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Sage stared at the envelope from Henriksson Genetics that lay on her desk, and the envelope stared back at her. Although she’d been expecting the letter for several weeks, a current of nerves stalled her curiosity. She knew that the DNA results inside it would confirm that the people she’d called Mom and Dad weren’t her biological parents. She was paralyzed by the sudden understanding that the envelope contained much more than the unquestionable proof she’d always sought, and in that moment, she wasn’t sure she was ready to unleash the everything-else that came with it.
She had long suspected that Dennis and Maggie Holloway couldn’t really claim her as their own. It wasn’t because of poor parenting or any measure of mistreatment. On the contrary, Sage had no complaints about them. Mom and Dad were devoted, loving and nurturing, and they’d never given their only daughter any reason to rebel against them. Nevertheless, something was off about their family dynamic. She’d discovered a pestering suspicion when she was eight years old, and it had prompted the creation of a mental catalog detailing all the reasons why they couldn’t be her parents. After years of painstaking and steady observation, fifteen-year-old Sage Holloway had concluded that she couldn’t possibly be their child because she just wasn’t anything like them. She merely needed the science to verify it.
Sage inspected her reflection in the mirror above the desk in her room and arrived at the most obvious argument against the Holloways being her biological kin: she looked nothing like them. She had long, straight black hair that could never hold a curl, almond-shaped eyes on the darker side of brown, full lips and a wide, straight nose. Her skin tone was medium-olive, and she thought that she looked like someone of mixed race.
She was distracted by the eruption of an enormous new pimple in the center of her chin, and she inwardly lamented that she needed to wear makeup to conceal her problematic complexion. She realized she was slouching, for her solid, athletic frame in the mirror looked defeated. She straightened her back and wondered if she were still growing. She frowned at the possibility of being over six feet tall, for in stocking feet, she stood 5’11½”.
She returned her gaze to the envelope on her desk and, by extension, the evidence against Mom and Dad. Mom was a slight 5’5″ with sand-colored, tightly curled hair and delicate features. She was still youthful and very pretty at forty-eight with her sparkling hazel eyes and warm, bright smile. Dad was 5’8″ and slim with blue eyes, and at fifty-two, what was left of his hair had become a wave of silver with a few stubborn traces of the brown of his younger days. Dad’s face frequently bore an expression of placid curiosity, but he was capable of a soulful grin whenever he felt the occasion called for it. Both were ethnically European, active and healthy, but neither of them was overtly athletic.
Sage had never revealed to her parents that she’d felt like an outsider within her own family, but Mom and Dad intuitively pointed out their similarities whenever they noticed them. Mom often told her that she looked like Dad’s younger sister Joanie, who died when she was twenty-three, but no one could produce a picture of her after the age of ten to compare. Dad reported that she resembled Mom’s late Aunt Tessa, but again, there was no picture of her prior to age sixty-seven. The dearth of similar-looking relatives was enough to compound her suspicion, and it was more suspicious still that there wasn’t one picture of Mom pregnant with Sage. With the facts assembled before her, the evidence was in favor of adoption, and the confirmation of that evidence rested in the envelope on her desk.
Her eyes lingered on the words Henriksson Genetics, and she contemplated ripping up the envelope without examining the results inside. She loved both Mom and Dad dearly, and she worried that the results would somehow change how she felt about them.
She reviewed another set of differences in her head. Mom and Dad were supportive of Sage’s interests, but they definitely had other inclinations. Her parents were organic farmers, and when they weren’t farming and selling their fruits and vegetables at all the farmers’ markets in northern New Mexico, they engaged in creative activities. Dad’s oil and acrylic paintings were on display all over the house, and every day, the Holloways ate their food off the ceramic crockery that Mom had made and fired in the kiln in the backyard. They also loved to read books and journals about art, science and math, especially anything dealing with sculpture, ecology and economics.
Sage thought of all the wilted ceramic bowls she’d attempted and accidentally-on-purpose shattered as an act of mercy. She could hardly ever turn out anything beyond stick figures, let alone paint anything that didn’t look like the tidier corners of a pigsty. She thought of how hard she had to work to get good grades in her math classes—sophomore-year geometry being the worst of all—and even harder to keep up her B average in chemistry. But above all, the biggest difference was the most important thing in Sage’s life: soccer.
Sage was astoundingly good at soccer, and she wanted nothing more than to play professionally when she grew up. Sage had been in the Olympic Development Program since she was thirteen, and she was a starter on the ODP state, regional and national teams. Graduation was still more than two years away, and yet she’d already been approached by several college scouts.
