Bonnie hasn’t forgotten the tattoo.
She’d been drugged. Her blood was taken and sent off for testing to see if she was a possible match for her dying half-brother. She hadn’t been in her right mind then, but things have been coming back in flashes of blurred memories. She hadn’t been meant to see the tattoo at all. They had kept her drugged, mostly, but every now and then she’d rouse and see the man who said he was her father and the bald man, both hovering over her. The bald man wasn’t old, but his entire head had been shaved for some reason. He had been furious at her father for the tattoo, because her father hadn’t understood it, didn’t deserve it. They spoke in a language that she didn’t know, but matters were made perfectly clear when the bald man yanked up the sleeve on her birth father’s shirt and pointed at the tattoo.
She had been frightened of the bald man. Sometimes she’d wakened from a deep fog to find him watching her with cold eyes. Her supposed father was quick to laugh and become angry, from what she’d observed, but the bald man had not showed any sign of excitability until the tattoo incident. When the bald man noticed she was awake, he’d left the room, her father following after him. The door slammed shut and Bonnie was alone again. Scared. Weak. Passive. She swore then that she’d never be in that position again. She would find out everything she could about her father’s family and the people who’d taken her as if she meant nothing.
She has been thinking about this a lot. In a way, she is nothing. Not this or that or the other. She has realized that her birth mom, Nora, has no clue, either. They’re both confused and in the dark, so what does it really matter the history that brought her here. Over time—not much, she’s still a teenager, after all—she felt less and less like nothing and more and more like part of everything. Nothing was hers, so everything was hers. It made no sense, not really, so she’s never mentioned this to her mother Lynn or her other mother Nora, or her father Everett or to Tom. She doesn’t really have friends in Toronto yet and she doesn’t talk to her best friend from Vancouver much anymore, so there’s no need to worry about keeping things from them, thank God. She just has to keep it to herself because it sounds crazy even to her.
She is her own.
Just like Nora, she doesn’t belong to anyone. Thinking about Nora, she experiences a pang of regret—or something like it. She’d sent the photo at the clinic, with her feet in stirrups, because she’d wanted to share that moment. It was just like last year, when she went to see Nora at the hospital. She had wanted her birth mother to know what she went through to find her. The pain, the fear, and everything else that had happened. But Nora hadn’t even recognized her then.
Thinking about that time only gives her nightmares, but she can’t help herself. She hasn’t slept through until the morning in . . . well, since forever, it seems. Drawing is the only thing that helps get her through the night. She gets out her sketchpad and pencil. After the incident last year, her therapist encouraged her to use art as therapy. Her sketches and paintings were almost always of shadow faces hidden in landscapes. Hidden so deep that it became a game to set scenes that were not obvious at first glance, but once you saw them you could not forget. It added an energy to the pieces that could not be explained unless you could see what was underneath. Every now and then she’d draw a symbol that she’d seen inked on her father’s arm. The symbol was dripping with blood. She mostly drew the blood.