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The tears finally ended, and my mind kicked into gear. I couldn’t stop thinking about the Boston Marathon, and I had to face the truth. Even if I got my money back, Mom wasn’t going to give me permission to go. I’d recognized that look on her face. No amount of begging would change her mind. It was a definite no. But I had to go to Boston. I would not give up. If I couldn’t find my money, I would have to figure out another way.
Maybe I could borrow the money from Francie. No, that wouldn’t work. Laney probably wouldn’t let me go with her and Francie without Mom’s permission.
My mind went around and around like a car motor that wouldn’t turn off. After hours of thinking, I decided that either I would have to give up and find another way to go to college, or I would have to run away to Boston.
Maybe I could find my real parents, and if they were still alive, they would want me. And they would send me to college. Or the school counselor could help me apply for grants and loans. Or the University of Florida coach would give me a scholarship, anyway, if Jess recommended me.
Long shots, all of them. Still, I wasn’t going to give up on getting out of my crummy life. Maybe my money would turn up. Maybe whoever had stolen it would feel guilty and leave it somewhere that I could find it.
Nah. That money was gone. I should have hidden it better. I hoped whoever had it would burn in the fiery pits of hell.
And I should have asked my mom in a different way—the way I had planned—instead of just blurting it out. She might have said yes then. Why wouldn’t she let me go? I thought I would drown in my anger.
Giving up seemed to be the only solution. But if I gave up, I would be letting Francie down. She was my best friend, and we had pledged to do the marathon together. She might not have the courage to run by herself. Maybe Jess would run with her. He hadn’t planned on going to Boston, but he might change his mind. It broke my heart that I didn’t have any money to give him.
My other option was to run away. I didn’t know how much it would cost to take a bus to Boston on my own. I still had forty-eight dollars left. If that wasn’t enough, maybe I could borrow the money from somebody else. Maybe Reese. Or Mr. Barrett. If all else failed, I could hitchhike. Hippie girls did that all the time, I’d heard. But I didn’t know if I was brave enough.
If I ran away, what would happen after the marathon? I didn’t think my parents would forgive me for defying them. But at that point, I didn’t care. The future I had envisioned was in ruins.
* * *
I DRAGGED MYSELF TO school in the morning, where the big news was the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The tension was thick and ugly. Many of the black kids were absent, and the ones who attended glared at us white kids. Most of our teachers didn’t even try to cover the assignments but talked about Dr. King’s legacy. This was the South, and not everyone agreed that the legacy was a positive one. I didn’t get involved in the discussion, but after the previous night, my loyalties weren’t the least bit divided.
At lunch, I wasn’t ready yet to talk about the assault on Jess. Instead, I told Francie about the theft of my money. I held my breath when I told her, afraid that she would stop being my friend when she found out.
She was so mad that she banged the table with her palm and knocked over my apple juice. As we cleaned up the mess, she saw the expression on my face. “I’m not mad at you, Faye, but at whoever stole your money.”
“I’m sorry, Francie,” I said, trying not to cry. “I’ll do my best to go to Boston like we’ve planned.”
“I know you will. We can talk about that later. First, we need to figure out what’s going on at your house. Something’s really wrong. We have to tell my mom right now.”
She was right. It was time to tell an adult about my family’s secrets. We marched to Laney’s clinic. When we got there, Laney told us to wait. There had been a fight that morning between two boys, one black and one white, and she had had to send both of them to the hospital. She had paperwork to complete. We sat on the bench outside the door and waited.
When she ushered us inside, I blurted out my suspicions about being adopted—about the memories that had been coming back to me, about the pictures and, finally, about the missing money. I could see her horror and sympathy in the way she sucked on her upper lip as I talked. Her eyes filled with tears when I told her about the baby pictures that weren’t me.
After I had finished, she said, “I’m so sorry, Faye. Yes, I agree that something has to be done. I’ll take you to the police station after school.” She took a deep breath and shook her head. “But whatever is wrong in your family has been wrong for years, and it can wait until the end of the day. I’ve got other things to do now. So it’s back to class for the two of you.”
The bell rang, and Francie squeezed my hand before we separated to go to our afternoon classes. All that afternoon, I couldn’t concentrate on anything except what I would say to the police and how my mom was going to kill me for telling the family secrets.
* * *
AFTER SCHOOL, LANEY drove Francie and me to the police station to see Detective Hunt, who was an old friend of hers from high school. He sat at his desk with a pile of papers spread around him. His eyes were bleary. “Hey, Laney, what brings you here? Been run off the road again?” He smiled his old-friend smile. “Have a seat, you all. You’re saving me from having to figure out how to pay for additional officers on the street.” He glanced at Francie and me. “How’re plans for the marathon going?”
