“Your destination is on the right,” Natalie’s GPS announced as she turned off the main road and onto a side street. It was an older neighborhood, one she’d driven through but never stopped in before, filled with rows of small houses with overgrown lawns. Zora’s house looked as though it had once been painted blue but now, after years of the sun bleaching the siding, it was more of a washed-out shade of gray. The roof was carpeted in thick green moss and sagged in the middle; the square window next to the front door had a large crack running diagonally across it. All the shades were drawn, so Natalie worried that the woman she’d come to speak to wasn’t there—probably at work for the day. But then, she saw one of the dingy yellow shades lift up at its corner, and a child’s face peeked out at her, only to quickly disappear again.
Natalie grabbed her purse and got out of her car, heading toward Zora’s porch, which was actually just a couple of crumbling cement steps. The yard, like the ones around hers, was overgrown with weeds and littered with brightly colored but heavily weathered children’s toys. Three full garbage bins sat along the edge of the fence, and one of them had tipped over, littering the grass with paper and other bits of trash. Natalie raised a hand to knock, but the door opened before she could. She looked down to see a dark-haired little boy who looked to be about three years old standing in front of her, wearing only a baggy black T-shirt that hung on his skinny frame like a dress, its hem reaching just above his knobby knees. He had smears of jelly on his cheek, and he looked as though he hadn’t bathed in days.
“Hi,” she said to the boy. “Is your mommy home?” The boy nodded, staying silent but opening the door wide enough for Natalie to step inside. She hesitated, leaning her head in but not crossing the threshold. “Hello?” she called out. “Is anyone here?” She looked to her left, into a tiny living room where a television was playing loudly, set on the Cartoon Network. She saw a rail-thin woman sitting on one end of the couch, her head lolled back, eyes closed, and mouth open.
Worried that Zora was unconscious, Natalie disregarded her uncertainty about entering uninvited and stepped inside. The air held a ripened, moldy scent, like fruit left too long in a warm place, and the coffee table and floor were littered with plates that still had bits of food on them—an apple core, pizza crusts, and half-eaten pieces of toast with jelly. When she saw a clear plastic baggie with a few white capsules in it peeking out from under a tattered trashy magazine, a sinking feeling pulled at Natalie’s stomach.
“Hey!” she said, reaching out to shake Zora’s shoulder.
“What!” Zora said. Her eyes snapped open, and she looked at Natalie, blinking rapidly. “Who the fuck are you?” she mumbled, shoving off Natalie’s touch. “What the hell are you doing in my house?”
Natalie straightened and took a couple of steps back, away from Zora’s rancid breath. “I’m sorry, but your son opened the door and it looked like you were unconscious. I was just making sure you were okay.”
“I was sleeping, for Christ’s sake!” Zora said. She stood up, and Natalie took in her appearance. Zora wore black leggings and a tight, thin-strapped purple tank top without a bra. Not that she needed one; her chest was nonexistent, and her clavicle looked like a sharp piece of jewelry at the base of her neck. Her dark brown hair was a stringy mess around her pockmarked face, and she reached up to push it back.
“I’m sorry,” Natalie said again. After seeing the baggie full of pills, she was pretty sure that in Zora’s world, “sleeping” was another way to say “passing out after taking some kind of narcotic.” The little boy had climbed up on the couch and grabbed a blanket that had what looked to be coffee stains on it, and then glued his eyes to the cartoons on the television screen. “You are Zora Herzog . . . right?”
“Who wants to know?” Zora demanded.
“I got your name from Miss Dottie at Hillcrest,” Natalie said, and went on to explain her search for Brooke.
“Huh . . . Brooke Walker,” Zora said as she grabbed a pack of cigarettes from the table and shook one out and lit it. She took a long puff and then blew out a white plume of smoke through her nose and tilted her head, peering at Natalie through half-lidded, mascara-smeared eyes. “Yeah, I know her.”
Natalie’s pulse quickened at Zora’s use of the present tense. “Is she still in Seattle? Do you know how I can reach her?”
“Maybe.” Zora took another drag on her cigarette and looked Natalie up and down. “That depends.”
