Read Birthright for Free Online Page B

pick out perhaps ten years before stood on doilies her grandmother had crocheted before she’d been born.
    The sofa was new. She’d had to browbeat her father into replacing the old one. The rugs had been taken up and stored for the summer, and summer sheers, dotted-swiss priscillas, replaced the winter drapes. Those housekeeping routines were something her mother had done every season, something her father continued to do simply because it was routine.
    Oh God, how she missed her mother.
    Her hands were clutched in her lap, white knuckles pressed hard against her belly as if she were protecting the child who’d once lived in her womb.
    Her face was a blank sheet, dull and colorless. It was as if she’d used up all her energy and strength to gather her family together. Now she was a sleepwalker, slipping between past and present.
    Douglas sat on the edge of a Barcalounger that was older than he was. He watched his mother out of the cornerof his eye. She was still as stone, and seemed as removed from him as the moon.
    His stomach was as tight and tangled as his mother’s fingers.
    The air smelled of the cherry tobacco from his grandfather’s after-dinner pipe. A warm scent that always lingered there. With it was the cold yellow odor of his mother’s stress.
    It had a smell, a form, an essence that was strain and fear and guilt, and slapped him back into the terrible and helpless days of his childhood when that yellow smear on the air had permeated everything.
    His grandfather gripped the remote with one hand and kept his other on Suzanne’s shoulder, as if to hold her in place.
    “I didn’t want to miss the segment,” Roger said, then cleared his throat. “Asked Doug to run home here and set the VCR as soon as Lana told me about it. Didn’t watch it yet.”
    He’d made tea. His wife had made tea, always, for sickness and upsets. The sight of the white pot with its little rosebuds comforted him, as the crocheted doilies did, and the sheer summer curtains. “Doug watched it.”
    “Yes, I watched it. It’s cued up.”
    “Well . . .”
    “Play it, Daddy.” Suzanne’s voice hitched, and beneath her father’s hand, her body came to life again, and trembled. “Play it now.”
    “Mom, you don’t want to get yourself all worked up about—”
    “Play it.” She turned her head, stared at her son with eyes that were red-rimmed and a bit wild. “Just look.”
    Roger started the tape. The hand on Suzanne’s shoulder began to knead.
    “Fast-forward through—here.” Energy whipped back, had Suzanne snatching the remote, fumbling with the buttons. She slowed the tape to regular speed when Callie’s face came on-screen. “Look at her. God. Oh my God.”
    “Sweet Jesus,” Roger murmured. Like a prayer.
    “You see it.” Suzanne dug her fingers into his leg, butdidn’t take her attention off the screen. Couldn’t. “You see it. It’s Jessica. It’s my Jessie.”
    “Mom.” Douglas’s heart ached at the way she said it. My Jessie. “She’s got the coloring, but . . .Jesus, that lawyer, Grandpa. Lana. She looks as much like Jessie might as this woman does. Mom, you can’t know.”
    “I can know,” she snapped out. “Look at her. Look!” She stabbed the remote, froze the screen as Callie smiled. “She has her father’s eyes. She has Jay’s eyes—the same color, the same shape. And my dimples. Three dimples, like me. Like Ma had. Daddy . . .”
    “There’s a strong resemblance.” Roger felt weak when he said it, husked out. “The coloring, the shape of the face. Those features.” Something was rising up in his throat that felt like equal parts panic and hope. “The last artist projection—”
    “I have it.” Suzanne leaped up, grabbed the folder she’d brought with her and took out a computer-generated image. “Jessica, at twenty-five.”
    Now Douglas rose as well. “I thought you’d stopped having those done. I thought you’d stopped.”
    “I never stopped.” Tears