And I had looked at her skeletal face, wasted by the cancer that would take her in a matter of weeks, and made no such promise. Instead, I’d wept as I’d smoothed a wet cloth on the forehead of my mother’s sister, the woman who’d raised me.
A chill so profound started at the tip of my toes and ended in a place near my forehead. I closed my eyes briefly.
“Are you okay?” A woman with gray curls approached me.
“Just a chill. It’s cold out there,” I said.
“Do you think so?” said someone else overhearing the tail end of our conversation.
“Warm for this time of year,” said another from across the room.
“Supposed to rain,” said someone else.
And while the ladies talked on about the weather, I drew back into my cheerful shop and made my way to the craft table in the rear. Earlier I had set out pieces of mirror, both glass and plastic. At each place I’d laid a nine-by-twelve mirror. I’d instructed the ladies to bring photos or pictures from magazines that they wanted to use in their mosaics. For those who hadn’t brought pictures, I had a stack of old tourist magazines featuring scenes from Vermont and other parts of New England they could cut pages from. I had told them this was going to be a fun class and that anybody could do it. Even Johanna, who claimed she couldn’t draw a straight line with a ruler, was going to participate.
Two more ladies entered; another two went for coffee and a few more sat down at the table and fingered through pieces of mirror.
“I’ve done decoupage, but never with mirrors,” one said.
“It’s something I learned from my aunt,” I said with forced cheerfulness. I was still reeling from what I’d seen out there. Or hadn’t seen. “But watch your fingers. Some of those pieces are sharp. We don’t need any cut fingers tonight.”
Ten minutes later all eleven women had arrived. Most of them seemed to know each other already. I had us fill out colored name tags with marking pens, but this was obviously more for my benefit than theirs. I stood at the head of a long table and began to explain mirror mosaic art as taught to me by Aunt Rose.
“Is it like tole painting?” asked a woman whose name tag read Gladys.
“Not really,” I explained. “It’s a bit like decoupage. But not exactly. It a bit dif—” I stopped. I began choking, coughing. I put my hand to my throat. My eyes went wide. I couldn’t breathe. One of the ladies reached into her purse and handed me a paper-wrapped cough candy. “Thank you,” I managed to say. I tried unwrapping it, but my fingers refused to find the edges of the wrapper.
This wasn’t an ordinary tickle in my throat. A woman named Beryl was smoothing out the picture she’d brought with her. It was the same exact picture I had kept in the frame on my nightstand for all of my growing-up years. It was the picture that had listened to all my whispered prayers and thoughts. It was the picture I had said good-night to almost every night of my life, and the one I had said good morning to when I woke up. I was still coughing. I needed to sit. I needed to flee. I needed to throw up. I closed my eyes. I swallowed.
Johanna drew back, put her hand to her mouth.
I pointed to the picture, astounding even myself by my ability to ask Beryl in a very calm voice, “Where did you get that picture? Do you know those people? Are they related to you?” Could this little owl-like woman with the oversized glasses be a relative of mine? Some distant aunt? Did she know my aunt Rose?
She shook her head. “This is just a magazine picture, dear. I cut it out years ago. I’ve always thought the picture so lovely and romantic.”
“What magazine?” I managed to ask.
“I have no idea. It was one of those magazines that had romance stories. Not many of them do anymore, you know. There was a time when every women’s magazine had a romance story. I miss that.”
Several women nodded in agreement. Several more looked up at me, concern across their faces.
“But what magazine? When?”
“Oh, my dear, that would be years ago now.”
I kept looking at her and asked, “Did you…Have you lived here a long time?”
She shook her head and said, “We moved here when Bert retired. That would be ten years.”
“Then do you know these people?” I pointed at the picture.
Her eyebrows screwed together into one long brow across her face. I was conscious of time standing still, of the rest of the class regarding me, but I had to know.
“No, dear,” she said. “I told you. This is just a picture from a magazine.”
“But, um…” I couldn’t take my eyes from the picture, the two of them, my parents in a stranger’s hands.
I had lived with the story of my parents for as long as I could remember. They’d died in a car accident, the details of which were too painful for my aunt to ever fully talk to me about. Even when she was dying, she’d refused to tell me about the particulars of the accident. Was it a head-on collision? Was it a drunk driver? Had the car skidded out of control on icy or wet roads? When I would ask these questions, my aunt would simply turn her head away from me, tears at the edges of her eyes. I finally figured out that losing her sister was so painful to her that she couldn’t, wouldn’t talk about it. But I never stopped asking.
I looked around me. “Do any of you remember Allen and Sandra Simson? They would have lived here a long time ago, around thirty years now.”
The ladies looked at each other and shook their heads.
I took a deep breath. “How about Rose Carlson? Do any of you know Rose Carlson? Or her sister, Sandra Carlson? That would have been her name before she was married.”
All around were mystified head shakes. By now I felt so nauseated I could barely stand. I felt hot and cold all at once. Without further explanation, I fled to my little bathroom in the back, where I leaned both hands on the edge of the sink and looked at myself in the mirror. I was freezing. I was sweating. Peas of moisture beaded on my forehead, yet my throat was dry. I swallowed several times and just managed not to throw up. Breathe. Breathe, I told myself. Something else was bothering me, something I’d shoved to the back of my mind for all these years, something I didn’t confront, couldn’t. But something that was even now staring me in the face. I looked up at the reflection of my own face in the mirror above the sink. That beautiful, barefoot woman with the long hair was not my mother. The two in the picture were not my parents.
I could hear Johanna in the other room. “Well, ladies, let me go see how Marylee is. Keep leafing through the magazines and we’ll be right back.”
A moment later her hand was on my neck.
“Did you see the picture?” I asked.
“I did, Marylee. I did. But there’s going to be a simple explanation. After the class, I’ll come up to your apartment and we’ll figure it all out.” Her voice was soothing, and I was so glad she was my friend and that she was with me tonight.
“But why?” I asked. “Where did Beryl’s picture come from? Where did my picture come from?”
After my aunt Rose had died and my engagement had fallen apart, I’d come here to Burlington, Vermont. It was the only thing I could really do. Even despite her Cassandra-like warnings, I was born here and had lived here for the three years prior to my aunt driving us out west. The secrets lay somewhere here in Burlington. I just had to find them. Of course, I had researched the accident. Through the years, I’d pawed through my aunt’s things looking for pictures, looking for news articles, looking for death certificates. I’d found nothing. I’d searched my parents’ names on the Internet, plus any reference to a car accident in Vermont many times, and had come up empty.
Someday