The Broken Ones (17 page)

ADELINE

Daddy was a tall man. Mom always said that was one of the reasons that people trusted him. Men are meant to be tall. They’re meant to tower over women and command respect. That doesn’t mean women have to be weak. There are Amazons among us. There are also quietly fierce women you wouldn’t mess with. Mom could have been one of those women, if she hadn’t met my father. She grew up on scraps in a poverty-stricken family of seven kids. She was hooked on drugs until she met Daddy and he got her clean, but not before she’d been in and out of jail.

You see, Daddy loved nothing more than a wounded bird, and that’s why I know it’s all true. He would’ve loved the idea of taking in a child unloved enough to be sold by her own mother.

Since my meeting with Ralph, I’ve had the same dream over and over again. I’m little, about five years old, I’m tired and hungry and self-conscious of how bad I smell. There’s a tall man staring at me, a man with blue eyes. He’s talking to me.

“We’re going to have to get rid of that accent.”

I reply, but I can’t hear the words.

“Loud little thing. You’ve got some spunk, don’t you?”

I can’t remember if I agreed or disagreed.

I didn’t feel anything when my parents died. You see, Daddy loved wounded birds, but he liked breaking them, too. It was a cycle with him. The women in his life should be broken, then fixed, then broken again. He liked them broken more, so that they never got ahead of themselves.

And Mom never did anything to stop it. I guess she had her own problems when Daddy drank too much and beat her, but she never left him and she never stopped him. She deserved it.

I grew up all broken inside. What scares me more than anything in this world is that all the pieces that are broken up inside me will one day come to the surface and everyone will see who I really am. They screwed me up bad, which is why I figured I might as well get some money out of it all. They broke me, but I killed them.

It was a hit and run.

But I know who to pay. I know which palms to grease with the dirty money Daddy earned for me. I should have done it years ago. I should have paid for my freedom. It’s only now that I realise what he took from me. What he bought.

It’s time to find the women who broke me first. According to the envelope Ralph gave me, my real name is Sophie Howland and I was born in suburban London to Maureen and Geoff Howland. My father committed suicide four years after I was born. Maureen sold me a year after that. But it gets worse. The part that I can’t wrap my head around is that I have a twin sister named Becca Howland.

A twin.

There are no pictures. That’s what I want more than anything: to see the face of the mother who sold me to the highest bidder. The woman who didn’t care if I ended up in the sex trade, or was sold to a man who liked to break the will of little girls. She simply didn’t care.

Ralph gives me the number of a John Ashley, a private detective he trusts. If Ralph trusts him, I trust him. To a point, anyway. There isn’t a human being on this Earth that I trust with my whole heart.

I arrange it all over the phone, though I’m desperate to know what this John Ashley looks like. I prefer to be able to imagine the people I’m speaking to; otherwise the suspense becomes too much. I resolve to Google him on the internet once I’m off the phone.

It’s a fairly simple transaction. I give him the details about Maureen Howland and wire him a bunch of money. He tells me he’ll be in touch. And then I wait.

Except I don’t.

I do my own digging. I put the name Maureen Howland into Facebook and set the parameters to London. There are a few dozen profiles, but only five or six are the right age. Most have their accounts set to private, showing little more than their profile pictures. I have no way of knowing which of them could be my mother, so I decide to hate them all with the same ferocity.

Then I try Becca Howland. I scour every profile, but none of them resemble me, so I shut down the computer and pace the apartment.

There’s someone out there walking and talking and looking like me. Is she more comfortable in my skin than I am? Has she had the life I deserved? Has she been loved and cuddled and tucked in at night? Safe and warm in the true love of a mother?

I can’t stand knowing she’s out there.

*

My dreams change. I no longer dream about the first moment I met Daddy. I dream about
her
. Becca. We’re in school, at the back of the classroom. I remember the hole in my shoe that let in water, and the wonky home haircut I used to sport. Becca and I had almost identical wonky hair because our mother always used to veer to the right with her scissors. I remember that now. It’s a small piece of knowledge that I
knew
, but hadn’t accessed for years.

In my dreams, we’re at the back of the classroom and our heads are bent low so that we can whisper to each other. We’re giggling. We have an idea.

