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I down the sherry like it’s a shot of tequila.
“My mother used to call the bathroom ‘the loo.’ I thought she was being pretentious.”
“There were no other signs?” Amity asks.
When my mother and I visited Indiana when I was little, I’d sleep in her childhood bedroom, in her old twin bed with the pine headboard and nubby chenille spread. There was a heavy old maple dresser, and on the wall above it, a framed drawing of a unicorn. Like the one doodled on the inside back cover of the Melling School book.
“Did you ever see photographs of your mother as a baby?” Amity asks.
“Maybe? I was only eight the last time I was in Indiana. I don’t remember much. Grampa Hal smelled like black licorice, and Granny Lou’s hugs lasted too long. She served chicken and noodles over mashed potatoes.”
The Indiana house was nothing like our house in Buffalo, which had so many mementos from my father’s past—his baby book filled with photographs and notes about the first time he rolled over or ate solid food, the white wicker bassinet he slept in as an infant, his first shoes, preschool photos against a painted backdrop of fir trees, the library card he got in kindergarten. The Indiana house was sparse, with little decoration other than lace doilies on the tables and some framed photographs of my mother and her parents.
I take out my phone to look at the photos of the book that Kim sent. I wish I had the Melling School book with me. If my mother really was Sukie, did she get this book after the fire? Or was it saved from the fire? If this is the book she’d been reading in the bathtub when the fire started, then I’d had a link to my mother’s past all along.
“I knew it! I knew your mother had an extraordinary story!” Germaine bursts into the cottage holding some papers. “She was one of us. You’re one of us! She was bringing you home.”
She spreads her papers on the coffee table. They’re newspaper articles she found online and printed out before coming over. Most offer the same details about the fire that we’ve already learned. A few of them include a photograph, dark and grainy, of the remains of the house, stone wall stumps and what looks like half a chimney. One has a picture of the exhausted fire brigade that fought the blaze. Another shows a fire truck and a canvas hose, depleted, on the ground. Off to the side is a thin, fair-haired girl in a long cotton nightgown and bare feet. A wool blanket is wrapped around her narrow shoulders. Her head is tipped up toward the ruins of the house. Her profile, with a prominent forehead, delicately tilted nose, and what’s often called a weak chin, is as familiar as my own.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Germaine wants to take us along the Monsal Trail to the top of the viaduct so she can point out where the old stone house was in relation to the river and the bridge. Then we’ll walk down to where the house stood.
Wyatt and Germaine lead the way, first over the bridge to the other side of the river. We walk in silence until we’re climbing the steep road that will intersect with the old railway.
“Are you okay?” Amity asks.
I shake my head. I’m too angry to speak.
“It’s a lot to take in. You must be overwhelmed.”
“I could kill her.”
Amity stops and rests a hand on my arm. “It’s awful to be lied to. Believe me, I know.”
And then I’m crying. Heaving, gasping, ugly sobs.
“She never told me anything.” It sounds so petulant and childish, but I can’t help myself.
Amity doesn’t say anything. She stays by me and lets me cry.
“I’m sorry,” I say, rubbing my eyes. When I look up at her, she’s wiping a tear away too.
We follow Germaine and Wyatt to the top of the hill, wherethey walk around an old station house and onto the trail. It’s wide and flat hard-packed gravel. On either side are thick bushes and trees. Germaine turns left, either toward Bakewell or Buxton, I have no idea which. We pass a trio of toddlers spinning in circles while their mother or babysitter talks on her phone. A bell dings behind us. We step to the side and an old man on a bicycle doffs his cap as he rides by.
“Didn’t I deserve the truth?” I say.
“Of course you did.”
“All she did was lie. I don’t even know if she told my father. And my grandmother couldn’t have known; there’s no way she would have kept that from me.”
“Maybe it was too painful for your mother to think about,” Amity says. “Maybe that’s how she survived.”
Maybe this, maybe that. Why this, why that? I am so tired of trying to understand my mother.
“She had so many opportunities to tell me.”
“The longer one lies, the harder it becomes to reveal the truth. Or so I’ve been told.”