Birthright

“She’s got the coloring, but . . .Jesus, that lawyer, Grandpa. Lana. She looks as much like Jessie might as this woman does. Mom, you can’t know.”
    “I can know,” she snapped out. “Look at her. Look!” She stabbed the remote, froze the screen as Callie smiled. “She has her father’s eyes. She has Jay’s eyes—the same color, the same shape. And my dimples. Three dimples, like me. Like Ma had. Daddy . . .”
    “There’s a strong resemblance.” Roger felt weak when he said it, husked out. “The coloring, the shape of the face. Those features.” Something was rising up in his throat that felt like equal parts panic and hope. “The last artist projection—”
    “I have it.” Suzanne leaped up, grabbed the folder she’d brought with her and took out a computer-generated image. “Jessica, at twenty-five.”
    Now Douglas rose as well. “I thought you’d stopped having those done. I thought you’d stopped.”
    “I never stopped.” Tears wanted to spill but she forced them back with the iron will that had gotten her through every day of the last twenty-nine years. “I stopped talking to you about it because it upset you. But I never stopped looking. I never stopped believing. Look at your sister.” She pushed the picture into his hands. “Look at her,” she demanded and whirled back to the television.
    “Mom. For Christ’s sake.” He held the photo as the pain he’d shut down, through a will every bit as strong as his mother’s, bit back at him. It made him helpless. It made him sick.
    “A resemblance,” he continued. “Brown eyes, blond hair.” Unlike his mother, he couldn’t live on hope. Hope destroyed him. “How many other girls, women, have you looked at and seen Jessica? I can’t stand watching you put yourself through this again. You don’t know anything about her. How old she is, where she comes from.”
    “Then I’ll find out.” She took the photo back, put it intothe folder with hands that were steady again. “If you can’t stand it, then stay out of it. Like your father.”
    She knew it was cruel, to slash at one child in the desperate need for the other. She knew it was wrong to strike out at her son while clutching the ghost of her daughter to her breast. But he would either help, or step aside. There was no middle ground in Suzanne’s quest for Jessica.
    “I’ll run a computer search.” Douglas’s voice was cold and quiet. “I’ll get you what information I can.”
    “Thank you.”
    “I’ll use my laptop back at the store. It’s fast. I’ll send you what I find.”
    “I’ll come with you.”
    “No.” He could slap just as quick and hard as she. “I can’t talk to you when you’re like this. Nobody can. I’ll do better alone.”
    He walked out without another word. Roger let out a long sigh. “Suzanne, his only concern is you.”
    “No one has to be concerned for me. I can use support, but concern doesn’t help me. This is my daughter. I know it.”
    “Maybe she is.” Roger rose, ran his hands up and down Suzanne’s arms. “And Doug is your son. Don’t push him, honey. Don’t lose one child trying to find another.”
    “He doesn’t want to believe. And I have to.” She stared at Callie’s face on the TV screen. “I have to.”
    S o, she was the right age, Doug thought as he scanned the information from his search. The fact that her birthday was listed within a week of Jessica’s was hardly conclusive.
    His mother would see it as proof, and ignore the other data.
    He could read a lifestyle into the dry facts. Upper-middle-class suburban. Only child of Elliot and Vivian Dunbrook of Philadelphia. Mrs. Dunbrook, the former Vivian Humphries, had played second violin in the Boston Symphony Orchestra before her marriage. She, her husband and infant daughter had relocated to Philadelphia,where Elliot Dunbrook had taken a position as surgical resident.
    It meant money, class, an appreciation for the arts and for science.
    She’d grown up in privilege, had graduated first in her class at Carnegie Mellon, gone on to get her master’s and, just recently, her doctorate.
    She’d pursued her career in archaeology while compiling her advanced degrees. She’d married at twenty-six, divorced not quite two years later. No children.
    She was associated with Leonard G. Greenbaum and Associates, the Paleolithic Society, several universities’ archaeology departments.
    She’d written a number of well-received papers. He printed out