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I’d also begun offering craft classes in the community. My favorite was a scrapbooking class for seniors over at the Champlain Seniors’ Center. In addition to tonight’s mirror arts class, I had a quilting class. Plus, I had plenty more classes in the planning stages.
Johanna was wearing two different colored socks I noticed, as we headed back down the stairs. I smiled to myself. Johanna was good for me. My funky friend brought a lightness to my life that had been absent for too long.
Three women were waiting under the awning at the locked front door. “Hello, ladies,” I said cheerfully, letting them in. “There’s a bit of time, so if you want, you can pop over next door and grab a coffee. They’re still open for a few more minutes. We won’t start without you.” I poked my head outside and looked through the large glass windows into the brightly lit coffee shop. But of course the man who got his coffee the same time I did each morning wouldn’t be there. What was I thinking? And why was I even looking for him?
I was about to turn back when I saw something. Or felt something. It was as if a dark hand had waved across the coffee shop windows. It disappeared so quickly that I couldn’t get a handle on it, couldn’t figure it out. A person? A cloud? Fog? What?
I held my sweater closed at my throat, but the sense of something, or someone, there made me quiver. I thought of my aunt’s constant premonitions, her asking me to make a promise before she died. “Don’t go back to Vermont. Whatever you do, don’t ever go back to Vermont, Marylee. Promise me this!”
And I had looked at her skeletal face, wasted by the cancer that would take her in a matter of weeks, and made no such promise. Instead, I’d wept as I’d smoothed a wet cloth on the forehead of my mother’s sister, the woman who’d raised me.
A chill so profound started at the tip of my toes and ended in a place near my forehead. I closed my eyes briefly.
“Are you okay?” A woman with gray curls approached me.
“Just a chill. It’s cold out there,” I said.
“Do you think so?” said someone else overhearing the tail end of our conversation.
“Warm for this time of year,” said another from across the room.
“Supposed to rain,” said someone else.
And while the ladies talked on about the weather, I drew back into my cheerful shop and made my way to the craft table in the rear. Earlier I had set out pieces of mirror, both glass and plastic. At each place I’d laid a nine-by-twelve mirror. I’d instructed the ladies to bring photos or pictures from magazines that they wanted to use in their mosaics. For those who hadn’t brought pictures, I had a stack of old tourist magazines featuring scenes from Vermont and other parts of New England they could cut pages from. I had told them this was going to be a fun class and that anybody could do it. Even Johanna, who claimed she couldn’t draw a straight line with a ruler, was going to participate.
Two more ladies entered; another two went for coffee and a few more sat down at the table and fingered through pieces of mirror.
“I’ve done decoupage, but never with mirrors,” one said.
“It’s something I learned from my aunt,” I said with forced cheerfulness. I was still reeling from what I’d seen out there. Or hadn’t seen. “But watch your fingers. Some of those pieces are sharp. We don’t need any cut fingers tonight.”
Ten minutes later all eleven women had arrived. Most of them seemed to know each other already. I had us fill out colored name tags with marking pens, but this was obviously more for my benefit than theirs. I stood at the head of a long table and began to explain mirror mosaic art as taught to me by Aunt Rose.
“Is it like tole painting?” asked a woman whose name tag read Gladys.
“Not really,” I explained. “It’s a bit like decoupage. But not exactly. It a bit dif—” I stopped. I began choking, coughing. I put my hand to my throat. My eyes went wide. I couldn’t breathe. One of the ladies reached into her purse and handed me a paper-wrapped cough candy. “Thank you,” I managed to say. I tried unwrapping it, but my fingers refused to find the edges of the wrapper.
This wasn’t an ordinary tickle in my throat. A woman named Beryl was smoothing out the picture she’d brought with her. It was the same exact picture I had kept in the frame on my nightstand for all of my growing-up years. It was the picture that had listened to all my whispered prayers and thoughts. It was the picture I had said good-night to almost every night of my life, and the one I had said good morning to when I woke up. I was still coughing. I needed to sit. I needed to flee. I needed to throw up. I closed my eyes. I swallowed.
