I wake up later that night to Nyla jerking upright in bed.
“The picture!” she says loudly, and I want to tell her to keep it down—my parents are sleeping in the next bed over—but then she throws back the covers and jumps out of bed. She runs over to the little table in the corner of the hotel room and turns on the lamp.
I’m blinded and annoyed. “Hey. Ny. What are you doing?”
“Where did we put the picture?” she says, still way too loudly.
I swing my legs over the side of the bed. “The picture. What picture?”
“The . . .” Nyla closes her eyes and her face scrunches up. “I can’t think of the word. The picture, you know?”
Dad sits up. His hair is a tangled red mess, and he looks somewhat freaked out.
“Hey, uh, girls?” He rubs his hand down his face and glances at the clock on the bedside table. “It’s two in the morning. Time for sleep?”
“Is everything okay?” comes my mother’s bleary voice from the covers next to him.
“I don’t know.” I turn back to watch Nyla dig through all of our papers—the notes and forms we’ve been working on today, S’s letters. She keeps grabbing a pile and rifling through the papers, then throwing them down with an exasperated sigh. “She’s making a mess. Something about a picture?”
“What picture?” Dad asks.
“Not a picture picture!” Nyla says. “The picture of the baby.”
“The sonogram?” Mom sits up.
Nyla looks up and points at her. “Sonogram! Gosh, I could not remember that word.”
Dad scratches his head. “Because it’s two in the morning. Maybe this could wait until the actual morning.”
“No.” Nyla crosses to the other side of the room and starts searching through some stuff there, moving like she’s made of liquid energy. She’s clearly wired, muttering to herself, but I can’t understand what she’s saying.
She can’t find the sonogram. She slumps against the wall. “Maybe I should have waited until morning,” she says. “But I can’t go back to sleep now. I remembered seeing . . .”
“Seeing what?” I demand to know. “What’s going on?”
She looks at me. “You don’t know your birth mother’s name.”
“Right. Except that it starts with S.”
“You don’t know, because it’s not in the letters,” she babbles on. “She’s careful not to give the real names of people in the letters. Remember that one where she almost writes her name, but then she catches herself?”
“Of course I remember. Look, Ny. You’re freaking out my parents. And I was having a nice dream.”
“I think her name is in there.”
I’m fully awake now. “What? No, it isn’t,” I say with absolute certainty. I’ve read the letters a thousand times by now. I could recite whole passages by heart. I would have noticed a name. “S never tells me her name.”
“She never tells you,” Nyla insists. “But she did give it to you. She probably didn’t realize. Or who knows, maybe she did.”
Now I’m really confused. “What?”
She slaps her hand down on the table in frustration. “Goshdangit, I need the flipping sonogram!”
“It’s here.” I grab my backpack and retrieve my wallet. I keep the sonogram in my wallet, because it’s the only picture, like S said, of her and me together. It’s right next to a photo my parents and I took when I was a kid at a photo booth. I hand the sonogram to Nyla, and she lays it on the table and puts her finger near the top of the grainy black-and-white picture. I really do look like an alien here. Then my eyes focus on the faded white print by Nyla’s finger. But it’s just a bunch of letters and numbers that don’t make sense.
“It’s medical jargon, I think,” says Nyla, moving her finger down the picture. “But here, below where it says, PROFILE 1. Here, Cass. You had it all this time.”
S. WHIT, it says.
“S,” I murmur.
“Yes, but ‘Whit,’” Nyla says impatiently. “That must be her last name.”
“S. Whit,” I repeat again. “S. Whit.”
“As in, Governor Whit,” Dad says from behind me. He’s fully awake now, too. “S’s father was in politics, right?”
“Governor Whit? I . . . I’ve met him. He can’t be my—”
“It makes sense, though,” Nyla says. “It fits.”
It does.
“My notes,” I whisper. “I need my notes. They’re in a yellow notebook.” We all get up, Dad in his boxers, Mom in the white hotel bathrobe, Nyla in her pj’s, and dig around trying to locate my yellow notebook. Mom finds it and brings it to the table like she’s about to read from the Dead Sea Scrolls or something. The hair on the back of my neck is standing up, goose bumps prickling up and down my arms.
