Firebloods

by Hays, Casey

  I squeeze my eyes shut. I have got to stop overanalyzing every little thing. Just open it, Jude.

  Before I can talk myself out of it, I grab a pair of scissors from a pen holder on the desk and climb right up into my mother’s bed, shoving the comforter out of my way. On my knees, I dig one point of the scissors into the end of the envelope, right under the edge of the tape. It punctures through, and I cut the entire end open.

  My nerves twitch. I drop the scissors, and then I sit very still for just a few minutes. There’s no rush.

  A few minutes turns into ten. My phone rings in my pocket, and I nearly jump out of my skin. I bound off the bed, heart pounding, and pull out my phone. It’s Frankie.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, Jude. We have our meeting with Nancy Babbitt at two. Are you driving, or me?”

  I shake my head once to clear it. That’s right. We’re going to Reno today.

  “Um… you can pick me up.”

  “Okay. Be ready at one fifteen.”

  I click the end button. The open end of the envelope stares at me like a big, gaping eye annoyed at the interruption. Okay… let’s get it over with. I swipe up the envelope quickly and dump out all the contents.

  I had no speculations as to what I would find, so I’m not surprised to see another stack of documents, along with some photos. I flip through a few pictures of a baby, two or three months old, maybe. I assume it’s me. Mom stands in front of a purple orchid cradling me in her arms in one. In another, my dad feeds me with a bottle.

  I pick up the first document. It’s a registry form that allowed my parents to bring a “three-month-old female child” into the country. I stare at it, warped with confusion for a second, but it doesn’t take long for that speculating I wasn’t doing before to kick in. I toss the registry aside and sift through the other papers. There it is: a Costa Rican birth certificate—with my name on it.

  I was born in Costa Rica?

  Hesitantly, I move on to the next document. This one is thick and stapled in the left corner. I skim it. It’s a manual outlining adoption procedures in Costa Rica. The back page contains a list of orphanages. Only then does a panicky-watch-out-I’m-going-to-throw-up feeling invade my stomach. I shuffle through a few more uninteresting items until I find what I’m looking for. I hold up the thick certified document.

  An adoption certificate.

  I stare at my name typed out in thick blue letters.

  I begin to shake, my hands trembling until my name blurs right out of sight. Images tumble in on me as my mind tries to piece this new information together. Information that doesn’t fit into the life that belongs to me.

  I was born in Carson City—at the same hospital where my mom works—and I’ve lived here all my life. I heard the story of my birth at least a hundred times. I was so tiny that Dad was afraid to hold me, so he stood outside the nursery window that first day for an entire hour just watching me sleep. He swore that when I was only three days old, I looked right at him and said, “Da da.” Mom tried to say it was only gas, but Dad was convinced that I was a prodigy of some kind who would be talking in complete sentences by six months.

  But if I was born in Costa Rica…

  I lose my grip on the certificate. It flutters to the floor and whips up under the bed. I stand stock still, my mind completely fogging over in the shock.

  This can’t be happening. This cannot be happening!

  I have to get out of this room. The stifling scent of my mother, the leftover traces of my dad, it’s all suddenly too much to bear. And so I flee… leaving all the proof of the lie my life has been scattered across my mother’s bed like leftover debris after a natural disaster.

  ***

  “Hi. It’s me.”

  “Jude?” Jonas’s voice sounds so close in my ear. “What’s wrong? Are you crying?”

  I bite down hard on my lip, pulling the tears to a halt. “Can you come over? Please?”

  “Yeah. I’ll be there in ten. Hang tight.”

  He doesn’t ask me another question. Jonas has known me long enough to read when I’m upset, and he never wastes time trying to pull things out of me. I need him; he gets to me.

  I wait on the porch. I can’t stand to be inside. The house, thick with betrayal, stifles me. My mind runs on a loop, continuously returning to the blue letters of my name and making me frantic about what other things in my life I may not know. What other secrets has Mom kept from me all these years? And this ring. This damned ring.

