The Bullet

by Mary Louise Kelly

“I would be completely freaked out, too, if I were you. For what it’s worth. This stuff coming out after all these years.”

  I said nothing, focused on radiating hostility through the door. Minutes passed.

  “I can sit here all night, you know. Always did like this landing. Mind you, I’ve got the whisky on this side of the door. Hear that?” A clinking sound, ice in tumblers. “I’m betting you could use some right about now.”

  I began to weaken. “Go away. I don’t like whisky.”

  “Fine. Pretend it’s champagne. Or Bordeaux, or Sancerre or something. Whatever you froggy Francophile types prefer to drink.”

  “Please just go away.”

  We sat awhile, and then he said, “You know, I think the last time I remember you locking yourself in this bathroom to sulk, it was over that loser. What was his name? The chubby one?”

  “Shut up, Martin.”

  “No, come on. What was that, your sophomore year? You were mad as hell because he’d cheated on you with some blonde. Josh something, wasn’t it? Or Jack?”

  “Jeff Benton.” I couldn’t help myself.

  “That’s right. God, what a tool. What was the deal? He bailed on taking you to prom?”

  “Yeah.” A long pause. “Yeah, he did. So you and Tony slashed his tires and spelled out the word dickwad in liquid fertilizer on his front lawn.”

  “Well, that’s what brothers are for.”

  Brothers. My stomach twisted. I pulled the towel tighter around myself.

  “Caroline. How about coming out now?”

  “No.”

  In the narrow gap under the door, four fingertips appeared.

  “Don’t,” I warned.

  The fingers wiggled farther in. “Come on. Before I get splinters all down the back of my knuckles.”

  “Or I could just stomp on them.”

  “Don’t do that. I have to play squash this weekend.”

  This finally made me laugh. It came out more a croak than laughter, but it released something in me. “Martin?” I hesitated. “What happened to my parents? My—my real parents?”

  “Your birth parents,” he corrected. “I don’t know. What I remember is being told we were getting a baby sister, and then one day there you were. Mom and Dad seemed happy about it, so we were, too. I don’t remember them ever using that word, adopted. It just seemed normal. Like . . . there had been two Cashion kids, and now there were three. Same as any other family when a third child comes along. Tony’s right, we kind of forgot about it. The circumstances of how you arrived. Honestly. It’s not like we’ve been sitting around for years gossiping behind your back.”

  I wasn’t sure I believed that, but I relented. Stood up and opened the door.

  Martin pulled himself to his feet.

  I eyed my rail-thin, blond, blue-eyed brother. “You know, I look nothing like you.”

  “This only just dawned on you?”

  “No, but I mean, why didn’t it ever strike me as odd?”

  “I don’t know. I have plenty of friends who look nothing like their siblings.”

  “Right, but you and Tony look like twins. Aryan male models in a Brooks Brothers ad—”

  “Oh, come on!”

  “Whereas I . . . I look like Salma Hayek if she were a few inches taller and had better cleavage.”

  He snorted. “Don’t think I’m letting you get away with that just because you’re having an atrocious day. Your girls got nothing on Salma’s cleavage.”

  I punched his shoulder.

  It felt like a resumption of our usual banter, yet hollow. As if something precious had been lost.

  Five

  * * *

  The story gets worse from here.

  The blackest, most terrible bits did not emerge until nearly midnight.

  The five of us huddled back in the living room, my brothers installed protectively on either side of me on the sofa. My father and they had kicked back the bottle of whisky and opened a second. Mom and I nursed mugs of tea. I figured I was already a wreck, my inhibitions plenty loosened as it was without adding whisky to the equation. But there was no suitable state—drunk, sober, or anywhere in between—in which to receive the story that Dad proceeded to unleash.

  He told me that I had been born in Atlanta.

  My parents were a young, married couple named Boone and Sadie Rawson Smith. Boone was a pilot for Delta; Sadie Rawson stayed home to raise me. They were college sweethearts. They had moved to Atlanta from Charlotte, shortly before I was born. These details were included in the newspaper obituaries.

