The Accidentals(80)

I’d never seen her look that way at anyone.

In the next photo, Frederick has a beard. He’s seated, shirtless, in a chair with a guitar, and my mother stands behind him, her hands on his shoulders. The casual curve of her fingers on his bare skin gives me a shiver. Here is the very thing I’ve never been able to picture—the two of them together. The uncensored joy on my mother’s face is astonishing to me.

I don’t even know I’m crying until Aurora comes running. “What’s happened?” She sits down on the bed. “Oh! This is your mother.”

Aurora takes the stack from my hands and flips through them slowly. “Where is this?” she holds up a photo. Frederick stands on a pathway, his guitar across his body. There are orange and yellow autumn leaves behind him. In the next picture, Mom is there too.

They’re kissing.

I wipe my eyes with the heels of my hands. “I have no idea. I’ve never seen these pictures before. She lied to me.”

Aurora looks startled. “She lied? About the pictures?”

I nod. I’d asked my mother many times whether there were pictures of him. When I got a little older, of course, I stopped asking and started Googling.

“Sweetie, she didn’t want to remember this. It’s not that hard to understand.”

“Yes it is!” I gasp. The next picture is of the two of them, bent over a map. His fingers have swept the hair off her neck. My mother’s hand covers his.

They were so happy.

The true lie, I realize, is not that the pictures exist, but rather what they show. Every time my mother mentioned him, it was as if he’d been inflicted on her, like a disease. But it wasn’t true. My mother had loved him.

It wasn’t all just a shady accident, a tawdry mistake.

“She was just so unlucky.” Aurora sighs, setting a picture down on the bed. It shows Frederick carrying her, piggyback, through a meadow somewhere. “How old was she when she died?”

“Thirty-eight.”

Aurora wipes her eyes. “She could have fallen in love again, no?”

I really don’t know. My idea of her is undergoing a rapid shift. The mom I knew had measured risk and reward with an eyedropper. She believed in delayed gratification. But it obviously hadn’t always been so. And it was me who’d changed her from the happy girl in the photos to the tired woman working double shifts in hospital scrubs.

The next picture makes me squint. But then I let out a little shriek of surprise. “Dios!” Aurora gasps. “Your mother played the drums?”

There she is, onstage, sticks poised over a drum kit. Her hair is pulled up into a knot on top of her head.

The bass drum has a decal on its face: WILD CITY BLUES.

“Wild City,” Aurora says. “Just like the song.”

I am speechless. There’s really no other way to handle my surprise. The photo shows Frederick at the microphone, and a bass guitar is propped against the amp stack.

My whole life I’d been trying to understand my missing father. And the whole time I hadn’t had the first clue about my mom.

“Who took all these pictures?” Aurora asks. “Who is this?” She holds up the final picture, which had three subjects instead of two. Three heads lie together in the grass, and one man’s arm reaches up above them to take their self-portrait.

I hadn’t even thought to wonder who took them. “That’s Ernie,” I say slowly. “When he still had hair.” I pick up the envelope and turn it over. “Hathaway” is scrawled at one end.

“What a blessing that this Ernie took them, and now they are yours.”

I’m not so sure. They make my head spin.





The next few days are rough.

For most of the year, Claiborne Prep has been my Hogwarts—a separate place in my life where things mostly go well. But now my grief has followed me all the way to New Hampshire. I’m just plain sad. Sorrow hangs over me like a cloud.

I still get out of bed every morning and go to class. But once I get there, I can’t concentrate. I’ve taken to Googling my mother now, instead of my father. Searching for “Wild City” had always led me nowhere. But searching for “Wild City Blues” leads me to an old set list from a Kansas City club.

The song titles on it are unfamiliar, or else covers. But the singer was Fred Richards, the bassist Ernie Hathaway, and the drummer Jenny Kaye.

My mother had a stage name.

Meanwhile, classes go on. I sit in the back of the English lecture hall, reeling. I’m puzzling over my mother’s life instead of the complexities of Middle English.

Two rows up, Jake takes fervent notes. But I’m thinking about the little green house we’d shared in Florida, of doing homework on my bed while Mom bumps around in the kitchen making dinner.

I spent so much time longing for this—the prep-school experience, living on a pretty New England campus. But now the loss of my mother is all I can think about. I want to go backward in time, to slide off the bed in our little house and wander into the kitchen, to watch the planes of my mother’s face as she seasons two chicken breasts and sets them in the oven to bake.

If I could just see her one last time, maybe I could understand everything that happened. But she’s gone. All my chances are used up.

The whiteboard at the front of the lecture hall becomes misty.