A Thousand Voices Page 3

  When she was gone, I stood for a while on the screen porch, then walked out the door and crossed the yard to the old hired hand’s house out back, where Grandma Rose had lived after Kate and Ben moved into the main farmhouse. Sitting in one of the old porch rockers, I laid my head back and curled my feet into the seat with me, picturing Grandma Rose in the other chair, rocking back and forth, her gardening galoshes tapping lightly on the worn wood floor.

  Smiling, she lifted her hand and reached out, her fingers weathered from hours of working in the soil. “Be patient,” she whispered. “All the answers don’t have to come today. There’s time.”

  I thought of Jenilee’s baby, the family gathering, the circle of faces, familiar yet foreign. Where was the circle of faces that looked like mine? Did they exist somewhere, or was I the last surviving member of my family? In the mist beyond Grandma Rose’s hand, I could almost see them—ancient faces with strong cheekbones and smooth, cinnamon-colored skin. Dark eyes, and broad smiles….

  The dog barked somewhere in the yard, and I jerked awake. Barry was coming around the corner of the house, looking for me.

  “Over here,” I called, still thinking about the baby’s soft blue eyes. She had Grandma Rose’s eyes.

  We’ll never sit in Kate’s kitchen and talk about who in the family my baby looks like….

  Tears prickled in my throat, even though it made no sense. Children, if ever, were years away for me, yet somehow I felt cheated. My babies would never have Joshua’s hair or Grandma Rose’s nose or Aunt Sadie’s long, thin feet.

  Barry started up the steps and I rubbed my eyes, pushing away the sting.

  “Good nap?” Barry asked, leaning against the porch post.

  “Yeah.” Standing up, I stretched my neck, getting my head together. “So you managed to escape my dad and the tractor scrapbook?”

  “Yeah, no thanks to you,” Barry joked. “You left me stranded there.”

  “Sorry. Karen told me to do it.”

  He shrugged, amiable as usual. “It’s all right. It was pretty interesting, really. I haven’t seen your dad since I got out of Harrington. Every time I help your mom with one of her after-school camps, your dad’s out of town flying.” I nodded, and as was often the case, Barry went right on talking. “Whenever the Jumpkids see me, they ask about you, of course.”

  “I miss the kids.” One of the things I hated about being gone was not being able to help Karen run the Jumpkids after-school arts program. Half of my teenage years were spent teaching kids to sing, dance, play music, and give theater performances. Those skills came in handy in Ukraine.

  Barry jabbed me in the shoulder. “Hey, guess who else I saw the other day.” He waited until I shrugged helplessly, then answered. “Mrs. Bradford. I was downtown and I went by Harrington and popped into the counselor’s office. Mrs. Bradford asked about you, by the way. She wanted to know if you ever worked on those scholarship applications she e-mailed you.”

  “Some of them,” I admitted. “Not the ones with all the Native American stuff on them. I’m really not sure I want to get into all that. I did e-mail the Choctaw tribal…headquarters…whatever it’s called down in Oklahoma. I don’t even have a roll number—I think that’s what they call it. Anyway, it’s a big process to get one, especially since all I know about my biological father is his name. I’d probably have to go to Oklahoma to start on it, and even then it’s a long shot. You have to find records tracing your ancestry back to someone on the original tribal lists. It sounds complicated.”

  Barry looked disappointed. “Mrs. Bradford thinks your father being Choctaw would help you get into Juilliard. You ought to go for it. Why not?”

  I shrugged off the question. I couldn’t explain why not. “I’ll try to go by and see Mrs. Bradford.”

  “She’d like that. You’d better hurry, though, before she goes out on maternity leave. She’s as big as a house, but don’t tell her I said so. It’s twins, you know.”

  “She told me that in an e-mail when I asked her for the scholarship stuff. It’s great that they’re finally having a baby. I think they’ve wanted one for a long time.”

