Page 31 of The Wandering Season
“So basically, you’ve been visited by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, Vrbo edition?”
Avery did her best to act nonchalant, but her grip on her glass of Chianti was rather tight. She had eaten an extra helping of the reheated pizza, so I knew she was rattled.
“Mostly just Christmas Past. Except not Christmas at all. And the ghosts are showing me their own lives, not mine.”
“Their lives are the prequel to yours, I’m fairly certain.”
Stephanie’s face was illuminated by the glow of her laptop screen. She was typing furiously and never took her eyes away from the web page she was hunting on.
“So you think these are my foremothers?”
I still hadn’t fully wrapped my head around the idea that Stephanie was buying into all this but was grateful she wasn’t overly concerned with my mental state.
“I’ve been mulling this over since this morning and I think it’s possible. I’m pretty sure all these visits are showing you the moment they decided to leave for America. It’s the pivotal decision that led to you being a possibility. If Aoife had stayed and married either Tadgh or the man her father wanted, or if Imogène had given the baby up for adoption like her parents wanted, you wouldn’t have been born. I’m guessing there is a similar story for Carlotta and Donatella too. There are a million decisions they could have made that would have resulted in a different outcome, but that decision was the biggest one.”
I squeezed Stephanie’s shoulder in wordless thanks.
“So what are you searching for exactly?”
Avery’s face had grown serious, and the slight furrow in her brow betrayed her worry.
“I’m searching in immigration archives for all the names we know from Vero’s visions, but it’s not easy because a lot of these were pre–Ellis Island, so no real paperwork was required. The best we can work with are ship manifests. From what I can tell, ship captains had to hand over passenger lists back as early as 1820. That might be enough.”
I dipped my finger in my wineglass and rubbed it along the rim of the glass, which emitted a low humming sound. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Aoife and Imogène used fake names. They wouldn’t have wanted to be detected.”
“Two steps ahead of you. Imogène DuChatel, a young widow aged twenty-two, was on board a ship in late August 1870, arriving in early September in the port of Philadelphia. She used Lucien’s surname.”
“I’d bet a nickel that Coralie sent her with a copy of Lucien’s death records and had a marriage license forged so there wouldn’t be questions about the baby’s legitimacy when he or she was born. It would make sense for Imogène to use his name. And no one probably would have had cause to doubt her, so they wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of writing to the authorities in Beynac to verify that the marriage license was genuine and waiting months for a reply.”
Coralie was a woman who’d thought of everything, and she would have done everything in her power to keep Imogène and the baby safe.
“I wouldn’t bet against you on that. And Philadelphia kept better records than most ports, so that’ll work in our favor.”
Avery shifted position. “But what are you going to do? You’ve proven that Imogène was likely a real person, but that doesn’t tie her to Veronica.”
“That’s where your list of cousins comes in. I’m going to try to trace Imogène’s ancestry down until we find someone on that list. Barring that, I’ll start tracing the cousins back up the line. If I hit a dead end, I’ll start with the Irish and Italian sides of the family.”
“How on earth did you learn how to do all this? Did you sneak off to PI school when no one was looking?”
I was impressed, not only with her research skills but with her dogged focus on the task at hand. It was rare that I got to see her in work mode, and I could easily see why she was such a hot commodity in her industry.
“PR involves more sleuthing than you think. And my grandma was into genealogy stuff too. She asked for my help using ‘that Google thing’ and I delivered.”
“Thank heavens for digital natives helping their boomer grandmas. You’re a genius, Steph.”
Avery leaned over Stephanie’s shoulder, scanning the rows of digitized script that was more than 150 years old.
“No doubt,”
she quipped.
Her hands were a blur as she typed and scrolled through the archives, occasionally pausing to scribble notes on the notepad she’d found in the kitchen of the vacation rental, and her face was as serious as I’d ever seen it.
My hands shook as Stephanie became further immersed in her search. I would have given anything for an occupation for my hands and my mind to distract me from what she might uncover. Did I even want her to find my family? Clearly, whoever my birth parents were, they had their reasons for placing me up for adoption. There was a better than zero chance that my showing up out of nowhere could damage people’s lives.
Perhaps my parents were with new partners and they hadn’t confided in them about me, and I’d cause irreparable harm to their relationships. Perhaps I had young half siblings who believed their parents were perfect and my intrusion would shatter that innocent worldview forever. On the flip side of things, with an NDA in place, I also ran the real risk of encountering legal troubles, which was decidedly not on my to-do list.
