31

Sienna

My whole body is throbbing when I let myself into the hotel room Tyson is paying for. I drop the scratch papers full of notes from the library on the dresser just inside the door. I’ve read every article linked to my mother and learned more truth in a couple of hours there than I had from a lifetime at home.

I am angry and hurt and confused and so very tired that I also feel dizzy and nauseated. It’s a relief to focus on the physical pain right now instead of the grinding anxiety and dread I felt as I read about Maebelle Gérard—a stranger in every way except the face that stared back from different mug shots. I’ll go through the notes when my head feels clearer—I want to put together a time line of her life. Once I have her birth certificate in a couple of days, I’ll have her parents’ names, and maybe I can use them to find other relatives who can help fill in the blanks—so many blanks. The woman Dad told me stories about and nudged me to emulate has been packed into a trunk like an item you can’t throw out but have no use for—a cubic zirconia you thought was a real diamond, the handmade quilt you prized until you find a MADE IN CHINA tag.

I think of Dad and want to cry and scream and reach out to him all at the same time. I have as many questions about him now as I do about her. Did you know she was seventeen when you met her? Did you feel like a hypocrite every time you told me to save myself for marriage and always tell the truth? Yet it’s his shoulder I can see myself crying on. And when I take him out of that image, because I can’t turn to him the way I have in every other hardship I’ve ever faced, there is no one to take his place. No one has loved me the way Dad loves me. No one has betrayed me the way he has, either.

I brace the palm of my left hand on the counter in front of the sink and drop my chin to my chest. I’m flushed with heat, like I have the flu or something, and I’m holding my right arm tight in that broken wing position, trying to get some relief from the relentless pain. I must have forgotten to take ibuprofen this morning, and I didn’t bring any in my purse this morning, because I hadn’t expected I would be gone this long.

I take a breath and pull myself out of the mire that has been sucking at me for hours. I can’t trust my thoughts, because I am at my physical and emotional limit. I need to focus on some short-term goals: I need food, a pain pill, and some sleep. Then I’m going to the house where Mae was living when she disappeared—David Vandersteen’s house at the time. I need to see something tangible. Stand where she stood. Maybe the home owners will let me walk through it. If Mae lived there, I lived there too, right? What if I remember something about the house? The thought gives me goose bumps and makes me want to skip the nap, but I know that’s not possible. I already feel as if I’m moving a few steps behind my body.

I eat a few chips left in the bag I bought at the front desk when I checked in yesterday. It would take only a few minutes to go back downstairs and buy something else from the little shelves of snack items—a protein bar would be a good choice—but it feels like a lot of work to leave this room and go down a flight of stairs and make a decision and go to the counter . . . not doing it. I open my pill bottle and tap one white pill into my hand, then stare at it for several seconds. Maebelle Gérard went to jail three times between her eighteenth birthday and being found in the Grand River a few months before she would turn twenty-one, twice for possession and once for . . . prostitution. She was nineteen when she was arrested for solicitation—I would have been thirteen months old—and she said she had done it to get money for drugs. A crack whore. My mother.

Had she left me with David when she went out that night? I’d seen his mug shots too—big, broad, hard, and with a huge eagle tattooed on his neck as though it was coming out of his skin, talons first. I wonder if the wings touch at the back of his head or if there’s a space there. I wonder if he’s still alive and if I have the guts to try to find him if he is. He knew my mother. He knew me. I think back to the imagining I’ve always had of meeting someone who knew her and hearing them say, “You look so much like your mother.” That possibility is so different now. I’m scared of finding him—he doesn’t seem like the kind of man I’d want anything to do with—but his is the only name connected to Maebelle’s that I’ve found so far.

Or maybe I was with Dad the night my mom tried to sell herself for drugs. The article about her death said she and Dad were estranged. Would Dad have been in his apartment making dinner for me while my mother was looking to trade sex for money? Did he hate her? That thought frightens me as much as David Vandersteen and his eagle tattoo. I have always believed that my parents shared a tragic romance and that he still loved her after all these years—I’ve believed that’s why he never married again, because he couldn’t make room in a heart still so full of Mable. Remembering the lies I made up because of the lies I was told makes Dad feel like a stranger. A person I’ve never met before. The kind of man who shacks up with a seventeen-year-old girl and gets her pregnant. The kind who makes up a totally different woman to put on a pedestal for me. Was it embarrassment that made him do it? Shame? Fear?

I fill a glass with water from the bathroom sink and take the pill, then text Beck that all the travel has caught up with me and I’m going to take a nap. I should call and give her a fuller update but I’m too . . . embarrassed? Is that the right word? And what, exactly, am I embarrassed about? That Mom was an addict? A prostitute? That Dad made up a different mother for me to know? That I fell for it? Yes, I determine—all those reasons. My mother was not who I believed she was, so where does that leave me? I’m not genetically predisposed to law-abidingness or domesticity or all the other virtues I was led to believe my mother prized. What am I genetically predisposed to? Who was I supposed to be before I was told to live up to a very different expectation?

I climb between the starchy hotel sheets and pull the coverlet up under my chin, praying that I will wake up with a clearer head. The information I’m uncovering—the truth—is like one of those Russian nesting dolls; story hidden inside story hidden inside story hidden, except that each layer gets uglier, the images get darker, the faces drawn into more and more disturbing expressions that make me want to stop opening the next doll. But I won’t stop. I deserve to know those layers even if they aren’t pretty. I deserve to know all the dolls hiding inside me.