Selkie

Prologue

Prologue

I was twenty years old when I learned that I was adopted. My father - the man I had grown up thinking of as my father - had just died. Cancer. 

You know it's bad. You know the statistics favour the disease, but it's still a shock when it's your Dad. I'd moved home from school to help Mom handle his at-home care. It nearly killed me when he didn't make it to the end of the semester I'd dropped out of.

When Mom called us all together a few days after his death, I felt hollow, scooped out and scraped raw from the inside out. We sat in the living room I'd grown up in like some dour Christmas card. My brothers wore suits for some reason and stood behind us like a rearguard. Mom and I sat on the loveseat, and I swear one of my brothers had his hand on the back of the loveseat for dramatic effect. Or maybe he was looking for comfort. The lawyers sat on the couch across from us with their backs to the window - silhouetted.

The tall one handed me a sealed letter  while the short one read us my 'father's' will. I remember how the shorter one did all the talking, the condolences, the assurances. The tall one barely said a word. But he was the one who motioned for me to wait when I went to open the letter.

It isn't like the movies. It wasn't even like my books. Mom - or whoever she is to me - wasn't in a black veil. There were no shady, mustachioed characters in impeccable suits. No tastefully dressed servants with suspicious eyes. The reading of the will was unbearably ordinary. We sat in our regular house on our regular street in our boring suburb. Don't get me wrong, it was gut-wrenchingly sad, but it was the kind of thing you expect when you lose a loved one. The type of sad you expect.

The letter, however, was unexpected. I waited to open it until the lawyers were done and my brother's had wandered off while the lawyer went into details about the complicated bequests to Mom. 

She asked me about the letter later, but I couldn't tell her. I just didn't have it in me.

That letter changed my life. It was in a regular 8x10 manilla envelope. The letter was short, but there were two deeds in the envelope, a financial information sheet, and a safety deposit box key.

A safety deposit box key. Like some sort of action/adventure story.

I had to tell my Mom something, so later I lied to her. I said that Dad and I had had a bigger fight than we'd let on when I'd chosen to go to school out of state. I told her that the letter was a note to say he forgave me and asking for my forgiveness. It wasn't.

I told her I forgave him. I don't. Not for that fight and not for what he did.

Dear Edith,

My sweet, brilliant, capable daughter, I am sorry. I have never been completely honest with you. Your mother doesn't know, but the child she gave birth to on May 23, 1999, was stillborn. Your birth mother approached me at the hospital and asked me to care for you as my own. So I... I traded babies. When your mother woke up, I brought you home from the hospital. She doesn't know.

Your birth mother's name was Edith May Murchadha. She gave me the deeds to two properties, the information on a bank account she opened in your name, and a safety deposit box key. She asked me to keep them safe for you. I've included them in this envelope.

I need you to know that it never mattered that you weren't biologically ours. I love you. Your mother loves you so much. She has no idea about any of this. I didn't have it in me to tell her that we had lost that little baby girl. I won't ask you to forgive me. What you do with this information is up to you.

Love Always,

Your foolish old man.

Do you know the worst part? I'd asked him about my name. A million times, I had asked why my name was so weird. He had said the same thing every time: It's a family name. Some great aunt who had died long before he'd met Mom.

It was my mother's name.

I was named after my mother.

That was the moment - I knew it even then - when I realized I had a choice. I could pretend I'd never seen the letter and go on like nothing had changed or I could see where this new path would lead. 

So, I flipped a coin and made a life choice with it. Two choices, one coin, no turning back. 

It came up heads.