  Angry, I wrench it off and throw it into the yard. One second. Two. I bound after it and drop to my knees, digging through the grass until I find it, the spot of red glaring at me. My sigh brings on the tears again. I slip it on and bury my face in my hands.

  This is how Jonas finds me. His Tundra roars into my drive, and he’s out the door a half second after the engine dies.

  “Jude?”

  He squats and lays a tentative hand on my shoulder. That’s all it takes for me to break. I leap into his arms, causing him to lose his balance and fall back into the grass, but this doesn’t stop him from gathering me up, tight and safe.

  “What’s wrong, Gallagher? Did something happen?”

  Answering him is impossible. I heave uncontrollable sobs that ripple through my entire body in waves. Jonas tightens his hold on me, his heartbeat kicking up a notch. I don’t mean to scare him, but I can’t speak. I just need a minute. I need to hold on to this one true constant in my life. Jonas. He’s never faltered, never thrown me a curve ball, never flinched or changed or let me down. Until recently, I have never kept a single secret from him. I press into him, take in the smell of his shampoo, and hook my arms as tight as I can around his neck.

  “Jude,” he whispers. “Talk to me. What’s the matter?”

  I don’t tell him. Once I get my emotions under control, I show him. I drag him through the house and up the stairs to my mom’s bed littered with evidence of who I really am. And the worst part? I don’t even know who that is. No one ever bothered to tell me. And none of this… not a single shred of the stupid documents in that envelope gives me one answer about why I can understand Jezik or feel Kane’s emotions or hear him in my head.

  For a minute, Jonas looks as confused as I first did. He picks up my birth certificate, reads it, looks at me.

  “You were born in Costa Rica?”

  I sniffle, dropping to my knees to grab the adoption certificate from under the bed. He takes it from me, a wary look in his eye. But when he reads it, the expression on his face literally melts into shock.

  “What?” he whispers.

  “Yep.” I wipe the back of my hand across my runny nose and climb into my mom’s bed, curling my knees up to my chest. My stomach hurts.

  Jonas takes another minute to read through the entire document again before he lowers himself onto the edge of the bed, pinching it between his fingers. “They never told you?”

  “Never,” I whisper.

  “Why?” He looks at me. “Isn’t that something a person should know?”

  I shrug, tumbling over and balling my fists up against my eyes as I feel the tears threatening. I have no explanation. Maybe my parents had their reasons; maybe they were going to tell me one day. Or maybe they were never going to say one word. Maybe… if I hadn’t opened that envelope, I never would have known. Would that have been better? Well, I know one thing… I wouldn’t feel like crap right now. I’d be clueless, living my little life in complete oblivion.

  At the moment, every fiber in me wishes I’d left that stupid envelope alone. But it’s too late for all that.

  Jonas lays a hand on my knee, and we’re both silent for a really long time. I want to sleep; I want to drift off and forget my troubles. I want to wake up and find out this was all a really horrible nightmare.

  “Listen,” Jonas finally says, and I drag myself to a sitting position and focus on him. I’m sure I look hideous with my puffy, red eyes and matted hair, but he overlooks this. He grabs my hand, squeezin
g it. “It’s not the end of the world, right? So you’re adopted. It doesn’t change one thing about who you are. Not to me. And it won’t matter to Kane or Devan or Frankie, either. You’re still our Jude.”

  I give him a teary-eyed-squishy-faced-ugly-cry smile, nodding. My lip trembles. He always says the right thing at the right time, stabbing an arrow through my heart and making me emotional all over again. That’s what friends are for, I guess. I stretch my arms out, and he smiles and lets me tug him into my embrace.

  “I’m not saying it wasn’t really shitty of your parents to keep this from you.” I meet his blue eyes. A piece of my hair is plastered to my cheek, and he peels it off and smooths it into place. “They should have told you.”

  “Yeah,” I whisper. “So—do you—do you think I should confront my mom?”

  “Uh, yeah.” He says this without hesitation.

  “She’s going to know I went snooping.”

