Stranger With My Face (7 page)

“And what?” I prodded.

“I wanted to put her down.”

“Why did you want to do that?” I asked.

“That’s what your dad kept asking me. I couldn’t explain it to him then, and I can’t to you now. It was instinctive. She felt
alien in my arms. I knew I would not be able to love her.”

“Just like that? Without any reason?”

“There was something strange about her. I can’t tell you what it was. I know it doesn’t make sense. I’m not a baby-lover by
nature. There are women who are, you know—women who adore all babies, just because of their babyness—but I’ve always been
selective about the people in my life, babies as well as adults. I even used to wonder, when I was pregnant with Neal, how
I would feel about him after he was born, and whether I would be able to love him the way I did you. I picked you out. He
was an unknown.” She smiled slightly. “Of course, that was a ridiculous worry. Neal and Megan were meant to be ours just the
way you were.”

“How could you have gotten pregnant later if your ovaries weren’t working?” I asked her, almost accusingly.

“We don’t know,” Dad said, speaking for her. “The doctors couldn’t give us any explanation. Maybe they made a mistake in their
diagnosis, or maybe there were hormonal changes in your mother’s body. Who knows? There again, what does it matter? We’re
here—we’re a family. Now that you know your background, there’s nothing left for you to wonder about. Can’t we just file this
away and go on with our normal lives?”

“It’s not that easy,” I said. “I want to find my twin.”

“This is just what I was afraid of!” Mom exclaimed. “It’s the reason I didn’t want you to know. You can’t just accept it,
can you? Oh, no. You’ve got to want more; you have to find out about these people who aren’t anything to you.”

“The girl is my sister.”

“Megan is your sister!”

“Meg is my adoptive sister,” I said bitterly, accentuating the word. “I want to know about my real, blood sister.”

“You’re just trying to hurt us.” Mom’s voice was rising. “You’re trying to punish us for not telling you before.”

“Easy now, Shelly,” Dad said soothingly, laying a restraining hand on her arm. “It’s natural for Laurie to react this way.
It’s a shock to discover there’s a part of your past you weren’t aware of.”

“But now she wants to throw out the people who’ve loved and raised her and go out hunting for perfect strangers!”

“I want to know about my sister,” I repeated. How dare my mother put me on the defensive this way, when it was she and Dad
who had created the situation?

“Aren’t you even curious how I found out about her? It’s because she comes to me at night.”

“Oh, Laurie—” Dad began.

“You don’t believe me? You think I’m lying?”

“I think you’re very upset,” Dad said.

“Of course I am. I’m upset because the two people I trusted most in the world have deceived me all my life, and I’m upset
because this sister—this Lia—has been visiting me at night, stirring around my dreams, appearing places where people think
she’s me. Remember, Dad, when you thought you saw me going up to my room, and I wasn’t even in the house? That was Lia. She
went to my room. She looked through my things. She sat on my bed. When I entered the room later, I could feel her there. Then,
when Helen spent the night—”

“Make her stop, Jim,” Mom pleaded. “I can’t take any more of this. You see now how right I was, don’t you? We never should
have told her.”

“You wouldn’t have if I hadn’t forced you,” I reminded her. “If you don’t believe me about Lia’s visits, then how do you think
I found out about her?”

“Obviously, you must have gone through the file cabinet and found the adoption papers,” Dad said. “Get a grip on yourself,
Laurie. Overdramatizing isn’t going to accomplish anything. Your mother and I feel bad enough about this already. So, you’re
adopted. So, you’re angry because we didn’t tell you sooner. All right, then—you’re angry. Perhaps you have a right to be.
But there’s one thing you’ll have to admit if you’re honest. It’s that we love you. Any mistakes we may have made were made
for that reason. You don’t doubt that, do you?”

I was silent for a moment. Then I had to answer, “No.”

As furious as I was at them, I did not doubt that they loved me.

And because of that—because they loved
me, and I knew it, and they knew I knew it—we could not stay estranged. We were awkward with each other for a day or so,
but it subsided. It was especially hard to remain aloof when the kids were around. I looked at Megan, bustling about in that
funny, self-important way of hers, and found myself smiling as I always had. And when Neal sat, dreamy-eyed, over his drawings,
his soft, pale hair fluffed forward over his forehead, I was filled with the same surge of overwhelming tenderness I had experienced
when he was first brought home to Cliff House. They were my sister and my brother. Nothing could change that.

And Dad and Mom were my parents.

So we slipped back into what Dad had referred to as “our normal lives.” We didn’t speak again about my adoption. The only
two people I told about it were Gordon and Helen. Gordon didn’t say very much, but, then, what was there that he could say?
He mumbled something about its being “a really crazy thing to find out about yourself ” and switched the subject as though it embarrassed him.

Helen reacted with no surprise at all.

“I thought that might be it,” she said. “Especially after I met your family and saw how blond they were. I even guessed about
the Native American heritage. You’re lighter-complexioned than the kids I went to school with, but your eyes and those cheekbones
are very Navajo.”

