There are moments in your life you can’t plan for.
They happen, hit you, render you incapable. I am in the middle of a moment where nothing I do will stop it from happening. Every second that passes is another step closer to that moment.
In my mind, in the sequence of freeze-frame moments that I see the world in sometimes, I am heading back to Lottie. I have my butterfly-covered toolbox of tricks in one hand, my green, many-pocketed bag is slung across my body, and in my other hand I have my car keys. I am walking away from this place and I am going to my van for a sit down and a think. I am not doing this. I am not standing outside a door that has a brass plate emblazoned ‘OFFICE’, contemplating knocking.
Only a silly, deluded person would do something like that. I am not a silly, deluded person. Much.
I’ve probably violated all sorts of security protocols and I’m almost certainly being watched on a camera right now as I stand here, hand raised to knock.
This is an ordinary corridor in an ordinary and strange building. This probably shouldn’t happen in an ordinary corridor. On television, when this happens, the people involved meet in places of significance or a café or a park. Wherever it is, there is usually some kind of sentimental memory attached. Also, probably most importantly, they have prepared themselves, they have thought about what they’re going to say. They don’t take the word of an old woman they’ve never met before and decide to do this.
I am being ridiculous. It’s understandable, but ridiculous nonetheless. The promise I remade my mother four weeks ago comes to mind, rising up like a phoenix from the depths of the flames of what I am doing. I promised her I wouldn’t do anything like this while there was even the slimmest of chances that my biological family would take me away from her. The promise phoenix beats its wings at me and I know I can’t do this. I can’t do this to my mother. She’s too fragile to be able to handle this. Whatever this is.
Imagine, too, Smitty, what you would actually have to say: ‘Excuse me, I think you may be my sister. I’m the child your parents gave away before you were born. Yes, that’s right, you call for security and call for a psychiatric assessment, too, because that’s exactly what I would do in your position.’
Before anyone can see me, I snatch up my toolbox and get the hell out of there.
Dad was weak some days, so thin and fragile, his skin translucent with a blue-green-black network of veins beneath the surface, and his body so obviously wracked with pain. Other days it all seemed like some awful mistake, that the doctors were all wrong and he was on the mend. He had little appetite, little thirst, and every time I tried to get him to take something in, he would refuse, or ‘Later, quine, later’ me.
‘Have you ever thought of finding your first parents?’ Dad asked me. Today was one of those in between days, where he seemed to hover almost comfortably between waning and might improve. He had probably been waiting for one of those days to ask me that, although I wasn’t sure how he managed to fix it to land on a day, like today, where Mum would be out for a long period of time.
‘No. I don’t generally think about them, Dad.’
His face made a smile, one that I’d become so accustomed to over the years, and I struggled again to believe what was happening, what I’d one day have to live without. I had pictures of Dad, so many pictures, but none were good enough, none captured the perfect symmetry of his smile, the way his top lip would move upwards a fraction more, the way the smile would connect with his blue eyes. ‘Smitty, I’m not your mother. You don’t have to pretend with me.’
They were so together, Mum and Dad. The kind of couple who never seemed to argue for long, who were openly devoted to each other and really would only be parted by death. Yet, they dealt with the whole ‘adopted daughter’ issue so differently. Mum never wanted it mentioned, like she could pretend away the fact I was not biologically theirs, and Dad, he was like this: always willing to talk about it.
‘I do think about it sometimes, but not all the time. Or even often. Or very much at all. It’s not as if they’ve made great moves to find me.’
‘Would you want that? To be tracked down like they do on those television shows?’
‘No! I can’t think of anything worse. I can’t explain how I feel, Dad,’ I admitted.
It’s always there – you don’t grow up like I did and simply forget how different you are from your family and most people around you – but it’s simply that the sense of difference sometimes recedes to the back of my mind and I’m not bothered about finding them. And, sometimes, my curiosity bubbles over, like a pot that has simmered for too long and the gentle blue flame is edged up and up until it is orange and fierce.
‘I should want to find them, and I do,’ I said to Dad. ‘I also think about what it would do to my life, having to get to know people who I should want to know. I worry about what it would do to you and Mum to think I’m looking elsewhere when I have you at home. I also think about them and how they’ve probably got lives that are sorted, and the last thing they need is to have me turning up wanting in on that. If it was as simple as searching and being a fly on the wall of their homes so I could see what they were like but only engage when I want to, I’d do that.’
‘I hate this disease, Smitty. It’s robbed me of the time I should have spent telling you …’ His eyes were heavy, his frailty acute and overtly torturous. ‘I should have encouraged you earlier to find them. To know where you come from … I didn’t do right by you.’