  He just shrugs as if that’s the most ridiculous reason I could ever come up with for not going straight to my mom and demanding answers. The look on his face makes me smile for the first time today. I nod.

  “Okay.”

  “Okay. It’s settled.” He scans the room. “So… this is the sanctuary, huh?”

  “It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?”

  He picks up my parents’ wedding picture, lifts a brow. “Your mom was hot. I don’t remember that about her when I was three.”

  “Haha.” I half-sniffle, half-laugh. “Very funny.”

  He creases his brows. “Hmmm….”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.” He glances at me briefly before his eyes return to the picture. “It’s just… you look exactly like her.”

  I take the picture from him. People have always said that. It’s a compliment, but I don’t see it. Aside from the dark hair and eyes, our noses are different… and our lips. My mom? She’s much prettier than I.

  Jonas stands, walks around the bed, and examines another picture on top of the dresser. “Yep. You look like her here, too.”

  With his back to me, he angles the picture over his shoulder. I glance at it and lower my eyes to the one in my hands.

  “I’m thinking in light of our discovery, that’s pretty impossible.”

  “You know…” He replaces the picture and faces me, hands on hips. “I read this study once in health class that said kids who are adopted can start resembling their adoptive parents based on diet and environment and economics and stuff.” He saunters through the room, exploring with his eyes, strumming the neck of my dad’s guitar once as he passes it. “Even their personalities can be influenced by all that. Maybe that’s what happened to you.”

  “Or maybe my mom and I just look like every other dark-haired, browned-eyed girl in the world.” I set the picture back on the nightstand. “I’m sure my parents did their homework to find the perfect baby that would fit right in to their little family.”

  Jonas thinks on it. “Yeah… that’s probably more accurate.”

  I take that moment to release a huge sigh. I’m emotionally exhausted. I glance at the clock. Frankie will be here in an hour. I’m so not in the mood for a road trip.

  “Jon—”

  I break off, scanning the room. Jonas has disappeared, but my dad’s closet door stands ajar, the light seeping through the crack. I hop off the bed and swing it fully open.

  “Jonas, what are you doing?”

  “Wow. You weren’t kidding.” He looks at me over his shoulder and cracks a knuckle. “You walk in here, and it’s like your dad is still alive.”

  I curl my fingers around the edge of the door and rest my cheek against them. It’s true. Mom has left everything so perfectly in order that you’d think any minute now my dad would show up looking for his favorite shirt. He’d find it too, right here next to his suit jacket.

  “No offense,” Jonas brushes his fingers the length of a black sleeve. “But this is kind of morbid.”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” I say. “Mom just… she can’t let go.”

  He faces me. “What about you?”

  “I’m good.” I offer him a weak smile. “I mean, finding out I’m adopted sucks, but I’m used to Dad not being here. It’s getting better.”

  He clutches my arm and pulls me into a big Jonas bear hug.

  “I played the piano yesterday.”

  “You did?” I nod, my face bobbing against his chest. “That’s awesome.”

  “Yeah. It felt good too.”

  We pull apart, but he keeps hold of my shoulders, his eyes piercing me. “We’re gonna get through this whole adoption thing, just like we got through your dad’s funeral. And we’re gonna come out stronger on the other side. No excuses, okay?”

  Here come those damn tears again. I suck my lower lip between my teeth to staunch them, and I nod fiercely.

  “You want me to be there when you talk to your mom?”

  I blink a few times, sniffle once. “Maybe.”

  “Okay,” he nods. “You say the word, and I’m here. Like always.”

  “Okay,” I whisper.

  He pulls me into one more hug before we get the heck out of that sanctuary.

  Twenty-four

  We fly down I-580. Frankie in her excited exuberance puts the top down on the Mustang before she comes for me. I’m grateful for the wind whipping up all around us. It makes conversation harder and keeps me from having to divulge my latest heartbreak. I’m not ready to talk about it yet, not even with Kane. He texted me just before Frankie showed up to tell me he was thinking about me while he slaved in his dad’s garage. Whatever. He loves that job.