Johanna drew back, put her hand to her mouth.
I pointed to the picture, astounding even myself by my ability to ask Beryl in a very calm voice, “Where did you get that picture? Do you know those people? Are they related to you?” Could this little owl-like woman with the oversized glasses be a relative of mine? Some distant aunt? Did she know my aunt Rose?
She shook her head. “This is just a magazine picture, dear. I cut it out years ago. I’ve always thought the picture so lovely and romantic.”
“What magazine?” I managed to ask.
“I have no idea. It was one of those magazines that had romance stories. Not many of them do anymore, you know. There was a time when every women’s magazine had a romance story. I miss that.”
Several women nodded in agreement. Several more looked up at me, concern across their faces.
“But what magazine? When?”
“Oh, my dear, that would be years ago now.”
I kept looking at her and asked, “Did you…Have you lived here a long time?”
She shook her head and said, “We moved here when Bert retired. That would be ten years.”
“Then do you know these people?” I pointed at the picture.
Her eyebrows screwed together into one long brow across her face. I was conscious of time standing still, of the rest of the class regarding me, but I had to know.
“No, dear,” she said. “I told you. This is just a picture from a magazine.”
“But, um…” I couldn’t take my eyes from the picture, the two of them, my parents in a stranger’s hands.
I had lived with the story of my parents for as long as I could remember. They’d died in a car accident, the details of which were too painful for my aunt to ever fully talk to me about. Even when she was dying, she’d refused to tell me about the particulars of the accident. Was it a head-on collision? Was it a drunk driver? Had the car skidded out of control on icy or wet roads? When I would ask these questions, my aunt would simply turn her head away from me, tears at the edges of her eyes. I finally figured out that losing her sister was so painful to her that she couldn’t, wouldn’t talk about it. But I never stopped asking.
I looked around me. “Do any of you remember Allen and Sandra Simson? They would have lived here a long time ago, around thirty years now.”
The ladies looked at each other and shook their heads.
I took a deep breath. “How about Rose Carlson? Do any of you know Rose Carlson? Or her sister, Sandra Carlson? That would have been her name before she was married.”
All around were mystified head shakes. By now I felt so nauseated I could barely stand. I felt hot and cold all at once. Without further explanation, I fled to my little bathroom in the back, where I leaned both hands on the edge of the sink and looked at myself in the mirror. I was freezing. I was sweating. Peas of moisture beaded on my forehead, yet my throat was dry. I swallowed several times and just managed not to throw up. Breathe. Breathe, I told myself. Something else was bothering me, something I’d shoved to the back of my mind for all these years, something I didn’t confront, couldn’t. But something that was even now staring me in the face. I looked up at the reflection of my own face in the mirror above the sink. That beautiful, barefoot woman with the long hair was not my mother. The two in the picture were not my parents.
I could hear Johanna in the other room. “Well, ladies, let me go see how Marylee is. Keep leafing through the magazines and we’ll be right back.”
A moment later her hand was on my neck.
“Did you see the picture?” I asked.
“I did, Marylee. I did. But there’s going to be a simple explanation. After the class, I’ll come up to your apartment and we’ll figure it all out.” Her voice was soothing, and I was so glad she was my friend and that she was with me tonight.
“But why?” I asked. “Where did Beryl’s picture come from? Where did my picture come from?”
After my aunt Rose had died and my engagement had fallen apart, I’d come here to Burlington, Vermont. It was the only thing I could really do. Even despite her Cassandra-like warnings, I was born here and had lived here for the three years prior to my aunt driving us out west. The secrets lay somewhere here in Burlington. I just had to find them. Of course, I had researched the accident. Through the years, I’d pawed through my aunt’s things looking for pictures, looking for news articles, looking for death certificates. I’d found nothing. I’d searched my parents’ names on the Internet, plus any reference to a car accident in Vermont many times, and had come up empty.
Someday I would stand at the graves of my parents. Someday I would find the rest of my family. For I knew there had to be more than just me and Aunt Rose.
