The Mystery of Hollow Places(24)
Another difference between us—I can barely draw a stick-gallows in hangman. “I guess that’s why she went to art school.”
“She never finished, though. Whatever she did at the museum, it wasn’t something you needed a degree for, not back then. Now they say you need one to wash dishes.”
Something sinuous wraps around my leg. I look down to discover one of the cats and resist the urge to kick it away. “Why didn’t she finish school?”
“Sid met your daddy. Had you. And then . . .” Lil sighs deeply. “I talked to Sid the night she left you both, you know?”
Jessa is trying to catch my gaze, but I avoid her. She feels sorry for me. Well, she shouldn’t. Because right now it isn’t even me talking to Lil Eugene. It’s Miles Faye, with one goal: to get to the bottom of this mystery and find my dad. I make that the stone truth and harden myself around it. “What did she—Did she tell you why?”
Her lips screw up into a tremulous line. “There was no good why. She was troubled waters. Like her mother. Siobhan was troubled waters too—that’s what my own mama called her. Sid said your daddy would be better off, you would be better off, everyone would be better off. But I don’t think anybody was ever better off for what that girl did.”
The clock ticks away the silence while a cat with what might be a sinus condition jockeys for position in Lil’s lap, wheezing and purring in turns. She stares into its snot-streaked face, and who knows what she sees there, but her voice is duller and distant when she speaks again.
“Well, I really got to be running out now.”
Unexpectedly, Jessa leans across the table. “Im is your cousin and you just met her. Can’t you stay for a while?”
Lil levers herself stiffly off the floor, shedding animals from her lap as she rises. “It’s my doctor’s appointment. Not supposed to be late. But I have some pictures and things, if you want to take them with you.”
“That would be great. Anything you can give me. And maybe your number, so I can call you sometime? I’ll leave mine in case you remember anything.”
She hesitates in the kitchen doorway. “Just hold on a minute.” With a last look, she ducks into the hallway.
I jump as Jessa slaps her hand over mine. “Okay, she’s weird, Im. I mean, like, I know teachers are weird—I had Mrs. Marconi in sophomore year, and she had, like, a deli in her desk? Not chips or breath mints or anything. Lunch meat, pickles, huge bottles of Pepsi in the bottom drawer. But your second cousin is unusual.”
“Maybe it’s the curse,” I say, fingering the stone in my pocket as I watch the biggest of the cats mount the kitchen counter, flop backward, and lick the dark fur between its legs.
“What curse?”
I shrug.
Lil makes her way back into the kitchen with a small stack of photos and time-rippled papers in her hands. “Here’s all I got. That’s my number on that sticky note, but it’s a home phone. I don’t see much need to carry a little phone around all the time. If I wanted to talk to anybody, I’d call. And I usually don’t want to talk.”
Greedily, I flip through the pictures. There’s a fuzzy baby photo in the pile, a little bald, hazel-eyed girl wriggling on a patchwork quilt, her oversize head tilted toward the camera with great effort. In Dad’s office there’s a picture of me just like this. I’m maybe a few months old, wallowing on a blue shag rug strewn with soft, plasticized baby books, my enormous skull wobbling so precariously that even though it’s a moment frozen on film, you could swear I’m about to face plant into Goodnight Moon. Dad insists “book” was my first word, though sometimes Lindy swears the first words out of my mouth must have been “I’m fine, I don’t need any help, go away.”
Next is a picture of two little girls, the younger in brown pigtails, the older one a dirty shade of blond. Mom and Lil stand on the lawn of a church. Lil surprises me by tapping the picture with a fingernail bitten down to the skin. “That’s the church we used to walk to each week. And our mamas would let me and Sid take the long way around Crocker Field on the way to Sid’s house for Sunday lunch. I swear you could hear the crack of the baseball bats from her backyard. Smell the hot dogs.”
I nod, wondering what goes on in Sunday school—Dad and I are not church people, though I’ve been in one, for Ma Ma Scott’s funeral.
In the next picture, Mom is still small, but alone by a wiry, forked birch tree in a front yard, the sky behind the little house awash in the yellow light of bad weather. Chain link borders the scrappy yard. My mother’s childhood home?
I flip to a Polaroid of teenage Sidonie in a very early-nineties prom dress, in front of a tall brick building with Fitchburg High School, Home of the Red Raiders emblazoned on a sign. Her dress is long and straight and silvery, with a ruffled bit draped over her breasts like a curtain valance. Her date stands behind her: a tall black teenager with the kind of high pillar of hair I recognize from nineties TV shows. The tip of her head comes up only to the padded shoulders of his navy suit. Even though she’s awkward in the picture, elbows away from her body, pink-lipsticked smile showing all the wrong teeth, he looks thrilled to be with her. His grin is huge, and his hand rests lightly on her arm, like if he couldn’t touch her he wouldn’t believe his luck.
The last and latest is Mom, pregnant in the shade of a birch tree, in front of a gray stone fountain I recognize from the Patty Linden Memorial Park in Sugarbrook.