What She Inherits

by Diane V. Mulligan

  Frustrated and exhausted, Angela drove to the lawyer’s office, and when his assistant insisted he had meetings all morning, she sat obstinately in the lobby, refusing to schedule an appointment, demanding she be seen immediately. Finally the assistant relented and alerted him to her presence, and he appeared in the lobby.

  “Were you aware that my mother had a safe deposit box?” Angela asked, when he asked why she was there.

  “Let’s go to my office,” he said, reaching out a hand to guide her.

  Angela didn’t care where she discussed her mother’s business. Her mother was dead! She didn’t want to walk down the hall and discuss things calmly. She wanted answers. Now.

  “Did you know about the safe deposit box?”

  “I learned about it last week,” he said. “Now, if you’ll just—”

  “Were you going to tell me?”

  “Of course, but I don’t see what the rush is. I thought we’d go over everything once I made all the arrangements. Will you please follow—”

  “I need to get into that box,” Angela said, crossing her arms and standing her ground.

  “Miss Ellis, this is really not the place to discuss personal matters.”

  “I would like you to accompany me to the bank right now,” Angela said. She was so tired. If she could only get the contents of the box, maybe she could go home and get some rest. But first she needed answers, and the box was the only place left for her to seek them.

  “That won’t be necessary,” he said.

  How dare he refuse her! He worked for her. She opened her mouth to protest, but he spoke before she could.

  “I have already emptied the box. The contents are in my office. So if you’ll please follow me,” he said softly, and then he turned and walked down the hallway.

  In his office, he told her to sit, and this time she complied. He moved a stack of file folders on his desk and produced a slim folder.

  “I’m afraid there wasn’t much in there that’ll you find useful. No secret treasure, no family jewels.”

  He handed her the folder and then leaned on the edge of his desk as she opened it and flipped through. Birth certificates, social security cards, the title for her mother’s car, her parents’ marriage certificate—it was ordinary records. Angela had expected more than this. She turned back to the birth certificates—her mother’s, her father’s, Ryan’s, and her own.

  She took out her birth certificate and studied it. On the line for her mother was her own mother’s name: Deborah Ellis. On the line for father, Richard Ellis. They really were her parents. The birth certificate said so as clear as day. Date of birth: May 7, 1992. Nothing was amiss here.

  “May I have this?” Angela asked, closing the folder, but keeping her own birth certificate on top.

  “Certainly. It’s yours. You can keep the entire file.”

  “Okay,” Angela said, standing up.

  “I’ll be ready to go over the estate plans with you next week.”

  Angela nodded. She didn’t care. All she cared about now was finding out why Marilyn had lied. She was no closer to solving the strange happenings at her home now than she’d been two weeks ago, no closer to understanding why her parents had kept her from their families all these years.

  “I’m afraid I won’t have much good news,” he said, as she was walking to the door. “I’m going to have to put the house on the market immediately.”

  Fine, she thought. Sell it and its ghosts. She didn’t need to solve the mystery. She could walk away.

  ***

  Marilyn studied the birth certificate Angela held out for her. She couldn’t explain it, but the document was wrong. The date was right, but Angela had not been born to Deborah and Richard. About that, she had no doubts. For one thing, Deb had had her tubes tied several years before Angela was born. She shook her head and handed the birth certificate back.

  Angela said, “I don’t know what’s going on here. I believe that you really are her sister, you look exactly like her. But I don’t get why you’re lying any more than I get why they lied all these years.”

  There was nothing Marilyn could say that she hadn’t said the night before, and part of her wanted to shake the girl to wake up and listen, but the poor kid looked exhausted. She was way too thin, her cheekbones sunken, her eyes ringed with dark circles. Her hair was a mess, and she hadn’t changed her clothes since the day before. She needed sleep, a good meal, and a long hot shower.

  “Honey, I’ve told you everything I know,” Marilyn said. The only proof Marilyn could offer was the photograph of Ryan and his girlfriend, CJ, that and her own testimony, and she thought Angela would realize that she was right, if she’d calm down a little.

  Angela ran her hands through her hair, rubbed her eyes, and sighed.

  Marilyn asked, “Do you want to know more about Ryan and CJ?”

  Angela met her eyes for a minute and then looked away. Then she gave a little nod.

  Marilyn told the story as best she could. Ryan and CJ had been picture-perfect high school sweethearts. He was a handsome, popular, smart athlete. She was pretty and thoughtful, although Marilyn suspected she was something of an outsider. She was artsy, loved to draw and paint, and she wanted to be an artist, which Marilyn found charmingly naive. Deb didn’t like her, though, and it wasn’t that Deb would have disliked any girl Ryan brought home. It was about her home life. Marilyn didn’t know all the details, but she had inferred that it was a wrong-side-of-the-tracks situation. Even in the few times Marilyn met her, she had been able to tell there was some unspoken tension regarding her parents. But she and Ryan were adorable together. They had been dating for a year—an eternity for high school students—when CJ got pregnant.

