She smiled wryly. 'Tell me about it.'
'You have no idea who this girl is? You've never met her before? Never dreamed about her in the past?'
'That's the thing. She seems familiar to me.' Laurie paused. 'Sort of.' She looked across the table at her brother. 'I mean, I think I know her from someplace, but I can't for the life of me figure out where. I don't know if she's someone I met or imagined or saw in a movie. There wasn't a girl on our street like that, was there? When we were little?'
'Not when you were with us. But maybe before.'
She frowned. 'Before?'
'Yeah. If your birth mother was around we could--'
Laurie's heart stopped in her chest. It suddenly seemed impossible to breathe. 'My 'birth mother'?'
'Yeah.'
Laurie tried to will the saliva back in her mouth. She felt dizzy.
'I thought . . .' Josh shook his head. 'You don't remember?'
'I didn't know.'
'You didn't know you were adopted?'
She stared at him numbly. 'I thought you were my real brother.'
'I am your real brother.'
'I mean--'
'We may not be biologically related, but I'm your brother, and Mom and Dad were your parents. We're all family.'
'How long have you known?'
'Always.' He seemed uncomfortable. 'I thought you knew, too. I wouldn't've said anything if--'
'Were you born when they adopted me?'
'Yeah. I was pretty little. You were, I don't know, eight or nine, I guess, when Mom and Dad brought you home. Which meant that I was four or five, but I still sort of remember it.'
She stood. For the first time in her life, she knew what writers meant when they described their characters' heads as 'spinning.' 'This is too much to take. I need . . . time. I need to think about this. I
need to absorb it.'
Josh looked worried. 'I still love you, Lor . I couldn't love you more if you were my Siamese twin.'
She put a hand on his shoulder. 'I know. I love you, too.'
'Okay. Let's talk about this, then. Obviously, we need to work this out. I thought you knew all along. I don't know how you could not--'
'I don't want to talk about it.' She tried to smile, did not entirely succeed. 'Not right now. I think ... I think I'm going to go for a walk. I need some time to think.'
He nodded.
'I'm sorry,' he said as she headed toward the door.
She turned, smiled kindly. 'You have nothing to be sorry for.'
Then she was out of the shop and on the sidewalk, and there were tears in her eyes. She wiped them angrily away. She had nothing to complain about. Her family had been loving, caring, supportive, always there for her.
They'd brought her up to be the person she was today.
But it still felt as if her life had suddenly turned upside down, as if the rug had been yanked out from under her. She'd just found out that her brother wasn't her real brother, her parents hadn't been her real parents.
She was related to strangers she didn't even know, and she wasn't related to the people she knew and loved.
On the scale of problems, it was low priority. She wasn't a crack-addicted teenager knocked up by her stepfather. She wasn't a battered wife with no education and no prospects. Like anorexia and bulimia, hers was strictly an affluent, upwardly mobile concern.
But it still had a major impact on her life.
Who were her biological parents?
That was the big question. She tried to remember something from before she'd been adopted, some scrap of memory from her previous life, but as hard as she tried to recall the past, her mind remained stubbornly in the present.
She never thought much about her early childhood, she realized, and when she did her thoughts were confined to specific subjects, specific instances, specific images.
She'd never stopped to analyze it before, but she understood now that the reason was because most of her early years were a blank.
_
She frowned. Not noticing that she never thought J F
about her childhood, not wondering why, was as strange as the memory blank itself.
It was all strange, and she was tempted to ascribe a deliberate design to it, to recognize a supernatural reason behind it all, but she knew that was stupid. It was probably the dreams that had put her in this frame of mind, that had encouraged her to see anything unusual in this. The truth was, it was probably a perfectly natural reaction for a child to block out memories of parents who had died that early in her life.
Died?
Yes. Her biological parents had died. She knew that much. She could not remember how or why, could not bring to mind any specifics, but the certainty was there, so strong that even though she had no memories or concrete proof, she did not doubt it.
Laurie paused at the corner, thought about crossing the street, but turned right instead. In a kind of daze, she stopped at a coffee stand, bought a mocha, and continued on up the sidewalk.
How had her parents died? she wondered. She had the feeling that they'd both died at once, so it couldn't have been old age or disease. It had to have been catastrophic.
Fire? Plane crash? Murder? Had it been something simple or one of those bizarre, convoluted occurrences? Had her father caught her mother with another woman and then joined in the fun only to have the woman's jealous boyfriend kill all three of them?
Had her parents been aspiring actors who were conned into doing a snuff film and killed, their murders recorded on camera and now available on video?
She would probably never know.
She slowed to look at the series of newsracks on the side of the street, sipping her coffee as she peered through the faded plastic windows. She'd always been attracted to supernatural stories in lurid tabloids, the more outrageous the headline the better. She told herself that it was camp, a kitsch, postmodern irony, that she liked to read those stories because they were so bad they were funny, so outrageous they were entertaining, but the truth was that she was genuinely interested in the bizarre tales. She felt some sort of affinity for those subjects, and she could not help wondering now if that could be traced back to her first family.
A headline caught her eye: minister's family flees HAUNTED HOUSE.
She'd lived in a haunted house as a child.
The knowledge came to her not as a revelation, not as a sudden memory breakthrough, but casually, gently, as though it were something she'd always known and often thought about and had just been reminded of by the tabloid. She reread the headline, stared at the obviously fake photograph of a clergyman, his wife, and his daughter looking up at a dilapidated house over which towered a huge horned demon.
Now that she was actively seeking them, memories of her early childhood seemed to be seeping slowly back into her consciousness. But she was no longer sure she wanted to know about life before her adoption. She was curious, of course, but that was balanced by a growing feeling of dread, the impression that there were things in her past she was better off not knowing.
She could see the house in her mind: a dark Victorian mansion located in a clearing in the woods. The surrounding trees were giant, old-growth redwoods, so it must have been in Washington, Oregon, or northern California. As for why the house was haunted, the specifics of it, she had no idea. She knew only that there was something frightening about the house, something she'd sensed even as a young child.
She could not remember having any brothers or sisters, but there'd been another man living with them, hadn't there? An uncle? One of her dad's old army buddies?