“One, two, now you,” I say.

That’s our cue. It’s our code that means we’re about to do a dare. This time, while the teacher has her back to us, we whip off our sweaters and swap them. Then we swap places. For the rest of the class, I’m Becca and she’s Sophie. I’m beaming, full of glowing confidence, because I know that Becca wants to be me. Everyone does. I make people laugh and smile. I can get people to do things for me by being cheeky.

“Come on, Shadow,” I say to Becca as we wait outside the school gates. “If we don’t hurry up, they’ll make us wait inside the school and Mum will get in trouble.”

“I don’t know if we should,” Becca replies.

I take her hand in mine and lead her away from the school.

That’s when I wake up in a puddle of my own sweat. I don’t like these dreams. I don’t like remembering that I had a relationship with my sister, one that contained a great deal of affection. I press my knuckles against my skull, wishing all the memories away. But they won’t go. They plague me.

It’s a week before John Ashley calls me. I meet with him immediately, no longer able to stand the suspense. I sit in his office on Long Island, tapping his desk with a pen, full of enough nervous energy for stadium full of virgins on prom night.

He takes an obscene amount of time to get his papers together before he begins. While he’s jerking around I study him, relieved to finally know what he looks like. He’s younger than I imagined, maybe late forties, very fuckable. Maybe if I ditch Party Guy, I’ll have a spot open for PI Guy. I like the chestnut stubble on his chin, and his big, strong hands.

“Your birth mother moved away from London shortly after your disappearance. She moved to a small village in North Yorkshire called Eddington.”

He pushes a photograph across the desk, and I finally get to see her. I snatch it greedily, hungry for knowledge.

“Can I keep this?” I ask.

“Of course.”

The photograph is grainy. There’s a chance that it’s a selfie, judging by the angle of the picture. That in itself is odd, that my birth mother is the kind of person who would take a selfie of herself, probably for social media. The resemblance hits me instantly. I’ve never noticed how much I don’t resemble my parents—until I see how much I do resemble my real mother. We have the same sharp eyes and high cheekbones. She holds herself like some old-time queen, staring down at the peasants below. If I didn’t hate her, I might like her.

“That’s from her Facebook account,” John continues.

“But I checked Facebook, and I couldn’t find her,” I say.

“It was a tricky process. She’d removed her profile from appearing on the search. After I learned that she’d moved to Eddington, I trawled through the friends lists of women her age in the area. Eventually she popped up.”

I nod. “What about Becca Howland?”

John’s eyes flash, and for the first time I realise he loves his job. “Ahh, well, that was a lot more… interesting. According to your father’s records, you are Sophie Howland, which means your sister must be Becca Howland. You’re the girl snatched from a park in 1985. But there must have been a mistake, because your birth mother registered
Becca
Howland as missing. The disappearance hit the newspapers in England. Your parents were lucky that you were never discovered. A week after you were taken, another child went missing and people lost interest.”

“But I have memories from when I was a child, and I
remember
being Sophie. I’m not Becca. Becca was my sister.”

“Becca is definitely the child who was reported missing.” He hesitates. “And later declared dead.”

“She lied.” My voice is hoarse and quiet. “She lied to the police. Why would she do that?”

John Ashley swallows before he replies. For the first time, he seems uncomfortable. He even pities me. I can see it in his eyes and in his slight, sympathetic frown. “I don’t know.”

“Do you have a picture of her?” I ask.

“Yes. I took it from the website for Eddington Primary School, where she works as a teacher. She doesn’t have any social media accounts. Oh, except for a dating profile.”

That almost makes me chuckle. The thought of my sister dating internet guys. But my desire to laugh is killed when I’m holding the photograph of her in my hand.

The punch to my stomach is so hard I can’t breathe. I remember her now. I remember the sad little expression she’d get when I tricked her into covering up for me when I was naughty. I remember that her favourite stuffed toy was a lion missing an eye and stuffing coming out of his left paw. I remember how I pulled off his head once in a rage and Mum… Maureen… had to stitch it up. I remember how my sister’s voice sounded exactly like mine, and we both had a London accent. I remember her smell and the feel of her hair.