  “I think so,” Barry muttered, and our conversation fell into a rare lapse as we watched Josh and Rose’s dog, Tracker, chase a squirrel up a tree. My mind drifted to the scholarship paperwork. If I went to Oklahoma and found the Choctaw tribal offices, would there be a Thomas Clay listed on the membership rolls? Would I be able to prove he was my father? If I did, what good would that do? Before my adoption by James and Karen became final, child protective services had searched for my father and found no sign of him. They’d concluded that he was probably deceased. End of story. For years, James and Karen and I had skirted the issue of my Choctaw heritage, for fear that delving into it might cause my presumed-dead biological father, or members of his family, to resurface and lay claim to me.

  Now that I was of age, that danger was gone. What if I really did have a biological family out there somewhere? If I searched for them, what would James and Karen think? How could they possibly understand? Yet, if I didn’t, there would always be the unanswered questions, the hollow place that had ached when I gazed at Jenilee’s baby and saw the family resemblances.

  Barry was looking at me, watching the wheels turn.

  “Barry?” I said slowly.

  “Hmm?”

  “I know it’s a lot to ask, but are you up for a little road trip?” Somehow the unknown seemed easier to face with Barry along. “We could stay here tonight, and then hit the highway in the morning.”

  He drew back curiously. “Where to?”

  “Oklahoma,” I blurted, then glanced around, afraid someone might have heard, but the yard was empty. Everyone was still inside with the baby. Barry blinked, taken aback, and I added, “Will you go with me?”

  “I…I can’t.” Grimacing, he squeezed one eye shut. “Well…there’s this…girl.” His loafer scraped dully against the porch as he rolled a pebble under the sole and shoved his hands deep into his pockets like he wanted to fold himself up and disappear. “Her sorority’s having their spring cotillion, and I’ve…we’ve…well, I’ve been planning to go for a while. With her. To the dance, I mean.”

  I suddenly clued in to the fact that Barry had a life I knew nothing about. “Bear-bear, did you go and get a girlfriend while I was away?”

  Sagging, he nodded with a sigh of resignation.

  “A girlfriend girlfriend, or just a date-for-the-spring-cotillion girlfriend?”

  He winced. “The first kind.”

  “And you didn’t tell me?” I smacked him on the arm, a little harder than I meant to, actually. “Shame on you.”

  Bracing his hands on the railing, he leaned over. “I didn’t want to upset you while you were half a world away.”

  “I’m not upset. I think it’s great.” Part of me did, but another part felt surprisingly bleak. For years, Barry had been the one constant in my life. Even with thousands of miles between us, we were sidekicks. Now he was moving on. Leaving me alone. “I’m happy for you, really.”

  Drumming his fingers on the railing, he gave me a sad, wry, sideways look. “I didn’t want you to be happy for me, either.”

  My heart melted into a star-crossed pool, and I leaned out over the flower bed, shoulder-butting him. “We’ve come a lot of miles together, huh, Bear-bear?” He nodded, and emotion tightened my throat. The past was fading. Time to move on.

  “Yeah,” he said softly, and I rested my head on his shoulder. “We have.”

  We stood that way, quietly watching the late-August sunlight fade into the pale pink of evening. My mind paged through a photo album of Barry, the past, the future, a girlfriend, an engagement, a wedding, kids. He would become a band director at some high school, just like he’d always planned. Strangely, I could picture his future but not my own.

  Why was I stuck in this state of arrested development—uncertain of who to be, what to do, where to go next? Karen and James’s plan to go forward wit
h the application to Juilliard seemed to make perfect sense. Until I found out whether or not I’d been accepted, I could live at home and take classes in Kansas City, help Karen with the Jumpkids programs, and maybe see about guest performing with the symphonic. The director there had once been my mentor.

  He’d be horrified to know that I’d hardly touched a piano or a violin this past year, and I couldn’t explain why. It was as if the drive had slowly faded out of me during the year of traveling around Europe with the student exchange orchestra. By the time I went to Ukraine, I was glad to be away from the pressure, away from the noise, the constant crowds of people, the director screaming every time someone botched a note or missed an accidental. Even my fascination with the European cities, their narrow streets and ancient stone buildings, had faded by the time my year in the orchestra was over. I didn’t know if I was exhausted from the constant performing or if something had changed inside me, but for the first time in years, I didn’t feel the overwhelming desire to play my violin, or the old piano we used to teach music classes at the Internat mission in Ukraine. I didn’t go to sleep hearing music, dream about it, and wake up with yet unwritten melodies in my head.

