The Correspondent: A Novel by Virginia Evans - 46

Sybil Van Antwerp

17 Farney Road

Arnold, MD 21012

USA

22 October 2017

Dear Sybil,

Thank you for sending along the paperwork regarding our DNA match. I hope you won’t mind, but I went and called up to my friend who is a geneticist in London and told him the whole story. I sent the paperwork to him, and he gave it a good looking over, and then I had some chats with my brothers. I suppose there’s not a way to be entirely sure about the testing, but the friend of mine said the labs used by Kindred are aboveboard, as they say, and there isn’t really any reason to think the report wouldn’t be accurate. All of that was rather my doing a bit of stalling, and between it there is work and life. Declan, the pub-owning brother I believe I mentioned, is the keeper of the family history. He keeps the boxes of photos and paperwork, so of course when we received your letters it was to the boxes and looking through. Dec is a skeptic as well as possessive, so his first response to the whole thing was unenthusiastic. The fact is I knew Mum had a daughter before I was born, but Dec thought she’d delivered stillborn. Mum always told me the baby had died in the first few days, and I’d not had any reason to second-guess a thing like that, but it was something else you said in your first letter, which was that your DNA showed Native American parentage. My father was half Crow. It seemed too odd a coincidence to ignore.

There is an old photograph we found in the mix of my mother and father (my father’s name was Charlie Thorne and it was his mother who was Crow; his father was of Spanish descent from the state of Oregon) and in it my mother is pregnant. I would have assumed it was myself in utero, but Dec and I sat with the photos for some time and there are some indicators the photo is from an earlier time, some letters (Mum was always writing and receiving letters) that indicate pregnancy at an earlier time, so I suppose, well, I suppose it might be you she’s got inside. This is a very long way of going round and round to say that if what you are suggesting by reaching out to me is that we are, as strange as it is to write, sisters, then I think you must be (unless I’ve missed something obvious and you’re quite a savvy crook) correct.

After sitting with this information these months I wish I had some way of knowing more for you. After I was born my father abandoned us. He had lived a hard going life on the drink, always gambling, and he only had one leg because of something that had happened to him in his teenage years and it’d been removed. He was meaner than a provoked snake is what I was always told, but I have no memories of him. Anyway, my mother—I suppose, it’s still hard to imagine, our mother, our father—left America to return to Scotland, where she was born. Gleason is her surname, and she gave it to me rather than Thorne. She married a Welshman here in Scotland and together they had Declan, John, and Douglas. He stood in as a father for me and I was nary the wiser until when I went to university and Mum told me the truth, and that did explain a great deal because I have very dark features and the rest of them are freckled and fair haired. Mum died in 1998 with lung cancer (she was a smoker), and I wouldn’t say she told me very much about her life outside Scotland, between her early teenage years to her late twenties. When I did a few months with the Kindred website it was because I had an itch to find some information on my father, and I dug up his obituary from out somewhere in Montana and it was something brief and impersonal from a local paper, but here is what I learned. His name was Charles Broderick Thorne, eldest of two children to David and Mildred Thorne, born 1 September 1917 in Portland, Oregon. He died in a strange way, and that was being stampeded by a herd of cattle. I read that and it’s stuck in my mind these years. Terribly gruesome. I don’t think if Mum ever had another point of contact with him after we’d left for Scotland.

One doesn’t know how to bring a letter of this sort to a close. There isn’t a template for such a thing. I’ve sat here for quite some time, and I don’t know what else to say other than you get to be seventy-four and you think it’ll be a nice easy coast to the end, and then you find out all along you had a sister living in Washington, DC. I guess I would like to know about you. What has come to pass in your life?

Enclosed is the photo I mentioned of Mum pregnant with you. Have I said—would you know, I guess you wouldn’t know—her name was Louisa. I have also enclosed a photo of myself and Dec, Douggie, and John from Christmas a year or two ago. I very much look forward to your reply,

Hattie