn't find anything, but it kept us busy until lunchtime. Until after the mail had come.

  There weren't any more letters that day. But I knew that Dad and Mom made a call to the Russos in St. Paul. I didn't ask what was said, and when Mom tried to tell me, I said I didn't want to know.

  • • •

  Lex and I were among the first hopefuls to show up at the Worm Creek Opera House for the melodrama auditions, which was both good news and bad. The good news was that we wouldn't have to sit around all afternoon listening to everybody else read, unless we wanted to. The bad news was that the three casting judges might forget how superlative we were by the time they'd heard all those who came after us.

  On the other hand, Mr. Duvall, who was the speech and drama teacher at Prentice High during the school year and who directed most of the summer productions at the Opera House, had worked with both me and Lex before and knew our abilities. Which again could be either good news or bad.

  “We're starting the season off with a real winner,” Mr. Duvall said to all of us sitting in the audience seats. “It's called Hitched in January, Ditched in June. There are four pretty big parts as well as a number of smaller ones.” He picked up a stack of playbooks from a small table. “Lex, you come up and read the part of Hector Pugh, the villain.” Looking at the girl sitting next to me, he said, “Judy, you have a go at the dual parts of Astrid and Zorina, the twin sisters.”

  Lex twirled an imaginary mustache as he walked up the steps to the stage. I watched Judy enviously as she joined him, smiling confidently. A dual part! A chance to be both the good sister and the bad.

  It wasn't until Judy was reading the speeches that it struck me how appropriate it would be for me to play the dual role. Selene could play the good sister, and Micaela the bad.

  Lex wasn't a very convincing Hector, probably because his pink face couldn't look villainous enough. Mr. Duvall had him switch and read instead the part of Ab Higgins, the bumbling sheriff. He was a natural for that one.

  Judy was better as Astrid, the innocent sister, than she was as Zorina, the bad one, so Mr. Duvall let her read the lines for Goldie Hart, a dance-hall girl with a heart of gold, a standard melodrama character.

  He asked me to read the parts of Astrid and Zorina.

  I loved acting. I loved having everything worked out ahead of time so that all you had to do was follow the script. Things went the way they were written, in plays. You didn't change everything halfway through.

  I knew I read the lines well, especially at the end of the scene where Goldie is trying to talk Astrid out of throwing herself from the school's bell tower. Astrid eventually runs from the tower, and Zorina appears almost immediately to threaten Goldie. It would require fast costume changes.

  Lex and I didn't stay long after we had read. Mr. Duvall said that anyone who had finished could go, and that he would put up a cast listing both at school and at the theater probably by Tuesday.

  Before we went home, we walked down the street toward the Arctic Circle to get burgers and fries. Turning around, I looked back at the marquee of the Opera House, which used to be the plain old Grand movie theater before somebody got the idea of presenting live productions on weekend nights during the summer and movies the rest of the time.

  “Wouldn't it be great,” I said, “if we both got leading parts and they put our names up there on the marquee?”

  Lex turned around too, and we both walked backwards, imagining how it would be.

  “I can see it now.” Lex put his two hands up as if to make a frame. “Lex and Selene, the Pride of Prentice.” He glanced at me. “Or are you going to go by Micaela from now on?”

  Obviously he wasn't going to let me forget my other identity.

  • • •

  I hadn't yet called my best friend, Abby, to tell her what had happened to me. I don't know why I hadn't. Certainly it was the kind of thing you'd share with a best friend. She'd been absent from school with a cold on Friday, and I was too busy on Saturday with the auditions. I didn't see her on Sunday because she was still sick and didn't come to church that day. In the afternoon I told myself I had to study, even though there was only one more full week of school.

  On Monday the next letter came. It was waiting for me when I got home. Abby still hadn't come back to school, so I hadn't had to make any decisions that day about telling her.

  This time the letter was addressed to me. The return address was “Mr. and Mrs. Henry Russo.”

