for a glimpse of a younger mother on her wedding day, I removed the lid and peered inside, hit by a musty smell. There weren’t any shoes, but my initial disappointment gave way to an unexpected burst of excitement as I delved inside and drew out a faded Polaroid photograph. It was of Mum, cradling a newborn baby wrapped in a lacy white shawl. She looked different than in other photos I’d seen of her with me when I was a baby. She was wide-eyed, her black hair a wild mass of tangled curls around her heart-shaped face. I couldn’t make out what she was wearing. It looked like a nightdress, and she was sitting on a bed that could have been anywhere.
Why wasn’t the photo in the album with all the others? Why shove it in a shoebox? I flipped the photo over and read the words scrawled on the back in blue ink.
Colleen.
My heart gave a thud.
Colleen?
So, the baby wasn’t me.
I looked closer, but there were no discerning features, apart from a swirl of fair hair. Could it be Aunt Tess’s baby, Mum’s niece? But her name was Rosa, after their mother.
I plucked out a tiny wristband, almost identical to the one I’d kept after leaving hospital with Maisie. Only this one had Colleen Brody written on it, along with a date of birth: five years before I was born.
I felt as if someone had squeezed all the breath out of my lungs.
A vision of Mum, just before she died, swam into my head. She’d started apologising to Dad and me, her eyes cloudy from the morphine. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she kept saying, clutching at our hands, blinking too much, as if she was trying to bring us into focus. ‘I should have fought harder. I’m so sorry. Forgive me, please forgive me.’ We’d assumed she was talking about the cancer that had fatally spread.
‘Oh my God.’ Forcing myself to breathe, I dug out a square, dog-eared envelope addressed to Anna Harrison. Mum’s maiden name. The address on the front was my grandparents’ house in Hampshire, where she’d grown up.
The letter was crumpled, and soft with use, and the writing was tiny and sloping – almost impossible to decipher. The word Reagan leapt out. A man’s name. Irish? My eyes jumped to the address at the top of the page. Cork, Ireland. Underneath, were the words:
Anna, I thought you should have Celia’s new address. She doesn’t want any contact right now, but might change her mind. We did the right thing, you know. She’ll have a good home with a mother who loves her. I’ve been abroad more or less since you left and will be returning to America at the weekend. Hope all’s well and that you’re on your way to becoming a famous artist! Reagan. PS: The baby’s well.
The words slammed into me like a punch. I stood up, my thoughts simmering and darting, and finally grasped the only possible conclusion – the one I’d suspected the second I saw the picture of a mum I barely recognised, holding a baby that wasn’t me.
‘Ella, what is it?’ Greg manifested in front of me, coffee slopping out of the mug he was holding onto the cream carpet. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing,’ I managed, knowing how crazy I must look, standing there clutching a wristband and a letter in one hand, and waving a photograph with the other. ‘Oh, Greg,’ I spluttered, laughing and crying at the same time. ‘You’ll never guess what.’
His look of bemusement only made me laugh harder, even though my eyes were leaking tears. ‘What? What is it, Ella?’
‘Something wonderful,’ I burst out. ‘Greg, I have a sister.’
‘I can’t believe it.’ Greg studied the photo with a furrowed brow, turning it over and over, as if doing so would reveal answers. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’
‘Why not?’ I said, dropping back on the bed. ‘Do you remember I told you how Mum kept apologising right at the end? Well, I think this is what she was talking about.’ My cheeks were burning, as though I were running a fever. ‘I think she had a baby girl before me and gave her up for adoption.’
Greg threw me a perplexed look. ‘But why didn’t she ever say anything?’ He’d been close to my mum. They’d shared a dry sense of humour, as well as a love of art, and would sometimes meet for coffee in the city if it was one of her days at the gallery where she occasionally worked before she became too ill.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, not wanting to dwell on the ‘why’.
‘Maybe it’s a friend’s baby.’
I jabbed the letter I was holding. ‘It says in here, “we did the right thing”,’ I repeated. I’d read it out once, but unusually for Greg, he hadn’t taken it in. As a lawyer, he was used to absorbing all sorts of confidences, but perhaps this was too personal. ‘I think she had a baby with this Reagan and they gave her up for adoption.’
‘It doesn’t seem like something she would do, that’s all.’ Shaking his head, Greg looked down at the garden. ‘Do you think your dad knows?’
‘Probably not.’ I tried to imagine it. There’d always been something self-contained about Mum that suggested she might be good at keeping secrets, and Dad had a jealous streak. ‘If it happened before they met, she might not have wanted him to know.’
‘Pretty big secret to keep from your husband.’ Greg’s tone held an undercurrent that annoyed me, considering he’d once kept a secret of his own for months. ‘What if this Colleen had tried to find her?’ he continued. ‘How would your mum have explained that?’
‘Well, maybe he does know,’ I said, changing tack. ‘I’m just getting to grips with all this.’ I gave an incredulous half-laugh. ‘Perhaps they made a pact never to talk about it.’
He glanced at the photo again. ‘So, she’s your half-sister.’
‘She’s still my sister, Greg.’ I couldn’t hide the bite in my voice. ‘I want to find her.’
‘Whoa, hang on.’ He came and sat beside me, dislodging the shoebox, which slid off the bed and scattered its contents on the floor. ‘Let’s take a minute to think this through.’ He reached for my hand. ‘You’ve had a shock,’ he said with a worried smile. ‘Christ, even I can’t take it in.’
‘It’s more of a nice surprise than a shock.’ I pulled away from him, poking around my feelings. It was as if a switch had been flicked inside me, lights going on. I wanted to bounce on the bed, to run up and down, to rush off and find her immediately. ‘It’s a wonderful surprise.’
‘Aren’t you angry with your mum?’ He picked up the letter and squinted at the tiny script. ‘This writing’s awful.’
‘Maybe she didn’t want to hurt me and Dad,’ I said, chewing my thumbnail – a childhood habit I couldn’t shake. ‘Or buried the memories so deep she kind of forgot.’
‘Forgot?’ Greg pulled
