Attempting to converse with Diana as though I didn’t know her well required concentration, not to mention acting skills.
“Thank you. I really appreciate this.” I wondered if my outburst at Eddie’s had already spread its way through the local grapevine, praying it had not; Diana might reconsider allowing a potentially crazy person into her home, no matter how well she knew my mother.
“No problem!” she said. “That old junk has taken up space in my attic for too long. I’ll put on some coffee.”
I descended the stairs to find Mom and Aunt Jilly sleeping on the couch, one on each end, their legs tangled together atop the middle cushion. They’d still been up when I went to bed last night and I paused on the landing, observing from above; my mother and my auntie, two of the women from whom I’d learned how to love, to find joy in small details, to appreciate life. I sank to the faded carpet, perching on a stair riser, unwilling to disturb them just yet. Mom’s straight hair fell like a silk scarf along her right shoulder, rich golden-blond, gorgeous hair I’d always wished I inherited. So thin I could see her collarbones poking through her shirt; her thinness frightened me on an elemental level, suggesting illness, or despair.
How could we have known the significance of what happened that summer, how much Blythe’s presence affected the rest of our lives?
I’d never fully comprehended the power of one event to trigger a series of them, to tip the future in one direction or another. At some level, of course, I’d realized, but I’d taken for granted that my life followed a particular path; the path I was meant to walk, I’d so innocently believed.
Did I deserve my life as a married mother of five?
Mathias and I were so happy.
But maybe that’s all the time we were meant to have together.
I bent forward, wrapping into my own arms, but no amount of pressure could combat the ache of considering such a possibility.
Maybe this is what I deserve. Separated from Mathias, just like Malcolm was separated from Cora. Maybe this is our fate and I never wanted to accept the truth.
Tish had insisted otherwise. I glanced toward the small leather trunk in which Malcolm’s photograph had been stored for many decades, the photograph now propped against the lamp on my nightstand where it belonged. The photo and the letter existed exactly as I remembered them, as did the other items Mom and Aunt Jilly had turned up in the trunks from our attic; another of which was an old tin print contained in a fragile oval frame. The man peering outward from the brown-toned image was young and smooth-cheeked, so handsome he was almost beautiful. He was the first Davis in Minnesota, we believed, and wore a pale military uniform we guessed was from the Civil War era.
There were no other artifacts from the nineteenth century, no hint that Ruthann or Marshall might have been here in Minnesota at that time. The bulk of the documents, photos, and letters were from later decades, after Myrtle Jean Davis built and founded Shore Leave in the 1930s. Myrtle Jean had been my grandmother’s maternal grandmother. Despite several marriages, Myrtle Jean never changed her surname from Davis and raised my great-grandmother, Louisa, and another daughter, Minnie, all on her own. Louisa, in turn, grew up to raise two daughters, Ellen and Joan; Joan was Mom and Aunt Jilly’s mother, and my grandma. We’d unearthed a marriage certificate for Grandma and her first and only husband, Mick Douglas – the grandfather I’d never known.
But nothing new. No clues or hints as to why some things remained just as I recalled and others had changed so drastically.
It’s like unraveling a tapestry someone started weaving at the dawn of time, Aunt Jilly had said last night. A fucking single skein could change the pattern of the whole thing. How do you trace the altered thread to its source?
None of us had a good answer.
No sounds came from the kitchen, no scent of perking coffee, but I was glad for the silence; no need to make conversation. Rather than disturb Mom and Jilly I crept back upstairs, forgoing a shower in favor of brushing my teeth and slinging my long hair in a ponytail. I dressed in faded jeans and an old green sweater, still undone by the sight of my high, firm breasts and unlined stomach in the bathroom mirror. It was a stranger’s body, youthful and slender. How I had mourned the loss of my taut teenaged figure in the days after Millie Jo was born; I’d been only seventeen, after all, immature and overtired, unaccustomed to the unceasing demands of motherhood.
And what I wouldn’t give now for the return of breasts and belly marked by the rigors of pregnancy and nursing, a soft, stretch-marked body which had contained and grown and cherished five new lives.
Clamping down on those thoughts, I hurried across the slushy parking lot, devoid of any cars but our own, and climbed into the green Toyota. I drove slowly around Flickertail to the Carters’ house, a gorgeous modern cabin a quarter-mile down the lake road from their family business, White Oaks Lodge. The little homesteader’s cabin in which Mathias and I had lived for the past eight years was tucked in the woods beyond White Oaks; I couldn’t bear to think of it today, rundown and lonely, devoid of our busy family.
I knocked on the wide front doors of Mathias’s childhood home.
Diana answered immediately, a pretty, petite woman with shining auburn hair, offering a polite but impersonal smile; I was all but a stranger to her in this life, not the wife of her beloved only son. It felt unnatural not to hug her. I entered to the scent of baking bread and coffee and something sweet, like melting chocolate; Diana took my coat, making genial small talk, asking about Mom and Aunt Jilly and
