“Och, non! Ce n’est pas moi. This is not me. I have no twin. No brothers and sisters at all. Only me.”
“Oh, I just assumed, since you kept the photo all these years, that it must be—”
“Relatives,” Mrs. Saint said. “Cousins. On my Edouard’s side. I hardly even knew them.”
She flipped the photo over. I’ll show you how little these people mean to me, she seemed to be saying. Markie thought the tears she had seen in the woman’s eyes when Jesse first produced the picture told a different story. But Mrs. Saint had been released from the hospital only an hour earlier, and she had been robbed the night before. Today was not the day to press her.
“Anyway, I must go,” Mrs. Saint said. “Before they all come to check me up.”
“Can I walk you to your room?” Jesse asked, and to Markie’s surprise, Mrs. Saint agreed.
He stepped to her, and she took his elbow and held out the ring and photograph. “Thank you for finding,” she said. “Now, on y va. Let us go. Frédéric will be having his own heart troubles if I am not back in my bed very soon.”
Markie said goodbye and went home. An hour later, Jesse walked in.
“I thought Lola left,” Markie said. “What were you doing over there for so long?”
“Looking for more stuff.”
“Did you find anything?”
He held out another photograph. “I’m going back tomorrow, when it’s lighter. This was way back, about ten feet from the garage. Must’ve gotten blown by the wind. I’m thinking there might be more stuff where I found this.”
“Why didn’t you take it right in the house to her?”
“When I left, she told me she was going to take a nap. And, also, I thought you should see it.”
“Why?”
He held it out and she took it. The photo showed twin girls, about seven or eight, wearing matching dresses and birthday hats. They held hands and giggled, and one waved to someone outside the frame.
Markie looked up at her son, then back to the picture. “The one waving,” she said as she studied the girls’ faces more carefully. “Don’t you think she’s a dead ringer for—?”
“Read it,” he said. “The back.”
She flipped the photo over: Angeline et Simone, 7ème anniversaire.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The Frenchwoman was standing in the bungalow again, only a few days after Halloween, trying to convince Markie to keep Lola every evening while Patty was “out.” Lola hadn’t stopped talking about how much fun she’d had at the bungalow, Mrs. Saint said, and for her own part, she couldn’t stop thinking about how much better off the girl would be if she spent part of each night in a home that insisted on bathing and teeth brushing. Jesse had even read to the girl before bed! No one did that for her at Patty’s apartment.
Markie stood in the middle of the family room, her feet planted wide, her arms crossed in front of her. If there were a mirror nearby, she was certain her reflection would show smoke coming out of her ears. She had told her neighbor twice, and not in a subtle way, what an inconvenience it had been for her and Jesse to be woken in the middle of the night in order to hand Lola back to her mother. How they had been too exhausted to think the next day, let alone complete the work they each had to do.
None of this had registered with Mrs. Saint, evidently, so Markie repeated it for a third time now, adding for clarity that there was no way she was going to sign on for that kind of interruption on a nightly basis. Mrs. Saint only blinked uncomprehendingly, as though Markie was complaining about nothing. Yet when Markie tossed the issue back to her—“Why doesn’t Lola stay with you every evening?”—the old woman waved her hands as though it was out of the question.
“Why?” Markie demanded. “Why are you standing there acting like it should be no trouble at all for me when you won’t even take her?”
Her answer was a blank stare.
It didn’t surprise Markie, but it aggravated her, and she stomped to the kitchen counter, plucked up the photo that Jesse had found the night before, and marched back to Mrs. Saint, shoving it in her face.
“You are full of requests for things I should do to help your employees,” she said. “And you have no end of questions for me and my son about our lives. And yet anytime I ask you the simplest question about anything to do with your life, you have no answer!” Mrs. Saint reached for the photo, but Markie hung on to it, and with a dramatic flourish, she turned it over so the handwriting was in the old woman’s face, undeniable: Angeline et Simone, 7ème anniversaire .
“‘Are you a twin?’ I asked you last night,” Markie said, still holding the photo out of Mrs. Saint’s reach. “‘Oh, non,’ you said. ‘I’m not a twin. In fact, I never even had siblings! Those twin girls in the pram in the other photo? Edouard’s cousins! Not me. Not my twin.’ When in fact, it was you! You and Simone, your twin sister! And my guess is that the kids in that other photo were an older brother and sister. So you have three siblings, in fact, not ‘none!’
“That’s two lies from you this week alone! Who knows how many others you’ve told since we moved in! How many secrets you’ve kept, all while trying to get at all of mine! And now you’re standing here, in my house, asking me to look after a child whose mother disappears every night to somewhere you refuse to name! You can understand why I’m getting a little tired of this, can’t you?”
Before the other woman could answer, Markie said, “Never mind! Don’t answer that! I expect you won’t understand! But understand this: I am finished with your secrets and your nonsense! I’m not asking you any more questions about your life. There’s no point. But you need to be finished, too. Do not ask me anything more about me, and do not ask me to help your employees again!
“Don’t ask my son, either. He can work for you until he has paid Mr. Levin. After that, he’s done. And when February comes and our half-year lease is up, he and I are leaving. I hear you’ve been hinting that he should ask me to extend the lease. You somehow know that the landlord would be willing to do that for us, even though my deadline for extending has passed. Of course, I’m sure you won’t tell me how you know that, so I’m not going to ask that, either.”
Trembling, Markie offered the photo at last, and Mrs. Saint took it, staring for a long time at the inscription on the back before finally turning it over to see the two little girls at their birthday. Without waiting for the woman to react or explain, Markie marched to the door, opened it, and motioned with her hand for Mrs. Saint to leave.
“I am sorry,” Mrs. Saint said softly, her eyes still on the photograph. “This is something I do not like to speak of. So I lie about it. I . . . pretend she never existed.”
“Why?” Markie demanded.
But she didn’t step away from the door, and she made another sweeping motion with her hand. Even if she were to get an answer, which she doubted, she preferred to hear it as the woman was on her way out.