  They died together, shot cleanly and at close range. Boone through the head, Sadie Rawson through the heart. Murdered. My parents had been murdered in the autumn of 1979. They were both twenty-six years old. Their bodies were found in the kitchen of the white brick house they owned, on a pleasant street in a neighborhood called Buckhead.

  I was with them in the white brick house. I was shot, too. Shot in the neck and nearly died. When police kicked in the door, they found me blue-lipped and barely breathing on the kitchen floor. I was rushed to the hospital, given blood, stitched up. A miraculous recovery. But the case was never solved. The killer was never caught. Boone and Sadie Rawson Smith were buried, the house was sold, and I was sent to live in Washington.

  “That’s pretty much all we know,” my father concluded. “When you came to us, the police investigation was still active. They wouldn’t tell us much more than what was in the papers. And then time passed . . . years passed . . . and it no longer seemed to matter so much.” He had been speaking with an air of grim determination; now his voice softened. “You were so frightened when you came to us, Caroline. You wouldn’t talk the first few weeks.”

  “Our doctor was worried you might have suffered brain damage,” whispered my mother. (My mother. I suppose I’ll have to start being more specific. My mother, meaning Frannie Cashion. The woman in the room with me now.) She shook her head. “I knew he was wrong. I could look in your eyes and see that you were bright. Really bright. You just needed time.”

  “And we think that you might still have been in pain,” Dad added. (Dad. By whom I mean, Thomas Cashion. The dad I had grown up with. God, this was strange.) “You had been badly wounded. They told us you’d had two surgeries, that you’d barely . . . barely made it. But none of the medical records we received ever indicated that it might still be in your neck. We just”—he glanced helplessly at my mother—“we assumed that the bullet had been removed during one of those operations.”

  “But I don’t have a scar.” It was the first time I’d spoken in nearly an hour.

  “You did. You used to have a scar.” My mother leaned forward and touched the base of my skull, half an inch to the left of the raised ridge of my spine. “We could see it through your hair. But your hair grew in thicker every year. And you got sick with chicken pox when you were six, and after that you had scars everywhere. I lost track of which were which. Then they all faded. Even this one.” For a moment her finger pressed hard against my skull, then she drew back and clasped her hands tightly on her lap.

  I turned to Dad. “It’s bizarre that the doctors didn’t tell you they left the bullet in. I mean, wouldn’t that be pertinent information to know, about a child you were adopting?”

  “It’s outrageous,” he said. “Both from a medical and a legal standpoint. But, Caroline, you were under Georgia state protective custody. Your records—they—everything was sealed. Because of the criminal investigation. We were never allowed to meet your surgeons. Maybe they were calculating that the bullet didn’t pose an urgent threat to your health by the time we were signing the adoption papers, so we didn’t need to know. And after that—I don’t know. Maybe it fell between the cracks, when Georgia handed off your files to DC.”

  “I suppose we could have lodged an appeal to get your medical chart,
” said Mom. “Especially once the investigation quieted down. But . . . Dad’s right. Months went by, and then years, and you were happy here. Thriving. You seemed fully healed. We weren’t focused on digging around for old charts.”

  It was too much to take in. I couldn’t absorb it. Instead I found myself latching onto small, concrete details. Such as my lack of a scar. Or the name of a city.

  “Atlanta,” I heard myself say. “I’ve never even been there.” The name conjured up scenes from Gone with the Wind, Scarlett O’Hara flouncing around in a hoopskirt made from curtains. What else? Coca-Cola. Coke corporate headquarters were there. And the Olympics. Atlanta had hosted the Olympics, back when I was in college. I remembered the US team dominating, Michael Johnson sprinting off with two golds. But I had no mental picture of the city. Apparently, though, I had indeed been to Atlanta. I had lived there, for several years, and then forgotten every second of them.

