The Silent Sister(89)

I used my cell phone to light the RV door as I tried the first key. It fit, though it took some jiggling before the door creaked open. Inside, I turned on the weak light that ran above the kitchen counter, relieved that the interior of the RV looked the same as it had the last time I’d been inside. Tom hadn’t touched it yet. There was the row of CDs bookended by rocks, and the newspaper ad was still taped to the wall next to the picture of the little girl and boy. I pulled the photograph of the children from the wall. I had no idea who they were, but they’d meant something to my father. The picture was going with me.

I searched through the CDs. There were three by Jasha Trace. Each of the jewel case covers had a different photograph of the four musicians, and in every picture, the violinist wore the white oval-shaped pendant. The photographs were somewhat stylized, making it difficult to make out the musicians’ features even when I held the CDs directly under the light. The violinist’s hair was not Lisa’s white-blond, nor was it dark, but somewhere in between. The other woman’s dark hair was short on the sides, but it fell over her temple in the front. Both of the men—one dark-haired, the other blond and wearing glasses—looked a little shaggy, their hair dusting their collars.

I opened one of the jewel cases and pulled out the booklet inside. It contained page after page of lyrics, and the musicians’ names were listed at the bottom of each song: Jade Johnson. Yes! Celia Lind. Travis Sheehan. Shane Lind. Celia’s husband? Maybe Jade and Celia were not a couple after all?

I carefully pulled the ad from the wall and held it under the light. Jasha Trace. Free Concert in Union Point Park. July 13 8 P.M.

I touched Lisa’s face, then the pendant with the Chinese symbols. Mother and daughter. I pressed the picture tightly to my heart and sat there for a moment, my eyes shut.

My mother was coming to New Bern.





47.



Back at the house, I listened to the CDs while I sat at my father’s rolltop desk, searching the Internet for Jasha Trace. I tried to separate Lisa’s voice from Celia’s as I listened to the music, unsure which was which and wishing I knew. Some of the songs were rousing, while others were achingly pretty, a poignant sound track for the information I was discovering. Details were easy to find now that I knew which Jade Johnson I was looking for. They were less easy, though, for me to read.

Jasha Trace had a Web site with a biography of each member, and I read the fiction of Lisa’s life. Jade Johnson had supposedly grown up in Los Angeles, the only child of a doctor and a nurse, both of whom were conveniently deceased so no one could possibly verify the story of her childhood. She learned to play the fiddle at the age of thirteen and taught herself several other instruments over the years. She’d lived in Portland for a few years before relocating to Seattle in 1999, where she’d been a fiddle-playing busker at Pike Place Market and the manager of a café. She lived with her wife and musical collaborator, Celia Lind, and their two children.

Her wife. Her two children. I stared at the photograph of the little boy and girl I’d taken from the wall of my father’s RV. Lisa’s children? Was I related to these two red-haired little kids? How had my father gotten this picture? These CDs? Had he stayed in touch with Lisa all these years? Had they communicated through the post office box?

There was an excellent picture of the whole band on the Web site. Forty-year-old Jade Johnson looked so different from the old pictures I had of Lisa. I guessed she’d dyed her telltale white-blond hair brown all these years. She was somewhere between plain and pretty and she appeared to wear no makeup, although she must have dyed her pale eyebrows to match her hair and used mascara on her blond lashes. In the one close-up picture I found on her bio page, I saw that her eyes were a vivid blue, like Danny’s. She wore a wide smile that gave her a carefree and confident look.

I continued searching through the Web site, and then landed at Wikipedia, where I was able to piece together a bit more of Lisa’s life.

Jasha Trace

Jasha Trace is a Seattle-based American folk group made up of Jade Johnson, Travis Sheehan, and siblings Celia and Shane Lind. Although they played music together most of their adult lives, the foursome did not perform in public until 2006. Their first appearance was at Spoon and Stars, a café Johnson manages in Seattle. Their name, Jasha Trace, came from combining the first letters of each of their names. They describe their music as “Celtic Scottish Bluegrass.” Celia Lind and Johnson collaborate on the songwriting and the foursome works out their arrangements together.

Jade Johnson and Celia Lind, who self-identify as lesbian, were married December 29, 2012, a few weeks after same-sex marriage was legalized in the state of Washington. They have two children, Alex born in 2001 and Zoe born in 2004. Lind is the biological mother of both their children, and Johnson legally adopted them shortly after their births.

I stood up from the rolltop desk and walked around the room, hugging myself, my fingernails digging into my arms. I felt hurt. Cast aside and forgotten. The sadness that had dogged me since Daddy’s death and the breakup with Bryan washed over me with full force. I felt so alone. I’d been an unwanted complication in Lisa’s life. She’d created a new future for herself. A new family. The last thing she’d want now would be for her past to crash into her present.

The pink light of dawn drifted through the living room windows and I was exhausted, physically and emotionally. I sat down at the desk again. Behind me, I heard the CD player click noisily from the second CD to the third, and another Jasha Trace song began, the sound of the band now familiar to me.