Girl One(4)

I walked through the hallway. Something felt off. Some layer beneath the obvious, gut-punch wrongness of the burned house. Everything looked just a little different. The pictures that had once lined the hallway—portraits of me, all taken by my mother, framed in cheap plastic—had been removed entirely, or knocked crooked. The baseboards were furry with dust; a chair was toppled in the hallway, legs sticking up like a dead insect. The place looked abandoned. I wandered down the hall, catching the staleness that drifted under the sharp scent of smoke. Mounds of neglected laundry moldering along the baseboards. I caught a flicker of movement and jumped, stifled a yelp. A cockroach, huge and shiny, stuttered across the hall and vanished under a vent. I swallowed hard.

I made my way to the garage, where our unreliable old Chevy still sat surrounded by musty boxes. My mother’s purse was on the front seat, hanging open. Goose bumps rose along my arms. Maybe she hadn’t actually vanished, but she was doing a damn good impression of it.

Yanking open the creaking Chevy door, I fished around in the purse and plucked loose the keys. I slipped them into my pocket, the pulse of worry growing stronger. How the hell could she have left town without the Chevy? I dumped the contents of her purse onto the seat. Her wallet was gone; I wasn’t sure whether she’d taken it, or if it was at the police station, abandoned in a plastic baggie. Only trivial junk was left for me now. A piece of mint gum, stale-smelling. A thick hair elastic. A local gas station receipt from months back. A yellow Post-it note, the adhesive strip gray with dust and lint. Her handwriting was quick and sloppy. T.A.—KCT. Then a string of ten numbers, randomly spaced. Maybe a phone number? The letters didn’t mean anything to me. I stuck the note into my pocket anyway. Even a tiny clue was helpful at this point.

I felt a sudden hopelessness, bottoming out beneath the frustration. I was worried for my mother; I was furious at her. This wasn’t supposed to be happening. All the time I’d been in Chicago, my mother’s place in Coeur du Lac had been a given. She’d scarcely ventured beyond the county lines since we’d landed here in 1977. I’d been safe in the knowledge I could walk back into our house and find her absorbed in a library book, looking up and reminding me to lock the door behind me: You’re too trusting, Josie. I might’ve been identical to my mother in every other way, but on the inside we were opposites. Her ironbound caution, my restless curiosity. She was the one who stayed. I was the one who left.

Walking back through the kitchen, I caught the muffled sound of an engine from outside. The cops? Gawkers? A news van drawn to the hot scent of scandal? I dropped into a half crouch as I went down the hall, hoping my flashlight beam wasn’t visible through the windows. I couldn’t let anyone find me here. I had wanted to get in, get out, get my mother, not end up as a tabloid headline myself.

My bedroom was a wreck. I had to quash the sudden sense of betrayal. It wasn’t like my mother had any obligation to keep my bedroom intact, with its outdated Popples pillowcase, my Rubik’s Cube one spin from being solved, the stack of ratty thirdhand textbooks from my undergrad courses. But I hadn’t expected her to tear the room apart. My mattress bare and sagging against a wall, my dresser pushed aside haphazardly. Strangest of all, the books and the papers. My whole collection, I realized. Scattered all over the floor, a chaotic layer of Homestead headlines and titles and photos. The entire fucking timeline of research that I had painstakingly put together on my own, now rooted from the top shelf of my closet and spread everywhere, some of the pages ripped, some with big squares cut out. My gaze landed on a photo of me and my mom, taken when I was a toddler. Our heads had been sliced out, replaced by a bare rectangle that showed the ugly green carpet pushing through.

I left my bedroom with my heart hammering. “What the hell?” I said, and it kept repeating. What the hell, what the hell. A mantra blaring through my head in the eerie silence. Somebody had been going through my things. Digging up the Homestead.

Moving on the balls of my feet, like someone would overhear, I made my way up the narrow staircase. In my mother’s small, angled bedroom, the feeling of weirdness grew even stronger, dizzying. My mother had been tidy. Not a neat freak—neither of us were—but I’d never seen this level of chaos. Books and notebooks and papers scattered everywhere. A half-full coffee cup growing lily pads of mold.

My mother hadn’t taken many clothes, wherever she’d gone. Most of her blouses and pants had been kicked to the floor of the closet in ungainly heaps. In the bathroom, her hairbrush was curled through with dark brown strands that matched mine, but threaded with gray. A preview of what my own follicles would do in another twenty-three years. The jar of coconut oil she used as moisturizer sitting half-open, releasing its warm, nutty smell. Her smell. But the trash can was overflowing, and the shower curtain was removed, and the grout was darkened into stark outlines between the tiles.

I breathed in, out, shut my eyes. I’d find her. Our DNA was identical. Our heartbeats once synced up. Our menstrual cycles, too, much to my adolescent embarrassment. Maybe our mindsets would finally match as well.

My eyes landed on the clock, and I hesitated. The clock was as big as a dinner plate and broken, a cheap plastic thing perpetually stuck at a quarter past four. I started toward it, stopped. It couldn’t be that easy—

I lifted it off the wall. My mother used to stash things inside the clock’s interior. A hiding spot I’d discovered when I’d peeked inside to see if I could replace the batteries, back in May of ’82. That time, I’d discovered the letter inviting us to the Homestead reunion, already a month late, our chance long gone. Later, in sixth grade, I’d retrieved a packet of fruit-flavored Nicorette pellets, even though I’d never once seen my mother with a cigarette.