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Lenna nods. “Her phone, I guess, but she did take that, because she sent the audio file.” She opens another drawer. This one holds jeans, sweatpants. If there are any clothes missing, Lenna wouldn’t know.
“Wait,” she says, standing straighter. “She’s got a locket.”
“What?”
“She was always wearing it…I think it was from her brother? Before he died?” She pulls open a top drawer but only finds socks. “If she knew she was leaving, she might have grabbed it…”
Sarah inspects a small table by Teddy’s bed and looks around for any jewelry. Lenna heads to Rhiannon’s dresser. On top of it is a little cloth box that might hold small items like a locket. Lenna lifts it, certain she’s going to find what she’s looking for, but there is nothing there except for a small beaded bracelet. She clacks the beads together, moving them through her fingers. It looks like the same one Coral was wearing. She gets down on her hands and knees and checks under the bed. All she finds is dust.
“Inside a pocket?” Sarah points to a pile of dirty clothes in a woven laundry bin.
“Maybe,” Lenna says, but she doesn’t move. There is something intimate about touching her friend’s dirty clothes. She spies the T-shirt Rhiannon wore the other day when she picked Lenna up at the side of the road. Just looking at the stuff brings unexpected tears to her eyes. She’d had so much hope about this place, aboutRhiannon.
She pads over to a few articles of clothing draped over the chair, perhaps to be hand-washed. One is a bra. She picks it up by the straps. She’s about to toss it down—handling it doesn’t feel right—but then something about the left cup is stiff in an usual way, certainly not like normal padding. She runs her hand along the fabric. The seam is sewn shut, but there’s something hard and unwavering between the pad and the underwire. Like something has been stuffed in there.
On Rhiannon’s dresser is a nail clipper; she grabs it and starts making tiny cuts at the seam. Sarah notices. “What are you doing?”
“It feels like there’s something stuck in here.”
She frees enough of the cup that she can push her fingersinside. Thereissomething there. Something folded flat. She twists and wriggles it so that it fits through the inch-sized hole.
It’s a color printout of a photo, pasted on a torn piece of paper. Lenna brings it to the light. A middle-aged woman smiles straight into the lens. She has a sharp jaw, thin lips, downturned eyes. Her face sags a little—she looks nearly fifty—and her hair is a shiny reddish brown, the same color hair as Rhiannon’s. Same eyes, too.
When she looks at the other person in the picture, it’s Rhiannon herself. And it’s arecentRhiannon, a grown-up Rhiannon, with her bouncy curls. The shirt she’s wearing is a sleeveless Old Navy plaid button-down that Lenna distinctly remembers.
The women look caught off guard, like they didn’t plan on someone snapping a photo. Rhiannon is thinner than she is now, her jeans hanging off her hips, her bare arms sinewy. But the other woman, the older Rhiannon clone, has a T-shirt stretched across her midsection. It takes Lenna a moment to realize that it isn’t just a beer belly.
She turns the photo over, blinking hard at the half-smeared poetic scrawl in black pen.
Mama and her babies: one inside, one where we can see.
You might be fooling some, but you’re not fooling me.
25
Rhiannon
June
Two years before
Rhiannon stomped on the sidewalk stars on the Walk of Fame, glaring at the text she’d just received. She was agitated. Gillian’s little sob story had interrupted her, thrown her off. Also, seeing Gillian felt like bad luck. She reminded Rhiannon about her own lies. One of which was, ironically, staring her in the face right now, in the form of a friendly text message.
Hi baby. It’s me. Your mom. Wondering if you wanted to come for a visit. It’s been a long time.
After all these years? Where was thiscomingfrom?
It wasn’t like Rhiannon was lying completely. Her mother, Joanna, was a shitty person—that much was very true. Addicted to pills—not that Rhiannon knew about that when she was young. Back then, there were some days when she’d extend her arms wide for Rhiannon to fall into. Other days, she hid behind closed doors, or else she’d be all fangs and horns, raging at Rhiannon and herbrother, throwing things at them, bemoaning the fact that she had children at all. They had to make their own meals on those days—if, that was, there was food in the house. One winter day, a pipe burst in their bathroom from a freeze, and water started flooding the floor. No matter how hard Rhiannon pounded on Joanna’s door, her mother couldn’t be bothered to come out to do anything about it. Eventually, Rhiannon had to run over to the neighbor’s, but she felt so much shame when the man came into the house and saw the dirty dishes, the filthy floor, the neglect. She still could picture the guy’s look of disgust.
Rhiannon’s father wasn’t much help; he worked long shifts at a local wastewater plant, and even when he was around, he was just a slumped presence at the edges. It was kind of amazing he was even in the picture, considering how young he and Joanna had gotten together—one baby when she was sixteen, a second one at eighteen. Granted, he was a little older…but not much.
For as many pills as her mother took, her father drank as many beers. Dad was not, however, an angry drunk—he’d never laid a finger on Rhiannon or her brother, Carey, which wasn’t the same as she could say for their mom. There was also a window between stressed and comatose where Dad was shining and mellow and gracious with his time; he liked when Rhiannon curled up next to him and read him stories—it was how she practiced learning to read. He sat with his eyes closed like he was listening to a symphony; she liked that she could give that to him. Though half the time, her reading just made him doze off.
She knew this wasn’t really a family. Or, rather, not the kind of familyshewanted. When she drew pictures, she drew a family portrait but with other parents. Taller. Different hair color. They ate ice cream cones. They paddled a canoe. She doubted her parents would ever take her and Carey to paddle a canoe.
On the last day Rhiannon ever saw Joanna, her mother satlistlessly on the couch. It seemed to hurt her to blink. When Carey, who was nine at the time, spoke to Joanna, she startled like she’d been sleeping with her eyes open. Rhiannon wasn’t sure what to do. Their father had told them if anything seemed wrong, they should call him at work, but she didn’t want to admit anything was wrong.
She suggested they rent a movie at the video store that had opened up down the road. Their father had just brought home a used DVD player someone had given him at the plant. It would be fun!
