Chapter 3: The Bracelet
“How?” was all I could say.
Lorraine turned the volume down. “You left your hairbrush in the bathroom,” she said. “Kayla took it to their lab. They asked her for a sample. She gave them yours.” She shrugged, like she was explaining a coupon. “Their lab swabbed nothing. Rich people trust paperwork.”
“That’s fraud.”
“That’s family.” She leaned back on the couch. “You were going to walk in there in your diner shoes and embarrass all of us. Kayla knows how to talk to people like that. Kayla deserves it. You never did.”
Gary stood up and walked out of the room without a word. I heard the back door close.
Kayla posted from the Halloways’ pool the next morning. Home at last. Fourteen thousand likes. Two days later, the Halloway Foundation announced a “welcome home trust” for Eleanor of two million dollars. Lorraine went to the Cadillac dealership on Rosedale Highway that weekend. She didn’t even hide it.
I drove to La Jolla anyway, on my one day off, in my denim shirt, with a manila envelope on the passenger seat.
The gates were twelve feet tall. A security guard with an earpiece looked at my envelope, then at my car, then at me.
“Ma’am, Mr. Halloway isn’t receiving visitors.”
“Please. Just give him this. Please.”
Then the gates opened, and Kayla came down the drive in a golf cart, wearing a white blazer and sunglasses pushed up on her platinum hair. She stopped on the other side of the bars.
“Oh, Mara.” She tilted her head. “You drove four hours? That’s sad.”
“You know what you did.”
“I know what I have.” She smiled. “Go home. Nobody’s going to believe the help.”
The guard walked me back to my car.
I didn’t cry until Bakersfield. Then I cried so hard I had to pull over on the 99.
When I got home, the house was empty. Lorraine and Gary were at Kayla’s fiancé’s parents’ for dinner. I went into their bedroom for the first time since I was a child.
I don’t know what I was looking for. Something. Anything Lorraine had kept.
Her jewelry box was on the dresser, pink leather, with a little gold key. I knew where the key was. Inside the lid, under the velvet tray, was a small envelope gone yellow with age.
Inside it lay a tiny plastic hospital bracelet. The kind they snap onto a newborn’s ankle.
The ink was faded but readable.
MERCY BAY HOSP. — BABY GIRL HALLOWAY — 06/03/99 — 7 LB 2 OZ.
My hand was shaking so badly I almost dropped it.
There was something else in the envelope: a photo, the old kind from a one-hour lab. A newborn in a pink knit cap, being held up to the camera by someone just out of frame. Its head was turned to the side. Behind its left ear, there was a tiny birthmark, shaped like a lopsided heart.
I lifted my hair. In Lorraine’s mirror, behind my left ear, was the same lopsided heart. I’d had it my whole life. Lorraine used to tell me it was a stain I could never wash off.
I called the only number I could find for the Halloway estate. A woman answered. The housekeeper.
“My name is Mara Dempsey,” I said. “I have Eleanor’s hospital bracelet. I need Mr. Halloway to see it, and I need him to see it without Kayla in the room.”
There was a long silence.
“Mrs. Halloway kept a copy of that bracelet’s number for twenty-six years,” the woman said quietly. “Read it to me.”
I read it.
“Be at the side gate at seven tomorrow morning,” she said. “Come alone.”
