“You’re leaving already?” Aunt A asked softly.
“Unfortunately, Caleb and I both have to get back to work. He can’t operate out of the craft room indefinitely. But last-minute airfare is out of our price range, so I’m sure we won’t be leaving for a few days yet.” I avoided looking at Aunt A’s face as I spoke, already knowing without seeing her that her ever-present smile would have drooped slightly, the prominent worry lines around her eyes deepening as she ingested my impending departure. I couldn’t bear to disappoint her again, like I must have when I left the first time. But we needed to go. I needed to know that the new me still existed somewhere, safe and happy and blissfully separate from her trainwreck of a past.
After Aunt A left, I carried my toast and coffee into the living room. The old house settled audibly, its walls shifting and groaning, and the floorboards directly above my head creaked. I instinctively shivered, then reminded myself it was just Caleb. The room above me was Aunt A’s craft room, where he was currently working . . . and my mother’s old bedroom. I remembered sitting on this very same couch, listening to her pace around the room. Then she stopped pacing. And then she was gone.
I turned on the television, cranking the volume up to drown out the house’s ghosts. I smiled when I saw Aunt A’s favorite soap opera, The Bold and the Beautiful, in her DVR queue. I had not seen the show in nearly a decade, but I found comfort in the familiar characters. Aunt A had recorded the show religiously, and many evenings had been spent beside her on the couch, drinking mugs of hot chocolate or sipping sweetened iced tea, depending on the season, engrossed in the tangled affairs of the characters.
As I pressed Play, I heard gravel crunching in the driveway and footsteps on the front porch. I set down my coffee in preparation for answering the door, but it swung open without a knock. I glanced up and saw my sister’s image reflected in the hall mirror. I studied her face: she didn’t look like a woman who could knowingly send an innocent man to jail. But then again, I knew all too well that Lanie only looked out for herself.
“Josie?” she called.
“In here,” I said, reaching out to pause the show.
She stepped into the living room, a smile flickering across her face, the equivalent of emotional static. “Hey. What are you up to?”
I waved a hand in the direction of the television. “Watching my stories.”
A mirthful grin erupted on Lanie’s face; she looked nothing like the unhinged woman I had seen last night, nor the woman on the verge Adam had described.
“No way. You watch this one, too?”
“First time in years. Brooke and Ridge are still together, it seems.”
“Back together,” Lanie corrected, joining me on the couch. “There have been plenty of intervening love affairs. She married his brother at one point, if you can believe it.”
I looked sideways at my sister, uncertain whether she was being purposefully ironic.
“Listen, Josie,” she said. “I’m really sorry about last night. It’s been a rough couple of weeks. Poppy Parnell has been hounding me incessantly, and then Mom . . . I guess I’m just a little more on edge than normal.”
I forced myself to nod while I scrutinized my sister, wondering if she was being entirely honest or if there was something more sinister lurking behind her big, sad eyes.
“What’s that?” Lanie asked suddenly, pointing at the UPS box still sitting in the corner.
“Mom’s stuff from the LFC. They sent it to us yesterday.”
Lanie rose silently and crossed to the box, kneeling almost reverentially before it. Carefully, she pulled open the flaps and dipped a hand inside.
“Look!” she exclaimed, lifting a pile of photographs. There had to be thirty or forty of them, neatly stacked and bound with green ribbon. The gummy infant smiles of my twin and me beamed up from the top photograph, and my heart swelled. She did think about us when she left. I moved to Lanie’s side, and we began peeling the photographs from the stack, one by one. I was in tears by the time we reached the last one, a snapshot of us as toddlers “helping” our mother bake cookies. Her arms were around both of us, beaming proudly, and there was pink frosting in our hair and on our noses.
Lanie traced the curls of our mother’s hair lightly with a fingertip. “I didn’t know she took these with her.”
“Me either. I thought she was trying to forget us.”
“Oh, Josie,” Lanie said, looking up with a pained expression. “You didn’t really think that.”
I briefly described my meeting with Sister Amamus in California, when I was told in no uncertain terms that our mother did not want to see me.
“We don’t know what her reasons were,” Lanie said. “But she always loved us.”
“Sometimes that’s hard to remember.”
“Here,” Lanie said, snatching one of the photographs and pushing it into my hands. Lanie and I were six years old, with gap-toothed smiles and sunburned cheeks, squinting at the camera, while our mother knelt in the middle, one arm around each of us, her dark hair caught in the wind, Mount Rushmore looming large and out of focus in the background. “Do you remember this road trip?”
I struggled to remember the trip as I studied the laughing, seemingly carefree face of our mother. Was she happy then? Or did she hide her sadness well?
“Was this the vacation where they sent us down to the pool on our own, and we got in trouble with the management?”
“No, you’re thinking of when we went to Yellowstone and stopped at that motel in Kansas. That was a few years later. The trip to Mount Rushmore was the one where Dad got lost, and we couldn’t find anywhere to eat. Remember? And they let us eat bags of potato chips in the backseat until we found that all-night diner? And then we had scrambled eggs and milkshakes at, like, ten o’clock?”
I smiled, the long-ago memory suddenly fresh: tired, smelly, barefoot, sitting in a shiny red vinyl booth, swapping sips of my strawberry milkshake with Lanie’s chocolate one, while Mom and Dad hunched over the counter, pointing at a map and talking with the smoky-voiced waitress, trying to figure out where we had gone wrong.
I picked up the pile of photographs again, hoping to recover more memories. As I flipped through the stack a second time, a vague sense of unease settled over me. I closely examined my mother’s face in a photograph of her in the garden with the two of us, trying to remember the exact tilt of her lips when she smiled, the pitch of her laughter. My eyes landed on a blurry figure over my mother’s shoulder in the photograph, and I squinted. I could make out the blond hair, the pink sundress. Melanie Cave.
Placing my thumb over Melanie’s unfocused face, I swallowed hard and asked Lanie, “Did you know about Melanie Cave?”