Everything she did was for soccer. At least three times during the school week, Mom or Dad drove her an hour each way from their farm nestled outside of the suggestion of a town called Dixon in north central New Mexico down to larger towns like Santa Fe for practice and games, and every Saturday, they trekked an additional hour south to the city of Albuquerque for her ODP practices. She babysat at the local hotels and resorts after school on Fridays and all day Sundays to make money for the ODP camps and training clinics. Sage was incredibly strong and always healthy, and she never had any injuries or experienced any exhaustion on the field. She was the superstar midfielder on every team, and she didn’t disappoint if she had the ball in her possession. She was a natural when it came to playing other sports, but none of them could hold a candle to the thrill and exhilaration of soccer.
The one drawback to soccer was that she wasn’t really friends with any of her teammates, which was predictably similar to the social climate at school. She wobbled her way through most interactions with the other kids, because she rarely found much in common with them. She was aware that she wasn’t pretty or outgoing or trendy enough for most of them, and at lunch, she ate in the cafeteria with a rotation of casual acquaintances who shared her goal of getting out of New Mexico after graduation to find a place where they did fit in. The only friend she’d ever had for any length of time was her ODP teammate Kayla, and they tiptoed around a mutual distance that wasn’t simply because Kayla lived in a different town and went to a different school.
A dizzying pit had taken root in her stomach the night before, when Kayla had texted her that the letter from Henriksson Genetics had arrived at her house. Kayla had brought it to practice that afternoon, and Sage had promised to text her after she’d read the letter in private.
The impulse to destroy the letter returned. The proof inside the envelope was there to justify all those feelings that she had never belonged in her own family, and she didn’t know if she wanted to give a name to another place where she knew, beyond any doubt, that she didn’t fit in. She’d wanted to know so bad and for so long, but at that instant, she was uncertain if she wanted those feelings supported by fact.
She turned her thoughts to her fantasy of what her biological family might be like. Both of them would also have to be very tall and athletic with dark hair and eyes. She wondered if they lived in New Mexico, too, and if they did, if she had seen them before and never realized it. She thought about what they did for a living. The nicer fantasies starred both parents as Olympians who gave her up because they were too young to take care of a baby. They would hug her tightly and explain they gave her up because it was the best thing for her. They would tell her how overjoyed they were to find Maggie and Dennis, because they were the nicest people in the world, and they would introduce her to her sister and her baby brother.
The uglier fantasies were another matter. She’d had a horrible one in her mind—dead father, abusive mother—when there was a knock at her bedroom door. Sage shoved the envelope into the drawer of her desk. “Come in!”
Mom carried in a pile of laundry. “Fresh out of the dryer, waiting to be packed. Do you need a hand?” She plonked the basket down on Sage’s bed. Her forehead sank. “Are you OK? You look troubled or something.”
Sage hadn’t meant to advertise her anxiety over the letter. “No, I’m fine. I’m just—”
“Just nervous?” Mom finished the sentence for her. “It’s OK to be nervous. It’s your first trip without us.”
Sage was about to protest, but she realized that the excuse was better than anything else she could have invented on the spot. She had forgotten that it was her first ODP trip without at least one of her parents as a chaperone. The thought of exercising some independence at the regional teams’ tournament had been alluring, but she wasn’t looking forward to spending most of her free time with her teammates, even with Kayla. “Yeah. I’ll be just dandy. It’s only for a few days, right?”
Mom sighed. She seemed wary of Sage’s explanation. “I hope you get to do something you enjoy instead of pretending to like shopping and whatever rock star it is that girls your age care about these days. Anyway, you should get to bed soon. We need to leave here by three to get you to the airport on time.”
Sage winced at the itinerary. Mom meant three o’clock in the morning, dark and early, and she hadn’t packed. She rose from her desk to fetch her suitcase from her closet and dropped it next to the fresh laundry. “I’ll hit the sack in about an hour, then.”
“Are you sure you’re alright?” Mom asked.
“You keep asking me and I’m not gonna be alright, alright?” Sage playfully winked.
“I’m taking you in the morning, so I’m off to bed. Be sure to say goodbye to your dad before you turn in. Good night, sweetie.”
“‘Night, Mom.”
Mom shut the door, and Sage sat back down at her desk and retrieved the envelope from the drawer. All the pros and cons of opening it collided in her head once again. She seized upon a sudden rush of bravado, tore open the flap and fished out the letter.
Dear Ms. Sage Holloway:
Please call (213) 545-6249 between 9AM and 5PM Pacific Time Monday through Friday to discuss the results of your IdentiDNA test.
