Frank tried to keep it hidden from me, but I saw a copy in my school file one time in the office. When the guidance counselor wasn’t looking, I grabbed it and took a mental picture of the document. Later, I tried looking her up online, but I couldn’t find very much: an article about an arrest, a school photo.
“But you couldn’t?”
“I...”
“She’s dead.” Karen says the words blandly, and I nod. My mouth goes dry.
“Yeah, um, I finally found her obituary. It looks like she died not long after I went to live with Frank.”
“What happened?” Emilia’s words are gentle and kind, but they don’t take the edge off what happened. They don’t make this hurt less.
Are her words supposed to make me hurt less?
They don’t.
“I don’t know,” I whisper. “Do you think she sold me to Frank because she wanted drug money?” I ask.
The question is one that’s plagued me for years. It’s something that’s kept me up at night. It’s something that’s made me feel sick. I can never ask Frank what happened or where I came from. The few times I asked as a child ended with a sharp slap to the face. Harrison never saw. He never knew that his father hit me, and he certainly never knew why. I learned very quickly not to ask about my mom.
I don’t know why she gave me up.
What did he promise her?
“No,” Karen and Emilia answer at once, and somehow, their fierce loyalty and kindness warms my heart.
It makes me feel like I’m not totally alone, at least not right now.
“Thanks,” I say.
“Nobody does that in real life,” Karen says. “There’s no way. Look, I don’t talk about my childhood much,” she says. “But I can tell you one thing, and that’s that being poor sucks. A lot. My mom’s a shrink now, but she wasn’t always. She grew up on the streets, and we were poor for a long time when I was little. You make a lot of hard choices when you’re poor. Maybe your mom had a hard choice to make.”
“It doesn’t necessarily mean a choice about drugs,” Emilia says kindly. “Maybe she thought that Frank would make sure you got a good education.”
“Or maybe she just wanted to know you were with a good family,” Karen says.
“Maybe.”
“Can you ever ask Frank?” Emilia asks.
“No. Never.”
Karen is watching me carefully, and then she asks a question I’ve been dreading.
It’s a question I was hoping to avoid.
“Why are you telling us this now?” She asks. “We’ve known you for years and you’ve never opened up about where you came from. Why today?”
“Because today I had detention with Harrison O’Conner, and for a minute, I thought he was going to hit me or kiss me.”
He did neither.
I don’t know what I wanted him to do.
Nothing, maybe.
A kiss, perhaps.
I don’t know, and I can’t be honest with myself enough to express that.