“She was bringing it to you?” I ask.
My mother leans back in her chair. “Maybe. It was too late. I wasn’t there anymore, so she never found me.”
“Dad said you took the other half with you when you left us.”
“I did, but that, I don’t have anymore. It’s back home.” She flinches. “In Fitchburg, I mean. That’s where my parents are buried.”
I hate to ask anything else, because I’m still trying to pretend I don’t care about anything but Dad. But I came all this way. “Would you ever have tried to find me? I mean . . . I thought you were a total broken mess, but here you have this, like, perfect life. Did you just forget about me?”
She gives me this pitying look, and it makes me feel like the kid again. “Imogene, you don’t just forget your daughter. There were times when I had to fight, every damn day, just to be here. I wish I’d gotten help sooner. But sometimes, all I could do was . . . I would draw.”
“Monsters, right? Made-up shit?” I think of Lil and my mother in their tent in that tangled backyard, of the shredded butcher paper balled up and stuffed in my garbage can at home.
Silently, she rises and leaves the kitchen. After a few minutes I think I’ve chased her away for good, and I’m not sure how to feel about that. But she comes back in and thumps a sketchbook down on the table. A thick cream one, much smaller than her drawing pad, bound like any book, with a deep seam down the spine. The cover’s splattered with pen and paint and god knows what else. It looks like my much-abused copy of Rebecca. She slides it across to me. I waver for a second before opening it.
Inside are drawings of little girls. Except they’re not all little. There are babies, and toddlers, and kindergarten-age girls and school-age girls and teenagers. After studying them, I realize they’re actually all the same girl, just at different ages. And they’re all familiar. They all look sort of like me.
Not exactly like me. The toddler is chubby and smiling, where I was thin and always looked a little angry/creepy, thanks to the frowny mouth. The ten-or-so-year-old has too-long hair and a ski-slope nose like Sidonie and wears braids, which I never did. Dad didn’t know how to braid. And the teenager is infinitely more stylish, and doesn’t have my kind of pear shape. They’ve all got thinner lips than mine, and the teenager’s hands look like smoother, younger versions of Sidonie’s.
These drawings aren’t of me, but of the way my mother imagined I might be. And there are pages and pages and pages of them. A whole book of them.
I paw at my eyes with the back of my hand.
Sidonie takes the book from me and slowly reaches for my arm, like she’s afraid I’ll jump away. “Were you really, honestly all right? Were you telling the truth when you said you and your dad were okay on your own?” Her eyes are huge in her small face. “You don’t have to make me feel better. I don’t deserve it.”
I try to think of an answer, but instead I find myself thinking of handsome forensic pathologist Miles Faye. The first thing he tells you about himself is how he can read bodies like they’re books. The plot of A Time to Chill kicks off with a simple, fascinating case that Miles solves easily. One of those gambits that shows us how brilliant he is, so that when the real mystery hits, we know it’s a big deal. Seven be-suited businessmen are pulled from Boston Harbor on a winter night, the luxury cruiser they’d inexplicably rented for twilight sail having sunk miles out. Though they floated for a long time, the men were A-OK when they came out of the freezing water, chatting happily with the Coast Guard aboard the rescue boat, accepting cups of coffee. They went below decks to dry off and wrap up, and every one of the seven dropped down dead.
Miles looked at those blue-lipped bodies and knew immediately that:
1) All of the men had been drugged—by poisoned complimentary champagne aboard the rental boat, it later turned out, which is how they ended up in the water in the first place.
2) The men suffered from rewarming shock, wherein their icy hearts, once warmed, failed in the absence of blood. “The heart can take the cold,” Miles said. “Sometimes it’s the thaw that kills it.”