  I wanted to burn it.

  “You'd better open it,” Mom said. I noticed that her family history charts, which generally lived on our kitchen table, had been stacked neatly on the counter. Had she crossed my name off all of them before she put them away?

  “I don't want to read it,” I said.

  Mom sighed. “I know, Selene. This is such a hard thing. But I've been thinking about what Lex said. About that other family. I've been trying to imagine how I'd feel if somebody had taken my child away thirteen years ago and I'd just found out she was still alive.”

  I put my hands over my ears.

  Mom came over to put her arms around me. “We're in this together, you know. We can work it out somehow, together. You're not alone, sweetie.”

  Holding me away from her, she smiled. “You know what they say: If you resist something, you give it strength.”

  “Where'd you get that, from the Reader's Digest? “Immediately I regretted my words. Mom reads a lot and is always using gems of wisdom she picks up. “I'm sorry, Mom.”

  Her face reddened a little, but she didn't scold me. She'd been really subdued since that first letter arrived on Friday.

  “Shall I open it for you, Selene?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  Mom reached out and took my letter. She got her red kitchen shears from the junk drawer by the refrigerator and cut open the envelope, then tried to give it back to me.

  “You read it,” I said.

  The letter turned out to be several letters. The top one was from Mr. and Mrs. Russo. “Dear Selene,” Mom read. “Although we still think of you as Micaela, we understand your name is Selene now. It's a nice name, and we'll call you that, if that's what you want us to do.”

  “Big of them,” I muttered.

  Mom glanced at me. “Selene, just listen.” She looked back at the letter. “You can't begin to imagine the joy we feel now that we know you're alive and well. We'd like to talk to you, hear your voice. We don't want to push you too fast, but would you call us when you feel you are ready?”

  That was all there was to that letter, except a note at the bottom that said, “Your three sisters and your brother have enclosed letters too.”

  I hadn't even thought about having sisters and brothers other than the older sister mentioned in the first letter. The older sister who had let me be kidnapped. Probably glad to get rid of me.

  The letter from her was even shorter than the one from Mr. and Mrs. Russo.

  “Dear Selene, I still think of you as a funny little three-year-old kid with drooping pants and sticky little hands who was always asking for ice c'eam. I guess you've changed a lot since then.” It was signed “Heather,” and there were little penciled pictures of flowers all around the borders of the paper.

  I took the other three small notes from Mom. The first one said, “I'm eleven and I like to read. What do you like to do? Do you like horses? Love, Brittany.”

  Another letter said, “Dear Slene, How are you? I am just fin. I named my favrit doll for yu. Her nmae was Micaela for my hole lif, but now I chaged it to Slene. Love, Chelsea, age 7.”

  I couldn't help smiling a little. Obviously spelling wasn't one of Chelsea's strong points.

  The last letter was from Kenyon,
age 9. All he said was, “I didn't think I needed any more sisters, but it's okay for you to come see us. Your fiend, Kenyon Carlisle Russo.”

  Besides the letters, there were two pictures in the envelope. One was of a family, with a mother and father, both dark haired, and four children. The oldest, Heather, wore her dark hair short and stiffly spiked. Brittany and Kenyon and Chelsea stood in a solemn, stair-step line.

  They all had dark hair.

  Like mine.

  The other photo was a baby picture. A round baby face with toothless gums and a head covered with dark fuzz grinned flirtatiously at the camera. Underneath was written, “Micaela, age five months.”

  They should not have included the pictures. Now the family was real. And it wasn't fair to show how I looked more like them than like the blond Swensens.

  They could have at least kept the baby picture of Micaela. Of me.

  Thrusting the letters and pictures at Mom, I ran upstairs where I snatched my long-retired teddy bear from a shelf and threw myself across my bed. Then, for the first time since I'd received the crushing news, I cried.

  Chapter 4

  On Tuesday Abby was waiting for the school bus with the other Nelsen kids. Climbing aboard, she plopped herself beside me and started right in to talking.

