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"Oh, dear," Helena's mother had said, her voice catching in her throat. "Molly, you say? Molly from Africa?"
"Well," Molly had replied, puzzled. "Yes, we met in Africa, but I'm American."
"Yes, yes, of course." Helena's mother made a noise on the other end of the line. "I'm quite afraid that you've missed her, love," she said.
Molly hadn't understood at first. "Missed her? Will she be home later?"
This time Helena's mother's tears were not smothered. She sobbed. "No, dear. You missed her completely. Helena died last year."
As it turned out, Professor Puffin had come back and been furious that Helena had not told him about his son, and he'd taken her for a drive one day under the guise of wanting to talk about raising Brian together. Helena never came home, and her parents ended up raising her son without her.
It hadn't surprised Molly--not entirely. She'd hoped for the best outcome for the girl, of course, but there had been an air of danger to Helena from the moment Molly had found her asleep by a resort pool in Madagascar. She'd run away from home, ended up on a different continent, and was trying to flee from a controlling man and his friends. In order to save herself, she'd gotten onto a boat with a woman she barely knew and traveled for nearly a month. That her life hadn't ended in a storybook way wasn't a complete shock.
Molly put the photo of Helena and Brian behind the one of her and Rodney and sipped her tea.
The next photo was of Dr. Reddy and Ema standing on either side of Molly. She was dressed as Queen Elizabeth on the night of the meke dance, and they'd flanked her like proud parents for this photo. There was no doubt in Molly's mind that her life was better for having known Ema and Dr. Reddy, and she'd kept up a warm and regular correspondence with Ema these past forty years. Dr. Reddy had died in 2020 after contracting Covid, but Ema, now nearly one hundred, was still living on Rotuma with her family and friends, and she still sent Molly semi-annual updates in her shaky handwriting, talking about the children and grandchildren of the kids who Molly had worked with during her time at Rotuma high school.
In one of her last letters she'd even included a photo of Adi and his second wife, Prya. They'd married a year after Molly's departure and gone on to have four children together. They were now the proud grandparents of nine, and Molly marveled at the way Adi's eyes peered out of the smiling, wrinkled face of this lean, gray-haired man in the photo. His wife was lovely: dark hair shot through with silver, a gentle smile, and the graceful hands of a dancer. Molly was thrilled to find that he was alive and well, though he was perhaps the one person she'd never wanted to reach out to for fear of re-opening an old wound. Loving a man like Adi had always been something she'd done while knowing it had a finite timeline. When she'd left Fiji she'd left him--forever--and she'd sent him nothing but good thoughts and intentions all these years. And, looking at the photo of him and Prya, she knew her wishes for his health, happiness, and prosperity had come true.
The next photo in the pile is one of Molly with Rodney’s grandparents. They’d set a camera timer and stood together in the dining room with Issei Kobayashi standing between Hana and Molly, the wife of the grandson they’d never met. Contrary to the photos you see of many older Japanese people, where they pose with serious faces and body language that says they aren’t sure how to position themselves, Issei smiles jubilantly, with one arm around each of the women. Oddly, even more than the photo of she and Rodney’s wedding day, this photo makes her eyes sting with unshed tears. For the time she spent with Issei and Hana, they’d been like surrogate grandparents to her, listening to her talk about her life with their grandson, and telling her stories of their time in America, and what things were like in Japan. She’d kept in touch with them for the rest of their lives, though they’d both been gone now for nearly twenty years, with Hana having succumbed to dementia, and Issei to a heart attack not long after.
Molly takes a break then, standing and stretching in front of her living room window. She carries her mug to the kitchen and pours more hot water into her tea mug, then returns to the front room and curls up on the couch again. These memories are as fresh as if everything had just happened yesterday. It could be that she’s just recently talked about all of these people, but at the moment, they feel close enough to pick up the phone and call, though she knows they aren’t.
The next photo in the stack is of Kate from Spain. Molly smiles, remembering the night they’d run from the men and dropped their gelatos, ducking into the butcher’s shop. In the photo, Kate is the epitome of youth and glamour: her long, brown hair waves over one shoulder, and her toned, tanned limbs are on full display beneath a tiny denim skirt and a tank top. She has a white leather belt with silver studs slung around her hips in the style that girls did in the mid-80s, and on her feet are scrunchy white leather boots. She looks cool and distant, and Molly wonders if Kate's daughters ever look at photos of her from this time, and think how beautiful and unknowable their own mother is to them.
She and Kate had promised to keep in touch when they parted ways, and, in true pre-Internet fashion, they had: first with letters, then phone calls when they could afford long distance, and then finally with Facebook, like everyone else. The decades between then and now have reduced them to nothing more than people who once knew each other, but there’s a bond there, and they keep in touch with yearly updates, liking one another’s posts, chatting about things like friends who might bump into one another at the post office.