But this didn’t have to be about my living relatives. There would be something meaningful in knowing that I truly was linked to these women from my visions. If nothing else, I’d feel a little more sane knowing they had not come out of thin air. I didn’t have to know my present-day family to be able to connect with my ancestors. That could remain between us.
Avery met my eyes. “You doing okay?”
“Fine, I guess. I’m just processing it all.”
She leaned over and squeezed my hand. “You know I’ll love you forever, right? Even if your family turns out to be a pack of ax murderers.”
I squeezed her hand back. “Gee thanks. Somehow I’m not worried about that. More worried I might come from a long line of delusional women who had to tread carefully not to get burned at the stake.”
Stephanie looked up from her screen, her face illuminated with the electric glow of the archives reflecting back in the stylish black-rimmed glasses she wore for computer work. “That’s like a 100 percent certainty, Vero . . . You’re too sassy to come from a line of well-behaved women.”
I thought of Coralie, who had to tread so carefully just to be allowed to run her business in Beynac, and smiled. I didn’t mind being related to that sort of outcast at all. “Fair enough. I can live with that. Hopefully just willful women and not actually dangerous.”
“In the era these women came from? There’s no distinction between the two.”
Stephanie spoke, but her eyes were already locked back on the screen.
Avery turned solemn. “For what it’s worth, I can totally see you as a descendant of an Irish pirate queen. It suits you.”
I chuckled. “Thanks, I think.”
Stephanie glanced up. “I’m not going back that far, you guys. You can do that on your own time if you want. But it would appear that one Lauren Elizabeth Martin of White Plains, New York, who seems to be your closest cousin on the DNA results, is an indirect descendent of Imogène DuChatel of Bordeaux, France. Which means you very well could be a direct descendant—a great-to-some-degree-granddaughter.”
I exhaled. Both relieved and unsettled in myself. “You’re sure?”
Stephanie leaned back in her chair, stretching after her long stint at the laptop. “I mean, DNA tests aren’t 100 percent accurate, and records from the nineteenth century are far from infallible, but I’d say, given the circumstances, it’s more likely than not. I don’t want to give in to confirmation bias, but this all seems too much to be a coincidence.”
“Wow, I’m not quite sure what to say. Thank you for digging, Steph.”
Stephanie’s brow furrowed. “I can keep hunting for the other lines if you want. Ireland and Italy?”
“No, we’ve invested enough vacation time on this. I can look into this back at home later.”
Stephanie slowly closed the lid of her laptop. “I can help you back in Denver. I’ll have more resources and contacts there to help anyway. We’ll fill in your family tree back to the Dark Ages.”
I poured us each a glass of wine. “I don’t think that will be necessary. But your skills are both impressive and terrifying.”
Stephanie lit up in a mischievous grin. “My favorite self-descriptors. Thank you.”
“Are you going to reach out?”
Avery asked.
I shook my head. “No, I don’t think so.”
“You’re not even a bit curious?”
Stephanie asked. “I sure would be.”
“Not really. They have their lives and I have mine. Does it feel good to know there are other people out in the world who share some genes in common with me? Sure. But I don’t want to upturn anyone’s life to satisfy my own curiosity.”
Avery took a sip of her wine. “You’re far more selfless than I am. I’d be banging on doors, trying to get answers.”
I smiled at the image of Avery, so beguiling that she’d go in with guns blazing and likely end up with an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner. That just wasn’t me.
“Lucky for you, your parentage is pretty darn certain. Hospital switchings are rare nowadays. Not to mention all the photographic evidence. There’s a photo of Mom in a hospital bed holding you minutes after you were born.”
The absence of a similar photo for me had been one of my first clues about the circumstances surrounding my own birth. I’d been brave enough to ask about it once, and Dad had made a flimsy excuse about dead camera batteries or some such thing. Even then it struck me as odd, because Dad was the most overprepared person in existence and was the sort to have raided Costco for batteries to ensure he wouldn’t miss photographing the birth of his first child. Now I knew they hadn’t been allowed to, or else they’d have risked the adoption falling through and potentially devastating legal hassles. That knowledge did help quite a bit.
It was a small thing—my parents had taken thousands of pictures in my first years of life—but it always stung that there were none until they brought me home.
But I wish my father had seen that question for what it was: an invitation to tell me some portion of the truth.