Page 19 of What You Never Knew

I push up off the couch, easily shedding the bad-mother feeling that the phone call gave me, and head upstairs to go looking for proof of my mother’s affair.

I go through every drawer in my parents’ room but don’t find anything of significance. What I do find is a photo of my mother that May took. It’s in the drawer of the bedside table that my father used. A candid shot, reminding me of how May used to sneak around this island, stealing moments from all of us with her camera. It’s more dramatic when you don’t know it’s being taken, she’d say, in an attempt to justify the unapproved shots. We all found it extremely annoying, but I realize now that some of her photos might hold the clues I’m looking for.

May used to keep all of her cottage photos in an old suitcase in her room. It’s not out in the open, so I go to her closet. A handful of dresses and a terry cloth robe still hang there. I can’t resist the urge to bring the robe to my face and breathe in its scents—mothballs and suntan lotion.

A vision of May walking down the path to the lake in front of me, wearing that robe over her bathing suit, instantly comes to mind. The morning sun is high and the lake is like glass, and we are wasting no time getting there. We will spend the day in and out of the water and stretched out in the sun on lounge chairs and leave the dock only when the sun is fading. I let the robe go, the pain of the memory slicing through me too deep to let me linger there.

Pushing the clothing to either side, I don’t find the suitcase, so I go to the next logical place: under the bed. Crouching down on the floor, I lift the quilt, and sitting there, tucked just out of plain view, is the suitcase. I’m surprised she didn’t take it with her. She was always so particular about her photos.

I lay the suitcase on the coffee table in the living room but decide it would be better opened with a glass of wine. On my way to the kitchen to get one, I notice my parents’ old record player and record collection. My mother loved music of all kinds, from Miles Davis to Patsy Cline and the Beatles to Frank Sinatra and Van Morrison.

I’m not sure it will still work, due to lack of use and years of damp, but I choose a Dave Brubeck album anyway, carefully place it on the turntable, and pull the arm back. It clicks into motion, and when I set the needle down, music fills the room. I feel the whole cottage sigh with pleasure. How long has she waited to hear music again?

Sick of the white wine I was drinking earlier, I grab one of the bottles of red from the storage room, throw some more crackers and cheese slices on a plate for my dinner, and head back to the living room.

The sun has set and there’s a slight chill to the room, so before sitting down with the suitcase, I make a fire. Logs are still stacked against the side of the fireplace, kindling in the metal bin on the other side along with some old newspapers. It brings me back to the many times my mother sent me in here after dinner to build a fire on a cool or rainy evening. We’d all sit around it with jazz playing in the background, just like it is now. It was my mother’s glass of wine on the table, though, not mine, and she’d be sitting in a chair reading while my sister and I played cards or a board game.

I was so safe and content back then, in my oblivion. Not knowing that behind the cover of her book, my mother’s mind was most likely drifting to thoughts of West. I naïvely and egotistically thought that May and I were her main concern, that she didn’t really have a life outside our family. As a child, you don’t imagine that your parents are capable of ever making decisions that aren’t in your best interest. As an adult, you realize your parents were human just as you are, and their mistakes along the way suddenly become illuminated by the phosphorescence of your own.

My hands tremble slightly as I flip open the clasps on the suitcase. The blue silk lining holds a mess of loose photos. The first photo I see is of a girl from sailing club. I remember her well. She came for only one summer, the cousin of one of the cottagers. Her name was Kennedy. She had red hair that she always wore in a long braid, a Milky Way of freckles across both cheeks, and a deep, husky voice. When she laughed, she sounded like a seventy-year-old woman who smoked a pack a day.

The picture was taken on the sailing club dock, and there are boats lined up in the background. May has captured Kennedy mid-laugh. The girl was May’s first crush, and they shared one brief kiss behind the sailing club. May was so scared of getting caught that it was all she could manage.

In high school, May finally got up the courage to tell my mother that she thought she liked girls instead of boys. My mother told her it was a phase and to keep it in check so as not to shame the family. May never spoke to my mother again about being gay.