Kate is lovely in her 60s, with shoulder-length hair and a big, white smile. The years have softened her edges and she’s a grandmother now, her two daughters having given her five grandkids. She gardens and posts about her work at the soup kitchen in her upstate New York community, and every so often she and Molly talk about that night when they nearly escaped certain kidnapping as beautiful young women, laughing about how times have changed, and how if anyone chased them now, they’d spend about five minutes in the company of two menopausal women with no compunction about speaking their minds, and set them free.
There are several pictures of Molly in the A-frame house in Lapland, laughing as she bakes bread, sitting on the couch with a book, and standing on the porch in the snow, hands shoved into the pockets of her heavy coat, smiling as if she’d always be that young and lovely. There are also photos of Graham and Ursula hugging one another by the Christmas tree, and of Carina wearing the Tomte hat, sticking out her tongue and crossing her eyes for the camera. All she knows of the friends she made during that time in Sweden are that Graham became a professor of astronomy at Yale, Ursula moved to London and married an artist, and Carina died of breast cancer in her 40s. This Molly knows because she’d Googled them all; her heart had lurched when a photo of Carina came up with her obituary, detailing how the author of the National Book Award-winning novel,The Northern Lights of Heaven, had succumbed to the disease after a short battle. She left behind a wife and young daughter.
Molly glances at the clock over her mantel, realizing that if she doesn’t sleep soon, she’ll be exhausted in the morning, mixing muffins and baking scones from beneath a fog of deep fatigue. But she still has one more photo, and as she holds it in her hands, she is transported back to Madagascar, with its giant baobab trees, dusty roads, beautiful beaches, and warm, fragrant stews. She is in her small third floor apartment again, washing dishes as she looks out the window at the buildings across from hers, or standing on the landing and watching the men with the trained lemurs in her courtyard. She is walking the miles each day back and forth to the resort, scrubbing, cleaning, kneeling, sweating, and daydreaming about Rodney. She is coming home to a young, scared Helena, cooking a simple dinner together, and listening to her little stowaway breathing rhythmically in the dark apartment as stray cats howl out on the streets.
Molly looks down at her hands, the photo clutched between her fingers. It still surprises her occasionally to see that the veins and tendons on her hands are so pronounced, and that the thinning skin stretched across them is covered with sunspots and signs of a life spent outdoors, sailing, walking, living. She focuses in on the photo, smiling at the face that beams back at her.
It’s Faniry, grinning that big, white smile at her from forty years ago. Faniry, with her shiny, apple-round cheeks, her gleaming dark skin, kept supple with lotion and the sweat of hard labor, and her ample body, wrapped in the maid’s uniform they both wore at the time.
In the photo, Faniry is holding a feather duster in one hand, twirling it in the air like a royal princess on a float in a parade. She’s laughing, happy; she and Molly were, no doubt, joking in their made-up language that they used to communicate while grinding through their shifts together. From Faniry, young Molly had learned hard work. She’d watched this woman with three children at home as she'd cleaned, labored, and smiled indulgently at the resort’s pampered guests, and from her Molly had gleaned that patience, kindness, and attention to detail were the only way to get closer to God.
Molly recalls how Faniry had put her own job on the line to sneak food from the kitchen for Helena that morning they’d found her by the pool, and she remembers the woman working twice as hard sometimes to make sure that Molly’s tasks were completed as well as her own. During a time in her life when she’d needed a friend and someone to give her hope, Faniry had been there. Molly has no idea what happened to her—if she is even still alive—but in some ways she feels like this is better. If something tragic has befallen such a beautiful soul it would destroy her.
No, she prefers not knowing.
Molly presses the photo to her chest like she’s sending Faniry a hug across the miles and the years, then places the photo back into the box with all the others. She puts the lid on it and pushes it away.
She won’t share the photos or the postscripts to these lives with her new friends on Shipwreck Key, because these things belong to her. Just like the last, tiny brass container of Rodney’s ashes does. Molly stands, and with the cooling mug of tea in one hand, she walks over to the mantel and stands before it, fingering the pearl from Kumi that still hangs around her neck.
“We’ve had a big adventure, haven’t we, Roddy?” she says, reaching out to place her fingertips on the top of the miniature urn. “And you’ve been with me every step of the way.”
Next to the urn is a framed photo of Rodney at twenty-one, his mouth open in a laugh as he holds a giant fish up with one hand. He’s on a boat, bobbing on the waves—always his favorite place to be. Molly touches the glass of this photo as well, letting her fingertips graze his face.
“We’ve been places, and we’ve seen things,” Molly says, her voice catching a little as she steps away from the mantel. “And you know what? We’re not done yet.”
With a final smile at her husband, Molly turns out the light and heads to bed. She needs to be up early—those scones won’t make themselves.
