On June 3, 2003, a little Maryland girl had disappeared from a campground in the Shenandoah Valley while vacationing with her family. Apparently, there’d been some controversy over the way the police had dealt with her disappearance, and that’s where Anna came in. I found her in the very last sentence.
Anna Knightly, spokesperson for the Missing Children’s Bureau, defended police handling of the case. “Issuing an Amber Alert with only a physical description of the child would have been inappropriate,” she stated.
This couldn’t be our Anna, but I checked Google for her name, anyway. The name Anna Knightly was more common that I could have guessed. Anna Knightlys were breeding dogs, blogging about counted cross-stitch and teaching school. I added the word missing to my search and up popped an article I hadn’t even known I’d been looking for. It appeared in the Washington Post on September 14, 2010—the day Noelle killed herself—and the headline read New Director Named for Missing Children’s Bureau. The article was brief and to the point.
Anna Knightly has been named director of the Missing Children’s Bureau. Ms. Knightly has worked with the bureau in various capacities since 2001, inspired by the disappearance of her own infant daughter from a North Carolina hospital. She has been committed to the cause of reuniting missing children and their parents since that time.
I sat back in my chair, an icy sweat breaking out all over my body. I didn’t really believe Noelle’s half-written letter until that moment. I couldn’t picture her stealing a pack of gum, much less an infant. I couldn’t imagine her living a life of lies. Yet here it was. Here was the proof.
Now, what was I supposed to do with it?
23
Noelle
Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina
1989
“Hey, Galloway Girls,” Sam said from the back door of the little oceanfront cottage, “here’s my contribution to dinner tonight.”
Flanked by Emerson and Tara, Noelle walked across the musty-smelling living room and peered into the bucket Sam was holding. Four sad-looking, silver-scaled fish lay one on top of the other in the bottom of the bucket.
“Wow, excellent!” Tara said.
“What are they?” Emerson asked.
“Fish.” Sam grinned proudly.
Emerson swatted his arm. “I meant what kind.”
“Who cares.” He laughed. The four of them had been at the beach for two days and his skin was already a rich caramel, his eyes the color of the sky behind his head.
Noelle could see that at least one of the fish was still alive and laboring to breathe. She shuddered and raised her eyes from the bucket to Sam’s face.
“You’re a brute, Sam,” she said.
Sam looked in the bucket himself. “I don’t think they suffered too much,” he said, but now he actually looked a little worried and that touched her. Sam was a softie.
He leaned over to peck Tara on the cheek. “I’ll clean them out here,” he said. “I just wanted to show them off first.”
The oceanfront house on Wrightsville Beach was small and funky and perfect. Tara and Sam had the largest bedroom, while Emerson had the nicest of the smaller ones. She’d suggested that she and Noelle draw straws for it, but Noelle told her to take it. She would do anything for Emerson. She said it didn’t matter which room she had and that was the truth. She was happy just to be at the beach with friends she’d come to love over the past ten months. She would never have the tight, freshman roommate bond that existed between Tara and Emerson, since she was three years older and had spent the year as their RA, but both of the younger women had become the closest friends she’d ever had. Early on, she’d worried that they’d think she was insinuating herself into their lives, but she gradually felt their genuine affection for her. They accepted her, quirks and all, the way few people had.
In some ways, though, she was even closer to Sam.
It turned out he’d been a teaching assistant in her Medicine and the Law course early in the semester and she discovered he was far more than just a pretty face. While her professor focused on how medical personnel could protect themselves from lawsuits, Sam seemed more concerned about the patients and Noelle loved that about him. He became a part of her world both in the classroom and out. They’d fallen into a pattern of meeting at the restaurant in the student union during their break after class, and she’d tell him about patients she was working with in her clinicals and he was always fascinated. Always concerned. She’d thought of lawyers as calculating hustlers who twisted the truth to suit their clients’ needs, but Sam would never be that sort of lawyer. She hoped law school wouldn’t jade him. He’d be going in the fall and she warned him at least once a week to hang on to his values the way she’d hung on to hers during nursing school.
Their conversations in the student union would occasionally stray from the professional to the personal, and she’d share with him things she usually kept to herself. Her father’s desertion. Her mother’s midwifery. She’d point out the handful of men she’d slept with, as well as the men who wanted her whom she’d turned away, disinterested.
“You like the kooks,” he said to her.
“What do you mean?”
“The guys you’ve slept with.” He nodded toward one of them who was sitting at a nearby table, hunched over a book, his waist-long braid over his shoulder. “They’re outside the norm.”
They were. So was Sam, in his own way, and if he had not already been taken she would have hoped for something more with him. She knew he was attracted to her, yet his commitment to Tara was as strong as if they’d been promised to each other at birth.
Things would be so different in the fall, and that’s what made this summer and her time with her friends so precious. In the fall, Sam would be in law school at Wake Forest and she’d be heading to midwifery school in Greenville. While she was excited about getting closer to her goal, she felt a profound sadness at the thought of being apart from Emerson, Tara and Sam.
