38
Rachel
For hours after Wyatt left, I could do nothing but stare at the photograph he had shown me and read the diary he had left. My mother’s diary. Her photo. Up until today, I had known I’d had a mother, and yet, she had never seemed quite real. Now, I looked at her picture, and I saw a girl like me, but not like me, a girl who had attended school as I hadn’t, who’d had a true love, as I had.
What had happened to her?
It was so sad that, though I could see her, we would never touch. I would never hear her voice.
I gazed upon the photo again. That’s when I realized she was wearing a coat. But not just any coat—the same coat I’d had on yesterday. I shivered, realizing it. The coat must have been in the closet where Wyatt was staying.
Now, it was here, under my bed!
I checked the clock. It was seven, an hour, still, before I’d planned to speak to Wyatt, longer still before Mama would arrive. I glanced out the window to make sure she was nowhere in sight. No. Nothing but trees. Even Wyatt’s footprints had already been covered by a fresh layer of snow, like they had never existed. He might almost have been a product of my desperate imagination.
I looked at the object he had given me, the telephone. No, I could never have imagined that. He was real, and he loved me. He would take me away with him if I only asked.
But, for now, he had given me this token of my mother’s existence.
I reached under the bed and drew out the coat. It was the first object I had ever owned that Mama had not given me. That made it the most precious as well, even more so because I knew it belonged to my mother, my real mother.
I lifted it to my face, sniffing it, trying to find a scent, a sign of her. I wondered what she had done when she wore this coat. Who had purchased it for her? What had she been like?
But I smelled nothing but the odor of age. Mama’s clothes smelled like this too, as if they were coated with a thin layer of dust.
Perhaps, I detected the slight smell of something else. Cinnamon.
Of course, that might simply be from the house where Wyatt lived, a smell of something baked yesterday, not when my mother was alive. But I preferred to think otherwise, that my mother had smelled of cinnamon, perhaps from a spiced cider she had drunk when wearing this coat, so many years ago.
I shivered at the thought of it, and in that moment, swept the coat around and onto my shoulders.
It fit perfectly. I buttoned it up and tied the belt around my waist. I made my hair into a ponytail and slipped it between the coat and my back, then lifted the hood over my head. I walked to the mirror.
Hair hidden, I looked exactly like the girl in the photograph.
I sort of hugged myself and then slid my hands deep inside my coat pickets, imagining my mother doing the same.
I gasped.
She had certainly done the same thing. I knew that, for when I reached into the pockets, I touched an object.
I drew it out.
It was a letter, a letter addressed to Danielle Greenwood.
The return address said Emily Hill.