One Cold Night

watching on my account.”
    “It’s just more of the usual,” Susan said. “Death and destruction, murder and mayhem. I don’t want to watch it.”
    “Hasn’t Dave rid the world of crime yet?” Lisa’s smile pulled smooth her dimpled chin.
    “Not yet. How was rehearsal?”
    “Good.” Lisa’s small, lithe body found its way onto the chair’s seat cushion. She laid her head against the back and stared up at the high ceiling. “Long.”
    “Lisa, honey?”
    Lisa lifted her head to look at Susan. The tendons in her neck braced, making her appear more fragile than she was. “You don’t have to say it,” Lisa said, “because I’ve already made up my mind, and it’s final.”
    “No, Lisa, listen to me.”
    Lisa shook her head. “I’m going to tell Mommy before I do it, but I really don’t think it’ll hurt her if I look for my birth parents. Mommy knows I love her. She knows she’ll always be my real mother.”
    “It isn’t that.”
    “I need to know who I am, who I really am.”
    “You’re unique, Lisa. There’s no one like you.”
    “So true.” Lisa grinned, then scowled. “But that’s not the point.”
    “I understand—”
    “No. You don’t. You can’t. No one can who isn’t adopted.”
    “I’m not going to ask you if you’ve felt safe and loved,” Susan said, “because I know you have.”
    “That isn’t the point. ”
    “I understand that you want... that you need to find your birth parents.”
    Silence. Lisa was listening.
    “I want you to be happy. I want you to find them. I would never stand in your way.”
    Lisa’s pale eyes seemed to darken. “What did you want to talk to me about, Suzie? Something else?”
    “No, this.”
    “So you agree it’s a good idea?”
    “I agree it’s inevitable,” Susan said. “I agree it’s important.”
    “So?”
    “So... I want to help you.”
    “Cool! I’ve already been on the Internet. I found the best site to start with. And I thought maybe Dave, being a detective and all, could help out with official records and stuff.”
    Lisa had popped forward onto the edge of the arm chair;her eagerness broke Susan’s heart.
    “We don’t need any help,” Susan said carefully.
    “But—”
    “I know who they are.”
    Lisa’s face appeared to freeze in that moment, like an instant caught in photograph. Everything about her seemed visible on the surface: the brilliant promise of her future, the anomalies of her past.
    “You know them? Have you always known them?”
    Susan nodded. “Brace yourself, honey.”
    “Just tell me!”
    Susan sat forward and clasped her hands over her knees. Today she had deliberately worn baggy pants, red cargo capris, though it was getting cold out for bare ankles.
    “I’m your birth mother.” Had she really said it after all these years? “I never gave you away; we kept you with us. You see? You were always wanted.”
    Lisa’s jaw had gone slack and her mouth hung open with an abandonment uncharacteristic for a girl who was always sharply right on the moment. Her eyes glazed, then snapped into focus.
    “You?”
    Susan nodded.
    “But you’re my sister.”
    “I gave birth to you,” Susan said, “when I was fifteen.”
    The salient fact hung between them like a weapon, spiky and ready to swing in any direction.
    “Does Dave know?”
    “Not yet, but he will.”
    “He’ll leave you.”
    So that was how it would be; the punishment would begin in heaps.
    “We’ll see.”
    “You could have kept it a secret,” Lisa said. “Kept on lying.” Her eyes darted around the large room before settling back on Susan with precision. “Lying to me, and to Dave, and to yourself.”
    Lisa sprang up. The curves of her young woman’s body seemed to melt and there she stood, the little wisp of a girl Susan had always openly adored.
    “I love you so much,” Susan said. She rose from thecouch, crossed the space between them and reached out to touch Lisa. Her daughter. There: It was a fact.
    Lisa pulled away, her arms dangling.
    “We were trying to do what seemed like the best thing, Lisa.”
    “Best for who?”
    “For you. ”
    “Mommy and Daddy, they lied to me, too.”
    “We all agreed it was best.”
    “What about my father? Who was he? Or don’t you know?”
    “That’s cruel.”
    “Oh, I’m cruel? That’s a good one!”
    Susan inched closer, her whole body pleading, but Lisa recoiled. She ran to the front door, jammed on her sneakers and banged her way out. Susan felt a chill at the