Page 55

Natalie

Annual reports, sadly, make for some very dull reading. Although the Wincott Foundation does a great job of making itself sound indispensable. By the third report, Natalie is well versed in their efforts to improve lives all over Maine as well as in Haiti and Africa.

Interspersed with numbers and accolades, there are lots of photographs. Sometimes the names of employees and volunteers show up in captions. Natalie reads each one diligently, because it would be fun to be a hero and spot one of the women her mom is searching for.

But Natalie really only cares about one name. Jones . She’s never seen a photo of her grandmother and she’d like to know more about her father.

Her father was born in 1982, so she started her search with the 1981 report and has moved slowly forward in time. Her mom is still out on an epic run, and her father has gone upstairs for a shower.

When he returns, he sits beside her on the sofa. “I’ve got to get to work. Cal wants me to help him inventory the bar before we play. But what are you going to do about dinner if you’re on your own?”

She looks up. He’s dressed for the gig in dark jeans and a black button-down shirt. He’s trimmed his beard carefully, and he looks like a hipster. “I dunno. I’ll eat something. Or order something. It’s not like I’ll starve.” His question triggers a traitorous thought. But where were you when I was too young to take care of myself?

“All right,” he says lightly, his gaze sliding away. Her mother had called out his part-time concern. Natalie doesn’t want to agree. But a tendril of doubt has curled itself around her consciousness. He clears his throat. “Hey, your mom was right. We should have left the bike at work.”

“Yeah, I know. But she’ll get over it.” Maybe .

He sighs. Then he taps the report on her lap. “What are you looking for?”

She tosses the shiny brochure onto the coffee table. “I got sucked into a rabbit hole trying to find Betsy Jones.”

“Ah,” he says wearily. “The elusive Betsy Jones. She wasn’t an easy person to know, even when she was alive.”

“Why?”

“She was usually depressed.” He shrugs. “But I didn’t realize that when I was a kid. And then, when I was in middle school, she started doing drugs. And in high school, it got really bad. There was a lot of crack around back then. I’d come home from school, and...” He glances at her and then shakes his head. “It wasn’t a great scene. I’m old enough now to realize how much it affected me. So many decisions I made were because of the things she did.”

“Like what?”

“For starters, I told myself I’d never do hard drugs. And that’s why I chose pot.” He lets out a sharp laugh. “We all know how that turned out.”

Natalie knows, because her mother explained it to her the other night. “But that was just unlucky.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t really see it that way.” He leans back against the couch and crosses his arms. “I grew up in chaos. Then I met your mom, and for a minute there, my life made more sense.”

Natalie holds her breath, because she knows this will be difficult to hear.

“But then I caused the same amount of chaos in your mother’s life that my family caused in mine. That’s why I stayed away, Natty. Because I knew your mom would raise you like this.” He spreads his hands wide in a gesture that manages to indicate Natalie’s whole existence. The little renovated house, with its refinished wainscoting and shiny wood floors. Books on the shelves, organic milk. Private school. “And I thought I couldn’t be what you needed.”

“Okay,” she says softly.

“The problem is that when you’re told your whole life that you’re trash, you end up believing it. I was dyslexic, but none of my teachers tried to figure out why I couldn’t read. They just told me I was stupid. I didn’t have a mom like yours to help me navigate the world. She probably grew up in chaos, too.”

“When was the last time you saw her?”

He has to think. “I guess it was December—right before I moved to Ithaca to be with your mother,” he says. “I went to say goodbye, and she asked me for money. I didn’t have any to spare, and she called me an ungrateful bastard.”

Ouch . “What about your father?” she asks. “Where was he?”

“Who knows?” he shrugs. “He paid child support for a while. Then he stopped. That’s when my mom kind of went off the deep end.”

Something tickles the back of Natalie’s brain. “What year was that, do you think?”

“Um... Mid-nineties? Somewhere in there.”

“Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth.”

He laughs suddenly. “This dinosaur has to go play some covers.” He stands up. Then he leans over and kisses the top of her head. “Lock the door behind me?”

“All right.” She rises to follow him.

“Kind of surprised your mother went out when she knows you’ll be here alone.”

Natalie shrugs. She’s kind of surprised, too. But she doesn’t want to say anything disloyal.

“I’m leaving my phone on vibrate. Call for any reason.”

“Will do.”

He slings his bass on his back and picks up his amp.

Natalie locks the door behind him and makes a bag of popcorn. She opens the next annual report. Her eyes skim the captions of the photos, on the hunt for Jones .

She finds a lot of big hair, and some really high-waisted jeans. But if Betsy Jones attended the foundation picnic in the eighties, she never posed for the group photo.

And now she’s running out of years. Natalie knows the maternity home closed for good in 1989. So she pulls the 1990 report into her lap halfheartedly. She peeks at the masthead. Marcus Wincott was still run ning the foundation. His headshot smiles confidently out from the first page, his smile smarmy.

His “Letter from the CEO” says something about new directions for the foundation. Yada yada yada.

Natalie flips the page to a photo of four young people, linking arms and smiling. They’re all unfamiliar, and mostly unremarkable, except for one detail—two of the women are wearing silver oval medallions.

Natalie stops breathing and reads the caption. It’s a reunion! The Wincott Foundation hosted a tea for grown adoptees who were born at the maternity home. Our guests enjoyed a tour of their birth place, plus cake and conversation. We hope to make it an annual event!

The names under the photo are unfamiliar; they must have been born in the sixties. But Natalie flags the page with a Post-it to show her mother. And then she flips through more of the later issues, looking for medallions of Saint Raymond.

It takes most of an hour before she spots another one, in the report from 2001. But when she does, it makes her gasp.

The caption: Shenanigans at the Wincott Foundation Family Picnic . The photo shows a few children waiting in line for a dunking booth, while one of them aims a softball in a cocked hand.

There’s a very attractive little girl in the photo, maybe nine or ten. She’s wearing what looks to be a Saint Raymond medallion around her neck. But that’s not what’s so shocking.

First there’s her face, which is unmistakably familiar to Natalie. Even as a child, she was already beautiful. And stuck to her shirt she’s wearing a paper name tag that reads, Hello my name is ... BEATRICE VESPERTINI.