I looked down at the floor and waited for Francie to answer. She didn’t say anything, and neither did I.
After a few minutes he asked, “You’re still hoping to run that?”
Francie answered for both of us. “Hoping. Not sure.”
He let that one lie. “How’re you getting along, Faye?”
I wasn’t sure where to begin, so Laney stepped in. “That’s why we’re here, actually. She’s okay,” she said in response to his look of concern. “But she insists that she remembers different parents from these. She thinks the Smiths adopted her.” She cleared her throat and looked at me. I gestured for her to go on. “There’s more. There aren’t any photos in the family album of her between when she was a toddler and the first grade. She thinks she was adopted during that time and that the baby in the early pictures wasn’t her. In spite of the fact that nearly every teenager thinks she’s adopted, I do agree there’s something awfully strange about her family.” She paused, tilting her head as if waiting for him to comment before she continued.
He leaned back in his chair and gazed upward, staring at the ceiling for longer than seemed necessary. I glanced up but saw only white tiles. We waited.
Finally, he looked at me. “This true? You think you’re adopted?”
I nodded, suddenly too shy to speak.
“And your parents have never mentioned it to you?”
“No. Does it make sense that I would have been adopted when I was four or five? Not a baby?”
“Sure. Parents die, or they go to prison, or they can’t take care of the kids. But it’s likely you’d remember something about that.”
I leaned forward as my mind whirled. “I think I do remember something. It was a car wreck. I was in the back seat, and there was a big crash, and my parents wouldn’t wake up.”
“Then who was the other child in the pictures? The baby, the one who wasn’t you?”
I hesitated then pulled out the photos. “These say that she was Dana Faye Smith.” I handed them to him.
He looked hard at the photos of the baby and then up at me. “I don’t know if this baby is you or not. I agree she doesn’t much favor you, and since the picture’s in black and white, I can’t tell if she has red hair. But babies change as they grow older. This might be you.”
I said quietly, “Turn it over.”
He did, and his eyes popped out when he read the words. He whistled then looked at me, his eyes glistening. “Do you recognize the handwriting?”
“Yeah, it’s my mom’s. Sue’s,” I amended, realizing I was probably going to have to stop calling her my mom. My chin started to wobble, but I didn’t look away.
“Do you know anything about this baby’s death? Think, Faye, if you can remember anybody saying anything about it. Anything at all.”
“No. Never once has either of my parents mentioned another child.”
“Could it be a niece or some other relative?”
“Not that I know of. I’ve never met any of my parents’ relatives.”
He licked his lips and turned over the photos, studying them. “Look, Faye, I know this seems suspicious. It’s definitely strange.” He thought for a moment. “Did you ever have a brother or a sister?”
I shook my head. “No. When I asked about it, my parents told me that something happened when I was born, and Mom couldn’t have any more children.”
He grabbed his yellow pad. “Let me take some notes. Tell me again why you think you’re adopted.”
I took a deep breath. “Ever since I’ve been running, memories have been coming back to me. I remember my real mother. Here’s her picture.” I opened my sketchbook to the page where I’d drawn pictures of both women. “See, she’s not at all like Sue, my current mom.”
He studied the two drawings. “Neither one of them has red hair. Sometimes hair color skips a generation. But if Sue had blond hair and was twenty years younger, she might resemble this woman.” He covered the mouths and chins. “They have similar eyes and foreheads.”
I’d never noticed that. “I see what you mean. Maybe I just drew them alike. But I’m positive they’re two different people. I remember another car wreck and a different name. My name was Pilot, or something like it, I think.”
He covered his mouth with his hand as if trying to withhold a smirk. “Pilot? Nobody names their child Pilot.”
“I know. But it was something like that.” My eyes filled up, and I blinked back tears. He was saying what everybody else had said: that everything could be explained.
He steepled his fingers in front of his face and stared at the ceiling some more. Then he looked straight at me. “Faye, I believe you.”
“You do?” I wondered if I’d heard correctly. I thought we were going through the motions by going to the police. I hadn’t expected him to believe me.
“I don’t know whether or not you were adopted, but when I met your mother at the hospital, I could sense how nervous I made her. Something is wrong there. Since you’re so sure you had another family, I’m willing to start with that. Now, what’s the first thing you remember?”
“With these parents?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I remember my mom trying to force me to eat oatmeal, and I gagged on it. She was really mad at me.”
“How old were you then, do you think?”
“I... I’m not sure. Four or five, I guess.”
“Were you in school at the time?”
“No. I think I spent most of my time with babysitters or playing with my stuffed bunny.”
“Have you asked your parents about these photos?’
“Not exactly. I did ask my mom why there weren’t any pictures of me from when I was a toddler to when I was in school, and she said my dad pawned the camera and they didn’t have one during those years.”
