Page 178 of The Sun Sister
‘I guess I must have lost the envelope you gave me and...well, I had some time to think in rehab and...’
‘You’ve decided you want to know where you come from,’ Ally said very gently as a great squawk came from the other end of the line. ‘Hold on a minute,’ she said, as I heard some rustling and a kind of suckling noise. ‘Right, I’m just going to my laptop.’
‘Okay,’ I said, realising that my heart rate was increasing as I waited.
‘Soo...I’m opening the file now...Okay, here we go. Can you write these down?’
‘Yeah, sure.’
Ally read out the coordinates, which I scribbled down. Then I stared at the set of numbers.
‘Thanks. So what do I do now?’
‘Okay, go onto Google Earth, and on the left-hand side there should be a little search box. Enter the numbers in there – they’re in degrees, minutes and seconds – then it should zoom in to the location the coordinates pinpoint.’
‘Great,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’
‘Electra, are you actually going to look up the coordinates now?’
‘Yeah, why wouldn’t I?’
‘Only that...it’s a big moment, isn’t it, finding out where you’re from? Is anybody with you?’
‘No, but...’ Then a thought struck me. ‘Hey, Ally, do you actually know where I’m from?’
‘Well, when we were first shown the armillary sphere, I looked up all the coordinates briefly to make sure they worked, but honestly, I only have a general idea of where yours lead to.’
‘Okay, so you’re not worried about me looking at it because it’s bad or anything?’
‘Oh Electra, it’s not as simple as “bad” or “good”...I can tell you that my coordinates led me to a museum in Oslo. It now stands where an old theatre once was that my ancestor performed in. It turns out that my brother Thom and I were born in a hospital in a place called Trondheim in Norway. Sometime after that, I was privately adopted by Pa.’
‘Right. And none of us know why he actually choseus? He always said hehad– chosen us especially, I mean.’
‘No, it could simply have been that we were in need of adoption and he wanted to provide a home for us. Are you worried about looking up where you were found, Electra?’
‘Yup,’ I nodded as I opened up my laptop, went to Google Earth on my browser and began to follow the instructions Ally had given me.
‘I suppose it’s a fair assumption that none of us were born into a happy family scenario,’ Ally said. ‘If we had been, we wouldn’t have ended up being adopted.’
‘True, true,’ I agreed as I tapped in the coordinates. ‘Okay, here goes...’
‘Want me to stay on the line or leave you to do this alone?’
‘Stay, if you don’t mind,’ I said, knowing this was not the moment to be brave. I watched the spinning wheel of death on my screen and sighed. ‘Sorry, for some reason the internet here is always slower at night...Right! Here we go...Okay, so we’ve got the globe and it’s closing in and it seems to be moving towards North America...’ I trailed off, feeling bizarrely like a NASA space reporter as the picture zoomed in on New York City, then onto Harlem. I watched with my heart in my throat as the pixels on the screen crystallised into a block of buildings on a leafy street, and a red pin landed on one.
‘Oh my God!’
‘What?! Don’t keep me in suspense here.’
‘Jeez!’
‘Electra! Please, has it shown you yet?’
‘Yup, it has,’ I nodded to myself. ‘It turns out I was born right here in New York City. To be precise, in a place called Hale House, which, according to Google Earth, is in Harlem and approximately –’ I counted quickly – ‘fifteen blocks or so from my own front door.’
‘You’re joking!’
‘I’m really not, no. Hold on, let me just google Hale House.’
