Kira Floyd knows she was adopted. That part isn’t a secret to her. She knows Marvin and Kendra found her as a baby and raised her as their daughter, and when Joyce asks what happened to her real parents, Kira doesn’t accept the wording. Mama and Papa are her real parents as far as she is concerned. I like that about her because it says something important without Kira needing to make a speech about it. She knows where she belongs. At the same time, knowing where you belong doesn’t stop a person from wondering where she came from. Kira can love the Floyds completely and still wonder why somebody left her on a doorstep. Those two feelings are allowed to exist together.
Families are full of things children know, things they half know and things adults have decided they are too young to know. The adults may be trying to protect a child, or they may be protecting themselves without admitting it, and sometimes everybody has become so used to avoiding a subject that nobody remembers who first decided it should not be discussed. A child can grow up inside a loving home and still know there is one question nobody can answer. Kira has brothers, parents, rules, chores and all the ordinary annoyances that come with belonging to a family. Her adoption doesn’t make her an outsider in the Floyd house. The unanswered part is somewhere else, in the years before the Floyds knew her and in the people whose choices brought her to their door.
That is where family secrets become useful in a mystery. A secret is rarely interesting just because information has been hidden. What matters is what the hidden thing does to people who don’t know it. Kira may not know much about her past, but other people do know pieces of it and have made decisions because of what they know. Douglas Reardon watches her from a distance with feelings and memories she doesn’t understand. Reverend Farley carries knowledge and guilt of his own. The adults around Kira can look at the same person and see something very different because they aren’t all working with the same history. Kira is living a normal teenage life while older choices are moving toward her.
I have always found it more believable when a secret is mixed up with ordinary life instead of placed in a locked box somewhere. Families don’t usually announce that there is a secret. People change the subject, leave out a name, say, ‘That was a long time ago,’ or tell themselves there is no reason to bring up something that might hurt someone. Years can pass that way until a person asks the wrong question, somebody comes back to town or an old friend says something he should not know, and what looked safely buried in the past is suddenly part of the present again. In Sylville, old relationships matter because they never disappeared just because the younger people knew nothing about them.
There is also a difference between a secret and a lie. A family can keep something private without meaning harm. Parents make choices every day about when a child is ready to hear something. But a lie grows more dangerous when other people are depending on it. The novel has people who keep quiet because they are afraid, ashamed, guilty or simply unwilling to face what they know. That silence can protect the wrong person. Reverend Farley is a good example of how guilt changes when a person waits too long. By the time he is forced to face everything he knows about Pauly Conrad and Douglas Reardon, the silence itself has become part of the problem. He didn’t cause every evil act committed by other men, but he has to live with the question of whether speaking sooner might have changed something.
That question can be harder than a simple question of good or bad. Most people want to believe they would speak immediately if they knew something terrible. Real life isn’t always that clean. A person may doubt what he saw, be afraid of accusing somebody unfairly or remember the person as a friend, as the young man he once knew rather than the man standing in front of him now. He may convince himself that what happened years ago has nothing to do with today, until something else happens and all the little doubts that were easy to push aside start looking different.
Kira’s own view of family is much simpler. The Floyds are her family because they raised her and loved her. She doesn’t need a blood test to tell her who Mama is. That doesn’t make blood meaningless in the story, because blood is exactly what some other people use to justify their claims on her. Douglas can look at Kira and think in terms of possession and what he believes has been taken from him. Kira looks at Marvin and Kendra and sees the people who were there. I don’t think those two ideas deserve equal weight. Parenthood isn’t just a biological fact. A child learns who is family by living with them day after day, through all the ordinary care and aggravation that comes with being raised in a house full of people.
That is why the ordinary Floyd scenes matter so much to me when I look at the story. Kendra worrying where Kira is going after school may not seem as dramatic as a kidnapping or a police search, but that worry is part of what makes her Kira’s mother. Marvin doesn’t need to explain his place in Kira’s life. He has already lived it. The brothers can irritate one another and still move quickly when one of them is in danger. The family motto, ‘never give up,’ sounds simple when it is something parents tell children. Later Kira has to decide whether she can actually live by it.
Secrets in a family can answer questions, but they can also create new ones. Finding out where you came from doesn’t automatically tell you who you are. Kira’s past matters because it explains why certain people have entered her life and why danger has followed her. It doesn’t erase the years she spent as a Floyd. That is one thing I wouldn’t want the mystery to take away from her. She can learn something terrible about where she came from and still know exactly where home is. Maybe that is the part of family secrets that interests me most. We tend to think a secret has the power to change everything once it is revealed. Sometimes it does, but sometimes it changes the story around a person without changing the person nearly as much as everyone expected. Kira has questions about her beginning, but she has already had fourteen years of people telling her, in a hundred ordinary ways, that she belongs. Learning more about her beginning can’t make the fourteen years in the Floyd house disappear.