Lil makes her way back into the kitchen with a small stack of photos and time-rippled papers in her hands. “Here’s all I got. That’s my number on that sticky note, but it’s a home phone. I don’t see much need to carry a little phone around all the time. If I wanted to talk to anybody, I’d call. And I usually don’t want to talk.”
Greedily, I flip through the pictures. There’s a fuzzy baby photo in the pile, a little bald, hazel-eyed girl wriggling on a patchwork quilt, her oversize head tilted toward the camera with great effort. In Dad’s office there’s a picture of me just like this. I’m maybe a few months old, wallowing on a blue shag rug strewn with soft, plasticized baby books, my enormous skull wobbling so precariously that even though it’s a moment frozen on film, you could swear I’m about to face plant into Goodnight Moon. Dad insists “book” was my first word, though sometimes Lindy swears the first words out of my mouth must have been “I’m fine, I don’t need any help, go away.”
Next is a picture of two little girls, the younger in brown pigtails, the older one a dirty shade of blond. Mom and Lil stand on the lawn of a church. Lil surprises me by tapping the picture with a fingernail bitten down to the skin. “That’s the church we used to walk to each week. And our mamas would let me and Sid take the long way around Crocker Field on the way to Sid’s house for Sunday lunch. I swear you could hear the crack of the baseball bats from her backyard. Smell the hot dogs.”
I nod, wondering what goes on in Sunday school—Dad and I are not church people, though I’ve been in one, for Ma Ma Scott’s funeral.
In the next picture, Mom is still small, but alone by a wiry, forked birch tree in a front yard, the sky behind the little house awash in the yellow light of bad weather. Chain link borders the scrappy yard. My mother’s childhood home?
I flip to a Polaroid of teenage Sidonie in a very early-nineties prom dress, in front of a tall brick building with Fitchburg High School, Home of the Red Raiders emblazoned on a sign. Her dress is long and straight and silvery, with a ruffled bit draped over her breasts like a curtain valance. Her date stands behind her: a tall black teenager with the kind of high pillar of hair I recognize from nineties TV shows. The tip of her head comes up only to the padded shoulders of his navy suit. Even though she’s awkward in the picture, elbows away from her body, pink-lipsticked smile showing all the wrong teeth, he looks thrilled to be with her. His grin is huge, and his hand rests lightly on her arm, like if he couldn’t touch her he wouldn’t believe his luck.
The last and latest is Mom, pregnant in the shade of a birch tree, in front of a gray stone fountain I recognize from the Patty Linden Memorial Park in Sugarbrook.
Clutching the photos, I want to say, Great, this helps; here’s my number and thanks for your time. I’ll make my way out of this dim apartment, which is weird—pickles-in-your-desk-drawer weird. I wasn’t expecting Lil to bake us scones or break into “Be Our Guest,” but if she couldn’t have been happy to see me, she might’ve been . . . interested? Instead of acting like her estranged cousin’s daughter is some Girl Scout selling charity magazine subscriptions to support underage monkeys or cure albinism.
Jessa stands up from the table, which is my ticket to ride. But when I open my mouth, the one question I’ve wanted to ask all along bubbles out. “Did she ever ask about me?”
Lil’s whole face slides downward just a bit, but she clamps her jaw and tightens up. “Last time we talked, she never said much about anyone but herself.”
I wish I knew what Lil was thinking. Sherlock Holmes would know. On the one hand, that guy is bug nuts—he’s selfish, rude, and messy. He leaves beakers and pipettes and knives and poisoned shoe polish lying all around. Sometimes Watson wakes up to find Holmes watching him from the foot of the bed at five a.m. He solves a lot of mysteries after sulking on the couch in his sitting room for days. Confession: when I read A Study in Scarlet, the first book about Sherlock Holmes and his lifelong sidekick, Dr. John Watson, I paid particular attention to the scene where Watson walks in to find Holmes on his back, staring with dulled eyes at the ceiling of No. 22IB Baker Street. Dad did the same in the bad times, a few of which I’d seen before we went to Lindy, and I thought maybe it was because that was how he figured out his mysteries. So Dad needed a little help sometimes—so what? Holmes needs Watson, and not just to fetch his shoes or write his biography. Watson brings him cases to solve when he’s been sitting around for weeks shooting morphine and cocaine. Watson’s the keeper of all the knowledge Holmes considers beneath him—literature, philosophy, politics. He didn’t even know the Earth revolved around the sun till Watson told him so, for god’s sake.