Today her parents and Uncle Giles had gone off to talk almost right away. Grandfather had said the children could all take a little break before they went back to their studies.
Carrie dried her hands and went upstairs to their big playroom. Grandfather turned and winked at her as she slipped in, but went on playing the piano, singing to her little brothers, Aaron and Troy. The boys stood as close to him as they could, eyes bright, joining in on the chorus. It was a song for young children, one Grandfather had written. Her nine-year-old sister, Genie, was quietly drawing. She smiled at Carrie, flashed a quick greeting in sign language, then bent her head over the big pad of drawing paper Grandfather had brought her.
Grandfather had taught all of his grandchildren some sign language so that they could communicate with their two deaf cousins. “And when my hearing goes, you can use it to talk to me,” he’d say.
As usual, he had brought a little gift for each of them. The drawing pad for Genie. For Carrie, a disposable camera, which made Mom roll her eyes but delighted Carrie-Grandfather had smiled at her excitement. The boys had been given storybooks, carefully chosen for their reading levels and interests-Troy’s was a book about dinosaurs, Aaron’s about astronomy. The boys loved books.
Carrie went to sit on the cushions on the window seat of the big bay window. She listened to the lyrics of Grandfather’s song, which was about the planets in the solar system. Carrie was old enough now to know that most of the songs Grandfather wrote were teaching songs, because Grandfather loved teaching almost as much as he loved children. The song was just the right thing for the boys. Aaron was five and Troy was six. Both of them could name the planets, because they knew this song so well.
Carrie had been able to name them at the age of four. She had learned them without the song.
Grandfather began to play a different song, a song about raindrops. He said that it came from a movie. Carrie, who was sitting away from the others, listened to Grandfather sing it as she watched raindrops on the windowpane.
Suddenly a strange feeling came over her. Inside her head, she could hear another voice singing the song. A man’s voice, soft and gentle. She was remembering that voice.
Someone else has sung this song to me. Another man. He sang it to me so that I wouldn’t be afraid of the rainstorm, the thunder.
She could almost see the man. In her memory, she could find the scent of him-it was a good and comforting scent, maybe from his soap or shampoo. Then, in snippets of memory that were nevertheless quite clear, she could see the man. His eyes were blue, like hers, and his hair was the same dark gold. As quickly as the images and memories had come to her, they were gone.
She watched the raindrops more intently. She had come up with a term for these experiences: a remembering. She knew Mom would scold her if she knew Carrie had tried to make a noun out of a verb, but Mom didn’t need to know all of Carrie’s thoughts. Mom would say they were memories, period. They weren’t exactly memories, to Carrie’s way of thinking. They were something on the way to being a memory. One day, she would remember more, and then they’d really be memories, not these vague impressions.
When the rememberings first came to her, she had been frightened and upset, and-for reasons she couldn’t immediately explain-sad. She knew she was adopted-they all were-but Mom and Dad said she had been adopted as a baby, not at three years old, as Genie and the boys had been. So how could a baby remember a song?
She was a sensible girl, as Dad was always saying, so she didn’t stay upset for long. She worked out several possibilities. She decided her parents had probably lied to her. She must not have been a baby when they adopted her. She must have been older. She looked something like Mom-and was probably chosen on that basis. After her, they gave up on that-Genie and the boys didn’t look anything like their adoptive parents. They just didn’t want her to be hurt by the knowledge that her real parents had a chance to get to know her before they decided they didn’t want her any longer.
She had seen how the boys cried when they first came to live here, each in turn. She had watched how wonderfully patient and kind Mom and Dad had been. Now, two years after the youngest, Aaron, had come here, he seemed not to remember being part of any other family. He didn’t cry out for his dead parents, or try to make up another name for himself.
Mom and Dad said Carrie’s parents had died not long after she was born. But she was sure that was a lie.
It made her feel sad that her adoptive parents had lied, even if it was a white lie. She was old enough now to realize that everyone lied, but still, you didn’t have to like it. She knew she was kind of a liar, too, because she kept secrets, and if her mother asked, “What’s on your mind, Carrie?” she didn’t always answer truthfully.
She wished she could ask questions about her birth parents, but she was afraid, she admitted to herself. What if she hurt Mom and Dad by asking? What if they decided she was too much trouble to keep? She was happy here, and loved her family. What good would it do to ask questions, especially if she might not like the answers?
She leaned her forehead against the cold glass and closed her eyes. The voice of the man of her remembering came back to her, and she found that she liked thinking about him. She had a series of private daydreams about this father who had not wanted to give her up, but a mean mother who insisted. The mean mother variously kept her locked in a closet, put her in a trunk, or sold her to strangers.
She never came up with a mental image or even a remembering of her birth mother. Only her father. She had another daydream in which her mother died just after Carrie was born, and then her father was in a terrible accident and hit his head and couldn’t remember anything and didn’t come home, and Carrie was put up for adoption.
That part of the story was inspired by a paperback book she had found in a box in the attic, called Emily and the Stranger, in which an earl falls off his horse and hits his head and loses his memory and is found by a woman who lives alone in the woods and who cares for him and marries him, and then she gets kidnapped and he hits his head again and remembers everything, then they learn that Emily was really not a poor girl after all. It was a book that Mom didn’t know she had hidden in her room, a book that had taught her many other surprising things. (She and Genie had been told about sex as an element of biological reproduction, but that was nothing like what the book described.)
Emily and the Stranger was now in a mailing envelope she had taken from the recycling pile and taped to the back of one of the sliding doors on her closet, one of several places where she kept small treasures. She never hid things under her mattress, though-Genie had told her that Mom hid things under her own mattress, so Carrie was sure Mom searched the kids’ beds every now and then.
In Carrie’s daydream, her father would be hit on his golden-haired head a second time, but not enough to hurt, just enough to make him remember his past and look for her.
He was her secret, just like the book. No one needed to know. Not even Grandfather. Especially not Grandfather or Uncle Giles, she decided, then wondered why such a thought should even cross her mind.
CHAPTER 13
Monday, April 24
4:30 P.M.
NEWSROOM OF THE
LAS PIERNAS NEWS EXPRESS
ALTHOUGH the City Desk had put a few more people on the story of the drowning victims out on the oil island, Mark Baker still had his hands full with that one. Mark and I have worked together for a lot of years, though, and he knows just by looking at me when I’m on to something.