The Search Angel by Tish Cohen

mother’s saucer. They’re too fragile to survive much more to-ing and fro-ing. It’s time to retire them. She opens the cupboard above the stove and pushes a few glasses out of the way. Then she drags over a chair and, with Angus watching, packs away her mother’s tea set. Drying her hands on her jeans, she wanders into her bedroom and opens her top drawer. She pulls something out and turns it over and over. A tiny, plastic hospital bracelet.
    It was a summer day and Marion had been out. The doctor or the dentist, doesn’t really matter. What mattered was Eleanor had a definite time period during which the house would sit empty. She’s wondered, since, what she was hoping to find that day. It wasn’t as if there hadn’t been doctor or dentist visits before. It wasn’t as if she’d never been alone. But this day she’d woken up feeling outside of herself, and slipping back in made her entire body feel hoarse and scratchy like a bad throat.
    She watched her mother’s Jetta round the corner at Hawthorne Boulevard and disappear. Her father, she knew, would be gone all day. He was playing golf at the club, had for weeks been looking forward to drinks with his friends at the nineteenth hole.
    Thomas’s office had once felt like a haven. A place to retreat to when the thunder grew too loud or her stomach hurt. Many an evening, she curled up on the tufted leather sofa across from his desk and read while he sorted the bills or played a game of solitaire. When she was younger, he would sometimes look up and ask if she’d like to play Go Fish. But now she was thirteen. Too old for baby games.
    She tiptoed across the plaid carpet, stepping, as she always did, only on the navy stripes, and opened her father’s desk drawer. Creased receipts from hardware stores, a car magazine, a box half full of loose change and a couple of pairs of tarnished cufflinks.
    The second drawer proved much more satisfying. Here she found old passports of her father’s—the goggled glasses, the slicked-to-one-side hair! She came upon seed packets and money from Italy and Greece. It wasn’t until she felt around behind the crumpled cottony bills that she discoveredthe envelope. Written across the yellowed front, in her mother’s cautiously loopy script, was one word.
    Eleanor
.
    Something tapped against the window. She started, then relaxed when she saw the sky had darkened, raindrops were striking the glass.
    She pulled folded papers from the envelope. Something fell and she bent down, picked it up. It was a small hospital bracelet, the clear plastic sliced beside the metal clasp from when it was snipped off.
University of Kansas Hospital
. The name:
Baby Girl Smith
.
    She might have stared at it a minute. Or it could have been an hour. Time didn’t matter. Only the truth mattered.
    She was adopted.
    With pain shooting through her left shoulder, Eleanor laid the wristband over her skin like a Band-Aid.
Baby Girl
. Her mother—who on earth was her mother, then?—didn’t even give her a name.
    All at once everything and nothing made sense.
    She hadn’t yet opened the papers when the back door squeaked. A heavy thud from the mud room, then, “Damned weather. Marion? Eleanor? Game called for lightning.”
    Eleanor stuffed the sheets back inside the envelope, dropping the bracelet. Her father’s footsteps rang in the hallway. She grabbed the plastic band, stuffed the envelope back into the drawer and slammed it shut. No time to get out of the room; he’d be walking in any moment.
    Quickly, she pulled down the blind and hopped onto the sofa, lying there with a cushion over her head, hoping her pounding heart wouldn’t give her away.
    “Ellie?” Her father—was he still her father even?—flicked on the overhead light. “What are you doing?”
    “Headache. Must be the weather.”
    It was the perfect ruse. He rolled his eyes and emptied his pockets into the desk drawer she’d just looked through. She hoped she’d placed the passports