7
Sienna
April
I’m standing in the doorway to Dad’s office with butterflies in my stomach. I’ve never gone through the ranch’s filing cabinet before—there has never been something in the cabinet that I couldn’t wait for him to get for me. If I were here for any other reason, I wouldn’t think twice about searching on my own. But I’m going around him, and that makes me anxious. I can imagine after the difficult exchanges we’ve had that if I asked him, “Hey, can I look through the filing cabinet for information about Mom?” he might say no. And yet that would be a ridiculous thing for him to do, right? He doesn’t want to talk about Mom, but he wouldn’t really prevent me from learning about her. That I’m not sure is enough for me to decide not to ask. I don’t want to take the chance. Repentance instead of Forgiveness, only I’m pretty sure that isn’t what Jesus taught.
The file tabs are handwritten—some in Dad’s handwriting and some Grandma Dee’s. I stare at Grandma’s familiar blocky print and wonder if I would have gone to her for help with finding this information if she were here. It’s hard to know whether she would help me. She didn’t know my mom very well—only met her a couple of times—and I’ve always sensed she was bitter about the years Dad was away from the ranch. He went to Ontario for a study abroad his final year of college, met my mom, and didn’t come back until after she’d died. If Mom had lived, I don’t know that he would have ever come back, though I’ve never thought too much about it, because Dad is the ranch to me. I can’t picture him in a city, wearing sneakers and button-up shirts.
I feel both guilty and giddy as I take a breath and set to work. Work is good for what ails ya, right, Grandma?
I first look for a file with my mother’s name—Mable—and quickly realize it will be in the second drawer down since the top drawer only goes to H. However, there is no file titled MABLE. She isn’t under C for Chadwick or G for Gerrard, her maiden name, either. Thinking that maybe I’m wrong about the personal files being mixed in with the ranch stuff, I look up my own name. My file is in the third drawer down, S for Sienna, located between SEARS ORDERS and SLOOT PRODUCTS—an equipment company we use for rails and things. I pull out my file and lay it open on Dad’s desk. Report cards, poorly done drawings, certificates of achievement, and a variety of programs for different events I’d participated in—mostly rodeo, which I’d done from nine years old through high school. I find a copy of my birth certificate and feel the thrill of success. Bingo. The copy I took with me to Chicago is in my personal files in a storage unit outside the city—I think I only used it to get an Illinois driver’s license.
The relief fades as I read through the information: my name. Date of, place of, weight at, and length at birth. Everything is listed in both English and French, which I’ve always thought was pretty cool. There’s a registration number and an official seal, but there are no parent names.
I flip the paper over to see if parent information is on the back, but it’s blank save for a watermark. Isn’t having your parents’ names on your birth certificate kind of a big deal? I scan the document again, then go through the entire file looking for any document with my mother’s name on it. I find nothing.
I go back to the very first file in the top drawer of the cabinet and tick off each tab with my finger as I move down the alphabet, looking for any file that might have potential information about my mom. The file titled MOM is for Grandma Dee.
There is a marriage certificate in Grandma’s file, copies of deeds and contracts, and a dozen newspaper articles that feature Grandma or the ranch or both. I skim through them, then pause when I find a copy of Grandma Dee’s death certificate. I remember being with Dad at the funeral home and the director explaining that Dad would need several official copies in order to settle Grandma’s accounts and insurance policies. It’s strange to see her reduced to the information on this form, yet I can’t help wondering why my mom doesn’t have a similar one.
Grandma Dee’s folder has everything I expected it would hold—legal certificates and proof of the defining events in her life. Dad’s dad—Gregg Chadwick—is peppered throughout Grandma’s file even though he’d left them. There’s a copy of his death certificate, too. From the dates, I realize he must have died when I was about ten. Dad never told me that, but there’s a copy of his death certificate all the same. I find Dad’s file, titled MARK. No marriage certificate. No additional photos or legal documents or love letters from Mom. Could he really have left Canada without anything? Wouldn’t he have needed my birth certificate with his name on it to prove I was his daughter? Could that be the one I have in the storage unit in Chicago? I’ve never actually sat down and inspected it. Had never seen it until Dad gave it to me right before the wedding.
A strange tingly feeling crosses between my shoulder blades as I slide the last file drawer closed after having gone through every folder a second time. If someone were to go through these files, they would have no idea that my mother ever existed.
Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you.
I feel a weird panic but tell myself I’m being silly. There is nothing to panic over. I’m just frustrated that yet another attempt to get information about Mom’s cancer has turned into grasping steam from a kettle. I’d made the decision to find what I needed to know without burdening Dad, and I’m irritated that the answers weren’t available. Right? I mean, Mom’s been dead for twenty-three years. It’s probably unfair for me to expect any minutia to be left . . . except that she’s still my mother. Part of me. The reason I’m here. It’s not minutia if it matters, right? And it matters. Mortality is blinking its dark, rheumy eyes at me, and I need information. But Mom isn’t in these files. It’s not just her cancer that I can’t find; it’s her.
My phone rings from where I left it in the kitchen, and I hurry to answer—glad for the interruption—only to stop my hand an inch from it. My phone is upside down so that I can’t see the caller, but I realize it’s probably Dr. Sheffield’s office again and feel a mixture of irritation and fear.
I have to face this.
I’m not ready.
