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“Of course,” she says, pushing her feet into the mattress, sitting up. She grabs a white tank top and slips it over her head, followed by a sweatshirt, and then she wriggles her pretty ass back into the leggings she had on before we got into it. “I was an adorable baby.”
“I bet you were.”
“Here, let me show you.” Brinley is all smiles as she takes the box from my hands and holds it in her lap. She flips open the top and starts rummaging around through the contents. “Look, tell me that ain’t the cutest damn baby you ever saw?”
The photograph she’s showing me is of a baby girl all dressed up in a pink knitted dress. The baby looks to be a newborn, and yeah, it is fucking cute. As far as newborn babies go. I never did understand the appeal, to be honest. Newborns are all floppy, and I don’t like the way they can’t hold their heads up by themselves. Annoying.
“Where were you born?”
“Not entirely sure. Somewhere down south, from what I’ve been told. My parents were young when they had me, still in high school. Apparently their parents disowned them when they told them my mother was pregnant with me. So, they packed up and moved away. A few years later they were both killed in a car accident, and my biological grandparents wanted nothing to do with me.”
“They sound like good people.”
“I know, right?” she says flippantly like it’s no big deal. But it’s got to hurt. “Anyway, I was placed into foster care for about six months and then I was eventually adopted, and I’ve lived in this house, in this bedroom, ever since.”
“Mia had already been adopted?”
“Yes.”
“You remember much about that time before you came to Ohio?”
“No.” She shakes her head, repositioning herself so that her legs are crossed and the box is resting in between them. “I remember having a birthday party here not long after I arrived. Mom made a big bowl of fruit punch, and there was a hickory-dickory-dock cake. There were candles on the cake but I can’t remember how many there were exactly. I’ll have to dig out the old photos.”
“What else you got in there?”
Brinley smiles, getting more comfortable as she pulls out a few more relics from her past. There’s a bracelet and some fluffy white socks. A vaccination certificate. A stuffed bear with blue eyes, and a Polaroid of a cat. There are a few other things in the box as well, but my eyes are drawn to the folded newspaper she’s just placed down on the bed beside her. It’s a bit tattered around the edges but other than that it looks in pretty good condition.
I reach across, pick it up and study the front page.
“Mia treated me like a doll when I first arrived. She’d been dying for a brother or a sister, that’s what Mom told me.”
I don’t answer her. She keeps talking anyway.
“And so this one day she put me in her doll’s stroller and pushed me all around the backyard. This would have been fine if it hadn’t started raining. But Mia didn’t like the rain, so she left me out there for almost an hour, before –”
“Brinley?”
“Uh... I’m kinda in the middle of a story here, Reed. Rude.”
I don’t flinch. I’m too focused on the newspaper in my hands, trying to piece together something that suddenly makes no sense to me. “Why do you have this newspaper?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. It’s just always been in my box.”
“Have you read it?”
“I’ve flicked through it a couple of times. I’m guessing it came from the foster family I lived with before I came to live here.”
I stare down at the newspaper, stuck on pause for the longest time. When I finally find the strength to look up again, I find Brinley staring back at me, totally confused.
“What is it? You’re scaring me. What’s wrong?”
“Have you ever stopped and really looked at this newspaper, Brinley?” I say the words in a rush. I can’t keep my thoughts in one place, they’re scattered and scrambled. “Here, take a look.”
I hand it to her and I can see her eyes scrolling over the front page, over the headlines, down the columns, and the stories.
“I don’t know what I’m looking at.”
I’m not surprised she doesn’t know what she’s looking at, because I don’t either. It makes no sense. A shudder passes throughout my entire body and my breathing changes. It’s suddenly shallow, forced.
