Baked Alaska

by Josi S. Kilpack

  “Anyway,” Maggie continued, “I talked about leaving the cruise when we got to Juneau, and Lorraina told me to go ahead.” Tears filled Maggie’s eyes again, and she looked at the tissue she was holding in her lap. “Then she left the cabin. I had a mini-breakdown but tried to get centered for when she got back.” She paused, then took a ragged breath. “The next time I saw her, she was in the ship’s infirmary. I think . . . I think she was so upset about our argument that she went on that drinking binge. And now she’s in a coma.”

  Maggie stared at her hands, her tears falling down her face. She looked completely exhausted.

  “What time did this argument happen?” Sadie asked after a few seconds.

  “It was around seven,” Maggie answered. “We’d just gotten back from dinner.”

  So before Sadie had seen Lorraina at the photo gallery. “And did you stay in the cabin the rest of the night?”

  Maggie nodded.

  “And Lorraina never came back—even for a little while?”

  Maggie shook her head.

  Sadie thought for a moment. “What deck is your room on?”

  “Eleven,” Maggie said.

  Sadie had assumed as much, since that’s where she’d seen Shawn and Lorraina talking the first day. Lorraina had also gotten off on the eleventh floor at around 8:40 after Sadie had chased her from the photo gallery. Why would Lorraina get off on her floor but not go to her room? “You never left your room after seven o’clock?”

  Maggie shook her head again. The tissue in her hands was now a damp, fuzzy ball of disintegrating paper. “I watched a couple of movies, then finally fell asleep around midnight.”

  The inconsistency bothered Sadie. She couldn’t think of any other reason Lorraina would have gone to deck eleven except to return to her room. But according to Maggie, Lorraina never came back. Sympathy aside, Sadie didn’t know Maggie very well, and if Shawn was right, and if he and she weren’t siblings, that meant that Lorraina had lied about something. Something big.

  “What time did you find out about what happened to Lorraina?”

  “The medical staff woke me up with a phone call around two o’clock and confirmed my name and everything, then sent someone to talk to me.”

  Sadie handed Maggie a new tissue, then helped her clean up the last of the smudges. She thought through everything she’d learned and tried to come up with a hypothesis. Without any background information on Lorraina or her family, though, it felt far more like conjecture.

  “You should go back to your family,” Maggie said. “I really shouldn’t have come tonight.”

  “Yes, you should have,” Sadie said. “Come have some dessert with us. Let’s talk about this with everyone there and see what we can make of it.”

  Maggie shook her head. “Shawn already didn’t want to meet me. He certainly won’t want to spend time with me now. Maybe the captain can help set up a flight for me from Skagway tomorrow.”

  “Maggie,” she said, feeling a little desperate to have her stay, “I haven’t had much time to talk to Shawn, but I do know he has questions about Lorraina he wants answered, too.”

  Maggie didn’t respond, but Sadie was encouraged by the fact that she seemed to have moved through the worst of her emotion.

  “I think maybe you could help him find the answers he’s looking for. And maybe he could help you find some answers, too. This isn’t just a hopeful suggestion; Pete’s a retired police detective, and Shawn and I have run our own private investigating company. Obviously, there are some things going on that none of us understand, but if we could figure them out, I think we would all feel better. You are an essential part of that process. We could really use your help.”

  Maggie looked up, intrigued but cautious.

  “We like having answers to questions,” Sadie added. “And we’ve found that knowing the truth, even when it’s painful, is usually better than wondering about it. Maybe by the time Lorraina gets well, you will have a better idea of what’s going on.”

  Maggie nodded, as though not quite sure she wanted to commit but at least open to the idea.

  “Would you be interested in helping us?”

  Maggie looked into her lap again.

  Sadie allowed the silence to build for several seconds before she spoke again. “There are no wrong decisions here. If you want to go home tomorrow, I will completely understand. But if you want answers, and if you want to be a part of this process, we would welcome you. I promise to help you find whatever peace we can.”

