20

Sylvie

You were found by a lovely young girl in a magical forest one warm summer’s night, safe on a tree stump,” my mother would whisper to me at bedtime. I’d immediately beg her to tell me the story again, enchanted by it in the same way I was with Santa Claus or the possibility of fairies at the bottom of the garden. It didn’t feel real, but it did feel true, like all good stories. My parents first told me when I was five: “There’s something you need to know . . .” Apparently I shrugged, nonplussed, and asked for a biscuit. It wasn’t just that I couldn’t grasp the enormity—and wouldn’t until I was much older. My mum and dad had searched for me and loved me so much they adopted me as their own: I liked this. As Caroline was also adopted, a few months after I was, this was our normal. We both knew what it was like to be chosen, not simply born.

I’d always known a vein of wildness ran through me. Like Caroline loved dolls, I was drawn to trees. I’d climb the old apple at the bottom of our garden every day and sit on the highest branches, sniffing the sea. I couldn’t concentrate in the classroom—my mind hopped about like a sparrow—but outside, in a tree, something in me would still.

Anyway, I decided, not every girl got to star in her own bedtime story and close her eyes and hear the feathery brush of an owl’s wing or the burrowing of hedgehogs through crispy leaves, all while tucked up in the comfort of her bed. Or gaze at the bedroom walls in the dark and see a forest, like Max in Where the Wild Things Are. Neither were other girls discovered, like a rare species of butterfly, as I was: Sylvie, a name of French origin, meant “from the forest.” So I enjoyed my foundling story on a childish level. What I didn’t understand was why my mother’s voice went croaky in the telling or why, if I ever asked her questions, the air went crackly.

When I was about nine, everything changed. It was recess at school and raining, the drops dancing on the corrugated outdoor-play roof. For some reason I thought this a good moment to confide my birth story to Donna, not an ally, who was standing next to me with her Heidi blond plaits and boasting about her pony. Donna’s eyes widened. “So your real mummy didn’t want you and left you to die?” I’d trumped her pony. But at some personal cost. That evening I told Mum I didn’t want that bedtime story anymore. (I’ll never forget the look of relief on her face.) I didn’t climb the apple tree ever again, either. I dug out my one neglected doll from the toy box, brushed her matted hair, tied in pink ribbons, and dressed her up so she looked neat and shiny, not wild or foresty. I’d pick the forest out of me too. And I told myself that life starts only when you can remember it.

My first real memory—the one with the grainy photos to prove it, along with thumb shadows and the requisite red eye—is of me sitting on a damp slab of beach, Dad bending down, pawing at the sand with a spade. Caroline is gripping his hairy shoulders and shrieking with delight. My mother is wearing the tiniest of crochet bikinis, with beaded bits dangling down, a top like two triangle-cut sandwiches, and holding up the big black camera that I loved. Sticky ice cream is trickling down my arm. I am three. Sylvie—me—has begun.

But the fear remains. Is there someone else, dormant, curled inside, like a young green nut in a shell? Could my brain reach further back if I let it? Into that void between being born and being found? And what about Caroline? Might she remember stuff too? Even if she doesn’t want to. And she doesn’t. She never has. She’s more past-phobic than I am, which is saying something. We made a vow. Shook little fingers on it. Sisters. Strong and loyal. Not victims.

I read once that the hippocampus, where memories are stored, is not fully developed in a baby’s brain. But the amygdala, where emotional memory lives, is already up, its engine running. And this worries me, the possibility that memory is more about retrieval than storage, that the memories might be there, like unread books buried deep in underground library stacks. Fortunately, most of the time trying to imagine my abandonment is like peering into a block of gray ice. There’s nothing to see, just the ice. It’s only on rare days, raw-edged, disintegrating days like these, after a big shock—and Annie’s keeping the baby is an earthquake in my brain—that shapes start to form, not so much a memory but something else, an untold story I can somehow feel without the language to describe it.

I feel it now potently as Annie and I crawl out of the sea foam. “Are you okay? You sure?” I pull her up to her feet. She’s shaken. Neither of us was braced for that boom of water to the back of our legs. We’re soaked. Sand in our hair. Our mouths. It could have been much worse. I glance nervously over my shoulder. The rogue wave has retreated to a frothing tongue of shallow water. But I can feel its big sister farther out at sea, pulsing in the dark, gathering energy, starting to roll. And I immediately think of the folder of newspaper clippings, waiting back at the house, secreted by my mother all these years. Like that wave, energy moving through matter, intent on release.