Yet in the seven months I’d been here, I hadn’t been able to find anyone who knew my parents or my aunt. I had scoured the cemeteries. No luck. None of the seniors in my afternoon scrapbooking class remembered the names Allen and Sandra Simson. I’d also worked my way through the newspaper archives at the public library so many times that the reference librarian was getting sick of seeing me come in. Yet I had found zilch. Google searches continued to yield nothing.
And now this! My first real clue in seven months and you’d think I’d be cheering and jumping up and down, yet here I was, my hand to my mouth to keep from throwing up.
Maybe there was a part of me that was afraid of what I would find. Or what I wouldn’t find. Maybe, after all, there was nothing to find.
TWO
After the last satisfied customer had left, I armed my store’s security system and we went upstairs to my apartment, where Johanna brewed a big pot of chamomile tea.
Somewhere during the course of the evening it had started to rain. An appropriately cold rain which matched my mood slashed at the windows like knives.
I’d managed to muddle through the class with Johanna helping. I also apologized for running off like that, but offered no explanation. No one pressed for a reason. Johanna helped me lay out their initial efforts on tables in my back room. Everyone chatted while they gathered up their coats and purses. Next week at this same time they would be back to work on them. The class was a success. Everyone was happy. I was a mess.
The framed photo that I had talked to all these years was between us on the kitchen table. Johanna carefully removed the photo from the frame. “There might be something here,” she said. “Maybe on the back.”
“There’s nothing,” I told her. “Nothing on the back. Nowhere.” And I should know. I’d scrutinized this picture many, many times for clues, a name of a photographer.
She said, “Why don’t you get all the pictures of your parents together and then you can show them to all the people who come into the shop. You could even tack them up on some of the bulletin boards around town. There are so many things you could be doing, Marylee, if you want to find out who you’re related to out here.”
“All the pictures? This is the only picture I have.” I was aware then that she was my friend, yet I had shared with her only carefully selected pieces of my life.
Her eyes went wide. “Really? Well, then, this one then, you show everyone this picture. You make copies. I could help you. We could put it in the paper, even.”
“I can’t. I can’t explain it, I just can’t do that.” I didn’t know if I could explain it properly to my friend, this reticence I felt. I didn’t know if I could explain it properly to myself. It was all bound up in my aunt and her fears. When I was little, she hadn’t even wanted me showing the picture to my friends. When I would ask her why not, her standard response would be, “You don’t know who’s out there.”
I took a sip of my tea. My fingers were shaking so badly, I put the teacup down and stared into its depths. Johanna touched my hand. “How did your parents die?”
I sighed. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“I don’t have all the information. My aunt wouldn’t tell me. That’s why I’m here. It’s a long story.”
“We have a whole pot of tea, and more where that came from.”
So I told her. I told her I was born here in Burlington and after my parents died, my aunt Rose packed me up in her car and we drove clear across the country until we ended up in Portland, Oregon.
“Aunt Rose was the only mother I ever knew. She’s been gone about a year.” I bit my lip. “Ovarian cancer. I still miss her.”
“Oh, Marylee.”
I swallowed and continued. “But she kept warning me about Burlington. She told me not to come back here.”
Johanna’s eyes were wide. “And she never told you why?”
I took a swallow of tea and shook my head. “She was thrilled when I began going out with he-who-shall-not-be-named. I think she thought that was a surefire way to keep me from ever coming here to Burlington…”
I let my voice drift off and thought about that whole chapter of my life.
“He had stood with me throughout her six-month battle with cancer, he’d been the comfort I needed, my rock. The day after my aunt’s funeral, he proposed.” I said it quietly. “We ended up setting a date a year in the future. I lived that year in a kind of stupor, grieving for my aunt, my best friend and only living relative. I couldn’t seem to focus on wedding plans. I couldn’t seem to focus on anything.
“Three weeks before the wedding he bailed. I supposed it was only to be expected.”
“Oh, Marylee!” Johanna came over and hugged me.
I blinked rapidly to keep the tears at bay. A shiver danced across my skin and I wrapped my arms around myself. It didn’t help. I got up and turned up the thermostat. I glanced out the back window as I did so, and a truck rumbled down the back alley between the buildings on this rainy night.