  “Your mother called me crying,” Marilyn said. “She went on and on about how Ryan’s whole future was ruined and his life was over.” She left out the part where Deb called CJ a money-grubbing whore.

  Marilyn didn’t really know how Ryan and CJ had felt about the whole thing or what their decision-making was like. She only knew what Deb had told her. She couldn’t even imagine being seventeen and discovering she was going to have a baby, even if she did love the father.

  She did know, however, that CJ’s mother was every bit as unhappy as Deb, or maybe even more so, because she kicked CJ out, and Deb, infuriated though she was, took her in. By Christmas, when Marilyn arrived for the holidays, the decisions had been made: CJ would have the baby, and she and Ryan would raise it, and apparently they’d live with Deb and Rich until they were able to support themselves, which could take God only knew how long.

  The kids seemed happy. They had their own little world. CJ had confessed to Marilyn that she and Ryan wanted to get married, and that they planned to go the justice of the peace as soon as they were both eighteen. For her part, Deb had confided that she was trying to convince the kids to let her and Rich legally adopt the baby. Despite this quiet scheming, it had been a fairly cheerful holiday. That was the last time Marilyn saw Ryan. Soon after, during a night out with some friends, Ryan died in a car accident.

  “He wanted to be your father,” Marilyn said. “He was happy and excited. So was CJ.”

  Angela had tears in her eyes. She wiped them away and sighed.

  “After Ryan died, Deb moved forward with her plan to adopt you. She told me that CJ had agreed, and to be honest, I was stunned, but I thought it was for the best, all things considered, until she told me that she planned to raise you fully as her own, to let you think you were hers. I thought CJ should get to be part of your life, but Deb was dead set against it. And that was it. She began making plans to move away, and as soon as you were born, they took you away and didn’t leave any way for any of us to reach them. They literally disappeared in the night.”

  “What happened to CJ?”

  Marilyn shook her head. She had no idea, and why would she? She wasn’t anything to the girl, there was no reason for CJ to keep in touch with her.

  Angela picked up her birth cert
ificate again and studied it.

  “Then how do you—” She let her question trail off and brought the paper closer to her eyes. “This says I was born in Palmetto Landing, South Carolina.”

  Marilyn shook her head. “You were born in Massachusetts.”

  Angela frowned and Marilyn reached over and took the piece of paper up again. City of birth: Palmetto Landing, SC. Then she noticed something else in the top corner: The date filed. December 11, 1992.

  “I don’t think this is your original birth certificate,” she said, pointing to the date.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Marilyn admitted, but she could make a guess: Somehow her sister had had Angela’s birth certificate changed.

  ***

  That afternoon, after Angela recounted Marilyn’s story to Randy over the phone, he asked the only logical question, “What are you going to do?”

  Angela knew that the first thing she had to do was see if it was possible to have someone’s birth certificate altered after adoption. The second thing would be to contact her father’s sister and see if her story matched Marilyn’s. And then... and then she didn’t know what.

  “Will you contact your birth mother?” Randy asked.

  “I don’t know,” Angela said. And she really didn’t. What would she accomplish by contacting this woman who had walked away from her the moment she was born? Her mother was her mother. She couldn’t make her brain think of the woman who raised her, the woman she now believed was actually her grandmother, as anything but mom. This CJ person wasn’t her mother any more than Ryan was her father, whatever their role in her conception and birth. Anyway, she’d be hard to find. Marilyn hadn’t known her full name—not what her initials stood for or her last name.

  But then there were all sorts of questions she still had about the situation. Why had CJ given her up? Yes, she had only been seventeen, younger than Angela was now, but if she had loved Ryan the way Marilyn said she did, how could she abandon his child—the only part of him that was left after he died?

  CJ had wanted to be an artist. So that’s where Angela got it. What else had she inherited from this stranger? As much as Angela wanted answers to the questions swirling in her head, she also realized that whatever answers she got might not be satisfactory, and in that case, what was the point? She had never before appreciated the saying that ignorance was bliss. She already understood that whatever she decided about meeting CJ, she would never again be able to think of her parents without thinking of their deception, and that loss, on top of the death of her mother, was crushing.

  “Maybe you should try to get some sleep,” Randy said, “or eat something. Or both.”

  But Angela was wired and she had no appetite. Instead she turned to her computer. After a brief internet search, she learned that birth certificates could be amended. It was actually common for the birth certificates of adopted children to list their adoptive parents. This fact felt like a personal insult. Things like birth certificates were supposed to preserve a record of facts for posterity. Hundreds of years from now, a record of her life would be maintained in the official public record of birth and death certificates. But her birth certificate was a record of lies. She could understand that in the case of an anonymous adoption, the birth parents’ names had to be withheld, but it should be clear whether or not the parents listed were biologically her parents, shouldn’t it? She looked at her birth certificate again. The filing date was the only clue. Without that, there’d be nothing to suggest that Deborah Ellis hadn’t given birth to her.