Sincerely,
Dr. Hilda Henriksson
She groaned at the utter lack of peace of mind the letter provided. She tucked it into her backpack and got on with her packing for the trip. She searched for her favorite hoodie in the pile of laundry, and upon locating it, she held up its warmth to her face. She swallowed an acidic pang of guilt for her curiosity—as well as the $200 in babysitting money that she’d spent on the DNA testing—for she was grateful for Mom, the smell of fabric softener and the prospect of a three-day weekend in Phoenix, far away from the coldest January in a decade in the Sangre de Cristo mountains.
***
At five o’clock the next frozen morning, Sage was grateful for hot coffee and donuts. Unfortunately her coffee had yielded to the cold before she could finish it, and it had become a disappointing, lukewarm sludge. She considered tossing it out.
Mom shivered. She looked tinier than usual.
“It’s OK, Mom,” Sage said. “You can take off. The other girls should be here soon enough.”
“Sweetie, there is no way I’m going leave you in the airport by yourself until a chaperone gets here.”
There was a temporary silence while Sage minded her coffee.
“Now that’s what I was talking about,” Mom remarked. “What’s gotten into you? You’ve got that look again.”
Sage’s tone darkened. “What look?”
“That look.” Mom grimaced. “The one you used to get, you know, before we got you into soccer.”
Mom, Dad and Sage had all adhered to a strict regimen of avoiding the subject whenever possible, because they’d all been more than happy to put that dismal era to rest. Sage realized why she’d had that same look on her face: she was keeping something from Mom, just like she had kept it from her back then. She made a mental note to work on masking her thoughts to spare Mom any worry in the future.
Regardless, she wasn’t sure how to respond. She didn’t want to blast her spirit and tell her that she had stolen their toothbrushes, forged their signatures and lied about her age in order to run paternity/maternity tests. On the other hand, she knew she had to ‘fess up to something. “I’m nervous, OK? There are going to be scouts from Stanford and Portland there. I just want to play my best.”
Mom wasn’t buying it. “You’re not having those hallucinations again?”
Sage couldn’t disguise her annoyance. “No, Mom, I’m—”
“You’re not hearing those voices again, are you?” Mom interrupted.
“No! Really! You know all that’s behind me,” Sage protested.
Mom still looked worried, but she had taken the bait. “Stanford, huh? Don’t get me wrong—I’d be prouder than you can imagine if my daughter went to Stanford. I thought UNC was your top choice.”
“It still is. I’m just making sure I don’t have all my eggs in one basket,” Sage replied. “You know, it’s too early for all these questions.”
“Look, if you want to have scouts competing for you—and they will, just you wait!—then I support your decision. Whatever makes you happy, sweetie.”
The guilt rebounded, but Sage chased it away with a smile to match the one Mom wore.
The entrance of three fifteen-year-old girls and their chaperone shattered the stillness of the airport. “That’s my cue!” Mom announced. “Where’s my hug?”
Sage obliged her with a genuine embrace. “I’ll text you when I land.”
“Call us anytime you want, and let us know how it goes. Love you, baby.” Mom waved to Mrs. Walsh, Kayla’s mom.
Their goodbye was briefer than intended, for Kayla shouted, “SAGE!!! Ohmigod I didn’t hear back from you last night. I was freaking out that you were freaking out all the way in deepest darkest Dixon. Are you OK?”
Sage caught Mom looking over her shoulder to gauge the response to Kayla’s outburst as she left. “I’m fine.” After Mom had disappeared down an escalator, she quietly dispelled the confusion on Kayla’s face. “It was pretty anticlimactic. I’ll show you the letter later.”
Sage and Kayla joined Mrs. Walsh and two of her ODP regional teammates in the line to check in to their flight, and Sage exchanged polite greetings with Liz Adler and Brittany Moore. Sage wasn’t all that fond of either Liz or Brittany, and she was aware that the feeling was mutual. Liz was puny with light-brown hair in a bob and small gray eyes, and she was never seen in anything other than drab workout clothes. She exerted a cutting judgment upon everything, putting on airs that she was superior to farm girls from deepestdarkestDixon. Brittany was a goth girl who was a few inches shorter than Sage and painfully thin, with curly brown hair dyed black, brown eyes and a withdrawn, bitter disposition. Sage felt that the difference between the two was that while Brittany kept her self-loathing close to the chest, Liz foisted hers upon the world. Sage felt sorry for Brittany, for the darkness inside her was palpable, but she didn’t feel the same about Liz, for Liz was easily dismissible as plain old mean and unpleasant.
