Mistaken Identity

shone with happiness.

Her mother? Her father? Bennie tried to dislodge the photo but didn’t force it. What year was it taken? And what about Connolly?

Bennie turned the page. It was blank, with the top layer of paper torn away where a photo had been ripped out. She ran a finger over the ragged patch. The threads of paper matched the tufts on the back of the photo Connolly had given her. Had it been taken from this book? Bennie turned the next page. Another wartime photo. Airmen in groups. She found Winslow quickly in the photo, but it didn’t answer any questions about Connolly. She flipped another page. A bomber with a pinup painted on its riveted nose. Winslow and two other pilots posed in front of it. Were there photos of Connolly and Bennie, together?

The last page of the album was blank, its picture torn out, too. Was this the page that held the photo of Winslow with the two babies? Bennie scratched at the heavyweight paper and its fibers came off under her nail. She squinted at the tangled threads, and Bear leaned over to sniff. She closed the book and reached for the next. Not a homemade photo album, a homemade scrapbook of newspaper articles.

The clippings.

Bennie read the first page, a newspaper listing of law students who had passed the bar. She found her name easily, even in the tiny letters, because it was circled in pencil. Her heart thudded hard within her chest. Winslow had cut out the article and pasted it here, decades ago. She turned the page. A clipping from the Inquirer five years later, a brief mention that Bennie had successfully defended one Guillermo Diaz on a murder case. Again her name had been circled in pencil. The page after that was a report of another murder case she had defended, with her quote, “This is a case only a fool would bring. Need I say more?”

Bennie winced, but she didn’t know if it was the cockiness of the quote or the fact that it was circled in the same careful hand. The rest of the book was full of clippings, as was the book after that and the one after that. The homemade scrapbooks-fifteen in all-constituted a chronological account of her career and life. The revelation left her shaking. Winslow had to be her father, and at some level, he had to care. About her.

Right?

Bennie stared at the scrapbook, her emotions turbulent: a combustible brew of anger, exhilaration, and confusion. That the feelings couldn’t be parsed didn’t gainsay their potency. She had always known Winslow’s name, now she knew his face, and his way of life. He lived simply. He loved books and tended perennials. As a young man he served on a bomber and loved her mother. For one night.

Then Bennie reprimanded herself. Think like a lawyer, not a daughter. The scrapbooks proved only that Winslow knew her mother and that he had kept track of Bennie. It was slender evidence on which to assume that Winslow was her father or that he loved her. And the clippings contained nothing of Connolly, neither proving or disproving their relationship.

Right.

Bennie closed the book and placed it on the top of the stack. She sat motionless for a minute, then replaced the books in the plastic bin in the order in which she had taken them out. The last one to return was the one with the missing photographs. She ran her fingerpads over its dark, pebbled cover. It was all she had of a secret history and she wanted to hold it in her hands another second. Her fingers encircled the back of the book, where she felt something cool, papery, unpebbled.

She turned the book over. There was a small pink envelope taped to its back. Bennie hadn’t seen it the first time around. She turned the book sideways so she could read the envelope. The ballpoint ink was faint and clotted in spots. “To Bill,” it said, in a woman’s hand. Her mother’s hand. There could be no mistaking it. Bennie had seen her mother’s writing a thousand times, on powers of attorney, medical releases, and informed consent forms. What Bennie held in her hands now was a letter from her mother to her father. Maybe.

Bennie felt her throat thicken. She hadn’t heard them utter a word to each other, but she could read their most intimate thoughts. She freed the envelope from the scrap-book.

17

“Five minutes to lights out!” shouted the guard, and inmates began shuffling to their cells for the night.

Alice was already washing up in her cell. She dried her face and spotted Shetrell’s girl, Leonia, glancing at her as she lumbered by. Weird. Leonia’s cell was on the lower tier of the unit, underneath the ground floor. What was she doing on the upper deck so close to lights out? Goin’ up to Shetrell’s for a quickie? Disgusting. Alice didn’t get it. She liked her men with dicks. Anthony had been the exception, and Alice used to call him the only dick without a dick. She wasn’t sorry he was gone. She was only sorry she’d ended up in jail for it.

Alice stepped close to her cell door and watched Leonia amble down the hall. The big girl’s arms hung apart from her sides, the steroid shuffle. Alice flicked out the light and edged away from the door, watching. Leonia looked back over her shoulder in the direction of Alice’s cell.

Alice stood motionless in the darkness at her door.

Leonia turned back and walked past Shetrell’s cell without going in, then continued down the hall and took the stairs down to her tier, where Alice lost sight of her.

“What’re you doin’?” Alice’s cellie whined from her bunk. “I was readin’.”

“Shut up,” Alice said. Wondering.

18

Bennie slipped a finger in the small pink envelope. Inside was a slip of rose-colored paper and she tugged it out. It came only reluctantly, apparently unopened for years, and she unfolded it.

August 4

Dear Bill,

Please try to understand. I have to go. Someday I will explain it all. Until then, please know how much I love you.

Yours always,

me

Bennie stared at the letter, reading it again and again. What? I’m leaving you? She had been told that Winslow had left her mother, not the other way around.

She shook her head, astounded. The date on the letter was roughly a month after Bennie was born. Had her mother left her father with a newborn? Maybe newborn twins? It didn’t make sense. It seemed incredible.

But there it was, on paper. The letter wasn’t signed, but it had to be from her mother, it was her handwriting. Still, Bennie wished it had been signed with at least a “C,” just to be sure. The photos, the handwriting, the way it was faithfully kept and even hidden, all of it taken together indicated the note was from her mother, but it struck Bennie as a circumstantial case. Or maybe she was thinking like a lawyer, not a daughter.

She refolded the note. She felt shaken, her body hollow. She returned the note to the envelope, then held the letter in her palm, feeling the old-fashioned heaviness of the stationery. Smelling the vaguely perfumed scent to the paper. Tea Roses, her mother’s perfume, or did she imagine that? Still, she couldn’t bring herself to put the note back right away.

Then Bennie paused. Whose note was it anyway? Whose secret to keep? It was truth, after all, and to keep it secret was to treat it as if it were property, fencing out others like trespassers. But truth wasn’t property, to be owned and held exclusively by anyone. Truth was to be shared, commonly and collectively owned. Bennie had a right to know the truth, certainly of her own birth, and no one else had an equal right to keep it from her. No, the note belonged to her. She placed it in her jacket pocket, put the scrapbook back in the bin, replaced the lid, and shoved the box under the bed.

Bennie rose unsteadily. Her history had changed, or at least her view of it. She questioned everything she’d been told and much that she hadn’t. Would her mother leave a man with a newborn, or twins, with no means of