29

Sienna

I feel out of place and small when I walk into the library. In Lusk, the library is a hundred-year-old building with oak shelves and divided rooms. This building is bigger and brighter and . . . Canadian. Not that a modern Canadian library would be all the different from a modern American library, but everything that’s happened today has come with a swirling amount of intimidation. Did Mom and Dad ever come to this library? Did Mom like to read? Did she bring baby Sienna here for story time before she got sick?

I have more questions now than when I crossed the border, and I’m anxious about the answers I’ll find. The anxiety combined with my increasing exhaustion is almost enough to turn me around and push me back through the glass doors—but I am here, and somewhere in these walls is information. I have two days until the documents are ready; it would be stupid for me not to take advantage.

I adjust my sling, which doesn’t ease the throbbing as much as I’d hoped, then walk toward the information desk, where I wait until a woman about my own age comes to the other side of the counter. “Can I help you?” the woman asks in a hushed voice. I clear my throat quietly before I speak. “I’m trying to find information about my mom who is from here but died when I was a baby. I don’t know where to start.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” she says, the vowels sounding just different enough for me to notice. “Your best bet is probably the newspaper archives. Birth and death announcements and all that can be found there. Let me show you to the computers.”

Ten minutes later, I am sitting in front of a flat-fronted monitor with a fresh screen that will take me through the archives of the Hamilton Spectator. Miriam, the librarian who helped me, has given me some basic instructions and provided me with some scratch paper and a half-sized pencil so I can take notes. She can make copies of anything I find for twenty-five cents a page and show me actual hard copies of some years of the paper if I want to see them. She also showed me how to access legal archives, for things like marriage, birth, and death records, but I don’t need that anymore—I can’t access actual copies of the certificates, just verify dates and things in the public domain.

I flex my fingers and then type “Maebelle Antonia Gérard” in the search field. A full page of hits comes up, and I catch my breath in surprise. The Google searches at the ranch had found nothing, which I understand now, but it’s surreal to have all this information so quickly. I lean forward to review the titles of the individual links. I expect a death notice, obituary, or my own birth announcement, but the first link is for an arrest notice, and the title reads “Drug Raid Leads to Four Arrests.” I let the mouse hover over the link for a few moments while I scan the other links scrolling down the page. One headline stands out above the others and I feel dizzy. “Woman Found Dead in the Grand Prompts Review of County Drug Enforcement Measures.”

I pause. Gather courage. Take a breath. Move my mouse to that link. Click.