May had a handful of secret relationships, telling only me about them, but none of them lasted. She just never found a way to escape the sense that she was doing something wrong, that she was dishonoring the family. Love can’t grow from that kind of toxic soil. Even I know that.

I put the photo of Kennedy aside with the plan to tack it up in May’s room. She wasn’t able to bring it out of hiding, so I’ll do it for her.

The next photo I pull out is coincidentally of me and Ezra and that one kiss we had on the front verandah. I study the smooth, tanned skin of Ezra’s cheek and the way his dark hair curls up off his sweaty forehead.

Bringing it closer, I notice how our lips fit together just so and how I’d brought my hand to rest on his thigh, whereas his hands are clenched, one resting on the glider, the other at his side. Both of us have our eyes closed. The photo captures a raw innocence that magnifies the passage of time. Never again will I have so many firsts ahead of me. The children in the photo feel like strangers. I set it aside as well, to show Ezra when he comes back for a visit.

Pulling the photos together into a thick pile, I go through them one by one. A lot of them are of nature—rocks, the lake, sunsets, sunrises, trees, flowers, birds, insects. There are also a ridiculous amount of pictures of me—diving, tanning on the dock, making faces, swinging my tennis racket around, doing cartwheels, hiding behind a handful of cards. My mother is also a favorite subject of May’s, but I don’t find anything suspicious looking.

I find another one of me and Ezra; this one has West in it as well. We’re all holding up jackknives and a piece of wood. I actually remember that day. Ezra and I had helped West put rocks into the dock crib, and as a reward he’d given us a wood-carving lesson.

We’d sat out on the front steps of the cottage. West had taken my hands in his to show me how to carve the wood without cutting myself. The rough calluses of his wide palms scratched the tops of my small hands, still soft and wrinkled from swimming for rocks.

In the photo, Ezra and I proudly hold up our carvings. He’d done a dog, its head too big for its body. I’d made a pretty good sailboat, and West had carved a bird.

Frustrated that I’ve found images of only the Avril Island that I already remember, I toss the photos back into the suitcase. Not thinking I’ll actually find anything, I stick my hand into the flat compartment on the roof of the case. My fingers brush paper, and I reach in farther to pull out a medium-sized manila envelope wedged deep at the very bottom. As I slide it out, my heart beats just a little bit faster.

Inside is a small stack of photos, obviously ones that May didn’t want out in the open. I take a big sip of my wine and ask myself if I’m really ready for the proof I’ve gone looking for. In truth, it’s a rhetorical question. Who is ever ready to have their mother fall from grace? So many of us have to work too hard to keep our parents on their pedestal as it is.

The first photo is of my mother and West, standing at the end of the dock, their backs to the camera. My mother is leaning into West, pointing at something out on the water. There’s a definite sense of familiarity between them and the skin of their bare arms is touching, but it’s no declaration of an affair.

Not on its own. The next few photos, though, are similar, my mother and West engaged in some activity or discussion, their bodies leaning toward each other, always some part of them touching—both unaware that they’re being captured.

The photo I flip to next leaves no room for dispute. It’s deep in the forest of the island. They must have sneaked off to steal a moment together, not knowing May was tracking them. My mother is in West’s arms, her hands on either side of his face as they go in for a kiss.

May knew all along. The fact hits me like a ton of bricks. Why else would she have hidden these photos? And why would they have been taken in the first place if she hadn’t been looking for proof of something?

I reach for my wine and stare into the fire. The secret she kept is like a hot poker being pressed into the open wound left by her death. If she were alive, I’d pick up the phone and demand to know why she didn’t tell me. We weren’t supposed to have secrets from each other. We were supposed to suffer through it all together, or at least I thought that was the rule. She had no right to protect me from this.

The record ends, and the needle bumps up and down. I don’t get up. I sit in the silence, trying not to feel betrayed by my dead sister. I can almost hear her voice: I was only trying to protect you. Why should we both suffer?

That idea settles the hurt down enough for me to get up and flip the record. I pour the remainder of the wine into my glass, not caring that I’ve drunk it way too fast and feel light-headed. Then I sit back down with the photos.