  “So have you got a new best friend or something?” Her eyes were wide and her voice was louder than it needed to be. “How come I don't know anything about this big problem you're facing? How come I don't even know what it is? How come somebody else had to let me know the world fell in on you? How come—”

  “Abs,” I interrupted. “I'll tell you later.” I made an eye-sweep of the others on the bus, hoping she'd get the idea that I'd rather not talk about this when people were listening.

  Since my family and the Nelsens lived at the end of the bus route, we were the first to be picked up, so there were just Keith and I and Abby and five of her siblings in the bus so far. Plus Chester, our bus driver, who turned his head a little so he could hear better. I hoped he wouldn't crank it so far that he'd drive us into the creek that ran alongside the narrow road.

  Abby looked around too. She lowered her voice but went right on talking. “So what's the problem? Keith already knows, doesn't he? And my family—they're not going to tell anybody. So who…” She paused when her eyes hit Chester. “Well, okay. I'll whisper.”

  We'd all had things we said on the bus come back to us from various sources, so we knew Chester entertained his friends by passing along what he heard. Like when Abby told me she really chilled for Matt Millar, one of our school's major football jocks. Who knows whom Chester told, but it eventually got to Matt himself, who now grinned knowingly at Abby whenever he saw her and wrapped his arms around himself and shivered.

  “So who told you about my problem?” I whispered to Abby.

  “She didn't mean to,” Abby whispered back. “In fact, she was pretty mortified when she found out I didn't know. How come you didn't tell me?”

  “Who?” I said. “Who was mortified?”

  For a moment I didn't think Abby would tell me, but then she cupped a hand around my ear and whispered, “Naomi.”

  Naomi? My sister?She was spreading the story around?

  “She didn't mean to,” Abby said again. “She called to talk to Mom about Molly.”

  Molly was one of Abby's sisters, and Naomi was Molly's third-grade teacher.

  “So?”

  “So I answered the phone, and I go, ‘How's Selene? I haven't talked to her since I've been out of school sick.’ And Naomi goes, ‘She was really flattened by that letter from Minnesota. I'm glad she has a good friend like you to help her through this.’ I'm like, ‘What letter?’ And she's all embarrassed and goes, ‘I was sure she would have told you,’ and then she clams up and I can't get another word out of her. So what's going on?”

  “Abs,” I began. “Abby, I didn't know how to tell you about it.” I wondered if I should say that I hadn't had a chance, which wasn't exactly the truth. On the other hand, it might have been sort of the truth because Abby comes from a family of ten talkative people, and whenever I go to her house I'm lucky to get a word in edge-wise.

  But I didn't say that. I ended up lamely with, “You were sick and all. I didn't think I should come over.”

  “Didn't know how to tell me?” Abby's voice rose as she repeated my earlier words. “So why would you have to come over? Ever hear of a telephone?” She put her right hand up beside her ear, with the thumb and little finger extended to form a phone. “Read my lips, Selene. You could have said, ‘Abigail, dear friend, let me tell you something devastating.’ Or maybe ‘Abby, beloved buddy, you should be the first to know this.’ Or even ‘Abs, I need an understanding ear.’ Right?”

  Slumping down in her seat, she pulled her harmon-ica from the huge denim bag she called a purse and blew a few bars of “The Dying Cowboy.” That harmonica is like an extension of Abby's arm. You can usually tell how she's feeling by what she plays.

  “Dying Cowboy” meant pretty yucky. But before I could say anything, she straightened up again. “Well? Aren't you going to tell me now?”

  The school bus drifted to the left, which meant Chester was all ears, which is the literal truth because they stick out like satellite dishes. Abby's brothers and sisters were leaning close to hear too, all of them quiet for a change. Even Keith hunched over the back of the double seat where Abby and I sat, waiting to hear the whole story again.

