For some reason I felt uneasy, although I couldn’t quite think why. Maybe it was simply that I’d never seen my birth certificate. To distract myself, I turned toward Connor where he sat beside me on the couch and commented, “That was smooth, complimenting my cooking…which is about the same thing as complimenting hers. Keep that up, and she may actually start to like you in about five years or so.”
“That soon? She must be a real pushover.”
I couldn’t help grinning as I reached for a second scone. Hard to believe I was still hungry, after everything I’d eaten at lunch, but suddenly I felt ravenous. Maybe it was the make-up sex.
Connor must have felt the same way, because he gave that scone the side-eye and asked, “Are you sure you’re just eating for two? Because I don’t think even I could keep up with you at the rate you’re going.”
Somehow I managed to resist sticking my tongue out at him, which was just as well, because Rachel returned in that very moment, holding a piece of paper in one hand. It was faintly yellowed around the edges, which I supposed made sense, considering that it was more than twenty years old.
Well, twenty-two, to be precise.
“Here it is,” she said, handing to me. I took it from her with fingers that shook only a little. “I’m not sure how much it’s going to help, but….”
“Thank you,” I told her. “It’s still more than I had.”
She resumed her seat in the armchair and picked up her neglected tea. “I suppose I should be glad that Sonya at least brought the birth certificate with her. It would have been just like her to not even have that.”
The condemnation was clear in her tone, and I couldn’t really blame her. To have your sister who’d disappeared almost a year earlier show up out of the blue, bringing a newborn with her — well, on the scale of life disruptions, that had to be close to an eight or nine. I didn’t know very much about my mother, but it was pretty clear to me that she hadn’t been the most responsible person in the world.
An awkward silence fell. Connor reached out to get another scone, probably just for something to do rather than because he was at all hungry. I smoothed the birth certificate out on my knee, scanning the little boxes for the pertinent information. Aunt Rachel hadn’t been entirely accurate about the “father of child” fields — they weren’t entirely blank, but instead had “UNKNOWN” typed in all of them. But at least I could see that I’d been born at Hoag Hospital, in Newport Beach, at 11:30 p.m. on December 21st. Also, I was able to see from the “mother of child” fields that she’d been living at 822 Oceanfront Drive, also in Newport Beach. There wasn’t an apartment or suite number, so I assumed it must have been a house.
So my mother had fled Jerome — and the responsibility of being the next prima — to live in a house in Newport Beach, California, where she’d met…someone. Was he a tanned, blond surfer type? There weren’t many of those in northern Arizona, that was for sure. But that didn’t make much sense, since from what I’d seen in pictures of her, my mother’s hair was much lighter than mine, a warm pale brown with a lot of red in it. If my father had been blond, wouldn’t my own hair be at least as light as my mother’s, rather than the near-black it actually was?
Like every McAllister, she had access to a good chunk of money that was her own, so the house could’ve been hers, or it could have belonged to my father. Or maybe she hadn’t lived there at all, had spent all her time in Southern California crashing at various hotels, and gave a made-up address at the hospital when they asked for her information. I had no idea, and obviously neither did my aunt.
Finally I looked up from the birth certificate to see both Connor and Rachel watching me. “Sorry,” I said. “I guess I kind of got lost in this.”
“It’s okay,” Connor said. “Do you think it will help?”
“Maybe,” I replied, my mind working furiously. He and I needed to talk…alone. Not that I thought Aunt Rachel would attempt to interfere, but there were some things I would rather not discuss in front of her. I shifted away from him so I faced my aunt and added, “Thanks again, Rachel. I really do appreciate…all of this.”
To my surprise, she smiled and nodded. “I probably should have given it to you a long time ago. I suppose I thought there wasn’t much point in focusing on the past. Now, though….” Her gaze slid somewhere toward my midsection, and I knew she was thinking about the baby — the child she was sure would kill me.