He asked tentatively, “Have you considered that she might be right?”
I sighed. “Yeah, I’ve considered it. But it’s not true. She also told me I had epilepsy, and I don’t. The doctor says he doesn’t think I ever had it.”
Laney jumped in. “Sue has been giving her pills in a phenobarbital container since 1956. I had them checked out in a lab, and they’re aspirin.”
He started then shook his head. “Aspirin? Why would she do that?”
Laney said, “We don’t know. Apparently, she wanted Faye to think she had epilepsy. None of it makes sense.”
He turned to me. “Have you asked your parents about this?”
My face heated up. “No. Not about the pills. But I asked Mom about a car accident, and she says we had one. But it was different from what I remember.”
He drummed his fingers on the table and then spent a few minutes writing on his yellow pad. Finally, he looked up at me. “The main question that occurs to me is why you’re so afraid to ask your parents about these things. They are definitely suspicious, I admit, but there might be a reasonable explanation. Are you afraid for your safety if you ask them?”
I took my time collecting my thoughts before I answered. “My dad hasn’t hit me since I was eight or nine. But I got those pictures from his guitar case, and if he found out I took them, he might beat me. He would ground me for life at the very least.” I hesitated. “My mom is a different story. I don’t really believe anything she says. Every time I ask her about some of these things, she starts to cry or gets really mad. I’m not afraid she’ll hurt me, but I don’t think I’ll get a straight answer out of her. Ever. That’s why I haven’t asked her directly.”
“Do you want somebody else to ask them for you? Laney maybe? Or me?”
This was quickly spinning out of control. I stopped to think about why we had come to the police station to begin with. “No, not yet. Maybe later. But would you be able to investigate these things before I talk to them?”
He considered for some time, drumming his fingers on the desk. “I’ll have to do some research and talk to some people to figure out whether telling somebody they’re sick when they’re not is a crime. And the same with giving them aspirin instead of prescription medicine. It’s definitely strange, but I don’t know if it’s illegal. I’ll get back to you on that. It doesn’t seem like you’re in physical danger for the time being. But about being adopted... what about your birth certificate? What does it say?”
I pulled it out of my geometry book and handed it to him. “I was looking for this when I found the pictures.”
He examined the birth certificate, holding it up to the light to see if there were any erasures or Wite-Out marks anywhere. “It looks fine. Let me just call and find out.” He asked the receptionist to connect him to the records department of Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia. He chatted with Laney about mutual friends while we waited. I thought about running in the morning, with the sun rising over the lake, and I began to calm down.
Eventually, the phone rang, and he answered it and talked for a few minutes. He put his hand over the phone and told us that a records clerk at the hospital was looking up my birth certificate in the files.
Then Detective Hunt spoke in the phone again. “Yes, that’s it.” After he hung up the phone, he nodded at me. “I guess you followed that. They’re the same document.”
“But...”
“I know, just because there’s a birth certificate doesn’t mean that the person who was born was you.” After a long pause, he continued. “All right, here’s what we’ll do. Something doesn’t add up with your family. There seems to be some secret you haven’t been told about. It could be that you were adopted, or it might be something entirely different. Adoption records are sealed by the courts, so I don’t have access to them. If you were adopted, your new name and your new parents would be listed on the birth certificate, not the old ones. So you’ll have to get that information from your parents. But I can look into child custody violations, things like that.”
I struggled to keep up with him. “Child custody violations?”
He chuckled. “You’d be surprised how many times a mother runs off and her sister or the grandmother takes the child, and the child doesn’t know a thing about it.” His eyes bored down on me. “Now, I don’t want you to worry unnecessarily. There’s a ninety-five percent chance that whatever happened to you can be explained. Maybe your parents couldn’t afford the real phenobarbital, so they gave you aspirin instead and hoped for the best. I don’t have the slightest idea what happened. But I’ll look into whatever I can find.”
He drummed his fingers on the table. “Every law enforcement agency in the country has a lot going on right now, what with the King murder, but I’ll call you when I have something. It might be a week or two before I can get to it, so don’t worry if you don’t hear from me for a while. Feel free to call me anytime you want, especially if you start feeling unsafe. But, Faye, remember that it would be best for you to just ask your parents about all this.”
He waited for me to answer, but I didn’t say anything. Finally, he said, “Will this plan work for you? Are you going to be all right at home for a while?”
I nodded. Waiting for even a week to hear from him seemed impossible, but somehow, I’d get through it. There was no other choice. Besides, I had to figure out how to get to Boston with only forty-eight dollars to my name.
Just as we were leaving, he said, “Why don’t we get your fingerprints? That way, I’ll have something to compare if I do find anything. Just wait in the reception area for a few minutes while I set it up.” He hesitated. “Don’t worry, Faye. We’ll figure this out.”