leafing through some papers. She pulled out a manila envelope, came over, and got down on one knee beside my chair. She opened the flap and handed me a photograph.
It was an eight-by-ten black and white. It was Eleanor in jeans and a sleeveless blouse, taken in the summertime in good light. She was leaning against the door of an old frame building, smoking a cigarette and smiling in a sly, sexy way. “Nice picture,” I said.
But I looked again and in fact it wasn’t a nice picture. It was her eyes, I thought, and that killer smile. She looked almost predatory.
“It’s not her,” Amy said.
I turned the picture over. On the bottom, handwritten in fading ink, was an inscription.
35
Isn’t that a kick in the head,“ Amy said, looking around my shoulder. ”Imagine looking at a mirror image of yourself, in a picture taken the year you were born. I thought about it for weeks, you know, whether I should show it to her or not. I knew the minute I saw it that nothing good would come of it. I felt all along that I should’ve burned it.“
“Why didn’t you?”
“It didn’t seem like I had the right. It wasn’t my call to make.”
“What did you do?”
“One day I just showed it to her. She had come out to Mamma’s to help me get started on going through things. We putzed around all morning on the first floor—I didn’t even want to go upstairs where all this stuff was— and we were sitting in the kitchen having lunch. It had been on my mind all morning, and I still didn’t know what to do. Then she looked across the table at me and said, ‘You’re like the sister I never had, you’re just so special, and I’m happier than you’ll ever know that we’re okay again.’ I felt tears in my eyes and I knew then that I had to tell her, there was no stopping it, and the best I could do was put a happy face on it.”
“How did she take it?”
“I couldn’t tell at first. I was hoping she’d look up and shrug it off, say something like, ‘Yeah, I never told you, I was adopted,’ and that would be the end of it. Then we could laugh about it and let it blow away and I could rest in peace knowing I’d done right by her. But the longer she sat there, the worse it got, and I came around the table and took her hands, and I knew for sure then that it had just knocked her props out. Her whole world was scrambled, it was like she couldn’t think straight for a long time, like she couldn’t get a grip on what she was seeing. I put my hand on her shoulder and said something stupid about what a coincidence it was, but we both knew better. There’s no way.”
“Then what happened?”
“She said she had to go home, she wasn’t feeling well. And she left.”
“Did you see her again after that?”
“Yeah, she called the next day and asked if she could come out to the house again and look through the stuff in the attic. So we did that. I worked downstairs and she sat all day in that hot attic, going through papers and old letters.”
“Did she tell you if she found anything?”
“All I know is, she didn’t
“Were there other pictures?”
“There was a whole roll taken at this same place. I think Mamma took them; it’s her handwriting on the back and I know she was doing some photography then. There were maybe twenty shots of different people.”
“Do you have the other pictures?”
“They’d still be out at the house, up in the attic.”
“Were they people you knew?”
“Mostly, yeah: there were pictures of Gaston and Crystal and Archie. God, were they young!”
“What about Darryl and Richard Grayson?”
“I don’t think so. But I wouldn’t know them if I saw them. I think they were just friends of Mamma’s, way back then.”
“Do you know if Eleanor ever told Crystal about this?”
“No, and I wasn’t going to. I felt like I’d done enough harm.”
“Then it’s possible they still don’t know.”
“Yeah, sure it is. But we can’t tell them. The last thing Ellie said to me was not to tell anybody, especially not Crystal and Gaston. She made me promise I wouldn’t.”
“It takes courage to break a promise like that. Sometimes you have to, if the person’s welfare is at stake.”
“Is that what you think?”
“I don’t know what I think. Has anybody else been up in that attic since your mother died?”
“There was a man who came, just after it happened.”
