Somewhere Out There (36 page)

“Hey,” Natalie said as she came up behind Hailey in the entryway. “Come on in.”

“Henry and I are playing restaurant!” Hailey announced. “You can play, too, Aunt Brooke, if you want.”

“Oh,” Brooke said, unsure how to rebuff a child’s invitation.

“Brooke and Mommy need a little grown-up time,” Natalie said, saving her. “You go on and play with your brother.”

“But he burns
everything,
” Hailey said. Still, she did as her mother had asked, skipping off through the living room and turning down the hall.

Brooke followed Natalie into the kitchen, which barely resembled the crazy mess of a room that it had been the last time Brooke was there. Everything was clean, and looked to be in its proper place. A stockpot simmered on the stove, filling the air with the scent of what Brooke guessed was some kind of stew. Brooke sat on one of the barstools next to the island, and Natalie poured them each a glass of water from the Brita pitcher on the counter.

“How’d the interview go?” she asked, pushing the glass toward Brooke.

“It was great. I got the job!”

“That’s fantastic!” Natalie said with a huge smile. “Congratulations!”

“Thanks. It’s such a nice place. I think I’m going to be really happy there.”

“When do you start?”

Brooke told her about having to give notice at the bar, realizing that for the first time since their initial brunch, she didn’t have a sinking, nervous feeling in her stomach. She felt like she belonged here, in Natalie’s kitchen, sharing excitement over the things happening in each other’s lives.

“The results of the amnio came back, too. Everything’s fine.”

“Oh, good! Did you find out the sex?”

Brooke shook her head. “I didn’t want to find it out alone.” She paused. “Do you want to maybe come to my next appointment, and we can find out then?”

“Absolutely.”

“Mommy!” Hailey’s high-pitched voice, calling out from another room, cut into the moment. “I need you! Pleeease?”

Natalie smiled. “She probably wants me to pretend to be another sous chef because she already kicked Henry out of the kitchen.” She made a funny face, and Brooke laughed. “Be right back.”

Brooke waited in the kitchen for Natalie to return. She thought about the dark bar where she’d spent so many hours the past five years. It was where she’d met Ryan, where she realized she might be pregnant with his child. But now, she felt more than ready to move on to bigger and better things. Meeting her sister and landing a new job might only be the beginning of a brand-new life.

She reached for her glass, but instead of grabbing it, she accidentally knocked it over, spilling water all over the granite-topped island. “Shit,” she muttered, hopping down from the barstool and stepping over to the sink, where there was a roll of paper towels. She pulled off a handful and quickly returned to the island, mopping up the liquid. Some of it had spread to a stack of papers that sat on the corner of the island, so she reached to lift them from the counter. When she’d finished drying everything off, she set the stack of papers back down, glad that only the edges were damp, and then noticed that there was a manila folder in the middle of the stack. The tab was labeled with her name, written in blue ink.

What the hell?
She pulled out the folder, holding it in her right hand, wondering whether or not she should open it. But her curiosity immediately got the better of her, and she reasoned that since her name was on it, she had every right to see the contents.

As she scanned the documents, Brooke’s face flamed red and her stomach twisted. Natalie had run a background check on her. She’d encouraged Brooke to trust her . . . to open up . . . and the entire time she secretly thought Brooke might be a criminal.

“Brooke?” Her sister’s voice snapped Brooke out of her thoughts. “Is everything okay?” Natalie glance at Brooke’s hands, then Brooke saw her sister’s eyes go wide.

“Wait,” Natalie said. “I can explain.”

“There’s nothing to explain.” Brooke slapped the papers down onto the counter and held her arms rigid at her sides.

“Yes, there is,” Natalie said. “It wasn’t me. Kyle was just being overprotective.”

“Which explains how he treated me,” Brooke said. She had thought it was a good thing that Kyle was protective, but it didn’t occur to her that he would have taken it this far. That while he and Natalie smiled at her and made polite conversation, they were digging around in her past. Brooke felt dirty and ashamed, even though she had done nothing to deserve it. She couldn’t believe this was happening. Her chest ached as though her ribs had been kicked. “So much for me being family.” Her voice was splintered by tears.

