I separated the picture of the woman who might be my mother from the rest and dropped them back into the drawer as close to the way they had been as I could. Then I closed the drawer, locking it again.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the picture I held in my hand. Questions exploded in my mind. What was her name? Where did she come from? Why did Daddy have her picture and the pictures of the other women? Did she die, or did she simply give me up to an orphanage?
Dare I open the second drawer? Maybe the answers to some of these questions were in there, especially something about my father. I had to look, but I was trembling so much I couldn’t get the key properly into the lock and dropped it. I held my breath. Had Mrs. Fennel heard that? Would she be charging in here at any moment? I waited nearly a full minute, but she didn’t come.
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and tried again, this time opening the drawer. There was a very old-looking, cloth-bound book in it and nothing else. I plucked it out very carefully and opened it slowly. It reeked of age, the pages yellow and fragile. I was afraid to turn any, but I did.
The words were written in perfect script, the first pages done with what was probably one of Daddy’s quill fountain pens. Each page contained one of the names I had seen on the backs of the photographs. Under the names were dates and addresses. There was a physical description of each as well, hair and eye color, length and weight, and any particular birthmarks.
I had a birthmark just under my left breast. It wasn’t quite round and looked more like an unfinished circle. Still turning the pages delicately, I found the page with my name on it and quickly went to the birthmark. It was mine; this was my page. I looked at the address: Lost Angels, An Infant Sanctuary, 8 Dunning Road, Heartsport, Oregon.
Was this where I came from, and was this woman my real mother? I looked back at Ava’s picture. She had the same address in her small biography, Lost Angels. Brianna did as well, and so did Marla. Before Brianna, a girl named Raine had as her address of origin New Creation Home for Foundlings. It was in Ukraine. Flipping back, I found homes in Russia, France, India, Thailand. Carefully, I closed the book and set it back in the drawer. Then I closed the drawer softly, relocked it, and returned the keys to Daddy’s velvet robe.
My discoveries didn’t make me feel better or explain why I felt so different from Ava. Instead, they created more mystery, dropped me deeper into the well of secrecy from which we all drank. Why was I always told my parents were unknown if my mother was known? Did this mean my father was known, too?
How did all of this fit the story I had been told and, to my knowledge, Ava had been told? Ava had been told that Daddy had fallen in love with her mother and had died in childbirth, as would any normal human woman who carried his child. Did Ava know of this book and these pictures? Should I tell Ava what I had discovered? Wouldn’t she tell Mrs. Fennel, if not Daddy? Wouldn’t I be in very big trouble then? How would I handle the burden of carrying this secret, knowing what I had discovered? Was I as bad at hiding my thoughts as Ava claimed? In no time at all, Mrs. Fennel would know what I had discovered, and Daddy would know soon afterward. Would they see my foray into his suite and into the closet and desk drawers as a kind of betrayal?
As quietly and as softly as I had come up the stairway, I descended. When I reached the bottom, I hesitated. I had a cold feeling at the back of my neck telling me someone was behind me, but when I turned to look, I saw no one, not Mrs. Fennel or my sisters and certainly not Daddy. He wasn’t home, but it really felt as if something was following me. Maybe he was able to leave his spirit here to watch over his things. I hurried on to my room and quickly shut the door behind me. Then I went immediately to my desk, and on a pad, I wrote the address of the orphanage from which I had been taken so I would not forget it.
After that, I sat on my bed and stared at the picture of the woman who could be my mother, looking again for any resemblances between us and trying to figure out what she was like from the way she held her head, from her eyes and her mouth. She looked happy in this picture. Had she been with my father when it was taken? Had I been born yet? What did her voice sound like, her laugh? How could she leave me behind? What if she saw me now? Would she recognize me?
I had gone upstairs, snuck into Daddy’s suite in order to satisfy my desperate need to know more about myself, and all I had done was create more mystery, more dark places. It was like unwrapping one of those boxes I dreamed would be under a Christmas tree and finding only another wrapped box. Frustrated, I put my mother’s picture inside my English lit textbook and set it aside on my desk. Then I went to my bedroom window and looked out.
Twilight was passing into night. A cloudless sky was beginning to reveal the brighter stars. A tiny cyclone of emotions was spinning up from the pit of my stomach. I felt myself begin to breathe faster and harder as my heart went into a gallop.
When Daddy had swooped down on Mark Daniels just outside this window, I had seen the fear and terror in Mark’s reddened eyes. He had resembled a child struggling against a powerful adult. Before he was swallowed up in the darkness, he had turned toward me, and for a fleeting moment, he once again looked like the Mark Daniels who had charmed me at school, who had tempted that part of me that longed to be like everyone else. Had he been pleading for my help?
But I saw his fangs again, too, and a wave of rage overtook any sadness I had felt. Something hard and muscular unfolded and awoke in me. I hadn’t admitted it to myself until this very moment, but I had had the urge to go through that window and help Daddy destroy what Mark had become. It had flowed through me with such heat I thought my skin had begun to melt.
And then later, after it was over, when I had finally closed my eyes again, I had sunk into my bed like a body in a coffin, reaching up to pull the lid down over myself and shut out the world outside.
It struck me that, like Daddy and Ava and Brianna, I was welcoming the darkness. I was no longer afraid of the darkness. The darkness had become my friend, too. It made me think of the most important question of all.
&nbs
p; That question still echoed down the long corridor of my sleep and into the morning light and still reverberated and haunted me, which I feared it might do forever and ever. Even now, perhaps more than ever before, because of the mystery I had begun to unravel, I could hear it clearly. Only now, I heard it in a voice unlike my own, an older female voice, but one with a sweet and concerned tone, a loving voice, asking more questions.
Who are you, Lorelei?
Really.
Who are you?
And what are you becoming?
12
Who Are You, Lorelei?
If Daddy knew I had gone up to his suite, he didn’t come down in the morning to confront me about it. Mrs. Fennel said nothing to me, either. Only Ava seemed to sense something different about me. I could see it in the way her eyes followed me about this morning, how thoughtful and studied she was. Suspicion fell from her eyes like tears. Unfortunately for me, this was the one morning she had an early class, so she was there at breakfast.
“What’s wrong with you today?” she asked me.
“Nothing. I’m just a little tired, I guess.”
“We don’t get a little tired,” she said. “You have no reason to be tired at all, Lorelei. I hope you’re not still thinking about Buddy.”
“Who’s Buddy?” Marla asked.