Page 109 of Meet Me on Greenwood

"What?" I groaned.

Maise opened the door part way. "Are you okay? Are you going to throw something at me?"

I chewed on my lip because I was thinking about it, but that would mean I’d have to find another place to stay. "No, it’s just roommate shit. Did you need something?"

Maise brought in two tote bags full of paper and notebooks. "Lyla brought this over. She’s been going through your father’s things. She thought you might want to have them. They look like photo albums."

That caught my attention. "I thought our father gave us all of our photo albums," I said, rummaging through the worn, leather-bound albums. The pages inside were yellowed, filled with newspaper clippings and a few photographs.

Maise looked beside me, as I flipped through them.

"Was your mom interested in missing persons?" she asked.

There were countless clippings of people, mostly women, disappearing. One disappeared while running a trail, another while on a New York subway, but there was one that made me stop entirely. A woman who had disappeared from Niagara Falls.

"Is that you or Gema?" Maise asked.

"It is neither," I answered. "This is our mother."

I traced the photo dumbfounded, zeroing in on the amulet at her throat. Something was not adding up.

"Wow. Gema doesn’t talk about her much. Only that she… well struggled with her mental health."

I lifted my head to face Maise. "You mean she killed herself."

She looked apologetic. "I didn’t mean to be insensitive."

"You weren’t," I said, looking through the article. "She killed herself, but this photo…." I paused.

"What about it?" Maise asked.

"This article was written a decade ago."

"And?" Maise said unable to put the pieces together.

I opened my phone, bypassing the threats from my roommate and stopped at a photo I’d saved and looked at often. "Look," I said. "This is my mother on her wedding day." She was wearing the amulet in this photo too.

Maise took the phone and looked at it. "Your mother is the epitome of Black don’t crack. I need whatever genes you all have because in both photos she looks exactly the same."

I breathed deeply, hearing out loud what I’d been thinking. "This article was written ten years ago, our mother killed herself on a cruise twenty-one years ago."

Maise’s eyes widened, finally understanding what I was struggling with. "So, she’s still alive."

I didn't answer right away. I set both images side by side on the table, the wedding photo on my phone, and the newspaper clipping in my hands. I looked at them for a long time, but it was the same face. The same amulet. Twenty years apart, and not a single day of difference between them.

I pointed to the wedding photo. "Gema had this amulet when she was struck by lightning. She was wearing it," I said suddenly.

Maise looked surprised. "Do you have it?"

"No, of course not. She was wearing it," I said.

Maise looked disturbed. "They gave me all of her jewelry when she was admitted." She looked at the photo on my phone more closely. "This necklace was not among them."

We sat in silence trying to figure out what happened.

Finally, a tear escaped from Maise’s eye. "Has Gema told you about the project she has been working on?"

"No," I said. "We don’t talk much anymore."