“Brooke, please,” Natalie said, with a touch of desperation. Her chin trembled. “I’m so sorry. It was a mistake. It never should have happened. He didn’t tell me he was doing it. I didn’t know, or I would have stopped him. He’s sorry, too.”

Brooke shot her younger sister an icy glare. “I don’t believe you.”

Natalie didn’t move. She simply stared at Brooke, helplessly, with tears running down her cheeks. Brooke stared back at her. She should have known better than to let Natalie in so quickly. Brooke couldn’t believe she’d been foolish enough to make this mistake.

Without thinking, she spun around and strode through the living room and out the front door to her car. Ink-black clouds had moved in from over the gray waters of Puget Sound. Fat droplets of rain fell from the sky, splattering on the pavement, turning it dark, too.
Fuck her,
Brooke thought.
Fuck her and her so-called good intentions.

“Brooke, wait!” Natalie said, following her outside.

Ignoring her, Brooke yanked open the trunk of her car. She lifted the brown box out of the spot where she’d placed it the morning she met Natalie for brunch. She’d kept it there ever since, unsure if she was ready to share it with her sister. She’d felt possessive, a little greedy, wanting to keep Natalie all to herself. But now that Natalie was showing her true colors, it was time for Brooke to show hers, too. She shut the trunk and jogged back to the front porch, holding out the box to her sister. Thunder clapped in the sky, and a moment later, lightning flashed, raising the hairs on Brooke’s skin.

“Here,” she said. “Take it. I don’t want it anymore.” Natalie looked at the box and then back to Brooke, confused. Brooke narrowed her eyes as she spoke again. “I know where our mother is. She lives up north, in Mt. Vernon, with her husband. She’s a veterinarian. Her last name is Richmond. She’s been there for over twenty years, since she got out of the Skagit Valley Women’s correctional facility. She spent seven years in prison for child endangerment and attempted kidnapping of a child. She doesn’t have any other children. She trains service animals for people with special needs. She’s a real saint.” Brooke sneered as she spoke those last words, watching as Natalie’s mouth dropped open.

“How?” Natalie asked, nodding toward the box, which she had yet to take from Brooke’s hand.

“One of my customers was a detective.” Chuck Baker was a hard-edged older man who had been a regular at a bar where Brooke had worked ten years ago. He liked to chat about his job when she served him his nightly pint of stout, telling her stories about how he tracked down suspects using the databases that only law enforcement had access to, and after several months, Brooke worked up the courage to ask him to use his connections to find her birth mother. He liked her well enough to bend the rules, as long as Brooke promised never to use his name in connection with how she got the information.

Natalie’s chin trembled. “But . . . I don’t understand . . . why didn’t you tell me about this before? Why did you let me think you didn’t know where she was?”

“I guess I didn’t trust you yet,” Brooke said. Her voice was hard. Unyielding. “And now I know why.”

Natalie closed her eyes, briefly, as though she’d been slapped. “Brooke, please,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

“I don’t care,” Brooke said. Natalie finally took the box, looking as though she might say something else, but before she could, Brooke spun around again and descended the steps. A gust of wind threw icy pinpricks of rain against her face.

“Wait,” Natalie called out. “Did you meet her?”

“No,” Brooke said, not bothering to look back. “She’s all yours.” What Brooke didn’t say was how she’d driven to their mother’s vet clinic and parked across the street, trying to work up the courage to go inside. She didn’t say that she’d seen the house their mother lived in with her husband, Evan, and the four dogs that played in the front yard. Somehow, seeing all of this, knowing that the woman who’d abandoned them had moved on and built a life without ever trying to find the daughters she’d once had, filled Brooke with bitter, twisted grief. She never wanted to see her mother again.

