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.

“It might not be that easy,” Michael said quietly. “She requested that her information not be given to you when you were legal age. That’s going to put a quite the bump in the research road.”

I didn’t hear him. I’d stop listening as I stared at the page in front of me. I tuned everything out but the words on the page. Slowly I handed it to him.

He looked at me, eyebrows raised.

“If you look on the right side, near the bottom, you’ll see it.”

He glanced down, lifted the page and tilted his head. He flipped back to the front and glanced at me.

“Ih-Ihh…” I cleared my throat and tried again, my voice coming out in a whisper, “My mother’s signature.”

Michael’s head dropped down. “Ohhhhh… I see it.”

“Rebekah. Her name’s Rebekah Gnowee.” I shrugged. “Or however you say it. I’m guessing there won’t be too many of those in the phone book.” I tapped my finger against my thigh. The last name sounded so weird. I planned to google it when I got back to the hotel later.

Michael set the Jeep into drive and pulled back onto the road. “Let’s head back to the hotel and see what we can find.” He tossed the file back onto my lap. “Is there an address on the page when she signed you over to the state?”

I ripped open the file folder to double check.

My heart nearly stopped. “There is… Holy crap! There is!” My hands shook at the address scrawled below the signature, her name printed and an apartment number in Niagara Falls.

“Put it in the GPS. Let’s go there now.”

“Now?” My heart that had felt like it has stopped a minute ago now felt like it was racing down a giant hill on a pair of roller skates. Michael was right. This is what I came here for. I tapped the address into the GPS. “Nothing like the element of surprise.”

I was awkwardly trying to close keep pages from falling all over the place and enter the address into the GPS, when a folded sheet with hand written notes slipped out of the file. It read:

Utica Hospital

Baby Doe, aka Rouge (R), was born premature. Biological mother was in a terrible state when R was delivered. She left the hospital before being medically released and never signed the forms to hand her over to the state. Only left a note to say the infants name was to be Rouge. Then the woman up and left; disappeared. She came the day we released R to the state. Dr. Mormar was the attending physician. He asked this note be written in case baby R is returned to the state again.

“I wonder where I got the name Thomas from?” I said out loud.

“Maybe your biological mother gave you the name so it would be easier for her to find you.”

I scoffed. “Thomas isn’t that unique, you know. Gnowee would have definitely been easier to find.”

“Okay then. Maybe she gave it to you because she was trying to hide you from someone.”

“I doubt it. There’s a note here that she left a note to say my name was Rouge. No last name. The state probably gave it to me. Jones, Smith, Thomas… something simple.”

“Did you know that your name means pure?”

I have him an odd look. Had he looked it up? “Really? My last name?”

He shook his head. “Your first name.” He made a left turn, following the GPS. “Maybe there’s a reason why she named you that. Maybe she named you Rouge, in the hopes of keeping you pure from the past.” He shrugged his shoulders, “Just trying to be a little philosophical for the moment.”

I patted his shoulder and laughed. “You’re doing a great job.” I straightened and stared out the window, filled with a new sense of purpose and drive. “Okay. Let’s go find my mom.”