“How much?”
He hesitated.
“How much?” I asked again, my voice tight.
“A hundred thousand dollars,” he said.
I looked away from him. He’d bought my daughter for the price of a house.
“So, we talked it over and decided to do it,” he said, rubbing at his chin. “We wanted a child badly and it sounded like she needed a family.”
“She didn’t,” I said. “She had one.”
He swallowed. “We didn’t know that.”
“But you blindly accepted that some seven-year old girl could be bought for a hundred grand, outside of the normal legal process,” I said, not bothering to hide my disgust.
“We were desperate,” Valerie whispered.
“As desperate as we’ve been to find her?” I asked. “I doubt that very much.”
Quiet settled over the room for a moment.
“Yes, we probably knew that it wasn’t the…smartest thing to do,” Alex finally said. “But we did believe that this girl was coming to us with nowhere else to go.”
I believed that that’s what they wanted to believe. But it didn’t make it alright.
“I called the woman, told her yes,” Alex continued. “She told us we needed to wait in Phoenix for forty-eight hours and then she’d be there. We made arrangements to stay two more nights and then she was brought to us.”
A thousand questions were running through my brain. What was she like? How did she feel? What did she say? But I kept my mouth closed and let him continue.
“She was quiet, very withdrawn,” Alex said. “Which we were prepared for. Again, we thought she’d just lost her parents and we were told it would be best not to bring it up. So, we didn’t. And we didn’t force ourselves on her.”
“Who was the woman?” I asked, trying to keep my composure and not picture how Elizabeth felt at that moment. “The woman who brought her to you and took your money?”
They exchanged nervous looks, hesitancy riddling their body language.
“I’m telling you right now, all of this is coming out one way or another,” I said. “You don’t wanna tell us now? That’s fine. But you’re going to be talking to other people and they are going to ask the same question and you won’t have the choice of not answering.”
Alex leaned back in the couch and folded his arms across his chest. “Her name was Marianna Gelson. But we’ve never spoken to her again.”
Probably not even her real name, if she was what I thought she was.
“So, she was quiet and withdrawn,” Alex said. “For quite some time, but eventually, she started to come around. We purposely avoided talking about her past and, given what we were told, we didn’t think she’d want to talk about it.”
I felt my blood pressure rise and I was having a difficult time maintaining any semblance of civility. I didn’t know what was going through Lauren’s mind, but it was all I could do to not jump across the room and attack him.
“We kept her home for a couple of years,” he said. “Val homeschooled her. She really seemed to like it and…”
“You know what?” I said, cutting him off. “I could give a shit about what she seemed to like and what she didn’t. I could give a shit about how you felt or homeschooling or anything else you did with my daughter. What I want to know is where she is so I can see her.”
Lauren’s hand pressed down on my thigh like she was trying to keep me seated.
Valerie started crying silently, tears streaming down her face. Alex put his arm around her. I wanted to punch them both in the face.
“As she’s gotten older, she’s asked us a few more questions,” he said, his voice less steady. “About her adoption. We were…careful.”
“Meaning you lied,” I said.
“Meaning we told her what we knew.”
“So, you told her that you bought her for a hundred thousand bucks? Did she ask to see the price tag that was on her toe?”
He shifted, uncomfortable. “No. Of course not. We were vague about the adoption details. We told her it was through an agency and that there was little information due to the circumstances.” He glanced at his wife. “That’s what we were told to do.”
I wanted to be able to put myself in his position, to understand where he was coming from, to have some sort of sympathy. But I couldn’t. All I could see was the guy who’d taken my place.
“And she was satisfied with that?” Lauren asked. “She just accepted vague details?”
“At first, I guess,” Alex said. “And there weren’t many more questions. But then recently, she pressed some more. She wanted more answers. More clarification.”
“And?” Lauren said.
He cleared his throat. “We shared some things, but not others. But…I think she sensed that. That we were leaving some things out.”
“Why?”
He glanced at his wife, then back at me. “We told her it was a private adoption. That records were scarce. She wanted more info on her birth parents. We tried to be vague, but she pushed. So, we told her about the explosion and the deaths.”
The hair on the back of my neck was standing at attention.
Alex Corzine ran a hand through his hair, deep lines gutting his forehead. “She said she didn’t remember any explosion. We told her that was probably normal, that she’d blocked it out. Too traumatic. But she was adamant. She didn’t remember any explosion. And that’s when she really started getting angry with us.”
I wondered what Elizabeth was like when she was angry. Did she yell? Did she withdraw? Did she slam doors? Was she like me? Like Lauren?
I didn’t have those answers and I despised Corzine for that.
“So, she went digging,” he said.
“Digging?” I asked.
“Through our file cabinets,” he said.
I took a deep breath, glanced at Lauren, who was deep in concentration, her eyes focused on Corzine. I turned my eyes back to him. “You kept her adoption paperwork in a file cabinet? Seriously?”
He shook his head. “No. We didn’t. There’s barely any paperwork to begin with. But we came home one night and she had the entire thing torn apart. Paper and files everywhere, screaming at us.”
“So, then you told her?” I asked.
He hesitated then shook his head again. “No. We still maintained we’d told her everything we could tell her.”
My teeth ground together.
“But then a week ago, she found it,” he said.
“What’s it?”
“The one piece of paper we had,” he replied. “With Gelson’s name on it. A phone number. A couple of other details about our meeting in Phoenix. We kept it in case we ever…I don’t know. We just kept it.” He exhaled. “Kept it inside the pocket of a pair of jeans that I don’t ever wear. Buried in my closet. But she found it.”
Valerie Corzine wiped at her eyes. “She called us liars. Called us a hundred things. She called the number. It was disconnected. Then she just refused to talk to us. Just stopped talking. Nothing for two days.”
“Then what?” Lauren asked, her hand still clutching my leg.
Alex and Valerie exchanged a look, then Valerie looked at Lauren, then me.
“Then she left,” Valerie said. “With Bryce.”
FORTY-FOUR
“Who is Bryce?” I asked.
Both of their expressions changed, concern and worry shifted into dislike.
“Her boyfriend,” Alex Corzine said. “He’s older. Twenty. And not a great influence.”
I was trying to create some distance as I asked questions, tried to separate myself emotionally from the fact that I was asking questions about my daughter, whom I didn’t really know.
“Not a great influence how?” I asked.
“He’s twenty dating a seventeen-year old,” he said, frowning. “No job. Doesn’t go to school. I know he’s taken alcohol from our house. Doesn’t respect our rules about curfew. Just not who you want dating your daughter.”
I resisted the urge to argue that she wasn’t his daughter. “So, she left with him?”
They both nodded. “She said he was driving her to the store. But they were both acting weird. We should’ve known something was wrong. But we were just happy that she was speaking to us again. So he came and picked her up and they left.” He swallowed. “We haven’t heard from her since.”