‘Please don’t say that, Dad. You’ve done everything right by me. All my life you’ve always been there. I can’t stand to think that you feel you did me wrong. I don’t want to find them at the moment. I may change my mind in the future, I may not, but right now I’m happy as I am.’ Even though I hate being untethered, feeling as though I don’t belong anywhere, I couldn’t be that unhappy if I wasn’t actively trying to change that.
‘When you were little, you used to say to me that you were from Scotland, like me.’
‘I don’t remember that.’
‘You would tell me all the time, “I’m from Scotland, just like you”.’
‘That does sound like something I’d say.’
‘Quine, I would burst with pride knowing that you felt that way.’
Inside Lottie, my balance returns. Calmness descends. My heart stops turning over itself in my chest, my lungs remember how to slowly draw in oxygen and carefully expel carbon dioxide.
What I was about to do … That isn’t like me. I have never been that impulsive. I plan, I think things through, I visualise and prepare. I’m not sure which would have been worse: her being my half-sister or her not. Either way, I would have had to tell a complete stranger that her mother has been lying to her for most of her life. This would have been based on nothing more than the word of another complete stranger, who spent most of her time thinking and speaking in Finnish.
‘Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid,’ I tell myself. I hang on to the steering wheel, bending forwards. My stomach is not settling, it isn’t as easily soothed and fobbed off as my heart and my lungs. My stomach believes Mrs Lehtinen. My gut is telling me that she is right. I am the little girl who slept in the butterfly box, whose mother went on to give birth to another girl sometime later. ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid.’ Even if it is true, there is nothing I can do about it. Simply thinking about it causes the phoenix, fiery and burning, of that promise I made my mother to beat its wings at me, the heat flashing through me. I can’t do it to her. I can’t break her heart when she’s only at the beginning of the journey of the grief of losing my dad.
Tap, tap, tap against Lottie’s window. So quiet and hesitant it takes a few moments for the sound to properly register.
Tap, tap, tap again. More certain, more sure this time. I do not need company right now. If there is one thing I do not need it is to speak to someone. What I need right now is to be left alone, to have a breakdown on my own before I go home and pretend to my mother that I haven’t inadvertently broken my promise and I haven’t almost ruined the life of some poor woman who happened to work in the same nursing home as a potential client.
Tap, tap, tap. Again. This person should have got the message that I’m not up for talking. Although, to be fair to them, they may think I’m dead or something and want to be sure.
The bones in my neck click as I raise my head and turn in the direction of the tapping.
I’ve never imagined being electrocuted before, but this feels like it. It feels like all the volts that used to pass through the power station where Dad once worked have been sent through me at the same time. Even through the grimy, salt-splattered window, the person is clear to me. My gaze does not move from the window while my fingers grope around for the window handle. With the grey plastic grip in my fingers, I slowly slide it open. The person in front of me is immediately crystal clear and I am looking into a mirror.
It’s a mirror that can take away the years, hide your wrinkles, change your hairstyle, give you spots and blemishes in different places, but it’s a mirror all the same. I am looking into my own face as it probably looked ten years ago.
‘Are you OK?’ she asks. ‘Mrs Lehtinen said you seemed upset and would I mind coming to check on you before you left.’ She sounds nothing like me, of course. She’s from here and I’m from nowhere. She pauses, stares at me like she’s only just seeing what I’m seeing. ‘I’m guessing she meant you as you’re the only person in this car park.’ This is said distractedly – the mirror is starting to work for her, too. She’s looking into it and she has more wrinkles around the eyes, more blemishes on her cheeks, her face is filled out a little more, her hair isn’t sleek and straight to her shoulders, but curly and shorter. But the eyes are the same in this mirror, the nose is the same shape, the lips are the same size, the forehead has the same curve. ‘I only do these things for her because she’s an old family friend.’
I don’t speak. My mouth does not know what to say. My brain knows what it should say but that would be ludicrous. She would probably freak out if I told her.
‘Sorry,’ she says after her eyes have repeatedly examined every part of my face, each time finding more and more similarities: the imperfection in the slope of my left eyebrow, the slight indentation at the tip of my nose, the way my right ear is a tiny bit more curved at the top. ‘Sorry for staring, but why do you look exactly like me?’
‘I don’t look like you,’ I want to say. ‘You actually look like me because I was here first.’
My shoulders shrug at her first of all. Then my mouth decides it needs to speak. It needs to do something because staring and shrugging aren’t the way to resolve this.
‘I look like you because I think I’m your sister,’ I say. And it takes all my strength not to burst out laughing because it’s the most ridiculous, unbelievable thing I’ve ever said in my life.