Name: Ella Blackwood
Date of Birth: July 12, 1980
Place of Birth: Nantucket Cottage Hospital
Mother: Joni Blackwood
For a long and powerful moment, Ella didn’t think of anything at all. She simply read the words and the date of birth and hardly considered that this piece of paper would rock the foundation of her world forever. Then, she leaped from the kitchen chair, bug-eyed.
July 12th, 1980 was her birthday.
Ella was her name.
But who was Joni Blackwood? What on earth did this mean?And why the heck had someone sent this to her, out of the blue, on a random Thursday in September— when she was forty-two years old?
Ella’s heart was in her throat. With the certificate still in-hand, she raced toward the upstairs library, where Greta had always kept the family photo albums. Each of the children had their own, which charted the baby years, the toddler years, the scabbed knees, the gymnastics competitions, the piano recitals, the sleepovers, the baking parties, and so forth. Ella grabbed hers and whipped it open to the first page, where Greta held an infant Ella in her arms, all swaddled in blankets. Ella’s face was impossibly small, and she had an adorable tuft of black hair.
Beside the photograph, Greta had written:“Home for the first time.”
Ella’s head spun with questions. The next photographs were of Bernard holding a baby Ella, followed by a teeny-tiny Julia trying her best to hold Ella, but with Greta’s help. Next, a proud-looking Quentin held her while Alana stood off to the left, clearly performing for the camera.
It seemed that the Copperfields had been very present for Ella’s first few days.
Was it possible that this birth certificate was a hoax? Someone’s idea of a joke? What?
Ella then grabbed Quentin’s photo album and flipped to the first page. Here, Bernard had apparently done his best to record everything about Quentin’s first few hours. There, an infant Quentin lay in a hospital crib. There, Greta lay in a hospital gown with Quentin across her chest. There, Bernard wore a hospital cap and held his first child for the first time.
They’d been at the hospital.
Ella flipped through Alana and Julia’s photo albums after that and discovered that there, too, Bernard and Greta had recorded the very early moments of their children’s lives at the hospital. Bernard, who’d always called himself a “photography buff,” hadn’t waited a single moment.
Why, then, had they waited till Ella had gotten home to start photographing?
Ella’s knees clacked together. Slowly, she put each photo album back on the bookshelf, grabbed the copy of the birth certificate for Ella Blackwood from the library desk, and walked like a zombie to her mother’s bedroom. This was the same bedroom she’d taken over after Bernard’s sentencing, the same one Ella had entered and exited with dinners and breakfasts that Greta mostly refused to eat.
Here, Ella knocked on Greta’s door.
Unlike all those years ago, Greta called, “Come in!”
Ella took a deep breath, telling herself that there had to be an explanation. Her world would go on spinning the way it always had been. She stepped through the door and found her mother at her own desk, a computer opened in front of her. She wore her cat-eyeglasses and seemed hard at work on something. An article? A manuscript? It warmed Ella’s heart to know that her mother still had some creativity within her. Maybe their family coming together again had coaxed it back to life.
When Greta turned back to greet Ella, she caught sight of the copy of the birth certificate. “What’s that?” She reached out and tugged it from Ella’s hands, then stared at it for an impossible length of time. All the color drained from Greta’s face. When she returned her gaze to Ella’s, the sincere shock and fear that echoed back told Ella everything she needed to know.
Ella took a large step back. She was wordless.
“Ella, please. Let me explain.”
Ella’s heart exploded. She didn’t want to hear any sort of explanation, not from a woman and a family that seemed entirely built on lies. She whirled around and rushed into the hallway, only grabbing her purse, keys, and guitar from her bedroom. As Greta called her name from the stairwell, she fled The Copperfield House, jumped into her station wagon, and started the engine.
Nothing would ever be all right again. That much was clear.
ChapterFourteen
Ella parked her station wagon outside Nantucket High School. It was now two-twenty-five, which meant that high school wouldn’t finish for the day for another thirty-five minutes. That wouldn’t do. Feeling manic, Ella hopped out of the car and rushed into the front office, where the woman behind the desk said, “Good afternoon! How can I help you?”
Ella forced a smile. “Hi. My name is Ella Copperfield, and I need to take my son, Danny Ashton, out of school for the day. It’s a private family matter.”
The woman nodded, typed a message to herself on her computer, scribed a note on a little pad of paper, and then instructed Ella to sit and wait. “I’ll go grab him from seventh period,” she explained. “We won’t be long.”