“So tell me what happened last night,” I insist, letting out a breath. He shakes his head almost in reluctance.
“I had just got to the charity dinner. Katie asked me to make a quick appearance on her behalf since was going out of town for one of her friend’s birthday. You and Kam were making your way through the crowd. I told you that I had the file on your parents.” He breaths all this out quickly.
“When I told you, you freaked out. You said you wanted it right now, and I told you I didn’t have it on me and I could bring it back to you. You were so pissed. I’d never seen you like that before. I went to go have Kam calm you down and before I knew it you had slapped George, like really laid it on him.” He says the last part with a proud laugh.
I’m not proud though, I’m disgusted and confused. He notices, becoming serious again.
“You raced out of there after that. Me and Kam looked for you the whole night.” I cover my face with my hands.
“I’m sorry,” I tell him quietly. He leans across the table.
“What happened Megan?”
Tears build in my eyes.
“I don’t know.” I shrug. We’re quiet and I take a deep breath.
“Sometimes I don’t remember things,” I whisper. He looks at me curiously. I lock my gaze on the table.
“When I was younger I’d have memory lapses, time losses. Sometimes after them I’d find out I did bad things.” I shake my head in frustration. “It hadn’t happened in so long…but yesterday it happened again.” I’m afraid to look at him but he’s not looking at me with pity, but with empathy.
“Have you told Kam?” he asks after a sigh. I shake my head.
“I was hoping I was past it,” I tell him, fighting tears. He nods slightly. A stretch of silence passes between us and he finally pulls out a laptop and slides in the booth beside me.
“So do you want to start with the good news or the bad news?” His tone is casual as he starts typing stuff into the machine.
“Good. Please,” I tell him softly.
“So the good news is, we were able to find a lot out for someone who basically didn’t exist before the age of five,” he explains, his eyes glued to the screen. My body is buzzing. I’ve never been so anxious but hesitant in my entire life.
“You found out who my parents are?” I ask, unable to keep the desperation out of my voice.
“Yeah,” he tells me with a small smile.
I nod casually, but in reality I want to jump off this seat and hug him. I want to laugh and cry and scream. He’s found them—my past! A part of me, what’s missing hopefully an answer.
“Then what was the bad news?” I ask cautiously. I notice my hands starting to shake and Blue takes one and squeezes it.
“You know, you think me and you are a lot alike but we’re not.”
I look at him bewildered.
“I wouldn’t want to know who my parents are.” His tone is more serious than I’ve ever heard him. “My dad, at least.”
“Well our circumstances are a little different,” I say.
He nods.
“For me it’s not so much who they are but where I came from. If I knew something about them, I’m hoping it’ll reveal more about me,” I try to explain.
“I respect that,” he says, letting go of my hand and clicking on an icon labeled T-3 on the screen.
“This is your birth certificate,” he tells me as the page fills the screen. I let out a small breath as my eyes scan it. I cover my mouth, feeling a combination of happiness and despair.
“Isabella Rice,” I mutter my mother’s name. I feel a weak smile spread across my face.
“Clayton Rice,” I say, realizing that they were married. My parents were together. She didn’t just have a baby by some guy she didn’t know. They weren’t desperate teen parents. My eyes move to their ages; my mom was twenty-nine and my dad was thirty-two.
“I wasn’t born in Indiana?” I hear myself say to no one in particular, seeing that I was born in some town called Venitan in Michigan. I sit for a moment collecting my thoughts and thinking of the irony of us being in Michigan right now. In less than one minute I’ve found out more about myself than I’ve ever known in my entire lifetime. Then the euphoria is gone and the realization crashes down on me like a truckload of bricks. If my parents were married, why would they give me up? How did I end up alone in the system?
“A-are they alive?” I ask, almost afraid to look at Blue. I’m not sure which of his answers would be worse. When his eyes cast downwards I already know the answer.
“I couldn’t find anything on your father but your mother passed away a few months before you were put in the system,” he says softly. I shed a tear for the mom I never knew. I’ve cried a million times for her when I was younger but these tears are different, they’re more sincere because now I know that she died and didn’t abandon me. I wish Blue was able to find out more information about my father.
“Do you know how it happened?” I ask. He nods but it’s slow, almost an eternity. And for a minute the thought crosses my mind that I don’t want to know what happened, maybe it’d be too much. What if something terrible happened to her, something that would haunt my thoughts every time I think of her? Or what if it’s nothing? Well, dying isn’t nothing but was it something unexpected like a car crash? Or had she died after battling some tragic illness? I finally tell myself to stop being a wuss.
“It was a gunshot wound,” he says. I let out a deep breath.
“The weird thing is, it took some digging to find out how she died. It wasn’t in the newspapers, I couldn’t find an obituary…it was almost as if someone didn’t want it publicly known that’s how it happened,” he explains, bewildered.
“How did you find out?” I ask and he gives me a look that says Hello, it’s me!
“Oh I forgot you’re the god of hackers or something, right?” I ask with a smirk and he gives me two thumbs up. I’m thankful for the small moment to ease the tension.
“What about my father?”
“Well, he’s not dead, but he might as well be. I couldn’t find any records on him past that year either. No utility bills, no bank accounts, not even a renewed driver’s license. It’s like he vanished into thin air,” he explains.
“So my mother’s dead and my father pretty much doesn’t exist. You said there was good news?” I add the last part with a dry chuckle.
“Yeah, sort of,” he says hesitantly, pulling up another file on his computer.
“You have three siblings. Two sisters and a brother,” he says and I’m shocked as he pulls up a driver’s license, and my heart begins to pound against my chest. That stuns me.
“Wow.”
For some reason I never really imagined myself having sisters, or a brother for that matter. In my own made-up backstory I was an only child who lost my parents tragically.
“This is Olivia, your youngest sister.” He zooms in on the picture and my eyes widen. She has red hair past her shoulder but her roots and eyebrows are dark like mine, dark colored eyes, I can’t make out. They’re tired, she’s smiling in her mugs hot but sadness reeks off of her.