“I can’t think of myself as part Navajo,” I said.

“Of course you can’t, because you haven’t been raised as one. You feel like a Stratton. But, Lia—who knows about her? She
could have been adopted by—well, by anyone. She might live here in New England or in California or Florida or anywhere.”

“Or even in some foreign country if her adoptive parents were diplomats or something,” I said, intrigued by the idea.

“Or she might still be in New Mexico,” Helen continued. “The location doesn’t make any difference. If she can project herself,
she can do it from any place she is.”

“But how would she know how?” I asked. “I’d never even heard of astral projection until you explained it to me. How would
Lia know about it? And how could she have learned to do it?”

“There’s one person who can answer that,” Helen said.

“And there’s no way to ask her. She hasn’t come to me since that night you saw her. Maybe she got scared when she found a
stranger in the bed she thought was mine. Maybe she’s not coming back.”

“I hope that’s true,” Helen said.

“I don’t!” The words burst from me without conscious thought, and I was as startled by them as Helen was.

“But I thought you wanted her gone,” she said in surprise.

“I did, but now—” I let the sentence trail off, unsure of how to finish it.

“She’s evil, Laurie. She’s out to hurt you.”

“You don’t know that,” I countered.

“I saw it in her eyes that night. I told you—”

“It was dark, and you were half-asleep,” I said. “She scared you, appearing that way. She didn’t do anything to you, though,
did she? And she’s never hurt me either. She just visits, like she wants to know about my life. Why shouldn’t she, when she’s
my sister?”

“You used to be scared of her,” Helen said.

“That was before.”
We floated together in the same sea before birth
. I hadn’t understood then, but now I did.
We are the two sides of a coin
. Suddenly I was filled with a terrible sense of loss. “I want to know about her too. There must be some way of locating her.
Don’t you think the adoption agency kept records?”

“Probably,” Helen said. “But I don’t think they’d give them out. Besides, you don’t know what agency handled the adoptions.”

“My parents do.”

“You can’t ask them,” Helen said. “You know they’re not going to tell you. You said your mother freaked out over the thought
that you might want to track down your other parents.”

“I don’t have to ask them,” I told her. “I know where to look for what I need.”

The information was in the steel filing cabinet in my father’s office. It wasn’t difficult to find. And, since Dad had already
accused me of having “gone through the file,” I didn’t feel any special guilt about living up to the accusation. I went into
the office on a Saturday morning when Dad was still asleep and Mom and Neal were upstairs painting, pulled out the sliding
drawers, and riffled through the alphabetically arranged contents.

There were book and movie contracts, business correspondence, bank and royalty statements and packets of research material. There were also folders on each of us children. Ignoring the ones on Neal and Meg, I pulled out the one marked “Laurie.” In it I was surprised to find my old grammar school
report cards, as well as a collection of hand-drawn birthday and Father’s Day cards dating back to kindergarten days. There
was also a set of formal papers, proclaiming me legally the child of James and Shelly Stratton, and photocopies of several
short letters to a “Mrs. Margaret Hastings, Director of Hastings Adoption Agency” in Gallup, New Mexico.

The letters revealed nothing of personal interest; they were confirmations of appointments that had apparently been over the
phone. They did, however, contain the address of the agency. I copied it down, returned the folder to the file, and went up
to my room to write the letter. Fifteen minutes later I was on my bike, headed for the post office in the village to put it
into the mail. The return address I gave was Helen’s, since I didn’t want my parents finding an envelope with an agency letterhead
in our post office box.

As it turned out, I didn’t have to worry about it. An answer to my letter didn’t arrive until the first week of November,
and when it did come, it was on the personal stationery of a “Mrs. Thomas Kelsey.”

In the meantime, autumn moved in upon us. The air became crisp and then chill, and the trees on the mainland turned gold and
red. On the island the grasses and sea oats browned. The little scrub oaks lost their leaves, and the poison ivy in the thickets
along the sides of the road blazed a brilliant crimson.

By mid-October the prams—rowboats—had been removed from the water, and the only boats to be seen on the horizon were those
of commercial fishermen. The souvenir shops and the art gallery closed, and the streets of the village were void of tourists.
The waves curled high on the deserted beaches, and blue days alternated with gray.

Autumn doesn’t last long on Brighton Island. It serves only as a brief prelude to winter.

I wasn’t seeing much of Gordon anymore. There were reasons. He and Blane had decided to go out for the basketball team, which
meant they had to stay after school for practices and take a later ferry to the island. On weekends he worked with his father
doing repair work on some of the summer cottages. The Ahearns owned a group of these on the southern end of the island.

We did go to the Halloween dance at the high school, triple-dating with Blane and Darlene, and Tommy and a girl named Crystal.
It should have been fun. The gym had been decorated with pumpkins and corn husks, and there was a witch on a broomstick silhouetted
against a full moon over the dance floor. There was a good DJ, and even the teachers were dancing. I just couldn’t get myself
into the spirit of the evening. I did all the expected things. I danced and laughed and made party chitchat and gulped the
punch that Blane had spiked liberally with vodka from a flask he’d brought in a bag marked “Tricks and Treats.”

