Never Coming Back(34)

“You used to be a reporter,” Brown said. “Put those reportorial skills back in action. Talk to her. Ask her questions. Interview her friends.”

“Annabelle Lee is her only real friend.”

“We are too,” Sunshine said. “Brown and me.”

“That doesn’t mean you know her,” I said. “Any more than I know her.”

“Then get going,” Sunshine said. “If Tamar is a locked trunk, your job is to pick the lock. Tick-tock. Hop to.”





* * *





We ringed ourselves on the floor around the books-as-coffee-table. Where to begin? A list of people to talk to, which boiled down to “Annabelle.” Brown got up to get Jack and in the getting stopped to peer at the photo propped on the shelf.

“Whoa. Is this The Fearsome? When was this taken?”

“No clue.”

“She looks so”—he shook his head.

“Unfearsome?” I said.

“Exactly. She also looks, I hate to say it, but kind of hot. Is that weird?”

“For you to say or for Tamar to be?” Sunshine said. “In either case, the answer is no.”

She got up to study the photo too. The two of them hovered before it, murmuring in their obnoxious merged-self way. Look at that cute shirt, Sunshine said, and She looks so—what’s the word—soft? Brown said, and Yes, that’s the word, Sunshine said, so unlike the way I always think of her, which when you think about it is kind of unfair, isn’t it?

“Who took this photo?” Brown said to me. “And what’s she looking at?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. It was stuck to the back of a photo of me as a baby.”

“It’s well-worn,” he said, which was his kind of phrase. The alliteration. “Clearly been carried about, maybe in a wallet? Maybe in a back pocket?”

Brown put the photo back on the shelf, smoothing it into place with the tips of his fingers as if it were precious. As if it were valuable. An heirloom. Which maybe it was, the mystery photo, Tamar with the soft eyes and soft smile. He lowered himself back to the floor and thunked the bottle of Jack down on the books-as-coffee-table.

“Think of it like this,” he said. He picked up his phone, ready to take notes. “If she’s at Stage Six-b, we’re halfway through the game. We’re already starting the Daily Double. All the bets are twice what they started out as, and you are the losing contestant. Every category, every clue, you’ve got to slam the buzzer fast and hard. Even if you don’t know the answer.”

Sunshine began crocheting a scallion hat. Crocheting, even the pretend crocheting she sometimes did when she’d forgotten her bag of wool, helped her focus.

“Let’s think categories,” she said. “What do you most want or need to know about your mother?”

“Why she only ate out of cans and jars,” I said. “Why she moved herself into that place without telling me. What she and Asa were talking about the night before he broke up with me. Why she practiced with the church choir for thirty years but never went to church. Why she got a long-term-care policy. Why she made me go to college two states away. Shit, I don’t know. Everything. Anything.”

“Whoa,” Brown said. “My thumbs can’t type that fast.”

“You must know the answers to some of these questions already,” Sunshine said. “Right?”

“No! I told you! She wouldn’t tell me anything! And now we’ve run out of time!”

Exclamation marks, scrolling along. Sunshine was not intimidated by them. Sunshine was not intimidated by much of anything. She had been earlier in her life, though, hadn’t she? Before she got cancer? Had there been a moment in there, a moment in the chemo room, maybe, or in the middle of an unsleeping night, that Sunshine had turned a corner in her mind, grown instantly out of being intimidated by anything ever again? Decided there was no more time in her life for things like intimidation, and, poof, zapped it right out of herself? Look at her, shaking her head. Look how fast the crochet hook moved between her fingers, flashing in and out of the pale green and white wool.

“There is no time,” she said. “There’s never time. People just think there is. They plod along as if it’s an endless resource. As if it’ll never run out.”

Brown looked up from his typing. “Wait, did you say long-term-care policy?” he said. “That’s kind of weird. Wasn’t—isn’t—she young to have one of those things?”

I had not even known what such a thing was until that first conversation with the doctor, when my mind first began to spin with what-ifs and wheres and hows.

“Early-onset often seems to progress quite fast,” the doctor said. “This perception may actually result from the fact that most early-onset patients have already been living with the disease for quite a long time, but because they are so young, it’s not recognized.”

That would be my mother. Check.

“But Tamar is lucky in one way,” the doctor said, “which is that she’s got a very good long-term-care policy.”

The idea of my mother with a long-term-care policy, or a policy of any kind—she was not a woman of words, nor was she a woman of insurance forms and legal documents, not to mention money, of which she had little—almost made me laugh. A long-term-care policy? The doctor had nodded, his lips pursed, as if this were excellent news.