  She waited with bated breath for an answer, and when Maggie lifted her head, Sadie knew by the spark of curiosity in the girl’s eyes that she was interested. Sadie knew that look all too well.

  Chapter 17

  Sadie could feel the tension between Maggie and Shawn as soon as they sat down.

  When the waiter came around asking if the newcomers wanted anything to eat or drink, Sadie shook her head. Breanna, Pete, and Shawn had nearly finished their drinks, and it looked like they had shared a large piece of cheesecake.

  “I really should get some sleep,” Maggie said after attempts at small talk fell flat. She didn’t mention Lorraina, and everyone else seemed to follow her lead. “Today’s been one of the longest days of my life. Can we talk more tomorrow?”

  “Of course,” Sadie said, standing and giving Maggie a hug.

  “I have some of Lorraina’s things,” Maggie said. “I can bring them with me tomorrow morning if you want, and we can look through them to see if we learn anything. I’m just worn out tonight.”

  “I could walk you to your room and get whatever you have,” Breanna offered, putting her napkin on the table. “That way we could get a head start.” She looked to Pete and Sadie for support, and they both agreed that was a good idea, if Maggie didn’t mind, which she didn’t.

  “Wonderful,” Sadie said, grateful for Breanna’s offer. “Should we meet for a late breakfast in the Tiara Room? Say, nine thirty?” That would give Sadie’s group a chance to meet up and talk about the situation before Maggie arrived.

  They all agreed to the place and time, and after Breanna and Maggie left the lounge, Sadie returned to her seat and zeroed her focus in on Shawn. She had liked the idea of Maggie joining them, but now that she was gone, Sadie was relieved to have the chance to talk to Shawn.

  The engines began to rumble, and Julie came over the intercom to inform them that they were leaving Juneau. She reminded the passengers to check out the daily onboard paper that was delivered to their rooms every evening and wished them all a good night.

  After Julie finished her announcements, Shawn, Sadie, and Pete moved closer to each other around the table, and Sadie updated them on the discussion she’d had with Maggie in the chapel. Shawn took a drink from his water glass. He looked nervous, and Sadie and Pete shared a glance acknowledging that they’d both noticed it.

  “So, fill in the blanks for us,” Pete said once Shawn had returned his glass to the table. “What don’t we know?”

  “There’s a lot I don’t know,” Shawn said, staring at his glass. He hadn’t used a coaster, and the glass had left a water ring on the Formica tabletop. He lifted the glass and set it back down an inch to the right, then did it again, making an interlocking chain pattern. Sadie had to sit on her hands to keep from taking the glass away from him. She wanted his focus, but needed his cooperation.

  “Tell us what you do know,” Pete amended.

  “I know that a woman named Lorraina Juxteson had a baby boy on April twelfth at the Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. That boy seems to be me, and the lady they took to Anchorage today seems to be Lorraina.”

  “You requested your original birth certificate?” Sadie asked. Upon adoption, a new birth certificate was created. Sadie had the paperwork explaining the process that could be used to get a copy of the original, ready for the day when her children might want or need it. They’d never asked. The irony of this did not escape her.

  “Seems to be?” Pete repeated. “You’
re not sure?”

  “I’m not sure of anything,” he said, sounding as worn-out as Maggie had.

  “Why don’t you start from the beginning?” Pete suggested. “How did you find her?”

  Sadie sensed that Pete already knew some of this, but she appreciated that he could bring her up to speed with the recap.

  Shawn nodded and took a breath. “I put up a basic profile on a few reunification websites last August, listing my date of birth, gender, ethnicity, and hospital—stuff from the certificate you had for me, Mom.” He glanced at her quickly, then continued. “Two months later, Lorraina replied with additional information like my birth weight and her full name, which matched the original birth certificate I was able to get via an official request from the county of record. We e-mailed for a while, and I was able to get enough information to do a background check that seemed to verify that she was who she said she was.”

  “So you do believe that the woman you met on this ship is your birth mother?” Pete asked. Sadie’s heart clenched just a little.

  Shawn hesitated but then nodded.