Especially, of course, Emerson.
Although her mother knew she’d befriended Emerson, she thought Noelle had made a sort of peace with the whole situation and could leave it alone. She would leave it alone, yes. She had no desire to hurt anyone. But peace? Peace was impossible.
All during the year, she’d hoped that Emerson’s parents might visit her from California and Noelle would finally get to meet her birth mother. That never happened. Once, Emerson’s grandparents visited unexpectedly from Jacksonville, but Noelle arrived back in the dorm mere minutes after they’d left. Ironically, she’d felt relieved. She was afraid that a surprise meeting with her grandparents might have caused her to blurt out something she’d later regret. She wanted to meet them, but she needed to be prepared.
The fourth night in the cottage at Wrightsville Beach, Noelle woke up with a start. She lay quietly in the darkness trying to figure out what had jolted her awake. Voices? The phone? Everything was so still.
Suddenly, though, her bedroom door flew open.
“Noelle, wake up!” Sam moved toward her bed. He shook her shoulder, and she sat up, brushing her hair back from her face with her hands.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“Emerson’s mother’s dead!” he said. “She—”
“What?”
“Her father just called. They were riding bikes and she was hit by a car. Emerson is—”
“Oh, no.” She swung her legs over the side of her bed and pulled on her shorts, her hands shaking. This couldn’t be happening. “Where’s Emerson?”
“She ran out to the beach.” Sam headed for the living room. “She’s hysterical. Tara’s gone after her and I’m on my way out there.”
“I’m right behind you,” she said.
They ran through the living room and onto the porch.
Sam pushed open the screen door and Noelle followed him out to the beach. She couldn’t absorb this. Her mother dead? No, no, no.
The air was like tar, thick and black, and the sea was s
o calm that they could hear Emerson before they saw her. The keening tore at Noelle’s heart. They found her sitting in a crumpled heap in the sand, Tara cradling her in her arms like a child.
“I can’t believe it!” Emerson wailed. “I can’t believe it!”
Noelle and Sam dropped to the sand next to them, wrapping their arms around both Emerson and Tara. Sam and Tara murmured words of comfort, but Noelle had no voice. It was caught fast in her throat and she was glad of the darkness so she could shed her own tears for the mother she would never have the chance to know.
None of them slept that night. There were a dozen more phone calls, arrangements being made, flights being booked. Tara decided she would fly to California with Emerson. Noelle somehow missed the information about Emerson’s grandparents picking them up for the drive to the airport, so she was the one who opened the cottage door and came face-to-face with a man whose vivid blue eyes were very much like her own. She knew instantly who he was and she stood frozen in the living room, her hand locked on the doorknob.
“I’m Emerson’s grandpa,” he said. “Are they ready?” He had starbursts of laugh lines at the corners of each eye as though he laughed often and hard. He wasn’t laughing now, though.
Noelle’s mouth was dry as sand. She knew she should say something—I’m sorry for your loss—but the words wouldn’t form. “I’ll get her,” she finally managed to say. She turned around and saw Sam walking toward the door. “Tell Emerson her grandfather’s here,” she said, heading for the bath room. “I don’t feel well.”
She’d wanted to hug Emerson and Tara goodbye. Instead, she stayed in the small bathroom, sitting fully dressed on the toilet, waiting for them to leave. She heard muffled voices through the door. Voices belonging to her sister. Her grand father. She sat there alone as the sound of slamming car doors sifted through the screen of the bathroom window.
Still, she didn’t budge from the bathroom. She stayed there so long that Sam finally knocked on the door. “Noelle? You okay?” he asked.
She splashed water on her face and walked out of the room into the hallway. “I’m all right.” She didn’t look at him. She wasn’t sure what was written in her face, but she didn’t want him to read it.
“Tara and Emerson wanted to say goodbye.”
“I just…I was nauseous for a minute.”
Sam looked at his watch. “I can’t believe it’s only two,” he said. “It feels like days since that call came this morning.”
“I know.” She felt him staring at her. “I’m going to read in my room for a while,” she said.
“Sure you’re okay?” he asked.
“Are any of us okay right now?”
He shook his head. “I guess not,” he said, but he was looking at her with a mixture of worry and curiosity, and she had to turn away.
She wanted to call her mother to tell her what had happened and yet she wasn’t ready. She would cry too hard and her mother would worry about her, but Noelle knew she would not be able to sympathize. Not the way she needed her to. Her mother already had such mixed feelings about Noelle’s secret closeness to her biological family.
She picked up the phone a few times and started to dial the number at Miss Wilson’s, but each time she put the receiver down again. Finally, she walked out to the beach where Sam was sitting in a beach chair, an open book resting on his bare thighs. She knelt in the sand next to his chair as if she were about to pray. She wrapped her hands around his arm, warm beneath her palms.
“Can I talk to you?” she asked.
He set down his book, and although she couldn’t see his eyes behind his sunglasses she saw the concern in his face. “Of course you can talk to me,” he said.
She reached forward to lift his sunglasses to his forehead. “I can’t see your eyes,” she said. “I need to see them.”
