Marked by Destiny (12 page)

“Squatter’s
rights?”

“It is kind of
like in real estate – you settle on a piece of land long enough,
you kind of own it. I need to know the area better before I take
any initiative. It’s not a big deal.” He picked up his empty sub
wrap and tossed it into the bin. “Just not everyone is a fan of the
Higher Coven.”

“Should I be
worried?” I hadn’t thought about Michael’s safety. My focus had
been on finding answers about my past. Guilt washed over me. I’d
been so selfish.

“No. We’re just
being cautious.” He grabbed the keys and tossed them to me. “You
know where to go?”

I nodded.

Michael opened
the room door. As we headed down to the car, he made an effort to
distract me. “Sarah told me we have to go to Fort George and see
Fort Niagara as well. She was here when they were built.”

“She fought in
the war of 1812?” Impressive.

“She actually
helped the Canadians,” Michael tapped his forehead. “I think he was
actually English. Brock. His name was something Brock.”

“
Sir
Isaac Brock?” I asked, my mouth gapping open.

“Yeah, that’s
it.” Michael tried to hide a smile. He was obviously enjoying my
disbelief.

I laughed as we
got into the Jeep. “I’m so asking Sarah the details when we get
back.” I started the engine and pulled out of the parking lot.
Twenty minutes later we were in front of the familiar Foster Care –
Children Services building. I parked the Jeep in the visitors
parking. We walked together into the building, Michael’s warm hand
holding mine. I gave my name to the secretary at the front desk and
we sat in the chairs waiting for Mrs. Hawthorn to call me in.

Nothing had
changed; the paint, the chairs, the pictures. Nothing here had
changed, but to me, nothing looked the same.

Mrs. Hawthorn
came out of her office, folder in hand. She looked up from her
bifocals and called my name.

“Rouge dear,
how are you? Oh, I see that you have brought a friend.” She looked
at Michael and began fanning her face with her hand. “What a
lovely, handsome friend you have!” She shook her head, as if trying
to figure if she had said the words aloud or in her head.

I smiled and
tried not to laugh – I had the same feeling every day.

The three of us
walked into her office, she still had files piled everywhere. She
moved files from a chair and plopped them onto the floor by the
wall. She sat down behind her desk and pointed to the pair of
chairs for us to sit in. Michael held the first chair out for me
and then sat himself down. Mrs. Hawthorn gave him a winning
smile.

“Thanks for
seeing me, Mrs. Hawthorn. Mrs. Hawthorn?” It took me calling her
name twice to turn her attention back to me.

“Sorry Rouge.”
She folded her small hands together. “Why did you want to see
me?”

“I was
wondering if you would be able to give me a copy of my birth
certificate from the hospital and any other information that might
help me find my biological parents.”

She tutted. “Oh
dear, let me see.” She opened the file in front of her and shuffled
through the pages. “You turned eighteen back in January. So you are
entitled to any information we might have about your birth. Let me
what we have on file with our secretary. She’ll be able to get a
copy of what we do have.” She stood and slipped out of the office
leaving the door slightly open behind her.

As soon as she
left, Michael was instantly behind her desk looking through my case
file. I hadn’t even seem him move.

“Michael!
What’re you doing?” I whispered.

“Just making
sure sweet-ol’ Mrs. Hawthorn doesn’t leave anything out. Don’t
worry; she won’t even know I looked.” He flipped through each page
at lightning speed. How he could read anything that fast was beyond
me.

He was sitting
down beside me before Mrs. Hawthorn even came back into the
room.

“Rouge, here
are the forms to apply for the original copy of your birth
certificate. We only have a copy. Here also are the hospital papers
when we retrieved you.” Mrs. Hawthorn handed me a small stack of
papers.

Retrieved me?
What was that supposed to me?

Michael cleared
his throat but Mrs. Hawthorn continued before he could speak.

“If you turn to
the third page of the hospital notes and look on the left hand
side, about mid-way down… you’ll see that you were born six and a
half, nearly seven weeks, prematurely and weighed just over 4lbs.
You were actually born in Utica, New York.” She skimmed through the
photocopy on her desk, pushing her reading glasses up the bridge of
her nose. “It’s a little confusing. Doctor reports show you being
here, but the birth was down there.” She set the papers down.
“Because you were so tiny, you were kept at the hospital in Utica
for two and half months before being released.”

