The Mark We Shared

I had to find out how far the story stretched. One careful question might show me where the truth ended and the lie began.

“Mom,” I said, trying to sound as if the thought had just occurred to me. “Before I came along, did you ever share a place with anybody? A roommate, maybe?”

She stopped with a container of chicken in her hand. The plastic lid hovered over the counter. I saw her shoulders stiffen beneath her scrubs.

“I had a couple of little apartments,” she said. “I mostly stayed by myself.”

“But never with a friend? Someone you thought of as a sister?”

The container struck the counter harder than it needed to. Mom faced me, and the tired softness she’d worn a moment earlier disappeared. In its place came that guarded look I remembered from our fight.

“What are you asking me, Paige?” Her voice had gone low and tight. “I told you yesterday: family is blood. It’s you and me. I never had sisters. There was no family before you. Why are you prying?”

Because you weren’t telling the truth, I thought. You said birthmarks came from biology, and now you were rewriting your past, too.

“Nothing,” I muttered, studying my fingers.

“I’ve had a long day. Let’s eat without turning this into something,” she said, then turned to set the microwave going.

Later, alone in my dark room, I opened the pictures on my phone. The screen cast a pale square of light across my face. I enlarged the image of Mom’s arm in the 2005 photograph.

The picture was grainy when I pushed in close, but the crescent stood out. It was too dark and even to be the soft, uneven brown of skin. I moved to the other photo, the one with the dark-haired woman holding a baby. Her arm carried the same mark.

I pushed up my sleeve and switched on the lamp. The crescent beside my elbow was light brown, its outline faint and blurred against my skin. Mine was an actual birthmark, made by the pigment in my body.

The answer brought a sadness that seemed to settle deep in my chest. Those women’s matching crescents weren’t birthmarks at all. They were rough little tattoos, the sort of marks teenagers might make on each other with ink and a needle.

Mom hadn’t invented a family crest because our bloodline carried some ancient symbol. She’d seen that I was born with a mark resembling the one she’d shared with the girl she left behind, and made a story to explain it. My tiny birthmark had reminded her of someone she’d tried to erase. She had dressed that coincidence up as a family legend.

I reached school early the following morning, fifteen minutes before the first bell. Near the bus lane, I waited by the chain-link fence with my hands buried in my jacket pockets. The October wind nipped at my face.

When Zoe got off her bus, hunched inside her roomy gray sweater, I headed straight over. “Come with me,” I told her, and started walking before she could answer.

I took her around the brick gym, away from the crowded entrance and the teachers’ usual paths. The air smelled of wet pavement and dead leaves.

“What’s going on?” Zoe asked. She held her books against her chest and searched my face with wary eyes.

I brought up the picture on my phone and turned the screen toward her. “I found this in a hidden compartment in a locked box in Mom’s closet.”

Zoe bent closer. Her breath caught. A quiet gasp escaped her before she could stop it.

“That’s my mom,” she whispered. Her voice broke slightly as her shaking finger hovered above the dark-haired woman. “That’s Maya.”

“You’re certain?”

“I am.” Tears shone in her eyes, though she seemed to be fighting them. “She looks so well in that picture. She’s been in and out of residential rehab for five years. Helen takes care of me because Maya can’t. But I know what my mother looks like.”

Her gaze shifted from Maya to the woman beside her. “Is that your mom?”

“Yes. Sarah.” I enlarged the pictures of their arms and passed the phone closer. “Look at the crescents. They’re tattoos, not birthmarks. They made matching ones. Mom lied to me about mine and about what it meant. I still don’t know why she needed me to believe her story.”

Zoe kept staring at the screen. It seemed as if she were trying to make the two women in the picture fit into everything she knew. “Helen was so angry yesterday,” she said softly. “When she heard your last name. Gallagher. She looked like the news had hit her.”

“Who is Helen? Is she Maya’s mother?” I asked.

Zoe slowly shook her head. “Maya was in foster care. Helen ran the group home where she grew up. When Maya couldn’t raise me, Helen adopted me legally. She’s the only mom I’ve really known.”

Something in my mind clicked into place. I pointed at the faded banner behind the women in the photograph. “St. Jude’s.” The sign read St. Jude’s Community Center—Annual Summer Picnic, 2005.

We looked again at the two young women standing shoulder to shoulder. If they had been together at St. Jude’s years before Zoe and I were born, then their connection didn’t begin with us—or with our matching crescents. Sarah and Maya had shared a past before either of us existed, and now Zoe and I were the ones left to uncover it.