Midnight fell upon the house when Anna pulled out the crumpled parchment
out from her pocket. Both Ma and Pa had returned hours ago, and her
brothers were sound asleep. She didn't know what the parchment scraps
were for, as they were in pieces, like a little kid tore them apart.
Silently,
Anna crept down the occasionally creaky stairway into the kitchen. She
snatched the roll of Scotch tape from their pencil/junk drawer. Anna
then tiptoed over to the lamp in the living room and turned the knob.
The sharp clicking sound made Anna wince. She desperately hoped that no
one noticed it and suspected anything. Luckily, Pa didn't come running
down the stairs with a Tyler's Nerf gun or baseball bat. Unluckily,
Harley stumbled his way downstairs.
His face had markings on it
from the way he was sleeping, and his blonde hair was sticking up all
over. He rubbed his eyes, then made his way to Anna, still half-asleep.
"What're you doing?" he groaned. "It's midnight."
"I know,
Har, but I need quiet to put the thing I..." Anna paused, thinking of a
cover up that was enough to satisfy a seven year old, "...broke
yesterday."
Harley's whole body perked up like a dog's does when
you offer it a treat. "What'd you break? Was it mine? I hope it
wasn't mine. I hope it was Tyler's. He deserves it for turning off
Spongebob."
Anna couldn't help but laugh. Little kid reasoning
was extremely simple and funny. "No, it's not yours. It's mine... I
think. It's a piece of paper that I... accidentally ripped... along
with the dumb letter I got a while ago."
"Oh." Harley just stood there as he watched his sister try and make the pieces into a rectangle again. "Is it like a puzzle?"
Anna
looked up at her little brother, wanting him to go back to bed, but also
wanting him to stay. She liked his company. "Um, yeah, I guess so. Do
you wanna help?" Harley's head nodded so much, Anna wouldn't have been
surprised if his head snapped off.
He scooted himself onto the
sofa next to her, and began to make the border of the paper. "It's
easiest if you do it this way," he instructed, and Anna handed him all
of the pieces with the smoother edges. She sat open-mouthed as Harley
took scrap by scrap of the parchment and put it into place. There was
no way she'd be able to do it as fast as Harley's flying hands could.
After
about an hour, the parchment was finished and taped. Harley was conked
out on the couch, and Anna was trying to decipher the strange letters
on the page. It looked like the Greek symbols that she had seen while
reading a book about Athens, but it looked like Egyptian hieroglyphics.
A part of it was in Spanish, and she tried to decode it as best as she
could. "El emperador azteca vive en el palacio con su hija, le
princesa, y su hijo, un guerrero. El guerrero pelea en la guerra con el
enemigos. El guerrero no quiere pelear. Quiere buscar..."
Anna
knew from her "Spanish teacher" (online) that the paragraph meant, "The
Aztec emperor lives in the palace with his daughter, the princess, and
his son, a warrior. The warrior fights in the war against the enemies.
The warrior does not want to fight. He wants to find..."
Anna
leapt up from her seat. "FIND WHAT?" she yelled, waking up Harley. Ma,
Pa and Tyler all ran downstairs. Once Ma saw the parchment that Anna
held in her hand, she broke down in tears.
"What's wrong, Mom?" Harley asked.
"Just
go to bed, Harley. You too Tyler. Your father and I need to talk with
your sister." The boys sleepily nodded and lumbered back upstairs to
their room, where they were no doubt listening through the air vent.
"How did you find that?" Ma asked in shock.
"I found a key, so I
thought it opened your top drawer, and it did, and inside was the paper,
and I had a feeling like it was meant for me, so I brought it down
here, Harley woke up, and he wanted to help me put it together, so we
did, and then I read the part I could understand and it doesn't make
sense!" Anna rambled. She ran to Ma and wrapped her arms around her
waist. Tears were flowing all over now, even Pa was sobbing.
Eventually,
Anna backed away and recomposed herself. "Do you know what it means?"
she asked her parents. They both shook their heads.
Pa finally
spoke up. "We're not your real parents. We just adopted you. You
appeared on our doorstep in a baby carrier and that note. We couldn't
read it because little baby you had ripped it up. We never had time to
put it back together, but we kept the scraps. All we knew was that they
were important. They're about where you came from, your history."
The
three of them stood in silence for a while, too scared to say anything
else. In their quietness, they all had accepted that things were going
to change. Anna was going to grow up and leave, and Ma and Pa would
have to wave good-bye to their amnesiac daughter as she goes off into
the world on her own.
