Marty and I have come to know each other well these past three years. He realizes that I am not being forthcoming, but still he does not push. I can hear him shuffle the paper he holds.
“There are two dragonflies, one slightly larger than the other. The artist has used a lot of color and bold swirling lines to create a distinctive image. The background is a complex pattern suggesting water and rocks and trees. The eyes on the dragonflies are riveting.”
The silence stretches for minutes, punctuated only by the soft breath of the sleeping girl. My mouth has gone dry, and I can hear my own heart beating.
“Where did you get it?” My voice breaks.
“It was in her violin case. There are others.”
I lean forward, whispering, not wanting to break the spell that hovers in the room, lingering on the notes of the now-silent violin. “Emily Livingstone, 1943. Sisters in Flight.”
22
Morgan
I wake to daylight brightening the room. My mouth feels like old shit, dry and furry, and a dull throb beats a steady rhythm behind my eyes. I roll onto my back, groaning, and squint up at the white ceiling, memories of the previous day slowly seeping back. Derrick. The cops. The drugs. The fight. The rye. The violin.
The violin.
I bolt upright, struggling free from the tangle of sheets and quilt, and land, my bare feet cold on the tile floor.
“Good morning.”
I spin toward her voice, and the room around me registers. The old lady is sitting in the chair, a silhouette against the window, wrapped in a blanket. I realize I’m dressed in a flannel nightgown, the kind grandmothers wear. My clothes are folded at the foot of the bed.
“What the hell?”
I sink back onto the bed.
“I trust you slept well?” she asks.
I bring my hands up to my face, rubbing my eyes and then running fingers through my hair. It’s still damp. The last few pieces of the puzzle settle into place. Crying in the old woman’s arms, babbling on—the whiskey did a great job of loosening my tongue, and I’ve made a stupid ass of myself. She brought me inside, with the help of some staff; tearstained, snotty, and empty. She made me shower. I let the hot water wash over me, peeling away the streaked makeup, the pain, the loneliness, and then passed out in her bed.
What a fucking idiot.
“Look, I’m really sorry about last night,” I mutter. “I was an assho— I mean . . .” I look up at her. “I was way out of line.” I grab my pile of clothes and stand up, heading to the washroom. “I’ll just get out of your way.”
“Who are you, Morgan?”
This stops me. What the hell kind of question is that? It makes me laugh. It’s like everything that’s happened in the past two weeks has been screaming that same question. Who am I? I can tell you my name: I’m Morgan Fletcher. But after that, all I am is a bunch of memories that are mine alone. To everyone else, I’m a few pieces of history bullet-pointed in a folder and stored in a social worker’s filing cabinet. I’m a child without a mother and a father no one knows anything about. A delinquent teen, living in a foster home, the now ex-girlfriend of a drug dealer, sitting in a borrowed nightgown, hungover, in the bedroom of a fucking senior home. Who am I? I’m just like Derrick said.
I’m nobody.
But I don’t say this. “What do you mean?”
The old woman sighs. “Marty found the pictures.”
I know right away what she means by the pictures, and this makes me angry. It doesn’t occur to me that it’s my own fault for getting wasted and leaving my violin case for just anybody to rifle through. But it pisses me off anyway. I turn and face her, clutching my clothes to my chest, like they’re my violin, like I’m protecting them. “What the hell are you doing going through my things?”
“Do you really think you’re in any position to ask that?” She snorts. “Fine question coming from someone who felt perfectly at liberty to poke around in mine. Twice.” I guess she knows I went through her medicine cabinet. “For god’s sakes, Morgan, you’re lucky those pictures didn’t blow away last night when you were carrying on like some tragic spectacle, holding a pitiful drunken midnight performance for a building full of old folks. What on earth were you thinking?”
“I don’t need this shit.” I sit back down on the bed and start pulling on my jeans. “A building full of old folks—blind, deaf, and mostly dead. I obviously wasn’t thinking.”
“Cut the crap, Morgan. You came here for a reason.”
“Your words, old woman. Your words.”
“I may be more than half blind, but that doesn’t mean I don’t see things. And while death prowls, my feet are still firmly planted in this world, and with each breath I take, I am living. What I heard last night was not happenstance, a return to the scene of your graffiti crime. You came here for a reason. What are you looking for, Morgan?”
I continue to struggle into my clothes.
Her voice loses some of its edge. “The pictures. The violin. The song.” She pauses, “Who taught you that song?”
I stop, one black boot in my hands. It had been his favorite. He never taught it to me, but I heard it many times and found it easy to pick up the melody, copying it from memory. He usually played it on nights when whiskey was in the tin cup, the wind howling around our little cabin while the woodstove popped and crackled in the background. After I was tucked into bed and he thought I was sleeping, he would tune the violin and play. It was light and upbeat, but still it always seemed so sad to me. And the pictures; they were hidden for years. He never spoke of them. I had never seen them when he was alive.
“Morgan, who is he?”
I look at the journals, still on the table where I left them yesterday, the dragonflies sleeping between the yellowed pages.
“My grandfather.”
23
Elizabeth
I close my eyes and lean back against the threadbare fabric of the chair. He had a granddaughter.
24
Morgan
I drop the boot and collapse back onto the bed. My hands find their way back to my face, and this time, I leave them there. The tears start again; I can’t stop them. They seep out from between my fingers. It’s a release. But still I want to hide. I’m ashamed to be so vulnerable.
“Did he draw the pictures?” I whisper.
Miss Livingstone stands and walks to the dresser, her hands exploring the items arranged there until they find the framed paintings. She picks one up, the dragonflies, and turns back to face me. “No.” She crosses the room and sits down on the bed. “No. They are Emily’s.”
I wipe my face with my sleeve. “Emily’s?” I sit up. Emily. That explains their appearance in the journals. That explains the collection on Miss Livingstone’s dresser. But it doesn’t explain how they ended up tucked behind the velvet lining of a violin case belonging to an old fisherman who lived in a rundown shack with his granddaughter.
Emily. Emily Livingstone.
Who are you?
25
Elizabeth