Birthright

magazines, rocks, empty beer bottles and two excellent sketches of the site off the narrow built-in sofa.
    “I just . . . I just don’t want you to hurt her. That’s all.”
    “Why would I?”
    “You don’t understand.”
    “No, okay.” She took off her sunglasses, rubbed her eyes. “Make me understand.”
    “She’s never gotten over it. I think if you’d died, it would have been easier for her.”
    “A little rough on me, but yeah, I get that.”
    “The uncertainty, the need to believe she was going to find you, every day, and the despair, every day, when she didn’t. It changed her. It changed everything. I lived with her through that.”
    “Yeah.” He’d been three, Callie recalled from the newspaper articles. He’d lived his life with it. “And I didn’t.”
    “You didn’t. It broke my parents apart. In a lot of ways, it just broke them. She built a new life, but she built it on the wreck of the one she had before. I don’t want to see her knocked off again, wrecked again.”
    It made her sick inside, sick and sorry. Yet it was removed from her. Just as the death of the man whose bones she’d unearthed was removed. “I don’t want to hurt her. I can’t feel for her what you feel, but I don’t want to hurt her. She wants her daughter back, and nothing is going to make that happen. I can only give her the knowledge, maybe even the comfort, that I’m alive, that I’m healthy, that I was given a good life with good people.”
    “They stole you from us.”
    Her hands clenched, ready to defend. “No, they didn’t. They didn’t know. And because they’re the kind of people they are, they’re suffering because now they do know.”
    “You know them. I don’t.”
    She nodded now. “Exactly so.”
    He got the point. They didn’t know each other’s family. They didn’t know each other. It seemed they’d reached a point where they would have to. “What about you? How are you feeling about all this?”
    “I’m . . . scared,” she admitted. “I’m scared because it feels like this is an arc of one big cycle, and it’s going to whip around and flatten me. It’s already changed my relationship with my parents. It’s made us careful with each other in a way we shouldn’t have to be. I don’t know how long it’ll take for us to be easy with each other once more, but I do know it’s never going to be quite the same. And that pisses me off.
    “And I’m sorry,” she added, “because your mother didn’t do anything to deserve this. Or your father. Or you.”
    “Or you.” And tossing blame at her, he admitted, had been a way to keep his guilt buried. “What’s your first clear memory?”
    “My first?” She considered, sipped her beer. “Riding onmy father’s shoulders. At the beach. Martha’s Vineyard, I’m guessing, because we used to go there nearly every year for two weeks in the summer. Holding on to his hair with my hands and laughing as he danced back and forth in the surf. And I can hear my mother saying, ‘Elliot, be careful.’ But she was laughing, too.”
    “Mine’s waiting in line to see Santa at the Hagerstown Mall. The music, the voices, this big-ass snowman that was kind of freaky. You were sleeping in the stroller.”
    He took another sip of beer, steadied himself because he knew he had to get it out. “You had on this red dress—velvet. I didn’t know it was velvet. It had lace here.” He ran his hands over his chest. “Mom had taken off your cap because it made you fussy. You had this duck-down hair. Really soft, really pale. You were basically bald.”
    She felt something from him now, a connection to that little boy that made her smile at him as she tugged on her messy mane of hair. “I made up for it.”
    “Yeah.” He managed a smile in return as he studied her hair. “I kept thinking about seeing Santa. I had to pee like a racehorse, but I wasn’t getting out of line for anything. I knew just what I wanted. But the closer we got, the weirder it seemed. Big, ugly elves lurking around.”
    “You wonder why people don’t get that elves are scary.”
    “Then it was my turn, and Mom told me to go ahead, go sit on Santa’s lap. Her eyes were wet. I didn’t get that she was feeling sentimental. I thought something was wrong, something bad. I was petrified. The mall Santa . . .He didn’t look like I thought he was supposed to. He was too big. When he picked me up, let out with the old ho ho ho, I freaked. Started screaming,