“I know. But I’m telling you, except for the dress she’s wearing, this couldbe meon my first day of first grade.”
Lenore shrugged. “So maybe you’re related. That would explain why Elizabeth looks so much like you.”
“You’re not listening. Okay, wait.” I opened another browser window on the phone and pulled up my mother’s social media account. She’d only had one. Though she’d died during our escape from the menagerie, her account was still intact, and it was both a relief and a heartache to see her face smiling out at me from her profile picture.
I opened the photo album labeled Delilah’s School Pictures, all of which I’d helped her scan onto her computer years ago, when she’d worried that a house fire could steal all of her memories. When she’d first shared them online, they’d gotten a few complimentary comments and a few more “likes.” But now...
I resisted the urge to click on any of the hundreds of comments, because I knew exactly what kind of vitriol they would contain. The world blamed me for the loss of the humans who’d died in the bombing of the Spectacle.
I scrolled through the pictures and tapped on the one from first grade. I wore a blue dress, and my mother had fixed my hair in loose waves falling around my shoulders. “This is me at age six.” I turned the phone around for them to see. “Erica Essig. Me.” I scrolled back and forth between the two browser windows, so they could see both pictures back-to-back.
“Holy shit,” Lenore breathed, but Gallagher scowled at the phone, as if it were responsible for information he didn’t want to hear. “There’s no way you two could look that much alike and not at least be related.”
“I know.” I minimized the image. “Elizabeth Essig—who’s a year younger than I am—looks just like me now. And Erica Essig—her aunt-who-was-actually-a-surrogate—looked just like me as a kid. But she was taken into custody as a six-year-old, four years before I was born.”
“The three of you are obviously connected.” Lenore wadded up her empty hot dog wrapper and dropped it into the grease-stained Sonic bag. “But I’m not sure I understand exactly how.”
“I think I’m starting to. I think that, rather than two children simply being swapped one-for-one, somehow the three of us were sort of shuffled down the line, in a loop. Like when you play Dirty Santa, and everyone has to pass their present to the person on their left. Only with babies.” I traced the dots I was connecting in a circle as I explained. “The surrogate wound up with my birth mother, I wound up with Elizabeth’s birth mother and, somehow, Elizabeth wound up with Rebecca Essig. Who, I guess, would be my...biological sister?”
Lenore nodded slowly. “So the question is how did Rebecca get custody of Elizabeth?”
“I think the more pressing question is why am I one year older than Elizabeth and ten years younger than Erica, if we were all swapped at the same time?”
“You weren’t.” Gallagher’s voice echoed through the car with a note of certainty. “You were born in March of 1980, into the Essig family, and were stolen from the hospital and replaced with a surrogate almost immediately. But you weren’t actually swapped for Charity’s daughter, Elizabeth, until she was born in 1990.”
“What? How could I not have aged in ten years?”
“You were kidnapped by thefae.” Gallagher shrugged. “I don’t know what species offaetook you, but if they kept you inFaeriefor a little while—even just days, in their time—years could have passed in our world. You could have been taken from the hospital in 1980 and given to Charity Marlow a decade later yet only have aged a few days or weeks in the interim.”
My thoughts spun so fast they were hard to make sense of. But one thing was clear. “You really think I was replaced by a surrogate? That I’m one of the babies that went missing in March of 1980?”
Gallagher shrugged. “Nothing else makes sense.”
“I’m not even surethismakes sense yet.” Lenore frowned.
“It sounds crazy, but I kind of hope it’s true, because if it is...” I slurped the last of my grape soda. “Our baby could have some other relatives out there.” We could get answers to the question of what she’d be inheriting from me, even if we had to hack into medical records.
“Are we good to go?” Lenore dropped her cup into one of the cup holders in the center console.
“Yeah.” Though I might actually be leaving the land of free Wi-Fi with more questions than answers. “Oh, wait a minute. I want to screenshot a couple of these pictures while we have internet.”
I opened the browser to my mother’s photos again and took a screenshot of each of my school pictures, all the way through high school. Then, just for bittersweet nostalgia, I took screenshots of the class photos, as well.
“Okay. I’m ready. I need to find a bathroom on the way, though.”
Lenore shifted into Reverse and backed carefully out of the parking spot. “Can you wait till we get back to the cabin?”
“In a universe where there wasn’t a fetal warrior leading the charge against my bladder, that would absolutely be a possibility.”
Lenore snorted. “At least pregnancy hasn’t stolen your sense of humor. There’s a gas station on the corner.”
“She can’t go in by herself,” Gallagher insisted.
“It’s the old-fashioned kind with an exterior-entrance restroom. I’ll pump and she can go to the bathroom. And you and your menacing glare can guard the door to the restroom from the backseat.”
Gallagher grumbled something unintelligible and I hid a smile as Lenore pulled out of the Sonic parking lot, headed toward the gas station on the corner.
She selected the pump closest to the facilities—the only one within sight of them—and while I rounded the corner of the building to use a filthy, single-occupancy public restroom that might have horrified me before I’d been hosed down naked in a cage, she used the last of the funds on our reloadable Visa card to refill the tank.
