Maya told me this morning that she’s thirty-seven, so Rory must be close to the same or a little younger. I count the dates in my head and run a search in the Thunder Bluff records for “Aurora born 1985.” The wheel spins and shows me a single result.
Aurora Sullivan, August 10, 1985. Mother: Betina Ann Sullivan. Father: Unknown.
Father: Unknown.
I do the math. Meadow was sixteen. The father was probably some local teen who didn’t want anything to do with it. I narrow my eyes. But why have the baby? Abortion was legal and easy. Why not just abort the baby and go on with a normal life? It’s hard to believe that the girl Meadow was didn’t have a lot of ambition back then, too.
Doesn’t add up.
I run a check of Betina Ann Sullivan’s name to see what comes up. A birth record for Betina Ann Dorset comes up, 1969, in the same town. Mother: Kimberly Dorset; Father: Billy Dorset （deceased）。 A sense of excitement rises, that intellectual curiosity that leads to all good things in research. Now we’re getting somewhere! I wonder what happened to Billy.
I find an obituary for William Adam Dorset, age twenty. His photo shows a good-looking guy in an army uniform. Died in Khe Sanh, Vietnam.
Ah, damn. Poor Meadow. Poor Kimberly.
Digging deeper, I look up marriage certificates for Kimberly Dorset, and one comes up for Kimberly marrying Gary Sullivan, 1978. Meadow was nine.
My eyes are getting dry staring at the screen so intently, and I force myself to sit up straight, stretch my arm, roll my neck around. From the corner of my eye, I see another line at the bottom of the screen, and scroll down to find an obituary.
For Kimberly Sullivan, killed in a car accident in 1984. My heart clutches. Meadow was only fifteen.
With a start, I notice the time—I need to be at work in an hour, and it’s a good walk from here. For a long moment, I can’t move, thinking that we are both orphans. Motherless daughters. It’s almost laughable how drawn I am to others like me in this way.
I look at my notes and incline my head, wondering what I’m hoping to see. How can I set myself up for the next session?
Meadow changed her name from Betina Sullivan to Meadow Truelove, an improbable name but very hippie. It fit her, as Meadow Beauvais fits her now. It’s impossible to even imagine her as Tina.
She has no contact with her family as far as I can see, but I need more information. Brainstorming in my notebook, I write down my next set of questions: Does her stepfather still live in Thunder Bluff? Did she have any siblings? What about yearbooks? There might be something there.
Reluctantly, I gather my things, mulling over the same central question that’s been nagging me from the start of this journey.
What did Tina leave behind?
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Maya
Norah helps me shower and get dressed in easy clothes—loose sweats and a T-shirt sans bra—and braids my hair efficiently to get it out of the way and keep it from tangling.
Then she’s off to work and I’m alone. I sit outside in the shade of a shaggy eucalyptus tree, watching the waves wash to shore down below. Overhead, a small bird offers a series of chirps, metallic and rhythmic. My uncast hand rests over my belly as if my palm can give me information.
Pregnant. My belly feels slightly rounded, but I’ve been attributing that to better health. Toward the end of my drinking, I rarely remembered to eat or even drink water, lost in the madness of endless bottles of sauvignon blanc. Endless. Sometimes in the morning I mixed it with grapefruit juice and ice to sip so my hands would stop shaking and I could function. For a while, usually until late afternoon or so, depending. By dinnertime, I was always too far gone to remember much of anything that happened.
Shame spreads beneath my skin like acid. How could I have allowed myself to fall so far? I’d been a hard drinker for a long time, a couple of decades, but so was everyone around me. We took pride in our ability to handle our booze, to drink everyone else under the table. I was nearly always the last one standing. It was a badge of honor. Josh bragged about it.
At what point does hard drinking turn into a problem? When does problem drinking turn into alcoholic drinking? I used to take quizzes about my drinking way back in college, when I’d wake up somewhere with no memory of how I ended up there. Sometimes, I was terrified by the bouts of memory loss, wondering what I’d done, where my friends were.
But we were studying viticulture. Our friends were chefs and bartenders and winemakers and brewers. All of us drank. A lot. We made jokes about a particular person being the memory keeper on a given night.
Even in that crowd, I was a little further in. My friends took turns watching out for my blackout markers and tried to steer me home before anything dangerous happened. Miraculously, nothing did, probably because I didn’t have a car at the time. I also had Josh, who drank at least as much as I did, but he was a big guy, tall and broad shouldered, so he could handle more. He always had my back, and wouldn’t leave me, even if we had some stupid fight.