  Martin seemed to read my thoughts. “You don’t remember any of this? About your . . . about the Smiths? Or about coming to live with us?”

  No, I didn’t.

  “It would be remarkable if she did,” Dad put in. “We did some research on this. Few children remember anything from before age four. If they do, it’s often not a real memory, but a narrative they’ve created for themselves, from being shown photographs or told stories about a place or a person. And we deliberately never talked about anything that happened before Caroline came to us. We certainly didn’t have photos to show.”

  “On top of that, you’d been through such trauma.” Mom looked at me. “Even an older child might have blocked it out.”

  I nodded. That sounded reasonable. They both sounded just like their usual reasonable and reassuring selves, if you set aside the sheer insanity of this scene. The insanity of the entirely rewritten life history that I had been handed, a history that included a double homicide and two sets of parents and a bullet burrowed beneath my skin. Mom was right: I should have so many questions. But at that moment they eluded me. My wrist ached, more sharply than usual. All I wanted was to lie down and close my eyes.

  “Dad.” The word seemed to charge the room, like a lie that we were all waiting for someone to challenge. I forced myself to repeat it. “Dad, would it be all right if I slept here tonight?”

  “Well, of course, darling.”

  I walked over and kissed the top of his head. Then I kissed my mother and stretched my lips into a weak smile at my brothers. They would all start talking about me the minute I left the room. I didn’t care. I turned and climbed the stairs to my old bedroom, cradling my wrist in my good hand.

  Six

  * * *

  FRIDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2013

  Remarkably, I slept. It is a small mercy that the body is capable of overriding the brain, forcing it to shut down in times of crisis. I slept for five obliterating hours before my eyes snapped open. I have never been one to wake up disoriented, and now, even in the predawn darkness, I knew exactly where I was and why.

  Of the many questions that must have percolated while I was asleep, the one that woke me up was this: Was my name really Caroline?

  I crept downstairs.

  In the kitchen, looking as though they had not fared so well in the sleep department, stood my mother and Tony. Mom wore a blue flannel nightgown and robe. Tony had changed into stretched-out, gray sweats emblazoned with the logo of his high school wrestling team. He must have found them folded in the back of a dresser drawer, forgotten for the twenty-odd years since he’d last shambled in from practice and dropped them, stained and sweaty, in a hamper for our mother to wash.

  They stopped talking when they saw me in the doorway.

  “What’s my real name?” I asked without preamble.

  “Your real name?” my mother repeated.

  “Is my name really Caroline?”

  “Oh, I see. Yes. Yes, it is.”

  “But not Caroline Cashion.”

  “No. Well, that is, of course it is. That’s your legal name now. But you were born Caroline Smith. We decided to keep it. The name Caroline fit you. So graceful. And it sounds pretty with Cashion, and . . . we thought it might be less disruptive for you, emotionally. To be called by the name that you were used to.”

  I thought about this. “Do you have my birth certificate?”

  “Yes.” She gestured vaguely toward the ceiling. “It’s upstairs in the files. We had to have that and the adoption papers to get your first passport. You can see it, if you want.”

  “Sure. Yes.”

  I chewed my lip. Tony stood and poured a cup of coffee. Then he excused himself. He needed to get home, get showered, say hi to the kids before work. He gave my shoulder a squeeze. “Hang in there. I’ll call you later, okay?”

  “Yep. Nice sweats, by the way.”

  He looked down. “High school glory days.”

  “Good times. Go Bulldogs.”

  He looked unsure whether to rise to this. Then old habit kicked in, reflexes honed over a lifetime of sibling bickering. “I’ll remind you that my senior year we nearly won the Mid-Atlantic Prep Championship tournament.”

  “You nearly won?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You mean, you came in second.”

  “Third. A mere detail.”

  “Wow. No wonder the ladies couldn’t resist.”

  He grinned and pulled me to him in a real hug. “My smart-ass sister. Sorry about all this. I’ll call you.”