Johanna took off her sweater. She was now down to a tank top in my warm kitchen, but bless her, she didn’t say anything about the place being too hot. Yet, I could not rid myself of the chill. I wondered if I would ever be warm again, whole again, like a real person.
I continued. “Since I’ve come here, I try to think back. I try to remember this place, but I can’t. I was too young. The first memory I have is of Aunt Rose driving. It was raining. I remember the sound of the windshield wipers, back and forth. For hours I watched them while my aunt kept driving and driving, not saying anything.”
Johanna pulled her legs up underneath her and was sitting yogi-style on my kitchen chair. She was listening intently.
“When I was growing up my aunt was always so jumpy, so jittery. Any time there was a phone call that hung up she’d go crazy, running around locking all the doors and windows. I think we were the first house in the entire country to get a home security system. She was so nervous, my aunt was.”
“Maybe she had a reason to be,” Johanna said.
That statement clouded the air like smoke. I thought of the shadow that had moved across the coffee shop window tonight. Had I seen something? Or had it been a product of my overactive imagination? Was I becoming like my aunt Rose after all?
Johanna got up and tucked a quilt around my shoulders. She asked, “Have you been back to the house you lived in when you were here?”
“I don’t even know where it is.” I paused and looked at the droplets of rain clinging to my balcony window. “When I was about fourteen I went through a sort of rebellious period. I sneaked into my aunt’s desk. She always kept it locked, but I knew where the key was. I was looking for something, anything, a picture, an address, a news clipping about the accident. But I found nothing. I had all her papers all over the bed, and that’s when my aunt came through the door.
“I looked up expecting her to be furious. But she came and sat beside me and held me in her arms for a long time. She just held me and held me. And when I looked up I saw that she was crying, too. I think that was the beginning of us being close.”
“You must miss her very much,” Johanna said.
“We sat there for a while and then she said, ‘I’m only trying to keep you safe. I’ve devoted my life to keeping you safe.’ And then she said, ‘Let’s go make paper instead.’ That was her answer to everything: Let’s make paper.”
“Paper?” Johanna looked at me, nearly spilling her tea.
I smiled, just a little. My aunt used to make paper. She had a special blender set aside just for her papermaking. We used to tear up old pieces of paper and then they would go in this blender with water. We had huge sinks in our basement and screens where we would lay out our pulp until it dried. She sold it by the sheet at markets and craft fairs. I told Johanna this, how my aunt was always saving bits and pieces of paper. She was into recycling before anybody else in the world was. “We would save old magazines and cut pictures out of them.” I stopped, a strange idea niggling its way into my thinking. Had she somehow found that magazine in the trash, somehow took a picture of it, had it developed and then told me it was my parents? Is that how she had done it? But why? And if these two aren’t my parents, then who are they and do they have any connection with me?
I picked up the photo and looked down at it. I had to admit that part of the attraction of this photo was the happiness this couple seemed to possess, the two of them, the way my mother looked into my father’s eyes, the way he gazed down at her. Was this kind of love even possible? When I was a little girl I would make up elaborate scenarios about my parents. I put the photo facedown on the table.
Johanna picked up the photo, seemed to consider it, then said, “The place to begin with all of this is Evan, of course.”
Despite myself I smiled. “We begin with Evan?”
“He’s a photographer, Marylee. You know that.” She leaned back and picked up her mug.
“A photographer’s not going to know.”
She leaned forward. “Sometimes he works with the police on forensics. Sometimes they get him to help them.”
I hated to tell Johanna, but going to see Evan was not in the plans. He’d taken my friend out twice and dropped her. Plus, Evan had been engaged before. Whenever I thought about Evan, I couldn’t help but think of Mark, my own ex-fiancé who’d dumped me when the going got too rough for him.
“He used to be an accountant,” Johanna said. “Did you know that? He dropped that to pursue his art, his photography.”
To me that was another strike against him; he can’t commit to a woman and can’t commit to a career. No, my friend could do a whole lot better than Evan Baxter.
“You should go see him.”
I told her no, emphatically no.
THREE
