I groaned. “If you’re not going to let me do the matchmaking, at least let me lie on the beach and ruin my skin.”
“I’ll do no such thing,” she said, taking my face between her hands and smushing it around with her thumbs to look for wrinkles. “Though it may be too late for me to save you.”
I shook her off, but I was smiling. “Fine. What’s in here? Heirlooms? Jewelry? The bodies of the people you kill to steal their youth?”
“Don’t be silly. I keep those in the basement of the Oxford Circle house. And I’d better be good and dead before you even think about my jewelry.”
“Oh, Ada, you’re too mean to ever die.”
She cocked a finger at me. “And don’t you forget that.” She gestured for me to follow her into the house and opened the top of a box. “No. These are photographs.”
I counted up the boxes. There were eight of them. And they were good sized too. “And you want me to . . . ?”
“Organize them into scrapbooks. They’re mostly labeled on the back. I want you to label them in the books in chronological order.”
I looked at her like she had suggested I eat the fish that I saw the pelican go for whole.
“I know you’re mad, but come on. This will take me until I’m your age.”
“I don’t get mad. You shouldn’t either. It—”
“Causes wrinkles, yes, I know.”
“Actually it causes stress, which makes your hair turn gray.”
I blinked heavily. “Can we please just move on? I promise I’ve learned my lesson.”
She shook her head. “It’s scrapbooks or back to New York you go.”
Yes, I missed my mother. But no. Her last letter had said my father was starting to waver on college, but warned that I had better keep behaving down here. It had arrived right on time, the day after I learned about Freddy’s impending marriage.
“What year do they start?”
“How should I know?” Ada asked as she walked away and offered Thomas a glass of lemonade.
“She’s never once offered me a glass of lemonade,” I grumbled. But I was mildly curious. And the sooner I started, the sooner I would be done. So I pulled the top box down, put it on the floor, and sat cross-legged next to it.
The box I opened must have been the one I saw in her attic in Philadelphia because the same wedding photo was on top. Below it, two little girls in matching dresses sat with my great-grandmother, my great-grandfather standing stoically behind them. Only my great-grandmother had a hint of a smile. It was a studio portrait, and I looked at the two little girls, trying to determine who was who. The younger had to be Ada. It was hard to imagine her as a child. But she held her sister’s hand, and I squinted at my grandmother. I was only ten when she died, and she had been sick for a couple of years before that. But I remembered hugging her and a feeling of safety when she was with us. It was an irreplaceable feeling, one that had never been remotely imitated since. And I remembered my mother crying randomly for weeks after we lost her, Harold trying his best to comfort her, me not really understanding. She was old—I thought dying was just what old people did.
But she wasn’t that old, if Ada was still here and my grandmother had been gone ten years. That thought was jarring and made me miss my own mother, who was now only twelve years younger than her mother had been when she died.
I set the photo down and reached for the next one.
When Ada returned, walking Thomas out, I had started stacks for different years, organizing the photos by actual date when they had one. She looked at my piles approvingly, but said nothing.
The next morning, I set out to Hoy’s early. I bought a set of pens, some folders, index cards, rubber bands, and rubber cement. I moved the first box up to my bedroom, being respectful of Ada’s wishes that I stay out of sight, where I took over the floor and then spread out into the hallway.
By the time Ada was finished for the day, I had cataloged most of the first box by date.
“At some point, I’d like those to go into albums,” she said.
I looked up at her. “Do you want the job done quickly, or do you want it done right?”
She held up her hands. “Proceed.”
I watched Ada’s childhood blossom in front of me, piecing together what I could from what I saw and what I didn’t. Her mother’s stomach swelled, there was a baby, and then there wasn’t. Her stomach swelled once more, but no baby followed.
“What happened to the baby?” I asked over breakfast.
“What baby?”
“Your mother’s—there were pictures of a little boy. And then there weren’t.”
Ada shook her head. “The Asiatic flu pandemic of 1890. I barely remember him. He was only a couple of months old. I don’t know who got it first, but we all did. The rest of us recovered.” She stared into the distance. “Well, physically. My mother—she struggled.”
“She got pregnant again though.”
Ada looked confused. “No. I don’t think she did.”
I pushed back my chair and ran up the stairs to get the photo. I handed it to Ada, who studied it closely.
“I suppose you’re right. I don’t know what happened.”
“When did she die?”
“A year after my father.”
I looked at her, surreptitiously, from the corner of my eye so she wouldn’t make a comment about my impertinent staring. She was still studying the photo of her mother. So much death, I thought. I wasn’t sure I would marry either if I were in her position. She lost her fiancé, her brother, her parents. It had to feel like everyone was temporary.
“It’s how things were,” Ada said finally. “You can stop looking at me like that. Everyone my age has similar stories, Marilyn. You had large families because things happened.”
But as I went through the photographs that morning, I realized something—her mother never smiled in a picture after the baby died. Not once.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
In the mornings, I sorted pictures and began placing them in the first scrapbook, carefully labeling each picture with the information from the back. There was something soothing about returning to these now-familiar faces, watching them grow and change.
After lunch, I took a break, walking two blocks north to the beach. It was a necessary change. The first day that I chose to return, I went to my normal spot, and Freddy came over.
“Can we talk?” he asked.
I opened a single eye. I had been enjoying a little “siesta” as Ada called her afternoon naps, typically taken on the wicker love seat on the porch.
“I’d rather not.”
He sat in the sand next to me, knowing better than to try to sit on my towel now. “Marilyn, please. I’m miserable without you.”
I pushed my sunglasses to the top of my head and leaned up on my elbows. “What do you want me to say to that?”
He looked perplexed, which wasn’t attractive. When confident, no one was more handsome. When confused, he resembled a chimpanzee.
“That you miss me too,” he said finally.
My eyebrows approached my hairline. “Darling,” I said. “I do not intend to lie to you.” I pulled my sunglasses down and lay back on my towel.