There are sobs caught in my throat, which feels ridiculous as I stare down at this woman who seems little more than a sad version of me. Her haircut is bad, her teeth are wonky, and there are lines around her eyes that I don’t have. She’s heavier than I am. Her posture is slouched forward, making her breasts appear to be sagging.

“Would you like a tissue?” John Ashley holds out the tissue box, but I shake my head. “It’s a lot to take in, isn’t it? You have a whole other family that you never knew about.”

“A family that sold me and stole my identity.” I sniff heavily and force the tears back. “Have you got an address for them?”

ADELINE

At 20,000 feet, the bleach-blonde woman still wearing her sunglasses finally turns to me and says, “We don’t get many Americans coming to Manchester from New York. It’s usually us tourists going home.”

“I’m going home to visit family. They live in Yorkshire.”

“Oh, how funny.” When she laughs, her sunglasses bob up and down on her nose. She has a voice that grates. Almost nasal.

“They’re distant relations. I hardly know them.” I lean back into the leather seat. I thought about flying cattle class to avoid attention, but then I figured that no one would be paying much attention to me anyway. It’s not like
Maureen
and
Becca
will be watching out for me. I’ve been gone for thirty years.

“Well, that calls for a bit of a celebration, then, doesn’t it? Fancy a glass of prosecco?”

“Make it champagne and you’re on,” I reply.

“I’m Amy, by the way,” she says.

I try to get a good view of her, but with the sunglasses I can’t quite guess her age. Her hair is dyed well enough to cover any grey, and her body is petite. She’s wearing expensive, if trashy, designer clothing, favouring animal print and black.

“Sophie,” I reply. I savour the name, feeling it on my tongue and sliding over my teeth. It slips out, smooth as melted toffee. I’m still not quite ready to be
her,
but I like trying the name on for size. “Tell me, Amy, do people in North Yorkshire speak like you?”

“You mean the accent? It’s close, but not quite. You’ll see when you get there.”

“Can you teach me a few sentences to say in your accent? I’ll teach you New York.”

The stewardess brings over two champagne flutes, and Amy giggles.

“All right, then. How about, ‘Fancy a cuppa, love?’” I repeat the phrase, and she laughs. “Not bad!” I try it again, and her eyebrows rise above the rim of her enormous glasses. “Hey, you’re getting good at this.”

“I’m pretty good at picking up accents,” I reply.

“No kidding.”

*

Amy is kind enough to tell me about the “high street shops” in England and where to buy the dowdiest clothes. I tell her they’re for my aunt, but I want to try on the clothes “Sophie” wears.

I rent a car in Manchester and practice driving on the wrong side of the road along some smaller, residential streets where dirty children are kicking soccer balls around. The car is a Ford Focus, something Daddy would never rent—or drive, or ride in. It’s old compared to the cars I used to drive when I ventured out of Manhattan. It’s a dull grey, exactly what I need to blend into the scenery.

England strikes me as a pretty grey place. The sun only seems to come out in patches. Then it disappears back behind the clouds, and the sky goes back to gloom.

On the drive to Yorkshire, I listen to an audiobook set in the very same county, pausing every so often to repeat the phrases. I stop in a pub for dinner and change into my new clothes. The bra fits badly, making my breasts feel unsupported. I don’t bother to brush my hair, and I slump forward a little. I wash away the last traces of my make-up. I’m almost her.

When I order my food I try out the new accent, taking care to listen closely to the way the young waitress speaks. If she notices my phoney accent she doesn’t mention it; she doesn’t even look at me funny. She comes back promptly with my large cheeseburger and fries, which I already knew were called chips. I need to put some weight on if I’m going to be her. We’re the same, but not quite. She’s had thirty years of British food and dentistry. I’ve had thirty years of Upper East Side New York.

My stomach tingles with the thought of those two differing histories finally colliding in what can only be a monumental event. I eat my burger and repeat the address of Maureen and Sophie Howland over and over in my mind.

I decide to stay at a small bed and breakfast in the town nearest to Eddington. There are a few vacation cottages in Eddington itself, but I’d rather not draw attention to myself. Plus, there’s the added fear of being mistaken for Sophie before I’m ready.