“On what?” Natalie asked. A sense of dread filled her as she waited for what Zora might say next.
“You know how it is. Not everyone wants to give up information for free.” She sucked on her cigarette again, turning her head to the right in order to blow out the smoke.
“Do you actually know where Brooke is?”
“Like I said, that depends.” Zora lifted a single dark eyebrow. “How much cash you got on you?”
She was a liar, Natalie realized. Zora had no idea where Brooke was, she was just an addict trying to work an angle for money. Whatever hopes Natalie had had in coming here vanished. “Sorry to have bothered you,” she said quietly. She turned around and faced the front door, thinking she would report the little boy’s living situation to Child Protective Services as soon as she got home.
“Wait,” Zora said. “You have to have something. Please. My kid is hungry. You can see that. Every bit helps.”
Natalie stopped, and even though she was fairly certain that whatever cash she handed over to Zora would be used for more drugs, on the off chance she was wrong, she reached into her purse, opened her wallet, and handed the other woman a handful of bills. “Please,” she said. “Use it the right way.”
“Yeah, of course,” Zora said, snatching the money from Natalie’s hand. Then she laughed, a dry, barking sound. “You know Brooke was a hooker, right? A total whore. I have no clue where she is now. Probably in a shitty hotel room waiting to suck her next dick.”
Natalie cringed at Zora’s vulgarity, and she raced out of the house with tears in her eyes, wondering if there was any truth to what the other woman had said. Even if Zora was a liar, it was within the realm of possibility that Brooke was a prostitute, or at least had been at one time. Natalie couldn’t imagine bringing her sister into her world—introducing Brooke to her children—if she was, in fact, anything like Zora. Brooke could be a drug addict, a criminal . . . and yes, a prostitute. It might have been callous, but there was no way Natalie would want anything to do with her if she was any of those things.
“Maybe it’s not such a bad thing that you’re finding all this out now,” Kyle said later that night when the kids were in the playroom enjoying their one hour of screen time while he and Natalie sat together on the living room couch. She’d filled him in on everything that had happened earlier in the day, including the phone call she made to CPS. Not surprisingly, the social worker who took the report indicated that Zora Herzog already had a file with the agency.
“Maybe,” Natalie said. “It’s just disappointing.”
“I know.” Kyle put his arm around her shoulders and kissed the top of her head as she leaned against his chest. “But what you saw today isn’t exactly an uncommon result for kids who get stuck in the system. I’ve defended them as adults. Brooke had a very different upbringing than you, and I think it’s important to take that into account.”
“Lots of people have a difficult time growing up and turn out just fine.”
“Of course they do.”
Natalie appreciated her husband’s attempt at neutrality, and his ability to comfort her, but the truth was that she believed people tend to do one of two things: either they break the patterns they experienced in their childhood or they perpetuate them. The odds were that Brooke had done the latter.
“Do you think I should just focus on my birth mom?” she said, tilting her head so she could look up at her husband. “And not worry about Brooke?”
Kyle nodded. “It might be better to leave well enough alone.”
While she wasn’t completely certain that was the right path, it was the stance Natalie took. For the next couple of weeks, she focused on work and taking care of her family, trying to make peace with the idea of not looking for her sister. In making impromptu visits to Gina, Hillcrest, and Zora, Natalie had been fueled by emotion rather than rationale. She’d simply gotten ahead of herself. After the remodel on the garage was complete, she would look into filing a motion to open her sealed adoption records and wait patiently for the legal system to find her birth mother. It was the least disruptive, most sensible thing to do.
In the meantime, Natalie knew she needed to speak to her parents more about why they’d kept Brooke’s existence from her, so when her cell phone rang on Tuesday in the early evening, two weeks after she’d met Zora, she grabbed for it. The caller ID told her it was her father, and she hesitated only a moment before picking up.
“Hi, Dad,” she said. She was certain her mother had already reported how Natalie had stormed out of her parents’ house after getting the news about having a sister, so she braced herself for a reminder of how sensitive her mother could be.