They can have each other,
she thought as she climbed into her car and slammed the door. Her mother and her sister would probably get along just fine. Natalie didn’t have the memories that Brooke carried; she didn’t feel like a piece of the woman’s discarded trash. The two of them would probably have some irritating, Hallmark-moment family reunion, and Brooke would be where she always ended up. Completely on her own.

Dazed, Natalie turned around and reentered the house, gripping the box her sister had been hiding from her for weeks. Her regret that Brooke had seen the background check Kyle had run was overwhelmed by her shock that her sister had known where their birth mother was all this time and never said a word. She understood that Brooke was still in pain about their mother’s decision to give them up, but had she really not trusted Natalie to the point of keeping her whereabouts from her? Natalie had asked her, point-blank, if Brooke knew where their mother was, and her sister had said no. What else had Brooke said to her that was a lie? Were the more tender moments they’d shared simply an act on her older sister’s part? Natalie had no way to know. All she knew was that suddenly, the relationship she’d hoped to have with Brooke seemed to be over before it had truly had a chance to begin.

Back in the kitchen, Natalie made a cup of coffee and then sat down at the table with the box in front of her. She wondered if she should wait to go through its contents until later, so Kyle would be there for moral support, but decided that she’d waited long enough.

She pulled the thick stack of papers from the box, her eyes immediately landing on several pages of Child Protective Services reports, all of which detailed instances of Jennifer Walker’s errant behavior. Natalie read how her birth mother had left her two-year-old daughter, Brooke, alone in a car, then failed to show up for the parenting skills classes that were required of her. She read the description of the night their mother was arrested at a grocery store for petty theft and for child endangerment and neglect. She read through Gina Ortiz’s reports of her meetings with Jennifer, whom she characterized as an emotionally unstable young woman with no family or friend support system to help her in raising her two young girls. She discovered that her biological grandmother wanted nothing to do with Jennifer or her two girls. She saw her birth mother’s shaky, black signature on the papers that signed away her rights as their mother. She pored over the accounts of her birth mother’s first year in prison, written by someone named Myer; she began to cry when, to her horror, she found the police reports describing how, only a week after she’d been released from her initial sentence, her birth mother had snatched a little girl from a playground and run away with her into the woods. She read the judge’s decision to send Jennifer Walker back to prison, this time for a decade, and how, when she was there, she began an antirecidivism work-release program that allowed her to train service dogs and eventually earn her GED and a degree as a veterinary technician. There was a prison medical form, detailing how her birth mother had suffered through a severe beating by another inmate, as well as the parole board hearing notes that had allowed her to be released three years early, after the glowing testimony of her employer, Randy Stewart, and several other employees with whom she worked.

After going through all of the official paperwork, Natalie found a page of handwritten notes made on yellow legal paper—jotted down by Brooke, Natalie assumed—listing three addresses in Mt. Vernon, one that appeared to be the clinic where her birth mother worked. The notes also included the name of a college from which Jennifer Richmond had earned her doctorate in veterinary medicine, as well as the location of her husband Evan’s automotive repair business.

The last scrap in the file was a newspaper article dated almost twelve years ago that described how Dr. Richmond was responsible for enlarging the same work-release program in which she’d participated, bringing on three other veterinarian clinics so that several female inmates could participate at a time. “I was a broken person when I landed back in prison,” her birth mom was quoted as saying. “The opportunity I was given to get out of myself and learn how to care for something other than what I wanted was the most important gift of my life. If it’s possible for me pass that gift on to other women who are suffering the same way I did, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

Natalie finished reading the article and leaned back against her chair, closing her eyes. She wondered how Brooke could have read all of this and not wanted to talk with their mother about everything she’d been through. What Natalie saw in learning about their birth mom was a woman who’d fought her way through some extremely difficult, painful experiences and found a way to channel all of that into contributing something good to the world. She imagined it was possible that their birth mom’s guilt over giving up her daughters may have prevented her from looking for them—that she didn’t want to disrupt their lives. There was a copy of her marriage certificate in the file, but no birth certificates, so Natalie assumed that what Brooke had said was correct—Jennifer Richmond had had no other children. She had turned fifty-five years old last June.