  I still had knowledge of music, but I’d lost the feel for it. I’d read about prodigies who suddenly grew out of their talents, and now I wondered if I was one.

  Barry was talking about the trip to Oklahoma, offering to go with me next week, after the cotillion was over. “It’d be fun—a little road trip, just like the old days.”

  “It would probably be a waste of time. I should be picking out some classes at KBJC. I can still do late enrollment for the fall semester, get a few credits in.”

  Barry gave me an incredulous look. “What are you going to do at KBJC? They don’t even have a music department there.”

  “I don’t know—take some basics, I guess.”

  “You should go to Oklahoma.”

  “I’d probably be better off getting my enrollment taken care of, for now. I can go to Oklahoma some other time…maybe.”

  “You won’t.” The remark was surprisingly frank for Barry. “You’re just making excuses. I thought you’d step right off the plane talking about getting into Juilliard, making plans to put together some pieces for your application CD, and instead you’re talking about KBJC. What’s going on, Dell?”

  Sagging forward, I sighed. “I don’t know. I’m just not sure Juilliard is the right thing for me. I’m not sure”—who I’m supposed to be—“I have what it takes.”

  Barry drew back, his eyes flashing the way they always had when he felt the need to defend me, even from myself. “What are you, nuts? Dell, you’ve got more talent in your little finger than the rest of us will have in a lifetime. If anyone should be in Juilliard, it’s you, and if being Native American can help you get in, you have to go for it.” He held his hands up, ready to either plead with me or strangle me. Maybe both. “D, you’ve got talent. You’re amazing.” He paced away, thinking for a moment, then turning back to me. “We’ll go to Oklahoma next week, all right?”

  “I don’t think your girlfriend would like it much,” I pointed out. “If I were your girlfriend, I wouldn’t like it. It’s a stupid idea, anyway. If I went to Oklahoma, I wouldn’t even know where to begin. What am I going to do, show up at some tribal office and say, ‘Hi, I’m Dell Sommerfield, used to be Jordan, but my real father’s name is Clay. My CPS records say he was a member of the Choctaw Nation, so I was wondering if you have him on your list somewhere?’”

  Barry nodded. “Sure. Why not. That probably happens all the time there—people looking for their ancestors and stuff.”

  I pushed off the rail and slumped into a chair. “Except I’m not looking for my ancestors, Barry. I’m looking for my father. What if…” Possibilities swirled through my mind, unanswered questions, altered realities. In my mind, my father was someone like my mother—mixed up, messed up, too irresponsible to care for a child. “What if I find out something really bad? What if my father was…” Was a perfectly normal person, and the truth was that he didn’t know me because he didn’t want to? What if he chose to leave me behind? What if my father was the man I remembered Mama dating just before she died—the stone-faced man with the long dark hair, the one who took Mama away to an apartment in Kansas City and let her pump meth into herself until her heart stopped beating? What if my father was the one who killed my mother?

  Barry perched on the arm of the chair, taking my hand. “What if he never knew you existed?” His voice was soft, compassionate, dependably logical and practical. “Did you ever think about that? What if you have family out there you’ve never even known about? What if you could find them?”

  My throat tightened. “I don’t know if I’d want to.” For years, I’d been struggling to become Dell Sommerfield, daughter of Karen and James, great-granddaughter of Grandma Rose. Having concrete information about my real identity might change that in some way I couldn’t predict.

  “Let’s see what we find out. Then you can make decisions about how far to go with it.” Straightening my palm against his, Barry smoothed his free hand over the top of mine and let out a long breath, the kind that told me he was about to level with me. “D, I think you need to do this. These last two years, there’s been something going on with you. It’s like you’re…lost. One minute you’re a senior at Harrington, on the straight track to Juilliard, and the next thing, you’re not applying to Juilliard or anywhere else. You’re heading off to Europe for some student music exchange program no one’s ever heard of. And then next thing you’re off to Ukraine, of all places, to teach orphans in a mission school. What’s going on with you?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I just…You know, when CPS did the investigation for my adoption, I really felt like I’d made peace with the fact that they couldn’t locate my father, and I’d probably never know any more about my biological family. But then, when we started on all the scholarship applications our senior year, and Mrs. Bradford brought up the whole issue of applying as a Native American and that maybe I could find out about my father through the Choctaw Nation headquarters…I don’t know…it opened up a lot of doors I thought I’d closed. I couldn’t deal with it. The opportunity for the student music exchange program came up, so I took it. I guess I thought that eventually I’d know the right thing to do.” There. I’d said it. I’d finally told someone the truth.