  I raised my purple loose-leaf in front of my face. “Abby,” I whispered behind it. “Dear friend. Beloved buddy. Pal. Believe me when I say I couldn't. And I can't tell you about it now either.”

  Abby glanced around at all the interested faces. “Then when?”

  “After school. Come to my house and I'll show you everything.”

  I thought about those pictures of the Russo family. Of Heather and Brittany and Chelsea and Kenyon.

  The picture of Micaela.

  I lowered the loose-leaf to my lap. “Look,” I said in an overloud voice. “All that happened was I tried out for a part in this summer's melodrama at the Opera House. It's a great part where I'll play two different people, if I get it. Now, is that such a big deal?”

  That was for Chester's benefit. Let him think all the fuss was about a part in a play. No way was I going to let him know what had happened. Not yet. It would be general knowledge soon enough.

  Abby caught on. “So did you get the part?”

  “I'll find out later today.” I raised my voice a little more. “I'll be sure to let you know too, Chester.”

  Chester's neck reddened and he turned his head back to look at the road.

  Abby and I talked about homework and the coming summer and guys as the bus picked up the rest of its load. When Lex got on, he sat across the aisle from Abby and me, and I stared at him, willing him not to mention my problem. But Lex is a walking corollary to Murphy's Law: If there's anything that's the wrong thing to say, Lex is going to say it.

  “Heard any more from St. Paul?” he asked, leaning toward me. At least he kept his voice low.

  Beside me I felt Abby stiffen. “So I guess everybody and his dog knows, except me.”

  “Abs,” I whispered. “I'll explain everything after school. It's complicated.”

  But something had come down in front of Abby's blue eyes, shutting me out. For the rest of the trip she slumped down with her harmonica, playing, “Though Deepening Trials Throng Your Way.”

  And I sat there angry at the Russo family who had barged unasked into my life with their letters and pictures of dark-haired kids who looked like me. Angry at the person who'd kidnapped me all those years ago and caused all this mess. Angry at myself because I was already becoming somebody I didn't even know. Selene Swensen would never have held out on her best friend, hurting her by not telling her the devastating news right away. So what kind of a girl was this Micaela Russo?

  I was angry all day at school. I was so angry that I didn't hear Miss deWinter sayin
g my name in social studies class until she'd repeated it several times.

  “Selene,” she said. “Selene Swensen, are you there? Can you tell me the answer?”

  “I can't even tell you the question,” I said. “Would you give me a clue?”

  Somebody across the aisle snickered.

  “The question is, ‘Can you name five propaganda techniques?’” Miss deWinter said patiently.

  It must take a lot of patience to be a teacher. You spend all those years learning how to teach and boning up on some boring subject, then nobody wants to know it anyway. Miss deWinter was new at it, just out of college and still sure she could make us inhale her lectures and exhale the right answers. Not like old gray Mrs. Seldon who knew we'd never digest split infinitives and dangling participles, so she just muttered to herself through five classes a day while we combed our hair or passed notes to each other.

  “Propaganda techniques,” I said. “One. Glittering generalities. Two. Half-truths.” I scanned my brain. Nothing more was in there.

  “It was in the reading assignment for last night,” Miss deWinter prompted gently.

  I stared stonily at her. “So why don't you read it yourself if you want to know?” It was like someone else had taken over my brain and was making me say horrible things against my will.

  She blinked. “Selene, it isn't like you to be mouthy. Is something wrong?”

  Yes, something was wrong. My whole life was wrong. Or was it Micaela Russo's life that was wrong?

  “No,” I said. “Everything is tutti-frutti.”

  I wished she would yell at me and send me to The Worm down there in the dungeon by the furnace room. That's where the incorrigible cases were sent, down there to Mr. Wormley, who lectured about the privilege of a free education and the importance of an informed citizenry, but more often about the history of Prentice, back when it was called Worm Creek. The bad people were sent to Mr. Wormley. The rude-to-teachers ones. The disruptive ones. The angry ones.