Birthright

summer nights when she’d pitched a tent in the backyard, she’d always slept in that room until she’d left for college.
    That made it, she supposed, in whatever incarnation, part of her.
    She moved down the wide hallway and into her father’s study. She hesitated there, wincing a bit as she looked at his lovely old mahogany desk with its pristine surface, the fresh blotter in its burgundy leather holder, the silver desk set, the charming folly of an antique inkwell with quill.
    The desk chair was the same rich leather, and she could see him there, as likely studying a gardening catalogue as a medical journal. His glasses would be sliding down his nose, and his hair, pale gold and shot with silver, would fall over his wide forehead.
    This time of year he’d wear a golf shirt and chinos, over a very fit frame. He’d have music on—probably classical. Indeed his first formal date with the girl who’d become his wife had been a concert.
    Callie had often come into this room, plopped down in one of the two cozy leather chairs and interrupted her father with news, complaints, questions. If he’d been really busy, he’d give her a long, cool look over the top of his glasses, which would make her slink out again.
    But the majority of the time she’d been welcomed there.
    Now she felt like an intruder.
    She ordered herself not to think about it. She would simply do what she’d come to do. After all, they were her papers.
    She walked to the first of the wooden file cabinets. Anything she needed to find would be in this room, she knew. Her father took care of the finances, the record keeping, the filing.
    She opened the top drawer and began to search.
    A n hour later, she went downstairs to brew a pot of coffee. Since she was there anyway, she raided the pantry and dug up a bag of low-sodium potato chips. Pitiful, she decided as she carted the snack upstairs. What was the point in living longer if you had to eat cardboard?
    She took a ten-minute break at the desk. At the rate she was going, it wasn’t going to take her as long as she’d estimated. Her father’s files were meticulously organized.She’d have been nearly done already if she hadn’t gotten caught up in the file dedicated to her report cards and grades.
    Walking back through her own past had been irresistible. Looking through the school file made her think of the friends she’d had—the digs she’d organized in backyards in elementary school. Her pal Donny Riggs had caught hell from his mom over the holes they’d dug in her garden.
    She thought of her first real kiss. Not Donny, but Joe Torrento, her heartthrob at thirteen. He’d worn a black leather jacket and Redwing boots. He’d seemed pretty sexy and dangerous to her at thirteen. Last she’d heard, he was teaching biology at St. Bernadette’s High School in Cherry Hill, had two kids and served as head of the local Rotary.
    There was her best friend and next-door neighbor Natalie Carmichael. They’d been as close as sisters, had shared every secret. Then college had come, and after a year or so of trying to maintain the connection, they’d drifted apart.
    Because it made her sad to think of it, she got up again and began to go through the second file cabinet.
    Like the school file, medical records were precisely organized. She flipped past the folder marked for her mother and the one marked for her father and drew out her own.
    It was where she should have started in the first place, she realized, and certain the simple proof she wanted would be there, she sat again. Opened the file.
    She noted the childhood inoculations, the X rays and reports on the broken arm she’d suffered at ten when she’d fallen out of a tree. There was her tonsillectomy in June 1983. The dislocated finger she’d earned trying to slam-dunk during a pickup basketball game when she’d been sixteen.
    She reached for more chips as she continued to scan the paperwork. He’d even kept the basic stuff from every one of her annual checkups until she’d moved out of the house. Jesus, even from the gynecologist.
    “Dad,” she muttered. “That’s just anal.”
    She didn’t react until she’d gone straight through every paper. Then she simply turned the file over and went through every paper a second time.
    But she found no hospital records of her birth. No paperwork from pediatric exams for the first three months of her life.
    Didn’t mean anything. She rubbed a fist between her breasts when her breathing