Mom lays the notebook down on my desk and starts flipping through it for the page where I listed the politicians.
“Here.” Dad, from over my shoulder, points to a list. State senators, it says in my handwriting.
It’s the third name down.
“Michael Whit, junior senator,” Dad reads. “It’s got to be him, right?”
“Governor Whit,” I say.
“Ew,” Nyla exclaimed. “Your grandfather is Governor Whit?”
“He’s not my grandfather,” I say hotly. “I don’t know him.”
Nyla sobers. “I’m sorry. You’re right. You’re absolutely right.”
“This is pretty flimsy,” I say. “It’s, what . . . circumstantial? Just because the name Whit is on the ultrasound doesn’t mean it’s . . . Whit could be the doctor’s name. Or the sonogram technician’s name. Or something.”
But the wheels of my brain are still turning, turning, turning, ever so slowly, until they arrive at the destination they’d started toward the second I saw the word Whit.
“Wait.” I pull the notebook toward me and flip back a bunch of pages, to the yearbook notes I took last year with Nyla.
Boise High School Newspaper Staff
Kristi Henscheid
Melissa Bollinger
Melissa Stockham
Sandra Whit
Sarah Averett
Sonia Rutz
Amy Yowell
“Sandra Whit,” Mom breathes from beside me.
I look around wildly and start rustling through the stacks of papers again, until find the photocopies Mom made today of some of the yearbook pages from the high schools that start with B. “It was in the red one, I think. Boise High School.”
IN SEARCH OF THE STORY, I remember the page was called. I hope Mom made a copy of it. And yes—then I find it. A copy of the school newspaper page. The first one I looked at when I was going through the yearbooks with Nyla the day of the drama competition.
This time, the name leaps out at me.
SANDRA WHIT.
I put my finger on the name, then follow the order that the students are standing in to figure out which girl in the picture is Sandra. It’s not a great photo, and the one who’s supposed to be Sandra isn’t looking at the camera. She’s looking off to one side, like she’s laughing at something. Her long straight hair is falling directly across her face.
I can’t see her at all. “I wish there was a better picture.”
“They keep the yearbook archives online now,” Mom says quietly. “The librarian told me.”
She hands me my laptop.
I open it and do a search for Boise High School yearbooks. And it’s there. The right year and everything. I click on the yearbook. I type “Sandra Whit” into the search bar, and it informs me that this particular student appears on two pages: the yearbook page and the individual student pictures. I click on the individual one.
The photo is in black and white. She’s smiling, but not with her eyes. She looks bored, like there’s someplace she’d rather be.
“Cass, she’s got your teeth,” Nyla says.
“My teeth?”
Dad leans closer to the screen. “Yep. Those are your teeth. They’re small, pretty close together. Hers are straighter, but they look basically the same. You also have the same chin, but different lips.”
I stare at the girl’s chin. It is vaguely familiar. I’m not the spitting image of Sandra Whit, but there is something of me in there. If I’m not imagining things. I mean, I did look at this picture once before, and Mom looked at it, too, only a few hours ago, and neither of us saw anything to make us believe that this girl is the one who gave birth to me.
Nyla cocks her head to one side. “God, what is she wearing?”
She’s got on not one tank top but two, layered one on top of the other, both dark in color. Her hair is straight, long, and pulled over one shoulder. A beaded choker is hanging tightly around her neck. It’s the choker, I think, that Nyla is referring to. It’s pretty nineties.
I sit back. Mom leans over to take a look.
“She has your eyes,” she murmurs. “If this picture was in color, they’d be blue.”
I wonder. I also wonder if I’m in this photo, too, invisible, but there. Just out of the frame. I can’t stop staring at her face, like I’m gazing into the eyes of her former self, and I’m able to see her in real life, wherever she is.
“Nice to meet you, Sandra,” I whisper. “If it’s you.”