  That clue and Marilyn’s story were proof enough, though. She searched again for her father’s sister and opened a window to send her a private message, but with the cursor blinking in front of her, she wasn’t sure what to say, how to even begin. Did her father’s family even want to hear from her? And then she thought, Who cares if they do or don’t? She typed:

  Dear Helen,

  I believe you are my aunt. My father is Richard Ellis, and my mother was Deborah. My parents always told me we had no family, and my father let me believe his only brother, Martin, died in Vietnam. Now, however, I have learned that they were not telling me the truth. If you are my aunt, as I believe you are, I would very much like to talk to you.

  She left her phone number, signed her name, and before she could second-guess herself, hit send. Afterward she didn’t know if she felt good or not. All she could do was wait for a reply.

  Chapter 32

  Devil’s Back Island, Maine

  Rosetta wasn’t sure what to say. She knew there had been more to the story of Maureen and Ed kicking Casey out, but frankly this wasn’t the more she expected. She thought maybe they’d caught Casey stealing money—they treated her like a seventeenth-century indentured servant, and Rosetta wouldn’t have blamed Casey if she had helped herself to a few bucks from Ed’s wallet; or perhaps Ed had taken too much interest in his beautiful, developing step-daughter and Maureen’s jealousy had gotten the best of her. Casey had suggested that Ed had untoward intentions toward her, although she had never said or implied that he had acted upon those intentions. But a baby? How could Casey have had a baby without Rosetta’s knowing?

  “I had a boyfriend, Ryan, his name was, and we adored each other,” Casey went on.

  Ryan. That Rosetta remembered. When she had tried and failed to change Maureen’s mind about sending Casey back to the island for her sixteenth summer, Casey had assured her that it was okay, because she had a boyfriend and she didn’t want to be away from him anyway. Rosetta should have insisted. She should have told Maureen that letting a sixteen-year-old make decisions based on not wanting to miss her boyfriend was idiotic.

  “We had been together for over a year when I found out. It was an accident, obviously. I mean, we weren’t stupid. We used protection, most of the time anyway. It just happened.”

  Rosetta let out a little snort and shook her head sadly. In her mind, she was picturing teenaged Casey—she was still CJ back then—so sweet, so pretty, so full of promise despite the hardships of her young life, sitting in the bathroom with the pregnancy test and struggling to comprehend what came next.

  “I was freaked out, I mean, I was totally terrified, but I was also secretly happy. I was going to be a mother and have a baby that I loved and that loved me. Me and Ryan and the baby were going to have our own little world, a universe of love. Ryan was happy, too. He knew it would make things harder, having a baby so young, but he loved that baby the minute he learned it existed, like I did.”

  “But?” Rosetta asked, because there was obviously a but. Where was Ryan now? Where was the baby—the baby who would now be twenty? Could that possibly be right? For the first time in a long time, Rosetta felt every one of her 78 years.

  “But nothing. When mom and Ed kicked me out, I stayed at Ryan’s parents’ house. They weren’t happy, not like we were anyway, but they at least understood what family is. They were going to help us. They promised to see Ryan through college and to help take care of me and the baby. They wanted us to have a good life.”

  Where did all that love and happiness go? Rosetta wondered. She didn’t want to interrupt Casey now that she’d finally told her after all these years, but the suspense was unbearable. She knew better than to rush Casey, though. She didn’t want her to change her mind and cut the story short.

  “And then,” Casey said, sighing, “Ryan died. Car accident.”

  “Jesus,” Rosetta said. What did fate have against the poor girl? Couldn’t the universe give her a little bit of goodness without always snatching it away again?

  “His mother convinced me that it would be best if I let them adopt the baby. They would pay for all my medical expenses, take care of me through the end of my pregnancy, and in return, I would let them raise their grandchild as their own. I was grieving, distraught, alone in the world. I did what she asked.”

  “I don’t understand,” Rosetta said, squinting at Casey as if she could see into the past b
y doing so. It sounded as if Ryan’s parents had done the right thing. They had had the resources to raise the baby, and Casey had had nothing. But at what point did they cut Casey out of the picture? Or did she remove herself from her baby’s life? Where was Casey’s child right now?

  “They didn’t want me. They only wanted the baby. They agreed to adopt her if I agreed to let them raise her as their own. Once the baby was born, I was not to have any further contact with any of them.”

  How had Casey ever agreed to such a thing? It was insane. “That can’t be legal,” Rosetta said. “How can it be?”

  Casey shrugged.

  “And that’s it? You gave birth and walked away?” Rosetta was surprised by how angry her voice sounded as she spoke. She wanted to be sympathetic to Casey, but she simply could not understand what Casey was telling her.

  “Why didn’t you call me? Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

  “How could I tell you? You were the one person in the world who believed in me, and then I went and got pregnant and I knew my future, the future you always talked about back when you wanted me to go to college and be the next Georgia O’Keefe or some crazy shit like that, was over. Your disappointment would have been worse than my mom’s in some ways. Hers was par for the course, but to disappoint you—I couldn’t.”

  Rosetta wilted as Casey spoke. “What I’ve always wanted for you was happiness.”

  “Yeah, well, I was on my way to becoming a single, homeless, teen mother, which I think we both can agree is not a recipe for happiness.”