Even as a kid, I saw the way Mom looked when she stared at her reflection in the mirror. She looked sad. I wondered what she saw. For some reason I don’t think it was the same pretty face that I saw.
I’m about to leave when I spot something out of the corner of my eye, something I’ve never noticed in Mom’s closet before. Something that would have otherwise been hidden behind the hems of clothes, except that now there are no clothes to taint the view.
I have to look twice to be sure that it’s there, that I’m not only imagining it’s there. What it is is black, metal, covered in louvers. A door. A boxy little door that hovers less than a foot above the hardwood floors.
I drop to my hands and knees and pull on the door’s knob, finding a crawl space on the other side. A crawl space. I never knew we had a crawl space before.
The space is dark and dingy, the ceiling low. The floor is dirt, covered only by a thick sheet of plastic. I can’t believe I never found this place before. How many times did I dig my way through Mom’s closet for clues as to who my father could be? But as it so happened, I never dug far enough. Instead I gave up when I got to the clothes, taking for granted that there was nothing on the other side but a wall.
Only one time did Mom bring my father up all on her own, without my begging. I was twelve years old. Mom had had a glass of wine before bed. She said to me that night, seconds before she fell asleep, head draped over the rock-hard sofa arm, A long time ago, I did something I’m not proud of, Jessie. Something that shames me. And that’s how I got you.
The next thing I heard was the sound of her half-drunk snore, but by morning I couldn’t bring myself to ask what she’d meant by it.
I reach inside the crawl space and drag something out. What it is, I don’t know. Not until I get it into the closet’s light do I see that it’s a plastic storage bin, and the adrenaline kicks in at the prospect of what I might find inside. My social security card, for one, but more likely, something having to do with my father, which suddenly, in this moment, takes precedence. Something Mom kept tucked away so that I wouldn’t find it.
I tear the lid off, finding photo albums inside. I find myself feeling hopeful, wondering what I’ll find in them. Photos of Mom, photos of my father, photos of Mom and her own mom and dad.
But of course not. Instead it’s me. All me.
I set the album aside to take back to the carriage home with me.
I crawl toward the crawl space, feeling blindly inside for another box. I can’t reach far enough in to grab it, and so I have to crawl in through the door. Inside, the space is only about thirty-six-inches tall. I’m not fully in before claustrophobia settles in. The dirty floors and wooden beams close in around me. The darkness is smothering. The only light comes from behind. I find another storage bin and drag it out backward, through the access panel and onto the closet floor, grateful for a little elbow room.
I open the lid and have a look, hoping that this is the mother lode I’ve been in search of. The answer to all the questions I have. But it’s not. It’s nothing, just a bunch of inconsequential items in a plastic storage bin, which makes me realize this isn’t a secret crawl space at all, but just a crawl space. For storage. For stuff Mom had no other place to put.
She didn’t intentionally keep this a secret from me. I just never knew it was here.
I sigh, feeling uncomfortable and glum. I rise to my feet, stretching my hands above my head, arching my back. But my movements are quick and careless. The blood flees my brain as I stand up, leaving me light-headed and dizzy. All of these nights without sleep are taking their toll on me. I reach for the wall to steady myself, crashing into the mirror as I do. I watch on helplessly as the mirror loses its hold on the wall and I can’t catch it in time. I’m too slow to stop it from falling.
It slips from its nail and slams to the ground, scratching the wall as it does, leaving a four-foot scrape in the paint. The entire mirror shatters before my eyes. Broken glass spreads like spiderwebs, chunks falling to the hardwood floors. And all I can think about is bad luck. Seven entire years of bad luck that await me now.
I curse out loud, wondering if there’s any hope of salvaging the mirror. I start to gather the biggest chunks in my hand, careful that I don’t step on the tiny shards of glass.
My eyes are so caught up in what’s happening on the floor that at first I don’t see the small compartment dug into the wall. A little recess carved there into the drywall, hidden behind where the mirror should go. A hole that’s been fitted with a sturdy box.
And I think for a moment that my eyes deceive me. That I’m only imagining the compartment is there. Because why in the world would there be a secret storage compartment on Mom’s closet wall? I rub at my eyes, certain it will disappear as I do. But sure enough, it’s still here.
For at least twenty seconds I stare at that box without moving.
Mom had a stash of personal stuff she kept hidden from me.
I think of all the times Mom and I looked together in the mirror when I was a girl. All I ever saw was a mirror—our own silly expressions looking back at us through the glass—but for Mom it was a portal to her private world, a gateway to the things she didn’t want me to see.
It feels an enormous invasion of privacy for me to snoop but I can’t help myself. I reach my hand inside Mom’s secret box. There’s only one item there. It’s a scrap of glossy white paper pressed into the corner of the box. My chest clenches. I hold my breath.
This could be something.
Or, like the plastic storage bins hidden in the crawl space, this could be nothing.
I have to use a fingernail to emancipate the scrap. When I do, I turn it over in my hands to see. It’s a photograph that some part of my memory reminds me I’ve seen before.
But with the memory of the photograph comes the memory of Mom’s face. Openmouthed and afraid. She knew I’d seen it. But what happened next has been wiped clean from my brain’s hard drive. Either that or entombed beneath a gazillion other memories, harder than others to dig up.
Mom hid this photograph from me.
It’s the kind of photograph that looks a little dated, a little old. Not crazy old, like archaic. But older than me. The colors are faded, the blues a little less blue, and the greens a little less green than they used to be. It’s a picture of a lake. A long seashore of blue. Tan sand, darker where the water hits it. White ripples of waves. Evergreen trees line the edges of the lake. There is a pier suspended over the water, one that looks unsound, unsafe. Like at any moment it could sink into the lake and get carried away with the waves. If I squint my eyes up tight, there’s a boat out there on the water. A sailboat, just a simple sloop with a single white mast. That’s what I see.
Mom knew a whole lot about sailboats, which she relayed to me when we used to walk past DuSable Harbor on occasion, hand in hand. See that one over there, Jessie? she’d ask, slipping her hand away long enough to point at it. I’d pretend to look. Pretend to look because I didn’t really care, her words falling on deaf ears. That’s a cutter, or, that’s a catamaran, she’d tell me. She had a book on them, a heavy coffee-table book called Sailing. Though as far as I knew, Mom had never once stepped foot on a sailboat in her entire life. At least not since I’ve been alive. I forget sometimes that Mom had a life that preceded mine.
But the lake and the sailboat are only an afterthought to the image I see, because there’s also a man in the photograph, one with brown hair and a large stature. He’s tall and husky with thick wrists exposed by a flannel shirt that’s rolled up to the elbows. There’s a watch on a right wrist, a hat in his hand. He stands with his back to the camera, blurred at the edges because he wasn’t standing still when the shutter button was pressed. He’s not centered on the photo paper, as if he was moving away when the picture was snapped.