  “But you have some concerns as well,” Pete added.

  Shawn nodded again. “She had some arrests for things like bank fraud and check kiting. Not serious, and nothing recent, but enough for me to be on guard. Still, things were going well; she was really funny and...” He glanced at Sadie, and she sensed his hesitation to say whatever it was he was about to say. She was glad he’d paused. This wasn’t easy to listen to.

  “Anyway, in February, Lorraina asked if she could borrow a few hundred dollars; she was short on rent. I’d read about a lot of birth family reunions online, and one of the red flags is when either party asks for money from the other one. But it was just $300, and she swore she’d pay me back, so I loaned it to her.” He paused to take another sip of his drink. “She asked for another loan a month later, and I said no. I didn’t have it anyway, and I reminded her about the money I’d loaned her in February. She got mad about it, saying how she’d thought we’d be a family, and how she’d help me out if I needed it—stuff like that. It made me really uncomfortable, and I started pulling back.”

  Sadie nodded. His response seemed perfectly reasonable.

  “When she realized what was happening, she apologized about the money and for losing her cool. Then she told me she’d been sick for a really long time and that sometimes it made her moody and stuff. I still wanted some space, and while she respected that at first, after a week she was calling me four times a day and sending me all these e-mails asking me to call her. A few weeks later, she left a voice mail asking me to come to a doctor’s appointment with her—in Tennessee—and said she would explain everything.

  “I’d stopped calling her back by then—the conversations were just too frustrating—so I e-mailed her and told her I couldn’t miss school for her doctor’s appointment and to please back off. I said I would contact her when I was ready to talk. She got all ticked again, saying how I didn’t care about her. She started leaving these long messages on my voice mail. It was so weird.”

  Sadie agreed with him completely; it was very strange behavior.

  “I mean, I was worried about her, but... . I don’t know, I just needed some space to think about things, ya know? Even a week without her bombarding me would have helped, but she wouldn’t stop. By April, I was ignoring her completely, and then a couple of weeks after the whole doctor thing, she e-mails me to tell me I have a sister, even though she’d told me back in October that I didn’t have any brothers or sisters.”

  “You think she lied about Maggie?” Sadie asked.

  Shawn shrugged. “It felt like she was just pulling one thing after another to hook me in or something. I felt manipulated by the whole thing, and so I told her, again, that I needed some time to figure things out and I needed her to back off and stop contacting me for a while. In the next e-mail, she drops this bombshell about needing a liver transplant.”

  Sadie startled. She hadn’t seen that coming.

  “A liver transplant?” Pete repeated, leaning in and glancing at Sadie—apparently he didn’t know this part either. “From you?”

  Had Shawn really said a liver transplant or had both Sadie and Pete heard it wrong? Maybe he’d said river houseplant?

  “She said I needed to be tested as a possible donor, that she hadn’t told me sooner because she thought I would think that’s why she found me and stuff—it was all so crazy.”

  “You can’t just give someone your liver,” Sadie said.

  “You can give them part of it,” Pete said. “It’s called a living donor liver transplant. Is that what she called it, Shawn?”

  Shawn nodded. “Yeah, I read up on it, and it’s a legit procedure. They take part of the donor’s liver, which grows back eventually, and put that piece into the recipient. It eventually grows into a whole liver for the recipient too. They’re getting more and more common, but she has a really rare blood type and none of her family was a good match.”

  Shawn’s blood type was AB negative. Very rare. Did Lorraina have the same type?

  Shawn rubbed his hand over his forehead, looking tired. “But after everything had happened, I couldn’t help doubting her. I mean, as soon as I start pulling away, she tells me she’s sick, and when that doesn’t work, I suddenly have a birth sister, and when I still want my space, she needs me to give her part of my liver?” He shook his head. “I thought she was messing with me,” he said, his voice soft. He looked at Sadie. “I didn’t know what to think, Mom. I wanted to talk to you about all of it on this cruise and then decide what to do when I got back...and then Lorraina was here and sent me into this panic and then she went on a drinking binge last night.”