“So I was just
left there?” I tried sorting through the papers but couldn’t seem
to make heads or tails out of the doctor’s notes and other pages. A
few slipped out and drifted to the floor.

Michael leaned
down to pick them up.

“Your
pediatrician check-ups from three months to somewhere around
thirty-six months are in Niagara Falls.”

That made
sense. If FACS picked me up then everything would have been done
here. “Did my mother stick around to at least put her name on my
birth certificate?”

“Stick around?”
Mrs. Hawthorn’s eyebrows rose. “I’m sorry, I thought you knew.”

“Knew what?”
Michael straightened beside me.

“Your mother
left you at the hospital just after you were born and then came
back when you were released.”

“What?” I was
sure I had never been told that. I definitely would have remembered
it.

“She picked you
up,” Mrs. Hawthorn flipped to the front of my file. “The day FACS
came, she showed up just before us and said she had changed her
mind. She picked you up.”

My heart
stuttered and its beat pounded inside my ears. “Really?” I
whispered.

“Yes. She had
you till you were about three and then brought you back to Utica
Hospital. She signed you over again to us… and this time she didn’t
come back.”

Michael reached
for my hand and held it tight in his.

“I thought I
was with the system since I was born.”

“Well, in a
sense you were. You’ve been on file since your birth.”

“What’s my
mother’s name?” I stood and looked over Mrs. Hawthorn’s file. “Do
you have that?”

She leaned back
against her chair, maybe surprised at my sudden movement. “She
requested it not be released. When she handed you over the second
time, she left written notice not to release her name.” Mrs.
Hawthorn smiled sadly. “I’m sorry. I don’t have it.”

We’d come all
this way for nothing then.

“So,” Michael
said as he rose from his seat and stood beside me. “All you have
for Rouge are the forms and what you’ve photocopied for her? Can’t
you give her your file?”

Mrs. Hawthorn’s
mouth dropped. “The file is state property! I can’t do that.”

“Psych
evaluations, notes on her foster homes and all that crap is her
business. Not the states.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “Why
don’t you make photocopies and give Rouge the originals?”

Mrs. Hawthorn
pointed a tiny finger at Michael. She obviously didn’t take
bullying from anyone. “You listen to me, young man! I’ve been here
a long time. If I could do that I would. Rouge doesn’t need what’s
in this file. She needs to focus on moving forward with her life.”
She slapped the file shut and pounded her fist on top of it. “Let
her do that.”

I put my hand
on Michael’s to stop him. “Let’s just go.” I couldn’t erase the
image of what I had expected my mother to look like, fitting her
into my internal fantasy, sitting, rocking me as a small baby and
singing me to sleep. She had wanted me – at least for a little
while. That would have to be enough… for now. “Thanks Mrs.
Hawthorn.”

She stood and
walked with us to the lobby.

Michael felt
the back pocket of his shorts. “Shoot! My wallet must have fallen
out when I picked up the papers for you. I’ll be right.” He jogged
back to Mrs. Hawthorn’s office and disappeared. He was back a
moment later, holding his wallet in the air. “Found it!”

We said
good-bye and headed to the Jeep. I gave Michael the keys to drive.
“Can we head back to the hotel?” I just wanted to sleep. I suddenly
felt exhausted.

Michael pulled
out of the parking lot and onto the main road. He leaned forward,
close to the steering wheel.

“What are you
doing?” I asked.

“Untuck my
shirt will you?”

As I pulled it
out of his shorts, I felt something hard on his back. “What the…?”
His shirt came free and a manila envelope appeared.

“I figured this
belongs to you.”

I pulled the
envelope out all the way, simply unable to believe what I found.
“You stole my file?”

Chapter
11

I glanced
behind us in the back window, expecting Mrs. Hawthorn to be chasing
us with some flashing light taped to the top of her car. She
probably drove some kind of car from the seventies, some huge
hunker that she had to sit on a phone book just so she could see
over the steering wheel. “I can’t believe you stole it!”

