The Mystery of Hollow Places(53)

“It . . . took a long time,” I settle on.

“I’ll bet. We’re kind of in the sticks. Is there anyone you want to check in with?”

I take a nervous sip of juice, wishing for the courage of a Captain and Coke about now. “When will Sidonie be home, do you know?”

“They usually wrap up around six. It won’t be long now.”

The clock on the microwave blinks 5:47. If I were to leave now, catch a ride from Todd to the Quick Mart, I might even make the six o’clock bus—my last chance to beat Lindy home, no harm, no foul. “I can wait.”

“I figured.” He nods. “So. What shall we talk about in the meantime?” He smiles, but in a likable way, unfortunately.

I ask him to tell me about my mother, of course, so he does. He tells me how they met—how they met again—about five years back. He was visiting his niece, a dancer with the Nutmeg Ballet in Torrington. He would’ve left town right after the matinee show, but his niece begged him to stay and take her to dinner, so he did. On his way out of town, he stopped at a gas station for cigarettes (he was a chimney stack of a smoker back then, he assures me). And who should be paying for her gas in cash at the counter but his old high school girlfriend Sidonie Faye, all grown up. Even though Todd had a long drive ahead of him and had already eaten dinner, even though it was a Sunday and he had work early the next morning at this mattress store in Fitchburg, he asked her to come eat with him without a second thought. They hadn’t seen each other in maybe twenty years, and he’d always missed her, always wondered what happened to her when she left for school and never came home.

They talked. A lot. She told him that while studying abroad—

“In Sweden or Switzerland?” I interrupt.

He scratches his chin and guesses it was one of those S-countries. Anyway, a letter had found its way to her from Boston, battered and much rerouted. It told her that her mother had died, that Sidonie was needed to come claim the body. That’s how she found herself back in the States, alone. One of those girls determined never to look back once she left their dinky little hometown and less-than-perfect childhood, she’d broken off with all her friends from high school, and the only surviving family in the area was a cousin she’d fallen out of touch with. She felt like she was floating, unattached to the place that had been her home, and too upset to go back to her life abroad. Then, when there was no one else, the forensic pathologist who’d worked on her mother was there, of all people. My dad helped my mother find a part-time job at the museum through a friend of a friend, a way to use the art degree she’d abandoned. He even helped her find a place to stay in Boston, a little apartment with a garden on the building roof. He was older than her, but soon enough they were together. When she felt her depression closing in, this dark cloud she’d struggled to outrun all her life, he convinced her to leave the city with him. A small, slow town in the suburbs would be good for them, he said.

Here in the story, Todd winces as the egg timer bleats beside the stove. He stops to extract the baking sheets.

“What about me?” I ask, hopping up onto the counter, the way Lindy hates. Do you think it’s wise to put your backside where we slice tomatoes? she always asks. But this way I’m eye-level with Todd Malachai, and I doubt he’s going to yell at me. “Did she ever even tell you she had a daughter?” I search his face for the truth.

He looks away. “No. If she had, we’d have gone from there. But I never asked. I suppose I guessed, though, because of the sketchbook.”

“What sketchbook?”

“You’ll see when your mother gets here.”

While the food cools and my stomach consumes itself over the smell, Todd tells the rest of the story.

When my mother left Sugarbrook—and she was never very clear on why she’d left, or how or when—she stayed with a work friend, then after she quit her job, a new boyfriend, and another after that. They never lasted or made much of an impression, and none were very good to her. (“One was in a band, and not a jazz band,” Todd adds.) Eventually she left the state entirely, and landed in Torrington. While she crumbled crackers into her soup in a little diner, my mother confessed to Todd Malachai that she felt she was floating once again. Lost. Todd told her if she ever came back to Fitchburg, she’d have a friend. He could help her, and coming home might be good for her. There was even a new place in town, a place his brother-in-law had gone in the months after he was laid off.

She thanked him, insisted on splitting the bill, and left. He never thought he’d see her again, until a month later when she was knocking on his door, telling him that she’d quit her job, that she was finally, really ready to get help.

“And what, she just barnacled on to you?” I sneer. “You take her in, and she takes your money and crashes your truck?”

“Huh?” He frowns.

“Your great-aunt Hilda told me about her.”

Todd surprises me by laughing. “Oh, no! That wasn’t your mother. You really did your research, though, huh? God, Aunt Hilda was thinking of Jen Lavato. Surprised she remembered her. That girl was a piece of work. I was dumb to run around with Jenny. My dad hated her, called me a fool. He was right. That was something like a decade ago, before he died.”

Hilda said as much, thinking back. Of course, if I was any kind of actual detective instead of a stupid kid pretending, I might’ve seen the truth, and not the story I wanted to be true.