The Heat of the Moon: A Rachel Goddard Mystery (Rachel Goddard Mysteries) (12 page)

I paid the bill in cash so I wouldn’t have to wait for my credit card to clear.

The locksmith carried the box to my car. I thanked him and closed the door on his friendly goodbye.

I drove with caution, conscious of the danger my hyper state created. I laughed at the thought of having an accident and afterward trying to explain to Mother why the box was in my car. My gaze strayed to it, sitting beside me like a smug silent passenger with a story that would, in time, come out.

Back in Mother’s study, I sat on the floor and opened the box. A photo album. I lifted it and found a second album underneath. And a third.

Pictures locked away in the back of a closet. Why?

Would I find something here to jog my memory? I plopped an album onto the carpet and opened the cover. On the first page was an 8x10 color photo of Mother, young and lovely in a white satin wedding dress, a cloud of veil floating around her head. Her smile was joyous. I’d never seen this picture before. I’d never seen her smile that way. 

I turned the page. Now she was joined by a young man with blond hair, dressed in a wedding tuxedo. My father, the man in the picture Mother kept on her dresser. The man whose other pictures I’d supposedly destroyed in my grief.

Confused questions crowded my mind. I searched the pictures for answers.

Leaning close, I looked into my father’s eyes and tried to feel a connection. If he’d been a monster, if he’d done unforgivable things to me, some part of me must remember. But he remained a picture, nothing more. It was hard to believe he had anything to do with my life.

I turned to the next page. Snapshots, four to each sheet, probably honeymoon photos. Her, him, the two of them together, in some place with palm trees and a beach. Pages and pages of them smiling, laughing, kissing. Then came a photo of them posed before a house I didn’t recognize, white with blue shutters and door. More pictures taken in the yard. My young mother planting a rose bush, standing proudly beside the same bush in flower.

I wandered through the early days of their marriage. The entire first album was filled with photos of the two of them, separately and together. They’d been happy. Their love was palpable in their eyes, their smiles, their touching hands.

Suddenly choked with tears, I closed the book and put it aside. Now I understood, more completely than ever before, what my mother had lost. A whole life, a whole future. Love.

With a kind of dread, I lifted out the next album. I wasn’t sure I could look at any more pictures of their brief shattered happiness. But I had to see it through. They were my parents, and this might be the only way I’d ever learn about their life together.

I took a deep breath and turned back the cover.

The two of them sat on a blue sofa, and Mother held a blanket-swaddled infant. The parents smiled down at the baby, whose eyes were squeezed shut. I had the sensation that I was hurtling back into another time. This must be me. Their first-born.

I bent low over the photo to study the baby. I recognized nothing of myself in the child, but that wasn’t surprising. Infants seldom resemble the adults they’ll become.

Eagerly I flipped the page to more baby photos, many of the child alone, others with the parents, one or both. I soon realized that these weren’t pictures of me. The fuzz of hair growing in on the baby’s scalp was blond, not red. Her eyes were blue. Michelle.

I turned the pages with increasing puzzlement. Where was I? Why wasn’t I in any of the pictures with my little sister and our parents? I looked through to the end without finding myself.

I sat for a few minutes with the third and last album unopened in my lap. Surely this would be the one with pictures of me, pictures of all of us together. If I saw myself with my father, something might shake loose and rise to the surface of my memory.

I found more photos of Mother, Father, Michelle, and dozens of pictures of my sister as she grew from a baby to a toddler to a beautiful little girl of two or three.

I fumbled through the album, faster and faster. Where were the pictures of me? Why were the pictures of Michelle separated this way, all together, with no sign of me?

Swallowing back the sourness that rose in my throat, I forced myself to think. One thing was clear: Mother had lied to me when she said I’d destroyed all the pictures of my father. But had it been a complete lie? Why would she make up something like that? Maybe I’d destroyed the photos that showed me with my father. Yes. That must be what happened. I couldn’t imagine what else would explain my absence from these family pictures. As if I hadn’t been part of their lives, wasn’t one of them.

But why did Mother hide all the pictures of herself and my father? Why pretend they didn’t exist? All I could think of was that she was protecting both of us from painful reminders.

I returned to the first page of the album. For a long time I sat staring at my young parents and tiny sister, trying to make sense of it all.

In the dogwood outside the window a mockingbird broke into song, imitating a cardinal. The throaty, mellow notes were pitch-perfect, but I realized absently that the cadence was off, too rushed and insistent. I would never mistake it for the real thing.

Chapter Eleven

When I was twelve and Michelle was nine, Mother bought a telescope so we could all look at the stars and planets and moon together. On a hot clear night, we set the instrument on its wooden tripod in the back yard, and waited for daylight to recede and the universe to come shining out of the darkness.

