Somewhere Between Luck and Trust

Georgia knew better than to point out that Samantha was the only one who did. Edna’s father was a mystery she never discussed. But the statement was a great lead-in to the subject she’d wanted to talk to her daughter about.

“I have something to show you. Something odd. Edna’s seen it already, but she doesn’t know how odd it really is.”

Samantha looked intrigued. Georgia reached for her purse and brought out the charm bracelet. She left the newspaper articles for later. She held out the bracelet, and Samantha took it.

“Is this yours?” Samantha examined the bracelet, charm by charm, then she looked up when Georgia didn’t answer. “I’ve never seen you wear it.”

“I found it, or rather I should say Edna did. Last week before we went out to the Goddess House. She was playing with it when I finally got back to my office. She said she’d found it on the corner of my desk.”

“Do you know how it got there?”

“I don’t. Nor this.” She took out the envelope and handed it to her daughter.

Samantha dropped the bracelet in her lap and carefully opened the envelope. She unfolded the articles and scanned the top one. Then she looked up.

“This is beyond strange.”

Georgia had been sure Samantha would see it that way, too.

“The thing is, if you look closely at the charms, you’ll see that one of them is the University of Georgia bulldog. And there are two dates before I was born. This wasn’t accidentally left by a student, as I first thought. I think it was left there for me. I think it may have belonged to my mother.”

“Whoa...” Samantha frowned. “Kind of an odd way of dropping back into your life after forty-nine years, wouldn’t you say?”

“Odd and unforgivable. All these years later to contact me with no way for me to contact her back?”

“There was nothing else with it?”

Georgia explained everything she had done so far to figure out where the bracelet had come from. “I can’t ask more questions,” she finished. “I don’t need a bunch of amateur sleuths digging into my past.”

Samantha thumbed through the other articles, then she folded them and put them back in the envelope. “Somebody went to too much trouble for this to be a prank.”

“These clippings have seen better days. They’re originals. And who would do something like this, anyway? It’s not a threat. It’s not like somebody could blackmail me with the story of my birth. It’s already out there. So, now what do I do?”

Samantha was examining each charm for a better look. “What can you do?”

“I can wait for whoever did this to reveal themselves. Maybe they’ll contact me directly, or maybe they’ll leave my mother’s diary or childhood photo albums on my desk.”

“This was strange enough, although maybe they will contact you. Maybe this was just to get you in the mood to hear the truth.”

“It’s been a week now. I think if they were going to contact me directly, they would have.”

Samantha looked up, having gone through all the charms. “So waiting’s probably not going to answer your questions.”

“I can try to find her myself.”

Samantha nodded, as if she was waiting for more.

“You know I’ve never looked. There was no reason I’d be more successful than the pros who looked at the time.”

“But now you have this. A bracelet of clues.”

“A good way to put it. Although are they good enough clues? And do I want to know?”

“I can’t answer the first question, and I don’t think you can, either, until you try to follow the trail. But can you answer the second? Because you’re the only one who has to.”

“It’s been years since I wished I knew the full story. Whoever left me in that hospital sink was probably young, probably terrified and definitely self-centered enough to worry more about what might happen to her than what would happen to me. She wasn’t checked in as a patient, so the experts guessed she came to the hospital in the final throes of labor, and from all signs, she had me in the same room where she abandoned me. I decided that’s all I ever really needed to know. But now?” She took the bracelet out of Samantha’s lap.

“Now your curiosity is piqued.”

“I look at you and at Edna, and I wish I could warn you about all the minefields in my family’s past. Wouldn’t you like to know if diabetes or breast cancer are common in the family so you can be extravigilant? Or a hundred other things? We can never know about your dad’s biological family, but maybe we could solve half the equation.”

“It would be nice, sure, but is that what’s most important? Don’t you need to put this first chapter of your life to rest? You say you have, and I think you’ve done everything you could. But now you have another chance to learn what you need to know, once and for all.”

“Then you think I should pursue this?”

“As long as you realize it might be a dead end. It’s not much to go on. But if you did discover something important, wouldn’t that be the best birthday present you could give yourself?”

Edna came to the doorway. “Your timer’s going off.”

Georgia realized she could hear beeping from the kitchen.

“Would you turn off the oven?” Samantha asked her daughter. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

Edna disappeared again.

“Thanks,” Georgia said. “I’ll give it more thought.”

“Nothing can top the bracelet as a subject, but before everything else gets away from us, have you given any more thought to teaching Cristy to read? If she’ll let you?”

Georgia was surprised her daughter had waited this long to ask, but Samantha was a patient woman. “I’m not sure she’ll be willing. She’s very closed off to the world right now.”

“That makes sense, don’t you think? The world closed her off, for a crime she says she didn’t commit.”

“Sam, don’t you think that’s what most inmates say? It’s part of a pattern. If they don’t admit to a crime, they don’t have to take responsibility.”

“I do know that, of course. But there’s more to this story than we know. She admits to one shoplifting offense as a teenager, but not to the one that landed her in Raleigh.”

“Whether she did it or she didn’t, do you have any real sense she wants her life to change?”

“Who can say but her?”

Georgia asked the question that most puzzled her. “What did you see in this girl that convinced you to help her? You told all of us the facts, but I don’t think you ever got down to the heart of it.”

Samantha laughed softly. “Nothing like a mother.”

“It might help me decide.”

Samantha hesitated, then she rested her hand on her mother’s knee. “I saw me. I looked into Cristy’s eyes and I saw a girl at the crossroads, just the way I stood at that same crossroads in my own life after I ran that car into a ditch. The feeling, the impact—they’re not something you ever forget. And I’ll tell you truthfully, I didn’t necessarily see that in the eyes of the other inmates I taught. But I sure saw it in hers.”