I smiled faintly as I looked around the room, realizing I still felt a thrill at doing the forbidden.
There’s hardly a bare patch of wall anywhere in my dad’s study. Two walls are taken up by floor-to-ceiling bookcases, the shelves crammed to bursting with books, grouped by subject matter, then alphabetized by author name, because this is Anal-Retentive Man we’re talking about. The other two walls are dominated by his massive mahogany desk, and more file cabinets than you’d see in a lawyer’s record room. These, too, were grouped by subject matter, with convenient labels on the outside so that prying eyes like mine could find the most likely candidates for interesting reading.
His personal files were on the bottom, right next to the door. I wasn’t entirely surprised to discover there was one entire drawer devoted to each member of our immediate family.
For some reason, my palms went clammy when I imagined pulling my own file open, so I started with Andy’s. Inside, there were folders for every aspect of my brother’s life. His birth announcement. A yellowed piece of paper with tiny baby footprints on it. Even the ID bracelets he and my mother had worn in the hospital. Then there was a file of all his report cards starting with kindergarten. Art projects that in a normal home would have been tacked up on the refrigerator but in ours had gone straight from Andy’s hand to storage. The homemade Christmas cards he’d given our parents every year until he turned twenty-one and was lost beneath Raphael’s personality.
I stopped myself from looking any further, feeling like a voyeur. My throat felt strangely tight as I realized that for all of Dad’s deficiencies, for all his coldness, he must love Andy somewhere deep down. Otherwise, why would he keep all this stuff?
I slid Andy’s drawer closed, then wiped my sweaty palms on my pants legs before taking a deep breath and opening my own.
I wasn’t surprised to discover my drawer was very different from Andy’s. That didn’t stop the hurt that stabbed through me when I saw that whereas Andy’s file was so full of memorabilia you could barely pull anything out, mine was positively sparse. No birth records. No cutesy, childish art. No report cards, though I could hardly blame him for that. I don’t think there’s a report card in existence that didn’t mention how much of a pain in the ass I was, even though I was smart enough to get good grades without having to work too hard.
The first thing of interest I found was the record of the paternity test, which was conducted when I was about a month old. I saw in black and white that Dad and I were not related. I swallowed hard and shoved the folder back in the drawer.
My files, being much duller than Andy’s, were organized by year rather than subject matter. I skipped forward to the year of my possibly mysterious hospitalization. I laid the file open on my lap and started flip-ping through it, looking more carefully than I had at anything previously. My hand—and my heart—came to a stop when I found a letter with the Spirit Society’s logo emblazoned at the top. It was from Bradley Cooper, although he hadn’t risen to his exalted rank of Regional Director yet and was merely a Team Leader.
Dear Mr. Kingsley,
We are sorry to hear about the difficulties you and your wife are experiencing with the child. We understand your frustration, and thank you again for the heroic efforts you have made for the Cause.
Our suggestion is that you have the child speak with one of our psychiatrists. He will examine her and make a determination as to the likelihood that she can be turned at this late age. It is possible that the resistance you are experiencing is nothing more than the rebellion of a normal teenager. If so, we would ask that you continue on as you have at least for the next couple of years until we can make a determination as to whether she will join with us of her own free will.
If our doctor determines that she is, in fact, intractable, then other, more desperate measures may be needed. We will discuss those measures when and if they become necessary so that we may come to a mutually acceptable arrangement.
Once again, I thank you on the behalf of the entire Society for your loyalty to our Cause, and for service above and beyond the call of duty. If you are amenable to our suggestion, please give me a call and we will set up an appointment.
My stomach flopped like a fish out of water. I could only assume this “teenage rebellion” of which Cooper spoke was my insistence that I would never, ever host a demon.
My parents had begun the recruitment effort on my twelfth birthday—the same age that they’d started working on Andy. But while Andy had immediately succumbed to the allure of becoming an all-powerful hero, I had balked. And more than a year of dragging me to Society meetings and shoving Society propaganda in my face had only made me dig my heels in deeper.
I remembered that trip to the psychiatrist. It had been the first of many. With trembling fingers, I turned to the next page, and saw the psychiatrist’s report. I was still reading through it, simultaneously fascinated and appalled to read this stranger’s impressions of me, most of which seemed surprisingly accurate, when the study door opened and my dad walked in.
For a long, breathless moment, we were both too shocked to move or speak. Inwardly, I cursed myself for getting so absorbed in my reading that I hadn’t heard him coming. If I’d heard him, maybe I could have stuffed some of the more interesting pages into my pockets for later perusal.
Dad snapped out of it first, stepping fully into the room and slamming the door behind him. I winced at the sound, then reminded myself that I was an adult, not a six-year-old girl.
With what I hoped was cool aplomb, I closed the folder and tucked it back into the drawer, then stood. I was a full head taller than my dad, and we looked nothing alike. When I’d been a kid, people had always commented to my mom that I was her spitting image in everything but height. No one had ever said I looked like my dad, but I’d always assumed that was merely a gender thing. Now I realized the true reason. Even so, as I stood there and watched him trying to absorb the indignity of my intrusion upon his sanctum sanctorum, he still felt like my father to me. The little girl in my core wanted to apologize, to finally see a hint of approval on his face, but it wasn’t going to happen.
“You have some nerve,” he said when he recovered enough to talk. His voice was highly controlled, but I could hear the fury in it anyway.
I crossed my arms over my chest and leaned back against the cabinets behind me, pretending to be a hell of a lot more relaxed than I was. “Nice to see you, too, Pops,” I said.
I think I saw a wisp of steam rise from his ears. “What is the meaning of this?” he demanded, and the look on his face said he was seriously considering taking me over his knee again.
I managed to swallow the laugh the mental image conjured and just shook my head at him. “You know the meaning as well as I do, assuming you spoke to Mom before you came in here. And if you’re planning to go the denial route, don’t bother. You conveniently kept the results of the paternity test filed for me to find.”
His face turned red with anger, but it seemed he wasn’t in the mood for a good knock-down, drag-out. “Get out” was all he said.
“What else is in those files?” I asked, not about to budge. “I saw Cooper’s letter about the ‘desperate measures’ the Society would take if you decided the brainwashing wasn’t working. And I can’t help connecting those desperate measures to my stay at The Healing Circle that very same year.”
“I said get out!”
“I heard you. But like I told Mom, I’m not leaving until I get the answers I came for. So you’re either going to answer my questions, or I’ll help myself to the contents of my file.” Or both, actually. It wasn’t like I’d trust anything he told me under the circumstances. Still, I wouldn’t mind getting the Cliffs Notes before I got started on the heavy reading.