Mother sat in a wrought iron chair she’d brought down from the patio, and Michelle and I lolled on the grass at her feet. The pink-washed sky faded to black, the birds hushed in the trees around us. Fireflies winked across the lawn. Michelle, giggling, tickled my neck and ears with grass blades until she saw the first bat swoop low, then she squealed and clutched at me, burying her face in my shoulder. We smelled of sweat and citrus insect repellent.

I’d studied every inch of the lunar map in our new astronomy book, and when the brilliant full moon rose above us I patiently guided Michelle’s eyes to the Bay of Rainbows, the Sea of Tranquillity, the Lake of Dreams. I pointed out the places where astronauts had walked. All the while, I sneaked glances at Mother on my right. Was she impressed? She smiled and briefly rested a hand on my shoulder. I was thrilled. She thought I was a good, smart girl. She loved me.

Then her gaze shifted to Michelle, and Mother’s expression softened, a deep tenderness bloomed in her eyes, and I felt an invisible circle closing them in, shutting me out. Her show of affection for me was like the heat of the moon, an illusion, a glow that gave no warmth.

That night marked my first conscious awareness of what I’d always sensed, that Mother would never love me the way she loved Michelle. 

Perhaps now I knew the reason why.

***

For days after I found the pictures I was nearly mute at home, fearful that I couldn’t speak to Mother without exploding into a babble of questions and demands. Before I dug any deeper, I had to work out all possible meanings of what I’d found, and not found, in Mother’s study. I needed to fortify myself by imagining the worst I could learn if I pushed for answers.

I was willing to believe that grief over my father’s death made me destroy the pictures that showed me with him. But that didn’t explain why there were so many photos of my parents and sister together, some of them formal studio portraits, with no sign of another, older daughter. Families didn’t do that, they didn’t pose for portraits with only one child.

Maybe I wasn’t one of them. Maybe I was adopted. The thought pierced me like a sword, but I forced myself to consider it. I’d never seen my birth certificate, a fact that hadn’t struck me as odd until now. I’d never needed it, never been asked to produce it. Mother had obtained my first passport when she took Michelle and me to Europe as teenagers, and I’d simply renewed it as an adult. I’d used my passport as proof of identity when I applied for a driver’s license. No one, anywhere, had ever asked to see my birth certificate, so I’d given it no thought.

But if I was adopted, why hadn’t Mother told me? What possible reason could she have to hide it from me? And when did it happen? After those pictures were taken, when Michelle was about two and I was four or five? Surely I would remember it, if I’d been that old.

This argument made me laugh scornfully at myself. I couldn’t remember a damned thing; I was stumbling around in the dark.

Or was I? I reached out and found them lurking at the border of consciousness, a sad-faced woman and an angry man, phantoms I’d never been able to explain or get rid of. Did Mother know who they were? Was something about my origins so awful that she never wanted me to learn the truth?

Mother could see, of course, that something was wrong. She came to my room one night, sat on my bed, and tried with her soothing quiet voice to coax out a clue to my emotional state.

She talked and I studied her face for similarities to mine.

You’re so lucky you got Mother’s coloring,
Michelle had said many times over the years, as if unaware of her own delicate, fair beauty. I’d always taken it as a given that I looked like Mother. But did I? We both had auburn hair, and dark eyes with thick lashes. Both tall, slender. The curve of my jaw was similar to hers, and my full lower lip. Yes, in some ways I looked like her. It was my father I didn’t recognize in myself. I looked like Mother, Michelle looked like our father. That wasn’t unusual. Not at all.

“Rachel?” Mother gave my arm a little shake to bring me out of my reverie.

Her eyes were wide, soft with concern. She watched me pull up my knees, smooth down my robe. The novel I’d been trying to read before she came in had fallen from my lap and lay open on the bed beside me.

“I asked if you’re still seeing Dr. Campbell,” she said.

This was the first time she’d mentioned Luke since the dinner.

“I see him at work every day,” I said, avoiding her eyes. 

Silence hung between us. She pushed the thin gold band of her watch forward, then back, on her wrist. She still had on the green silk blouse she’d worn to work, and I could see the outlines of her slender arms inside the sleeves. She always wore long sleeves to work, even in hot weather. I wondered if she was reluctant to expose too much of herself to patients.

Finally she said, “That’s not what I meant. I can’t stop thinking about that night he was here—”

“It doesn’t matter to me, Mother,” I said quickly.

She looked straight into my eyes, holding me fast, not about to let me off the hook. “It matters to me, because you’re my daughter and I care what happens to you. I’m not blind, Rachel. I know you were hurt when you found out he’d been hiding something important from you. I can’t forgive him for it.”

I almost laughed. This, from the queen of secrets! Feeling shaky and daring, as I always did when I challenged her, I said, “We all have things we don’t want to talk about, don’t we?”