I pick up my phone and turn it over so that I can send the call to voice mail. But it’s not Dr. Sheffield’s office. It’s Tyson.
Why is he calling me? Maybe it’s an emergency. But what emergency would he need my help with? I remember his text from earlier this morning. Whatever it was hadn’t been an emergency three hours ago. And my head is so full of so much. I think of that wedding picture as I let the call go to voice mail.
I go back to Dad’s office, where I spend another half an hour sifting through the piles of papers and pages in binders scattered all over the office. Mom’s not there either, but by now I’m not expecting to find her. I’m worried that the only proof of her is those sixteen pictures in an old photo album from Kmart. And the letters I haven’t appreciated as much as I should have. And me, I guess.
I think about a book I read in junior high about a girl who found her own face on the back of a milk carton. That was a thing they did before the Internet to get missing kids’ information into the world. People must have drunk a lot more milk back then. I know that isn’t my story; I wasn’t stolen—I have pictures of my mom, I know her name and her hobbies and stories about her life that she’s shared in those letters. But why is there a file for the antismoking campaign poster I drew in the fourth grade but nothing about my mother? Why is there a copy of my deadbeat grandfather’s death certificate but not a copy of my mother’s?
I catch myself putting the papers back into the same stacks I found them in. Am I covering my tracks? Not wanting Dad to know that I looked through his things?
I start working through possible ways to start a conversation I know I won’t have.
“Why are there only sixteen pictures of Mom taken over the course of one year and from the same roll of film?”
“Why is there no legal proof of her connection to me or you in your files?”
“Why isn’t Mom’s name written anywhere in any file?”
They are questions I can’t ask because they are accusatory. Dad’s been evasive already, and would I even be able to trust what he tells me should I press him? I hate this feeling and wish I could wash it off or ignore it or justify it.
By the time I’ve looked through everything I can search, I have another idea for finding out about my mom. I sit down at Dad’s computer and open a browser window. My hands hover over the keys a moment while I formulate the questions I want to ask the World Wide Web. I start by typing Mom’s name into the Google search bar—Mable Gerrard Chadwick. I’m hoping for . . . I don’t know what I’m hoping for. My mother isn’t in this house, but she’s got to be on the Internet. I start clicking links, but none of them take me to her. There’s a Mable Chadwick who died six years ago in Memphis. Marble Gerrard is a man who ran for city council in New Hampshire. There are some ancestry databases, and LinkedIn profiles for similar names, but nothing for her exact name. I click on some of them anyway, read through page after page of possibilities, and then close the tab and try again. My frustration grows with every dead end. She has to be somewhere. Maybe her being Canadian is getting in the way. Do U.S. Google searches prioritize U.S. links? I go back to the search bar and add “Hamilton Ontario” to the search criteria—that’s the city where I was born.
I don’t get anything that’s any better than what I had before.
When Dad calls my name from the kitchen, I jump. “Sienna?”
I close the page and hurry out of his office, smiling as I cross to him in hopes I don’t look guilty. “Hey,” I say. “You’re back early.”
“Am I?” He’s got grocery bags in his hands, and I move to help but he shakes his head. I can tell by the set of his shoulders and the downturn of his eyes that he’s exhausted. I should have gone with him to Cheyenne. I could have run the errands while he saw Dr. Jefferies.
“Did everything go okay at the appointment?”
“Everything looks fine. The blood work will take a week or so, but we don’t expect any issues. You didn’t clean out the fridge.”
Fridge? I think to myself, glancing at the one in the kitchen. Then I remember that I’d said I would clean out the fridge in the barn.
“Sorry, I’ll do it right now.”
“I already unloaded the vaccines. They’re on the floor by the fridge. Do you need help?”
“No, I’m good. It’s a one-person job.” I hope he doesn’t ask what I did instead of the one job he left me with.
He puts the grocery bags on the table, cans knocking together. A can of chili rolls out, and he grabs it and looks up to give me a drawn smile. “I think I’m going to lie down, if that’s all right.”
He doesn’t look like a man with secrets right now. He looks like a man who’s struggling to keep up. I don’t know how to settle everything jumbling together in my head. I smile and tell him to take a nap. I’ll take care of the fridge and the vaccines, and maybe we could go to the diner for dinner tonight—Jack cooks on Fridays and he does a good job with the steaks.
“That’s a good idea,” he says as he shrugs out of his coat. “You take good care of me, CC.”
“I hope so.” I feel terrible for having negative thoughts about him. Questions. Maybe it’s my diagnosis that’s making me anxious and wanting to blame someone for my troubles. Dad doesn’t deserve that from me. I watch him head toward his bedroom and think about what it must have been like to pack up what was left of his life in Canada and head over the border back to the ranch. I’ve never thought much about the fact that he’d left the ranch when he went to Ontario. He hadn’t come back until the love of his life was dead and he had no reason to stay. Maybe I was all that he brought with him. Maybe I should give him a little more credit and be a bit slower to withdraw my trust. Other than this one thing, he’s never done anything to make me distrust him.
I try to believe all these justifications for what I haven’t found, but they sit like a chair with one leg too short.
I get the cleaner and the bucket out of the closet and head out to the barn hours after I should have. I can’t sort out all this right now, but I can clean out the fridge and feel I’ve accomplished something.
Nothing in the files.
Nothing on Google.
Why?