  He slammed the kitchen door shut. My mother turned and started cracking eggs into a bowl. She rustled around in the fridge, pulled out bacon and bread. An uncomfortable silence grew between us.

  “What about the rest of my family?” I ventured after a while. “I mean, not to sound ungrateful, but didn’t I have grandparents? Why didn’t they take me?”

  “I asked that same question. Before we signed the papers. For selfish reasons, I confess. I didn’t want anyone to show up later and try to claim you back once you were ours. We were told there was no immediate family to take you. Your father’s parents were already dead. And your mother’s—I gather they were separated, and not in particularly good health themselves. Not the ideal home life for a traumatized little girl. So the decision was made to find you a new family. It was quick. They cut through all the red tape; no one wanted to see you stuck in bureaucratic limbo.”

  “But didn’t they ever try to visit me? My own grandparents?”

  “Once.” Mom lowered her eyes. “Your grandmother wrote once. Asking to see you. We thought it was too soon. That seeing her might confuse you. She didn’t have any legal rights, not after we finalized the adoption.” Mom hesitated. “I did write to her, some years after that. The letter was returned, unopened. She and your grandfather had both passed away by then.”

  I winced. A minute went by before I could speak again. “And why—why you? Why did I come here?”

  Mom glanced at me sideways. “You know I had trouble delivering Anthony?”

  “Yes.” I couldn’t think how I knew this; it wasn’t something I could remember ever being openly discussed.

  “I was unwell for a long time after his birth. We both stayed in the hospital for several weeks. It’s all fine now, of course, but the end result was we couldn’t have another child. It was physically impossible for me to carry a baby again. And we so badly wanted a girl. I so badly wanted a girl.” She smiled. “So we signed up with an adoption agency. We weren’t sure it would lead to anything, and for a couple of years it didn’t. We knew we were low priority; we already had two healthy children. But it turned out, in your case, that that was helpful. It bumped us to the top of the list. The social workers wanted experienced parents. A happy, stable family that you could slot right into. I showed them pictures, how I had a girl’s room all done up in pink, just in case. A week later, we got the call.”

  I reme
mbered the pink room. It was a little girl’s dream. The center­­piece was a lace canopy bed worthy of Cinderella. Beside it on the carpet had stood a matching miniature bed for my favorite doll. My plastic Fisher-Price record player had a real needle to play vinyl 45s, and my lightbulb-powered Holly Hobbie oven had singed a hole in the carpet (burn marks apparently being a signature of my childhood). What I could not summon now, for the life of me, was any memory of seeing that room for the first time. I had never given it much thought, but I suppose I’d always assumed that before the canopy bed, a baby’s crib had stood there. My crib. That was the logical evolution, just as the canopy bed had given way at some point in my teenage years to the queen-size mattress and headboard that now dominated the room. I had slept in that queen bed last night. The burned carpet had been replaced, the pink walls long since repainted a tasteful shade of taupe.

  Mom slid into a chair beside me and set two plates on the table. While I was wallowing in nostalgia, she had whipped up an omelet. Bacon, eggs, grated cheese. She knows I love bacon. Pork in all forms. I have been known to go well out of my way for good chorizo. But when I took a bite, I spit it right back out.

  My mother looked mildly offended.

  “I’m sorry. It tastes like cardboard.”

  “Ah.” She touched my hand. “That can happen when you’ve had a shock.”

  I stared at my plate in surprise. “I thought that was just something people said. Or, you know, literary license. Lazy writers always make grieving characters lose their appetite and complain how everything tastes like cardboard. I had no idea it was true.” My mouth felt filthy. I crossed to the sink and spat again. Scooped cold water and splashed my face over and over, until my hair was matted and water dripped onto the tiled floor. I stood there trembling. My mother rose and rested her hand on my back while I shook.

  After a long time I straightened. “Why didn’t you and Dad tell me?”

  “How could we? What happened to you was so awful. More than any child could bear.”