Only a student of her moods would have seen the slight narrowing of her eyes, the brief dimming of their light.

Ask her,
I urged myself.
Ask her if you’re adopted. Ask her what the pictures mean.

The very idea made me shrink back. Tell her I’d hired a locksmith to open the box I’d found inside a closet in her off-limits room? Tell her I thought she was a liar? She would fix me with a sad but forgiving look, and I’d be lost. She’d make me doubt myself, I’d end up convinced I was wrong, crazy, a bad daughter. And my questions would put her on guard; I’d never find out what I wanted to know.

She sighed and let her shoulders slump a bit. “I’m interfering, I know. But I can’t help worrying about you. I don’t want you to get hurt.” She touched my knee, her hand light, the weight heavy. Smiling suddenly, she said, “When children reach adulthood, they have to learn to be patient with their parents, instead of the other way around.”

She leaned to brush my cheek with a kiss. I was ashamed that I’d listened for lies beneath her loving words. But when she was gone, and the door shut after her, all the doubts and questions clamored in my mind again.

That night I dreamed of the three of them, a happy little family with only one daughter.

***

I talked to myself incessantly, the dialogue always going on at some level, whether I was driving down the street or examining an animal or sitting speechless at the dining table with my mother and sister. How much did I want to find out, what kind of answers could I handle?

Everybody claimed to welcome the truth, they demanded it—honesty is the best policy, I want your honest opinion, tell me the truth!—but the way people behaved showed that even this desire for the truth was a lie. People lied to each other all the time, about small things and great. There was so much in life we couldn’t bear to look at straight-on, or simply preferred to leave unacknowledged. Surely a lot of families had secrets that no one wanted to uncover and bring into the light, for fear of hurting and being hurt.

I should leave well enough alone. I should get on with my life. The present, the future. I should.

I couldn’t.

I had to know.

***

I made the call from my bedroom after work, before Mother and Michelle got home. It was mid-afternoon in Minnesota. The courthouse would still be open.

For ten minutes I paced back and forth with the phone in my hand, mentally reciting the reasons why this was a good idea. I would get my birth certificate, it would tell me what I already knew, that I was Michael and Judith Goddard’s child, and the question of adoption would be laid to rest without Mother ever knowing it had been raised.

But dread sat on my chest like a stone, and it was only the awareness of time passing that made me act. If I didn’t do this now, I might never work up the courage again.

I called long distance information. I waited another minute, eyes squeezed shut, breathing deeply, before I punched in the number I’d been given. After my call was transferred to the right extension, I was talking to a clerk who handled birth records.

“I’m trying to find out—” I cleared my throat. “I need to find out if you have my birth records on file.”

“We charge for copies of—”

“I’ll do that, I’ll send you a check for a copy, but could you just tell me now if you have the record?”

A silence, then a little grunt of puzzlement. “Well, were you born in Hennepin County?”

“Yes, in Minneapolis.”

“Then we’ll have the record. What’s the date and the name?”

I gave her my birthdate and name, spelling Goddard for her.

“Just a second. I’m going to put you on hold.”

The line went dead silent, no canned music to distract the mind. Chewing my thumbnail, I stood at a window and looked down at the driveway. Its black surface was dusty and dulled by the heat. Along the far edge, two dozen house sparrows bustled and pecked, probably scooping up ants that I couldn’t see.

“Ma’am?”

I snapped to attention. “Yes!”

“I’m sorry, but we don’t have any record of that.”

For a moment I couldn’t take in what she’d said. Then I stammered, “But—but it has to be there. Maybe you looked at the wrong day. It was August—”

“Yes ma’am, I got that right,” the clerk said, with the exaggerated patience of someone who dealt daily with the public’s inquiries. “I looked at that date, and I checked a few days before and afterwards, and it’s not here.”

My mind snatched at an explanation. “Maybe the records were destroyed in a fire or something—Could you—”

“No, ma’am. I’m sure these records are complete. Are you sure you were born in Hennepin County? I know you’re talking about yourself, but—”

I stopped listening. I pushed the off button and dropped the phone onto the bed. Thinking I was going to be sick, I rose, veered toward my bathroom, and smacked into the door frame.

I groped my way inside and sank onto the edge of the tub. The air felt clotted, unbreathable, and I couldn’t pull enough of it into my lungs. 

In a while the nausea passed, leaving a knot of pain under my heart. I stood on shaky legs, went to the sink, splashed cold water on my cheeks. Soon I would be expected to go downstairs and eat dinner with my mother and sister.

I raised my eyes to a reflection I didn’t recognize. The face in the mirror had the slack stunned look of people who appeared on the evening news after a tornado or hurricane or earthquake had laid waste to their lives.

I touched the cool smooth surface of the glass and whispered, “Who the hell are you?”