Birthright

see.
    She watched the pan of Main Street, smiling when she caught sight of her father’s store. There was another pan of the hills and fields outside of town, as the reporter spoke of the historic community.
    Interested now, certain the report would focus on the recent discovery near Antietam Creek, she wandered closer to the set. And nodded, knowing how pleased her father would be that the reporter spoke of the importance of the site, the excitement in the world of science at the possibilities to be unearthed there.
    She sipped, thinking she’d call her father as soon as the segment was over, and listened with half an ear as a Dr. Callie Dunbrook was introduced.
    When Callie’s face filled the screen, Suzanne blinked, stared. There was a burn at the back of her throat as she stepped still closer to the screen.
    Her heart began to thud, painfully, against her ribs as she looked into dark amber eyes under straight brows. Her skin went hot, then cold, and her breath grew short and choppy.
    She shook her head. Everything inside it was buzzing like a swarm of wasps. She couldn’t hear anything else, could only watch in shock as that wide mouth with its slight overbite moved.
    And when the mouth smiled, quick, bright, and three shallow dimples popped out, the glass in Suzanne’s hand slid out of her trembling fingers and shattered on the floor at her feet.

Three
    S uzanne sat in the living room of the house where she’d grown up. Lamps she’d helped her mother pick out perhaps ten years before stood on doilies her grandmother had crocheted before she’d been born.
    The sofa was new. She’d had to browbeat her father into replacing the old one. The rugs had been taken up and stored for the summer, and summer sheers, dotted-swiss priscillas, replaced the winter drapes. Those housekeeping routines were something her mother had done every season, something her father continued to do simply because it was routine.
    Oh God, how she missed her mother.
    Her hands were clutched in her lap, white knuckles pressed hard against her belly as if she were protecting the child who’d once lived in her womb.
    Her face was a blank sheet, dull and colorless. It was as if she’d used up all her energy and strength to gather her family together. Now she was a sleepwalker, slipping between past and present.
    Douglas sat on the edge of a Barcalounger that was older than he was. He watched his mother out of the cornerof his eye. She was still as stone, and seemed as removed from him as the moon.
    His stomach was as tight and tangled as his mother’s fingers.
    The air smelled of the cherry tobacco from his grandfather’s after-dinner pipe. A warm scent that always lingered there. With it was the cold yellow odor of his mother’s stress.
    It had a smell, a form, an essence that was strain and fear and guilt, and slapped him back into the terrible and helpless days of his childhood when that yellow smear on the air had permeated everything.
    His grandfather gripped the remote with one hand and kept his other on Suzanne’s shoulder, as if to hold her in place.
    “I didn’t want to miss the segment,” Roger said, then cleared his throat. “Asked Doug to run home here and set the VCR as soon as Lana told me about it. Didn’t watch it yet.”
    He’d made tea. His wife had made tea, always, for sickness and upsets. The sight of the white pot with its little rosebuds comforted him, as the crocheted doilies did, and the sheer summer curtains. “Doug watched it.”
    “Yes, I watched it. It’s cued up.”
    “Well . . .”
    “Play it, Daddy.” Suzanne’s voice hitched, and beneath her father’s hand, her body came to life again, and trembled. “Play it now.”
    “Mom, you don’t want to get yourself all worked up about—”
    “Play it.” She turned her head, stared at her son with eyes that were red-rimmed and a bit wild. “Just look.”
    Roger started the tape. The hand on Suzanne’s shoulder began to knead.
    “Fast-forward through—here.” Energy whipped back, had Suzanne snatching the remote, fumbling with the buttons. She slowed the tape to regular speed when Callie’s face came on-screen. “Look at her. God. Oh my God.”
    “Sweet Jesus,” Roger murmured. Like a prayer.
    “You see it.” Suzanne dug her fingers into his leg, butdidn’t take her attention off the screen. Couldn’t. “You see it. It’s Jessica. It’s my Jessie.”
    “Mom.” Douglas’s heart ached at the way she said it. My Jessie.