“The
information belongs to you. Do you want me to take it back?”
Michael asked, glancing in the rear view mirror.

I turned
around. “No!” It felt weirdly exhilarating and scary at the same
time. I opened the file on my lap, but left it there, unable to
look down.

“Do you want me
to look at it?” Michael asked quietly.

I inhaled a
deep breath and let it out slowly. “I’ll do it. Just seems weird to
have most of my life just sitting here.” I felt protective of it,
like I did with the Wolf Book. This was mine. In my whole life,
almost nothing had been mine and mine alone. This…was my history,
mine in a unique way, a way that made it impossible to for anyone
to take it away from me once I knew it. The problem was, I wasn’t
sure I wanted to know, now that I had it all literally in my lap. I
stared out the window for a moment, frozen in indecision. Wasn’t
this what I had made the trip for? Didn’t I need to know this? It
was mine. Mine. And yet, it wasn’t. Not yet. The good news was
though, that all I had to do to claim it, was to read it. Such a
simple task, but one that was almost as hard to complete as making
myself read the Wolf Book.

Ultimately, it
was a bump in the road that made the decision for me. Michael
couldn’t avoid the pothole in the asphalt. The jeep bumped and the
folder started to go flying. I had to plant my hands on my lap to
keep everything from flying all over the place. It seemed like a
sign. Whether it was subconscious, or a sign from On High, I didn’t
know. However, it was obvious that I wanted and needed to claim my
history.

Lifting the
left side, I let everything fall to the right so I could start at
the beginning. There were some photocopies and notes. “You know
what I don’t believe?”

Michael glanced
at me from the corner of his eye. “What?” He pulled down some
scenic route and found a lookout point of the Niagara River. He put
the Jeep in park and let the engine idle.

“I don’t
believe my birth mother ever kept me.” I stared blankly at the
file. “I mean, I would remember that, wouldn’t I?” I dug through my
earliest memories searching for some sign of her, even just a
feeling of cared for, but there was nothing. Not a warm hug, kind
word or anything that would let me think I had been loved.

“I don’t know.
I mean, if she left you before you were three, that’s pretty early
to remember.”

“Why would she
leave me in the hospital, then pick me up and then drop me off
there again?” I couldn’t wrap my head around it. I flipped through
the first five or six pages of the file and came to a medical page
with my vaccination history. The doctor was located in Niagara
Falls. “It looks like I lived here and then she dropped me off in
Utica. Why drive all that way down there to get rid of me.”
Only
to end up back here again.
“It just doesn’t make sense.”

“Maybe she
thought she could keep you and then finically couldn’t afford
to.”

“But she picked
me up at the hospital the day I was supposed to be given away. That
doesn’t get her out of the medical bills.”

“Okay. So maybe
it wasn’t about the money…” His let his sentence trail off.

I scanned a few
more of the medical pages but most of it didn’t make sense or
simply held no importance, no key to who my mother was. “You think
my father might not have wanted me?”

Michael pressed
his lips together before finally speaking. “Maybe… and I am just
saying maybe… maybe your mother already had a family. Maybe she met
someone and had an affair.”

It didn’t sound
true. I don’t know why I didn’t believe it; it was plausible after
all. I just didn’t. “No. I don’t think that’s it.” My stomach
churned at the next thought. “Maybe she got rid of me because I
wasn’t marked. She’s probably a Grollic and came back to check if I
had the birthmark by my collar bone.” I reached for the spot that
was smooth and without blemish. Like a bullet going straight
through my body, the exact same spot on my back burned. Maybe she
had seen the mark on my back and known what it meant. Maybe she had
thrown me away because of it.

“Or she was
raped by a Grollic and couldn’t bear to look at you and the memory
it brought back.” I looked at him with horror written all over my
face. Michael squeezed my shoulder. “That sounds terrible, but
something dramatic must have happened. I can’t imagine anyone
giving you up.”

It soothed the
awful sense of revulsion that had instantly sprouted in my heart.
He was sweet; one of the reasons I loved him so much. “I guess we
need to find her and ask why then.” I flipped back to the first
pages looking for a name.