Sage often wondered if Kayla was much different from her other teammates. Kayla was a medium-height platinum-blonde with pale-blue eyes. She loved to wear red, and the early hour was no exception, for she wore red knee-high boots over jeans, a bright red coat and a generous application of her favorite shade of red lipstick. From their very first ODP practice together, Kayla had been nice enough, but Sage suspected that their friendship was based on a shared loneliness rather than any true bond. Kayla usually had plenty to say about everyone else, and her perpetual commentary ensured that Sage never felt comfortable enough to confide in her any of the things that she’d heard friends normally shared with each other. There was also an edge of one-sidedness within their friendship, for Kayla had never been to Dixon to hang out, while Sage had been over to Kayla’s house many times to watch movies and complain about having nothing else to do.
Mrs. Walsh helped Sage place her bag on the scale. “I feel like you’re still growing, Sage.”
Sage peered down at Mrs. Walsh. The slim, petite blonde looked like an older version of her daughter with an obvious preference for pink over red. “Not in the last month, as far as I know.”
“Well, ladies—we’re all checked in. Shall we meet at the departures/arrivals board in front of security in fifteen minutes?” Mrs. Walsh asked.
“That’s fine with me,” Kayla replied.
“What she said,” Sage added.
Mrs. Walsh fought with the handle on her suitcase. “Is that OK with you, Brittany and Liz?”
Liz nodded and stalked off toward the bathroom.
“I’m going to get some fresh air. I hate planes,” Brittany declared.
Sage knew Brittany was covering to smoke a cigarette, but she saw no need to expose her deception. Mrs. Walsh followed in Liz’s footsteps, and Sage and Kayla headed toward the security checkpoint.
“Why didn’t you respond to any of my texts?” Kayla demanded. “The craptacular reception at your farm a few miles east of the middle of nowhere is a crying shame. You need to convince your parents to move to a real town. Ugh. Anyway, what did the letter say?”
Sage reached into her backpack and handed over the letter. “Here. You can be left in suspense for yourself.”
Kayla snatched it away. Her eyes darted over the text of the letter. “You have got to be joking. You paid two hundred bucks to have to make a phone call? The humanity.”
“Right?” Sage remarked.
“So—when are you gonna call?” Kayla asked.
“I figure I can call on Tuesday morning before we head back. Can I use your phone, you know, so my parents don’t know?”
“My mom’ll definitely wanna know why I’m calling weird numbers, too. You could try calling from a payphone at the hotel,” Kayla offered.
“That’s an idea. I wonder how much it costs. I have a bunch of change I could use.” A fresh fantasy brewed in Sage’s mind at the idea of finding out, but she couldn’t see its conclusion.
“Do you need the bathroom?” Kayla asked. “My hair looks horrible today. Like whatshername on the Region I team.”
“Nah—I’ll wait for you out here.”
Sage took a seat, pulled her phone out of her coat pocket and switched it on. She hadn’t wanted to waste the battery on the way to the airport. It buzzed with three unread texts from Kayla.
She looked up from her phone instinctively and cast her gaze over her right shoulder. Her eyes immediately met those of a man who was standing in front of a bench on the opposite side of the pathway. He was out of place, although she couldn’t identify why. He was on the younger cusp of middle age, apparently Caucasian, lean and tall—an inch or two taller than she was, she guessed—with brown curly hair that was on the verge of being messy. His features—particularly his eyes—had an intense edge about them, and they lent a severity to his gaunt, clean-shaven face. He wasn’t wearing a coat, which was odd, given the frigid temperatures both inside and out, and he wore a taupe-colored sweater and black cargo pants with boots. His head slightly tilted to his left as he returned Sage’s stare, and Sage stood to place his face. His expression was remarkable: it was a satisfied look of recognition. She took a step forward to see him better, and his eyes became clearer. They were green with a familiar, calming ring of pale-blue flame around the irises.
She broke the stare and stepped back. She felt the tingle—deep inside the ears, like an unscratchable itch—and heard the whisper. It was the old whisper, the one she hadn’t heard in years. It was often a musical chant in a language she didn’t understand. The best she could make of part of it sounded ludicrous: money fee caught on a may at owe me new.
A hollow scream of despair pooled within her, and her mind fought against its release. She sat back down on the bench, closed her eyes and reassured herself under her breath. “This isn’t real! This. Isn’t. Real. Get it together! It’s not real!”
She sank her head in her hands and repeated the advice over and over again. She was determined not to slip up again, especially not after three years of sanity.
Sage jumped as she felt a hand on her back and accidentally let out a startled gasp.
“Are you OK?” Kayla asked.
Sage blinked a few times. She glanced to where the man had been standing. He wasn’t there. “I’m fine. I dozed off for a minute, and you startled me.”
“Lucky. I want a nap. It’s too freakin’ early,” Kayla commented.
“Tell me about it.” Sage looked around surreptitiously to see if she could spot the man, but it was no use. He was gone.
Copyright © 2014 Estelle Ana Baca. All rights reserved.