“Natalie,” her dad said in his usual low voice. Natalie used to think that James Earl Jones had nothing on her father’s sonorous baritone. As an adult, she loved sitting in court, listening to him question a witness or present his passionate closing arguments to a jury. She had loved it less as a teenager, when he used that voice to yell at her for doing something to make her mother unhappy. “We haven’t heard from you in a while. Are you all right?”
This was not the first question she had expected her father to ask, so it took her a moment to respond. “I don’t know,” she said, which was as honest an answer as she could give. “I’m confused. And hurt, I guess.”
“Angry, too, I’d imagine.”
“A little bit. Yes.”
“I’m sorry we kept it from you so long,” her dad said. “It really was what we thought would be easiest for you.” He paused. “Perhaps we were wrong.”
Natalie knew how much it took for her father, a dedicated debater not only in his professional life but in his personal one, to admit that he may have made a mistake. She decided to take that for the olive branch it was, and to save the story of meeting Gina and seeing Hillcrest for another time, when they were in person. “It’s okay, Dad. I love you guys. I’ll see you soon.”
They hung up, and almost immediately, her phone chimed with a notification indicating that she had an email. When she saw who it was from, her heart literally skipped a beat and she strode into the den, where Kyle sat, working at his desk. The air smelled of the white bean and chicken chili Natalie had simmering on the stove, and the kids were in the backyard, playing on the jungle gym before the sky became too dark.
“What’s wrong?” Kyle asked when he saw the look on her face. He scrunched his eyebrows together. “Is it the kids?”
Natalie shook her head. “You’re not going to believe this,” she said. “But the adoption registry I put my information on just sent me an email. They think they found Brooke.”
“Wow.” Kyle pulled his hands back from the keyboard and set them in his lap. He had taken off the jacket to his suit when he got home from work but only loosened his tie instead of removing it, so it rested halfway down his chest like a green silk noose against his white shirt. “What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I was just starting to feel okay about letting the idea of meeting her go.”
“You still don’t know anything about her living situation.”
“Right, but . . .” Natalie trailed off, unsure what else to say. She felt twin urges—one to call the adoption registry immediately and the other to delete the email and pretend she’d never seen it. She didn’t want to find her sister—to meet her—only to discover that Brooke wasn’t the kind of person she wanted to know. It would be easier to just let the situation go.
Kyle stared at her with assessing eyes. He knew how to read her, Natalie thought. She knew she couldn’t hide how conflicted she felt.
“You don’t have to decide right now,” he finally said.
“You think I shouldn’t talk to her.”
“I think it might not even be her.”
“What if it is?”
“Okay. Let’s say it is. What if she’s just like Zora? What if she’s had trouble with the law, or a problem with drugs? What if she is a prostitute? Do you want to bring someone like that around the kids?”
Natalie realized he was using his careful, I’m-dealing-with-a-hostile-witness voice with her, and it made her jaw clench. She couldn’t blame Kyle for being concerned at the prospect of inviting a total stranger into their lives; his lawyer-brain was trained to automatically highlight areas of concern. Seeing all angles of a situation, looking for red flags so he could better argue his points was part of who he was; it was what made him good at his job. It was also what made him occasionally infuriating to have as a husband. Natalie tended to look for the good in every situation, and Kyle had a habit of pointing out the bad.
Natalie sighed, feeling like they’d already had this conversation. But things were different now. There was a real chance that the adoption registry had found out exactly where Brooke was. If Natalie didn’t at least talk to the woman who could be her sister, she knew she’d regret it for the rest of her life. Despite the apprehension she felt, she knew what she had to do.
“I need to call her,” she told Kyle. “I need to know if it’s her.”
He bobbed his head, once, and then stood up, coming to stand in front of her. “I just don’t want you to get hurt,” he said as he slipped his strong arms around her waist, pulling her to him.
“I’m not saying I’ll meet her,” Natalie said. Adrenaline pumped through her body, and her cheeks flushed pink. “We’ll just talk. I’ll be careful.”
“That’s all I ask,” her husband said. And then Natalie pulled away from him, eager to reread the email from the adoption registry and take the next step.
