“I want the truth,” the deputy says.
“I can’t tell you,” I murmur, my eyes shut tight. I can’t. I can’t.
“You can. And you will.” His words are hard, but they are spoken gently, as though to empower me to say what he wants to hear.
I open my eyes.
He is looking at me with a gentler gaze than when I first sat down with him. It’s almost as if we are no longer officer of the law and suspected accomplice. We are two people who know the world harbors cruel people who often go unpunished.
But I say nothing.
He points to the death certificate that rests between us. “Sophie Whalen was your sister, fifteen months younger than you. She died of a fever when she was three. You assumed her identity when you left Ireland. I want to know why.”
He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know. He has that thick file with all those papers and he still wants to know why I took my sister’s name. I want to press my hands to my ears to shut out his question and the roar of fear, but my arms won’t move.
What answer shall I give him? What answer can I concoct that will satisfy him and ring true? What can I say that will keep me safe and still sound believable?
What do I say?
But I can’t think. I can’t!
When I remain silent, the deputy reaches into the file and pulls out another document and pushes it toward me. I close my eyes so that I don’t have to see it. He says nothing as he waits, supposing that I will in fact look at it after all.
He is right. When I open my eyes, I see a copy of a birth certificate for Saoirse Colleen Whalen.
The girl I was.
“Where did you get these?” I whisper.
“They are public records. Anyone can access them.”
He pulls out another document. And another. And another.
A marriage certificate uniting Saoirse Whalen and Colm McGough.
A death certificate for the infant daughter of Colm and Saoirse McGough, born too soon.
Colm McGough’s death certificate, dated three months before I immigrated to America. Cause of death? Accidental drowning.
“I wrote to the authorities in County Down and inquired about the drowning death of Colm McGough in Donaghadee. I received a notice by return post that the ruling was accidental but that there was doubt among his family members that it was truly an accident. He wasn’t at sea; his boat was tied up at the pier when he fell overboard. He knew how to swim. The police had wanted to talk to his widow but she left soon after he was buried and no one has seen her since.”
I can only stare at the documents laid out in front of me. More tears slip down my cheeks.
Kat.
My little girl. I have failed her.
The deputy waits until I look up at him.
“It is just you and me in this room,” he says. “Mrs. Fielding is not here. This is your one and only chance to convince me to let you go and be done here. Tell me the truth.”
31
The few memories I have of my little sister are as delicate and thin as tissue. I was only four and a half when the sickness took Sophie from us. I remember her being a happy child, mischievous sometimes, and afraid of the dark—she would cuddle close to me in the bed we shared at night. I remember her sitting on my grandmother’s lap and my being jealous because I wanted Gram’s lap to be only mine. I remember her taking one of my shoes once and throwing it into the well just to hear it splash. I remember her golden brown curls and the yellow hair ribbons she liked to wear that at one time had been mine. I remember her lying in our bed burning with fever and how I had to sleep at Gram’s cottage while she was sick and I liked it. I remember Gram telling me between sobs that the angels had come for her and I remember the tiny coffin. I remember the sound of my mother’s wailing and my father carrying the coffin up the hill to the cemetery with other men from the village.
After Sophie’s death my parents seemed unable or unwilling to talk about her, and so her presence lifted and she became like a vapor to me, a dream. A dream of a sister whom I might have had but never did. As the years went on, my parents learned to laugh and smile again, and I know they loved again because I would hear them in their room next to mine. But there were never any more babies and I don’t think they grieved that. Losing Sophie had changed them, made them fearful of having more children who could also be taken from them.
My father brought out his word book again when I was eight or nine; I didn’t even know he had it, because he had put it away when Sophie died. But he was ready, I suppose, to continue to learn all that the world had to teach. I was the only one of the children interested in Da’s word book. My brothers weren’t curious and didn’t value schooling like my father did. None of them wanted to be learned men who taught at university or performed important work in an important office building dressed in an important-looking suit.
