Rachel Goddard 01 - The Heat of the Moon

my absence from these family pictures. As if I hadn’t been part of their lives, wasn’t one of them.
    But why did Mother hide all the pictures of herself and my father? Why pretend they didn’t exist? All I could think of was that she was protecting both of us from painful reminders.
    I returned to the first page of the album. For a long time I sat staring at my young parents and tiny sister, trying to make sense of it all.
    In the dogwood outside the window a mockingbird broke into song, imitating a cardinal. The throaty, mellow notes were pitch-perfect, but I realized absently that the cadence was off, too rushed and insistent. I would never mistake it for the real thing.

Chapter Eleven
    When I was twelve and Michelle was nine, Mother bought a telescope so we could all look at the stars and planets and moon together. On a hot clear night, we set the instrument on its wooden tripod in the back yard, and waited for daylight to recede and the universe to come shining out of the darkness.
    Mother sat in a wrought iron chair she’d brought down from the patio, and Michelle and I lolled on the grass at her feet. The pink-washed sky faded to black, the birds hushed in the trees around us. Fireflies winked across the lawn. Michelle, giggling, tickled my neck and ears with grass blades until she saw the first bat swoop low, then she squealed and clutched at me, burying her face in my shoulder. We smelled of sweat and citrus insect repellent.
    I’d studied every inch of the lunar map in our new astronomy book, and when the brilliant full moon rose above us I patiently guided Michelle’s eyes to the Bay of Rainbows, the Sea of Tranquillity, the Lake of Dreams. I pointed out the places where astronauts had walked. All the while, I sneaked glances at Mother on my right. Was she impressed? She smiled and briefly rested a hand on my shoulder. I was thrilled. She thought I was a good, smart girl. She loved me.
    Then her gaze shifted to Michelle, and Mother’s expression softened, a deep tenderness bloomed in her eyes, and I felt an invisible circle closing them in, shutting me out. Her show of affection for me was like the heat of the moon, an illusion, a glow that gave no warmth.
    That night marked my first conscious awareness of what I’d always sensed, that Mother would never love me the way she loved Michelle. 
    Perhaps now I knew the reason why.
    ***
    For days after I found the pictures I was nearly mute at home, fearful that I couldn’t speak to Mother without exploding into a babble of questions and demands. Before I dug any deeper, I had to work out all possible meanings of what I’d found, and not found, in Mother’s study. I needed to fortify myself by imagining the worst I could learn if I pushed for answers.
    I was willing to believe that grief over my father’s death made me destroy the pictures that showed me with him. But that didn’t explain why there were so many photos of my parents and sister together, some of them formal studio portraits, with no sign of another, older daughter. Families didn’t do that, they didn’t pose for portraits with only one child.
    Maybe I wasn’t one of them. Maybe I was adopted. The thought pierced me like a sword, but I forced myself to consider it. I’d never seen my birth certificate, a fact that hadn’t struck me as odd until now. I’d never needed it, never been asked to produce it. Mother had obtained my first passport when she took Michelle and me to Europe as teenagers, and I’d simply renewed it as an adult. I’d used my passport as proof of identity when I applied for a driver’s license. No one, anywhere, had ever asked to see my birth certificate, so I’d given it no thought.
    But if I was adopted, why hadn’t Mother told me? What possible reason could she have to hide it from me? And when did it happen? After those pictures were taken, when Michelle was about two and I was four or five? Surely I would remember it, if I’d been that old.
    This argument made me laugh scornfully at myself. I couldn’t remember a damned thing; I was stumbling around in the dark.
    Or was I? I reached out and found them lurking at the border of consciousness, a sad-faced woman and an angry man, phantoms I’d never been able to explain or get rid of. Did Mother know who they were? Was something about my origins so awful that she never wanted me to learn the truth?
    Mother could see, of course, that something was wrong. She came to my room one night, sat on my bed,