Upstairs in my room, I stare at the picture of Sophie and walk around the room pretending I’m her. Before I drifted into apathy, I took some acting classes, and I even auditioned for a few plays. Daddy was never happy about me being an actress. He was adamant that it wasn’t the right career path. We argued about it for a while. Mom even tried to talk me out of it.

They needn’t have bothered. I was neither talented nor beautiful enough to be an actress, as pretty much every agent in New York told me.

But the joke has been on them for the last fifteen years, because I’ve discovered how to become someone else, and isn’t that the ultimate acting job?

The Yorkshire accent becomes how I think. It’s time to rid my vocabulary of the word “mom”. Maureen Howland is my
mum
. She’s fifty-five years old, and she lives in Eddington. When I was five years old, she sold me to my mother and father for an undisclosed sum of money.

No, I can’t think like that. I’m the
other
Sophie Howland, the one who has grown up in a small house in Eddington and who has never moved away from that same village. She’s stuck by her mother’s side all these years, even living in the same house, without finding a husband or having children of her own, and she works at an elementary—no, primary school, teaching children in her Marks and Spencer cardigans.

Sophie Howland has never left the country. She’s never walked around Central Park out of her mind on ecstasy at 4am or tried to chew her own cheek off on the subway.

I lie down on my lumpy bed and wonder what she’s doing right now. It’s the first time that doubt creeps in. What if all this goes wrong? What if I lose control of the situation and I’m the one who ends up hurt? But my mind keeps returning to the day that I led Becca—or
Sophie,
as she’s calling herself now—out of the school gates, and I was snatched away. I was robbed of a sister. Robbed of spending my teenage years arguing over clothes and who to take to the prom.

Do they even
have
proms in England? Who cares. I missed all that stuff. I miss it now. I miss her.

*

I programme Eddington into the GPS on my rental car and drive over to the village. The place is how I imagined all of England to be, filled with small houses and gardens, all identical and quaint. It’s immediately obvious that this place is more affluent than some of the other towns I’ve driven through to get here. A shiver of rage runs up my spine, heating my face and fingers.
I
paid for this. It was the sale of
me
that allowed Maureen to move her one remaining child here.

The first time I see the house, I almost pull over to vomit, but the urge recedes, thankfully. There’s nothing strange about the house. It’s the same as any other. There it is, the place where my sister lives as me, and my mother treats her like she would have treated me. Why did she swap our identities? I don’t believe for a moment that she mixed us up. The vague memories I have of her tell me that she never mixed us up. She always knew which of us was which. The teachers at school could never tell, but she did.

I park the car across the street and sit low in my seat, tucking my hair into a hat. It’s Saturday morning, and I don’t know their routine. I don’t know if they’ll even come out of the house, but my heart thumps at the thought of seeing one of them for the first time.

“Come on, Shadow,” I whisper.

I watch as a petite woman with cropped blonde hair, wearing a nurse’s uniform, walks down the street. She turns the corner onto Maureen and Sophie’s driveway and raps on the door. Now my heart is in my mouth. I’m about to catch a glimpse of at least one of them. I don’t even think about why a nurse would come to their house; I’m too busy concentrating on the thought of seeing them. Will it be Maureen? Or will it be Sophie?

The door opens wide, and I gasp.

It’s
her
. Sophie. The woman who looks like me. I hear her voice.

“Hi, Erin. Thanks for coming on a Saturday…”

It’s
my
voice, except it isn’t. I commit it to memory. There’s a twang of the Yorkshire accent I’ve been practising, but it isn’t quite as strong as I thought it would be. I repeat her words softly to myself.

Hi, Erin. Thanks for coming on a Saturday
.

The sight of her is another punch to the gut. All these years I’ve been grieving the loss of her, but I put it out of my mind. Mom and Dad always told me that I never had a sister, that I used to be friends with someone a long time ago and it’s that friend I remember. After a while I put it all out of my mind and started my new life without ever looking back.

Do I regret that? No. I needed to survive. I needed to move forward.

And now I need more. I need answers, and I need justice.