Out the door and into the Subaru the minute my heart reverted to a normal rhythm. Down the half hour to Sterns, then onto Fox Road. When Annabelle opened the door I held the photo up in front of her, pincered between my thumb and forefinger. She leaned back instead of forward—middle-aged eyes, reversing course—and squinted. When she didn’t say anything, I waved it back and forth, dancing it through the air between us. I didn’t trust the steps I was standing on. They were made of plastic and flimsy metals. They could give way at any time. I waited for her to say something.
“Nice to see you too, Clara,” was what she said, after a minute or so. She stood aside so that I could come in, but I didn’t move. From what I could see and smell there was nothing baking in her kitchen, nothing bubbling on the stove under a pot lid. “How can I help you?”
I said nothing. I stood there and kept holding the photo. If my instinct was right, then Annabelle would crumple before my silence and tell me what she knew about this unfamiliar Tamar Winter dancing in the air before her. She would tell me about the look on my mother’s face. She would tell me who had taken the photo.
I stood silently, and so did Annabelle. She tilted her head as if she were trying to figure out why I was holding the photo before her like a piece of evidence. She frowned. She looked at me, except not really, because her eyes didn’t meet mine. And when someone’s eyes won’t meet yours, even though you can tell they’re trying to make their eyes meet yours, when their face turns even a fraction of an inch away from yours, when you can feel the unease flowing through their body even though they are forcing themselves to stand elaborately, casually still, that’s your answer.
Cultivate silence. Silence, and patience, and determination.
Now that I had my answer—she knew who had taken that photo—I stepped inside. The trailer felt warm. Not thermostat warm, not oil or gas or baseboard or electric-space-heater warm but warm by nature, as if Annabelle herself, the great furnace of her body and her heart, were all that was necessary. I pulled out a chair from the kitchen table and sat down. Annabelle stood across the table from me. She was trying to intimidate me by not sitting down, not joining me, as if that would make me stop whatever it was I was doing. Too late, Annabelle. You’ve already given yourself away and there’s no going back.
I laid the photo in the precise middle of the table. “Who took this?”
“No clue.” She was trying not to look at the photo but her eyes kept dragging back to it, as though there were something fascinating about it.
“Where was it taken?”
“No idea.”
“When was it taken?”
“You got me.”
The kitchen was the detaining room and Annabelle was the suspect, trying her best not to cave until the public defender arrived.
“Annabelle, tell me what you know.”
She shrugged. “It’s a nice photo of your mother. Something else to add to the pile.”
“The pile? The pile of what?”
“Things you have of her. Memorabilia.”
“She’s still around, Annabelle. She’s not dead.”
“You know what I mean.”
The sentences sounded like Annabelle sentences but the Annabelle-ness of her voice was gone. She sounded quiet. She sounded tired. The photo lay on the table between us, a jigsaw piece missing its puzzle. She pressed down on one slightly ripped corner with the tip of her finger, as if she were trying to make it whole again.
“You know more than you’re telling me,” I said. “Please, Annabelle. I’m trying to figure out my mother.”
I meant to sound like a detective, insistent on the piece of evidence on the table between us, but I didn’t. I sounded like myself.
“Did she . . . have a boyfriend?”
It didn’t come out right when I said it. There was a squeak at the end of boy, and friend trailed off. I tried again. “Or, like, a girlfriend?” That didn’t sound right either.
She shook her head. Immediate and clear. No. Not a girlfriend.
“Some guy? After I went away, maybe?”
Shake. No one in my mother’s life after I went away. But she kept shaking her head, too long to make a point, and suddenly another possibility came to me.
“Are you saying there was a man in my mother’s life when I was around? Before I went to college?”
She kept shaking her head, or trying to, but her eyes slid away. The giveaway.
“Before I went away?” I said. Repeating myself, as if there were a chance she didn’t understand. “While I was still here? I mean here as in Sterns, living with her in our house? Back then?”
She wouldn’t look at me.
“Who?” I said.
Silence.
“WHO.”
Silence.
“I will find out, Annabelle.” My voice was on the edge of breaking. My most-hated voice, the tremble. “If not from you, then from someone.”
She put her hands on the back of the chair in front of her and sighed. “Clara. Leave it be now.”
“I can’t leave it be when I don’t know what it was. Who it was. My mother had a boyfriend? And I never knew?” The italics went squiggling by at the bottom of my mind.
“Honey,” which was something that Annabelle had not once, ever, called me or anyone else I knew, “it was long ago and far away. Leave it be.”
And that was it. She was done talking.
* * *
“Who was it, Dog?” I said to his ashes.
Dog must have known. If there was someone in my mother’s life, before I left or after I left or in the middle of my leaving, Dog would have smelled him. The nose of a dog could smell 400,000 times better than a human’s nose, although how any scientist knew that for sure, with that level of precision, was beyond me. But the fact was, Dog would have been able to smell the scent of anyone who came within touching distance of my mother. One deep snuff, the way he used to do when we came home from anywhere we’d been, no matter how close or how far, was all he needed.
Dog had known. Annabelle had known. The someone my mother loved had known. Who else had known?
Had she kissed this person, whoever he was? Had she taken her clothes off with him? Slept with him? I sounded like a child. I sounded like an idiot. I sounded the way a person stepping gingerly into an ice-cold lake looks.
“For God’s sake, Clara,” I said out loud. “Don’t be a fool. Of course she did.”
Who had he been, though? Someone up north, in Watertown, maybe—I seized on Watertown because my mother had spent many days there, scraping old decals off milk trucks and applying new ones—and maybe there was a man up there who she worked with. It couldn’t have been anyone in Sterns. They whisked through my mind anyway, random neighbors and teachers and men, their faces as familiar to me as the urn that held Dog’s ashes: Burl Evans, William T. Jones, young Joe Miller the mechanic, Mr. Silvester the custodian, every male teacher I’d ever had from Sterns Elementary and Sterns Middle and Sterns High School. No. None of them. It was not possible. Except that it was.
“How oblivious did I have to be, not to notice what was happening, Dog?”
Very.
“Was she that good an actress?”
No.
“So you’re saying that I just didn’t notice? That I had one vision of her and no room for anything else?”