The Name on the School Form

I perched on a kitchen stool and watched the orange juice in front of me. Sleep had never come. The words in my mother’s handwriting from the kindergarten form seemed stamped behind my eyes: Eleanor Vance. Aunt.

“I spoke to the school district this morning,” Mom said, keeping her back to me as she stood at the stove. She aimed for an airy tone, but it sounded practiced. “I asked them to erase the old records. If David and I can’t be reached, they’re to call paramedics, not Eleanor.”

She set eggs on the counter in front of me. My fork stayed where it was.

“And I wrote to Mr. Harrison,” she said, turning around at last. Her smile held no warmth. “I told him you’re leaving the play. Yesterday showed you’ve been pushing too hard, Grace. Your blood pressure fell for a reason. You need to take it easy.”

“I was only dehydrated,” I murmured.

David lifted his eyes from the tablet. He reached over the island and covered my hand with his. His palm was warm. “Your mother’s right, Gracie. You’ve been doing too much. After the confusion with the nurse, we want things to be straightforward. We’re trying to protect you.”

He gave me the kind smile I’d known since I was five. He had taught me to ride a bicycle, stayed beside me when a doctor sewed up my knee, and filled the space left by the father I’d been told I never knew.

“All right,” I said, lowering my gaze to breakfast. “I’ll rest.”

My answer seemed to ease the tension. Mom breathed out, barely audibly. They believed the matter was settled, that I would obey the line they had drawn without asking what lay beyond it.

I tried to chew my toast, but it was dry in my mouth. The kitchen’s quiet pressed in from every side. Sitting with them, I felt as if I were sharing a table with strangers.

At lunch, I skipped the cafeteria and went to the media center instead. I chose a computer tucked behind a tall shelf of reference books, out of sight of the librarian’s desk.

I signed in with my student account. My fingers shook a little as I placed them on the keyboard.

For thirteen years, I’d heard the same account, repeated like a sad story learned by heart: Dad had been an orphan. He and Mom had been young and in love. He’d been driving home after a late shift when rain caused a terrible pileup on Interstate 95. He died at once, before I was born. It had always been just Mom and me.

If Eleanor was my aunt, then my father must have been Thomas Vance. I entered his name alongside words about an obituary and an Interstate 95 crash.

The results had nothing to do with him. One belonged to an Ohio real estate agent; another to a Florida track coach. I narrowed the search with our state and the year before I arrived.

Still, nothing appeared.

I moved to the state highway patrol’s online records and looked through fatal, multi-car wrecks on Interstate 95 in the year before my birth. The files showed two. One was a trucking company collision in January; the other, an accident caused by a drunk driver that July.

I checked the dead men’s names against newspaper archives. None was Thomas Vance. None seemed to be a young man in his twenties.

Mom hadn’t merely invented a story. She had taken another family’s catastrophe and used it to cover whatever had happened to ours.

When school ended at three, I passed the waiting buses and kept walking. The October air was cold, so I pulled my jacket close and headed for the downtown square. Nurse Hayes had said Eleanor worked nearby, at the library.

The County Public Library stood solid and gray, with huge oak trees framing its entrance. Inside, the air carried the dusty scent of old pages, polished floors, and wet wool.

I went past the children’s area and the rows of computers, my heartbeat quickening with each step. On the second floor, I found the nonfiction shelves.

Eleanor Vance was there with a metal cart, returning biographies to their places. Her gray trench coat was open, and the silver clip still held back her auburn hair.

Without the dizziness and blur of the day before, I could see how much we resembled each other. The angle of her shoulders matched mine. So did the sharp line of her jaw.

I entered the aisle. My sneaker made a small squeal on the floor.

Eleanor turned toward the sound. A thick book slid from her hand, struck the cart with a hollow bang, then fell to the floor. She left it there. Her face went pale as she stared at me, then glanced toward the stairwell, as though she expected Sarah to come hurrying up. When she saw that I was alone, alarm overtook her.