  Barry didn’t answer at first. As usual, he took time to consider the implications. “Have you talked to your folks about this?”

  “I don’t want them to know.” The answer was so emphatic that Barry blinked and drew back. “They’ll think our family isn’t enough for me, that it’s not real. James and Karen have given me everything.”

  “I think they’d understand that—”

  “No, they wouldn’t.” My voice rose and carried over the yard. Giving the house a cautionary look, I paused and got myself under control. “They wouldn’t understand, Barry. They’d be hurt. I can’t even understand the way I feel. How could they possibly understand it?”

  Chewing the side of his lip, Barry finger-combed a few strands of highlighted hair away from his face. “All right then, we’ll go next Friday. I have to work Monday through Thursday, but after that I’m off for the weekend. Tell James and Karen you’re coming to visit me at MSU the end of next week, and we’ll head out on a little road trip, see what we find out.”

  I squeezed his hand, filled with affection for him. “Thanks for understanding, Bear-bear, but I think this is something I’d better do alone. Besides, I don’t want to upset your girlfriend.”

  “She’ll understand.” Clearly his feelings were hurt because I was pushing him away. “We can leave early Friday morning and get down there while it’s still business hours. If this tribal place is more like a tourist trap it might be open on Saturday, but if it’s like real offices, we’d better hit it during a weekday. I’ve got a”—he paused and glanced away, then finished—“test in my mini-meste
r class on Tuesday, so I have to be back.” I could tell he didn’t have a mini-mester test. He had plans of some other kind, probably with his girlfriend. Barry was a terrible liar.

  “Let’s just see how the week turns out,” I said, as James and Karen came across the yard to call us in for supper. “I’m kind of wiped out right now—jet lag, I guess. I might not go anywhere next weekend.”

  “Where you headed next weekend?” James asked.

  “Maybe down to visit me at Missouri State,” Barry answered before I could, which should have been a tip-off to James and Karen. Whenever we were up to something, Barry always did the talking.

  “Ah, college life,” James waxed nostalgic.

  Karen narrowed an eye at the words Missouri State. She didn’t want me thinking about any place but Juilliard. She wasn’t going to be pushy because, in her own words, she realized I was an adult now and capable of making my own decisions. But the undercurrent was there just the same. I had a sense that, after all the time and work and love they’d put into me, I wasn’t panning out the way they’d planned. By now, I should have been halfway through a BA degree, playing music, performing with the symphonic in their young artist spotlight program. Instead, I was drifting, and that concerned Karen. She knew there was something wrong and it frustrated her that she couldn’t figure it out.

  Jenilee came out the back door of the main house with the baby and waved for us to hurry up.

  I waved back, thinking again of the baby, of how holding her reminded me of my little brother, Angelo. He would be thirteen now, still a minor, still young enough that his records were sealed and no one would give me any information about him—not even his last name or his father’s name. If Granny knew either of those things, she’d never revealed them to me. That baby’s daddy don’t want no more to do with us, she said. That’s that. Now, git on outside and find somethin’ to do with yourself. Stay off them cliffs by the river. You’ll fall in and drown.

  That was that. But I never forgot the way Angelo looked, the way he smiled, the way he liked to lie on my legs in the tall grass and stare up at the sky. Just before his daddy took him away, he had started crying when I left for school. He’d toddle out the screen door, calling Dee-gee, Dee-gee! And I’d run back, scoop him up, hug him, and take him inside to Mama or Granny. When he wasn’t looking, I’d sneak out, then slide a rock in front of the screen door, so he couldn’t get out and hurt himself. I always wanted him to be all right while I was gone, and through the school day I felt like I was holding my breath until I got home and saw that he was fine. I’d had that feeling for twelve years now, every time I thought about him. I needed to know that he was fine.