  “No one is blaming you for anything,” Sadie said, reaching out and giving his arm a squeeze.

  “I want to make sure I understand what you are telling us,” Pete cut in. “If you were tested and found to be a match, she wanted you to donate part of your liver to her?”

  Sadie felt like she was in The Twilight Zone. The whole transplant thing was ridiculous, like those stories of people waking up in their hotel bathtub without a kidney.

  “She never came right out and said that, but why else have me tested?”

  “When did she first tell you about the transplant, again?” He’d told them, but Sadie wanted to be sure.

  “About three weeks ago.”

  “And you didn’t get the test done because you didn’t believe her?” Pete asked.

  “From what I’d read about liver transplants, they were rarely something that happened quickly—not like a heart transplant or something like that. She said she’d been in liver failure for a couple of years, and I figured I had at least a few weeks to get things worked out with you and stuff.” He groaned slightly and shook his head. “I wish I could find the words to help you guys understand that what I felt was just so... . so out there, ya know? So weird, and not what I was expecting when I put up those profiles. It was like I hadn’t even caught up with wanting to find her before I found her, and I hadn’t gotten used to having her before she started bombarding me with these expectations I couldn’t understand.” He took a breath and scrubbed a hand across his forehead. “I just didn’t know what to think or what to believe or what to do.”

  “Of course,” Sadie said, smiling at him and rubbing his arm again. “You did the best you could do under the circumstances.”

  “So where does Maggie fit in?” Pete asked without allowing the tenderness to draw out too long. He was all business. Sadie appreciated his ability to keep Shawn talking.

  “I never even met her before this morning,” Shawn said. “And I can’t help but wonder if she is part of this game Lorraina seems to be playing with me. That’s why I didn’t want to meet her in the first place. I mean, Lorraina’s family says she doesn’t have a daughter, did you know that?”

  Sadie did, but wanted to hear Shawn’s information so she just nodded rather than get off track.

 
; Shawn shook his head. “I met some of Lorraina’s family when I went back at Christmas. They had a picture of me and everything, plus pictures of Lorraina for a few years after I was born and before Lorraina got all messed up with alcohol. I don’t know how Maggie could have been born during that time without them knowing about it; Maggie’s only two years younger than me. Lorraina would have only been eighteen years old back then, and she still lived with her sister. I don’t see how it’s possible.”

  “I think Maggie thinks she’s Lorraina’s daughter,” Sadie said. “Or at least she thought she was. You said Lorraina had told you back in October that you didn’t have any natural siblings. How did she explain the fact that, come April, you did?”

  “She said she wanted to wait until she and I knew each other better. She said she hadn’t wanted to get my hopes up, so she didn’t tell me until after she found Maggie.”

  “So,” Pete said, “it looks like we have three possibilities. One, Maggie is your sister and Lorraina was telling the truth and somehow hid Maggie’s existence from her family. Two, she isn’t your sister but was tricked by Lorraina into thinking she is. Or three, she isn’t your sister, knows it, and was going along with Lorraina’s story for some reason. Does that sound like it covers the possibilities in regard to Maggie?”

  Shawn and Sadie both pondered for a few seconds, then nodded.

  “Do you have any kind of verification about Lorraina’s liver disease?” Pete asked.

  “The doctor at the hospital tonight confirmed it. There was a big name for what she has and I can’t remember what it was, but it’s real and it’s really serious. They said there’s more testing they’ll need to do in Anchorage, but there’s a chance she’ll need a new liver in order to recover from this—assuming she’s strong enough for the operation.” Shawn hesitated, then said, “They took some blood from me at the hospital to see if I’m a match.”

  Both Sadie and Pete lifted their eyebrows. Shawn pulled up the sleeve of his sweatshirt, revealing a purple bandage wrapped around his elbow, holding a cotton ball in place. He looked at Sadie as he pulled the sleeve down again. “I don’t know what will come of it. Maybe I’m not a match, but knowing that she really is sick...well, it changes things I guess. Some things, anyway.”