  Despite what Jonas said, I have this unreasonable fear that my being adopted might change how Kane feels about me, and I can’t handle that thought. I’ve just begun to come to grips with the idea of us as a couple. I can’t take another adjustment. Not now.

  By the time we reach the parking lot at Willow Springs, my hair is a ratted mess. Strands of Frankie’s frizzy locks stand out all over her head even though she braided it as tight as she could get it. Of course, her hair has never once cooperated with her wishes. Not in all her life.

  “Ms. Babbitt said she’d meet us in the lobby.” She points toward the row of glass windows lining the front area.

  I drag a brush through my hair, scanning the front entrance. “And she still doesn’t know why we’re really here?”

  “Nope.”

  Frankie shoves open her door and climbs out, dragging her backpack after her. I slam my door and adjust the strap of my shoulder bag, apprehension rocking my spine. I don’t know how today will go, but every step toward proving the existence of Firebloods is one step closer to exposing Kane. I twist my ring once.

  The building looks like any other clinic I’ve seen. A well-maintained, squared-off building the color of earth. I follow Frankie up the walk. She pushes through the glass door, holding it for me. A young guy sits at a visitors’ check-in desk off to the side. Frankie hands him her best smile as she approaches. I trail behind her, wringing my hands and sweeping the large lobby with my eyes. Nothing about this field trip feels good to me.

  “Hello. I’m Frances Melmack. I have an appointment with Nancy Babbitt.”

  The guy taps a few keys and studies his computer screen. He picks up a phone and presses a button.

  “Nancy, your two o’clock is here.” He nods and hangs up. “She’ll be right down, if you want to have a seat.”

  We find a couple of chairs and sink into them. A sign on the wall outlines visiting hours, which explains why we’re the only ones in the lobby. The guy at the desk lifts his head above his computer enough to look at us.

  “Help yourself to the water.” He points to a cooler in the corner.

  “Thanks, we’re fine,” Frankie says. I sink a little lower in my seat and hug my bag to my chest.

  “I don’t have the best feeling about this,” I whisper. “How’re you planning to spark up a conversation about… you know?
”

  “Chill out, Jude. I have it all under control. You just follow my lead.”

  “I plan to keep my mouth shut.”

  “Even better.”

  A double door near the check-in desk swings open, and a woman in her early forties dressed in white slacks and a dark blue blouse pokes her head out.

  “Frankie?”

  Frankie shoots to her feet.

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “Well, look at you!” Nancy Babbitt lets the door fall closed behind her, crosses the room, and drags the stunned Frankie into a hug. “You were just a little thing last time I saw you.”

  “Oh,” Frankie smiles, regaining her composure and readjusting her glasses that slip to the side. “I’m sorry. I don’t remember you.”

  “You wouldn’t.” She smiles wide and reaches a hand toward me. “Nancy.”

  I stand. “Hello. I’m Jude.”

  “Jude. What a cool name. Well, come on girls.” She spins, addressing the boy at the desk. “Jack, we’ll be in my office if you need anything.”

  “Sure thing.” He tips his fingers off the side of his head in a salute. I see he’s playing a video game on his phone as we pass him.

  Nancy runs a key card over a panel, which yields a buzzing noise. On the other side of the double doors, a long corridor lined with offices greets us. Nancy swings an arm around Frankie’s shoulders, squeezing her.

  “How’s your father, Frankie? We sure miss him around here.”

  “He’s great.” Frankie’s arms pinned to her sides make her look like she’s wearing a straight jacket. I smirk to myself from behind them. Considering the circumstances, this isn’t far-fetched. “When did we meet?”

  Nancy stops in front of an office, a plaque with her name on it stuck to the door, and ushers us through. “Oh, you had to have been six or seven the few times I saw you, and we hardly had a chance to really get to know each other. I was a busy nurse with several patients back then. Chuck only brought you here a few times.”

  “I see,” Frankie nods.