But something was missing. I felt it, and so did Gordon.

When he brought me home he asked me, “Did you have a nice time?”

“Fantastic,” I said. “Did you?”

“Sure,” he said. “Great.”

It was as though if we kept reassuring ourselves long enough and enthusiastically enough, the words would become true.

On the ferry in the mornings I still rode with Gordon and his crowd, but on the return trips I climbed to the top deck and
sat alone or with Neal. The wind there was strong and cold, and I huddled in my ski jacket and kept a scarf pulled across
the lower half of my face. Sometimes Jeff was there, hunched over a book, a gloved hand cupped against the bad side of his
face to protect it from the wind. When he was, I sat beside him, neither of us talking much. I found his silent company more
to my liking than the incessant chatter of the group below.

At school I continued to share lunch with Helen, and one Friday I went home with her to spend the weekend. It was the first
time I’d had the opportunity to meet her parents. They were a lot like I had expected, pleasant people who obviously adored
their daughter.

“We’re concerned about whether we did the right thing by moving here,” Mrs. Tuttle confided at dinner. “The cost of living
is so much higher, and while my husband was able to find a teaching job, I wasn’t, so I’m just substituting. But we thought
it would be good for Helen to be exposed to another sort of life. She’s such an outgoing girl, we never thought for a moment
that she’d have problems making friends.”

“Helen has friends,” I assured her while Helen groaned in embarrassment.

“Oh, I know, but except for you they’re such casual ones. She never gets asked to parties or to people’s houses. Maybe it
just takes time. We’ve all heard stories about that famous New England reserve.”

“The boy with the scarred face comes over sometimes,” Mr. Tuttle interjected.

“Jeff ?” I turned to Helen in surprise. “You didn’t tell me that.”

“There’s nothing to tell,” Helen said. “He’s been over a few times, and one night we went to the movies. It’s no big deal.”

“He’s a strange young man,” her mother said. “It’s tragic what happened to him, and I’m very sorry about it, but it can’t
do much for Helen’s reputation to be seen with him. I’d hate for people to start thinking they were romantically involved.”

“I’m not exactly the world’s most glamorous creature myself, Mom,” Helen said lightly. “Who cares what people think? Besides,
I like Jeff. His looks don’t bother me. He’s lonely, and I—” She didn’t complete the sentence. To cover the unspoken words,
she gave a bright, natural-sounding laugh and shoved her chair back from the table. “Great dinner, Mom! Laurie, do you want
to go watch a movie?”

There was a lot of pride in Helen Tuttle. She’d never admit to anyone that her life was not exactly as she would have it,
and that she, too, was lonely.

The evening was relaxed and uneventful. We watched some DVDs and read magazines (how quiet it was in a house without little
kids!), and by eleven we were in our pajamas. Once settled into the twin bed across from Helen’s, I found that I wasn’t sleepy
at all. The rattle of traffic in the street outside the Tuttles’ two-story town house was an alien sound. I pictured the surf
breaking against the rocks beneath the windows of Cliff House and tried to transform the city noises into the roar of waves.
The kids would be asleep now, and so would Mom. Dad would be settled in his office at the computer. My own room would be empty.

Or—would it?

What if Lia has come?
I asked myself.
What if she’s there now, looking for me?

Instantly, I could see her on the screen of my closed lids as she had been that first night, reflected in the glass of the
balcony doors. My face. My hair. My features. But the mouth with corners lifted in a secret smile that had not been mine.
Myself, yet not myself. The other half of me. Was she now at Cliff House? Somehow, I was sure she was. For so many nights
I had lain awake waiting for her; it was fate that it would be on this night that I wasn’t there to receive her that she would
come.

Lia!
I called silently.
Lia, don’t leave again!

I reached out for her with my mind, willing my thoughts in her direction. Mentally, I saw myself entering Cliff House and
moving up the stairs—past the kitchen—past the darkened living room—past the children’s room and my parents’—to my own bedroom door. I stretched out my hand and rested it on the knob. She was there. I could feel her on the far side,
resting quietly, waiting. I knew it, but I was powerless to reach her. The knob would not turn.

“Helen?” I whispered. “Are you awake?”

“Mmmmmm.” There was the sound of her body shifting beneath the blankets in the bed across from me.

“I need to ask you something.” I hoisted myself up onto my elbow. “Helen, do you think I could do it too?”

“Do what?” The urgency in my voice must have gotten through to her, because she no longer sounded sleepy. “What is it you’re
thinking of doing?”

“Projecting. I’m identical to Lia. Isn’t it logical that whatever mind power she has would be available to me? A moment ago
I was thinking about Cliff House, and I had this feeling that if I tried hard enough, if I could just figure out how to direct
myself, I could will myself there!”

“No!” Helen said sharply. “You should never try!”

“Why not?” I was becoming more and more excited by the idea. “Think what it could mean! If I could free myself from my body
the way Lia does, I could do anything! I could travel anywhere!”