The Woman in the Photo Read Online Free Page A

of his compositions soothed her like raindrops on a windowpane. Shelby used to call Marradi the Walmart Franz Liszt, but Lee didn’t care. His music moved her. After school, she used to sit at their clinky old Baldwin and play Marradi’s “Just for You” over and over until her fingers knew it by heart. Now she no longer had a piano or a dad or a proper living room. But her hands still knew the notes.
    Elizabeth .
    Inserting itself into the melody in her head was her birth name. As it did from time to time. She’d always known it. Her parents never hid the fact that she arrived with a label. And one with so many variants! Liz, Liza, Lizzy, Eliza, Beth, Betty.
    â€œMy child will be called Lee, ” Valerie had decreed. “A baby shouldn’t have to cart around a name larger than she is. Lee is perfect. One foot in her original name, the other in her new life.”
    That was that. Lee had always been Lee Parker, daughter of Gil and Val, sister of Scott. The most wanted baby in the world. After a few years, she rarely thought about her beginnings at all. Well, hardly ever.
    Then the letter arrived. Pushed through the mail slot in the door of the house in the Valley where she used to live. When her family was still intact and her future was unbroken. The letter sat on the floor with the water bill and bank statement and a tool catalog that her dad would tuck under his arm on the way to the bathroom. When Lee spotted the envelope, her breath caught in her windpipe. Its return address—California Department of Social Services—could only mean it had something to do with her. Why would they make contact after all these years?
    â€œNew nonidentifying information . . .” That’s what she read that day, and re read a million times for months afterward. A national database had tracked her down. Limited genetic information, she was told, was recently discovered and would be made available after her eighteenth birthday. Since hers was a closed adoption, her history had been left blank. The onlyinformation Lee and her parents were ever given was that Lee’s birth mother had drowned when Lee was a baby. Period. End of story. As if Lee’s wondering would stop there, too.
    It didn’t. Of course not. As any adoptee knew.
    Now, in one more day, her history would open up. A tiny crack. Still. It was something. A squiggle on her blank slate. Limited though it might be, knowledge was there for the taking. “If the adoptee so desires,” the letter had stated. “Some do and some do not.”
    Lee did. Of course she did.
    Birth kids never got it. That simmering. Like white noise, tiny bubbles were forever agitating her brain, fizzing about, not making too much of a fuss until one day, out of the clear blue, they enlarge and multiply and swim madly for the surface. All at once curiosity roils.
    Who am I?
    Innate belonging—the aura that genetic children feel so naturally they don’t feel it at all—had remained a fingernail sliver away. Casual comments at the dinner table: Scott, you are as impulsive as your father pinched at Lee’s chest. Not hard. No bruising. Just there.
    Am I as impulsive as my father? As sensitive as my mother? The spitting image of my aunt? Had anyone ever wondered what became of me ?
    Lee hungered to know not just about her birth mother, but about her biological mother’s mother, and her mother, too. Her entire lineage. More than one generation is lost when you lack genetic parentage. A whole ancestry disappears like hot breath on a cold window. Dad? Granddad? Great-grandfather? Had any male ever been more than sperm? Who gave Lee browneyes that were so dark they looked black? Which ancestor wired her to be restless? A worrier? Had she, oh please, inherited resilience?
    As Ventura Boulevard came into view, Lee shifted into drive and returned her piano hand to the steering wheel. “Green, green, green,” she chirped, channeling