He squinted, studying her for a moment. “Are you all right?”
She shook her head.
“Let’s go inside.” He handed her his book, then stood and folded his chair. He carried the chair in one hand and put his other arm around her shoulders as they walked back to the cottage.
Noelle’s throat felt tight and achy. Could she do this? Could she tell someone? Would she be able to get the words out? Should she?
Sam motioned to the rockers on the screened porch and they sat down. “Talk to me,” he said.
She opened her mouth, but her throat locked tight around her voice and she lowered her face to her hands. Sam pulled his rocker right in front of hers and she felt his hands on either side of her head, his lips against her temple. It was exactly what she needed. The comfort of a friend. The comfort of a friend she knew loved her.
She lifted her head, wiping her tears with her fingers, and Sam sat back in his rocker, unsmiling. He rested his fingertips on her bare knee as he waited for her to get her emotions under control.
“What I say now…” She shook her head. Tried again. “If I tell you something, Sam, can you promise me you’ll never tell anyone? Not even Tara. Not ever.”
He hesitated, a line of worry between his eyebrows. “Yes,” he said. “I promise.”
Noelle licked her lips. “Emerson is my half sister,” she said.
The line in his forehead deepened. “She’s…” He cocked his head to the side as though he must have misunderstood her. “What are you talking about?”
“Her mother was my mother.”
“But I’ve met your mother,” he said.
“You’ve met my adoptive mother.”
Her meaning was slowly sinking in. He rocked back in his chair. “Holy shit,” he said.
“No one knows,” she said. “Only my adoptive mother and me. And now you.”
She explained everything. The file she’d found. How she’d felt when she saw Emerson’s name on the list of students at Galloway. How her mother made her swear she would never tell any of this to a soul.
“Was it legal?” Sam asked. “Your adoption?”
“Yes, although there might have been some…I think my parents got some preferential treatment because my mother was involved in my birth. I don’t know. At this point, it really doesn’t matter.”
“So you… Shit.” His eyes widened. “You lost your biological mother this morning and you can’t tell anyone.”
She felt her lower lip tremble. “Except you.”
“Your father,” he asked. “Do you know who…?”
She looked down at her knees where his tan fingers still rested against her fair skin and shook her head. “Some boy she met at a party,” she said. “I don’t even have a name for him.” She pounded her own knee with her fist. “That was my grandfather at the door earlier!” she said. “My grandfather. And I just stood there staring at him.”
“I’m so sorry, Noelle,” Sam said.
“I don’t exist for that family. I couldn’t say anything.”
“Maybe…” Sam looked through the screens toward the beach. “You know how sometimes women who relinquish their kids for adoption later agree to have the records unsealed if both parties want to—”
“She didn’t,” Noelle said. “I’ve checked. I’m just a giant hideous reminder of a mistake she made. That’s all right. I have a great mother, so I lucked out. But I thought I’d…” Her voice broke and she struggled to go on. “I thought I’d get to meet my birth mother someday,” she said. “I thought there was time.”
Sam stood and held out his hand. “Come here,” he said, and when she stood, he closed his arms around, holding her while she cried. There were men who would be afraid of what she’d told him, she thought. Men who’d fear that level of intimacy or who’d crumble under the weight of such a monumental secret. But Sam felt like a pillar beneath her arms. Someone she could lean on. Someone she could talk to about anything. Her biggest wishes. Her worst secrets. Someone she’d be able to talk to. Always.
They spent the next three days together in the cottage. Tara would return on the evening of the third day, though Emerson woul
d stay with her relatives in California another week. Noelle would always treasure those three days with Sam—days of a friendship that deepened by the hour. The only difficult thing was that she knew there was only one Sam and he was not hers. She’d always thought she could live without a man, easily. This man, though, she was not so sure she could live without.
By the morning of the third day, she’d found her smile again. She and Sam had cooked together, gone out to eat one night, rubbed sunscreen on each other’s backs, swam in the sea and talked and talked and talked. The words felt like an aphrodisiac to Noelle, but she fought back the desire. He was not hers. Don’t ever hurt another woman the way Doreen hurt me, her mother had told her. Never, she thought, lying in her bed at night, wishing Sam could be beside her. Never.
“I want you to know something,” he said to her the night before Tara returned. They’d built a small illegal fire on the beach and were toasting marshmallows on bamboo skewers they’d found in the cottage.
“What’s that?” Noelle nibbled the gooey white candy from the skewer.
“That I love you.” Sam had his eyes on his skewer instead of on her. “But Tara is it for me. I think you know that.” He glanced at her.
She felt dizzy from the heat of the night as well as from his admission.
“I love you, too,” she said.
He nodded. That was no surprise to him. “You understand how it is with Tara and me, don’t you? Our history. And how we’ve always just known we’d be together.”
She nodded. “I love Tara, too,” she said honestly. “If I can’t have you, I’d want her to have you.”
“The sort of life I want, I can have with her.” He seemed lost in his own thoughts. “A normal, settled-down kind of life.”