I stop reading there. Our daughter. Walt is my father. For all these years, I never believed him. But why would I believe him? He told me that he and my mom were happily married and that my mom died when I was a baby. Why would my mom be writing him a note and leaving me out in the cold? I continue:
I’m sorry. For everything. For leaving you at the wedding, for disappearing like that, for not calling, for not telling you about her . . . I don’t expect you to forgive me, but I hope you will believe me. I don’t want things to be this way.
I love her and you very, very much.
I read that line again. Then why did you leave me? I want to scream, but there’s no one to hear.
It’s about the fire, Walt. When I touched your hands at our wedding, I had that same vision. I thought it would go away when I left, I thought maybe I could save her by taking her away from you, but nothing changed. As soon as she was born and I touched her, I saw the fire again. I can’t raise her knowing how it ends.
I am leaving her for you. Please don’t try to contact me. Tell Elaine that she had a mother who loved her very much. Tell her that I died when she was just a baby.
I hope you two will be happy together. I know you’ll be a good father. Keep her away from fire. Maybe without me she’ll be safe.
It’s better this way.
I love you.
Aster
Across the bottom, the stationery is printed with the words:
ASTER LAZOS, ARTIST, 917-555-0281
They lied. Together, my parents lied to me. I’ve spent my whole life believing that some stranger left me and that Walt took me in and wasn’t even my dad. I want to tear the letter to pieces. Instead, I ball it up and throw it at the wall. It hits with an unsatisfying whisper.
Walt is my father and Aster Lazos is my mother. The words repeat in my head over and over until they stop making sense and simply become words, jumbled and disconnected.
Aster Lazos. There’s more than just her name written at the bottom of the letter.
I grab the balled up letter and smooth it out on the bed. There’s a tear now along one of the creases.
Aster Lazos, Artist, 917-555-0281
I pick up the phone. Don’t think, I tell myself, just dial. With shaking hands, I dial the number and wait for my mother’s phone to ring.
“The number you have dialed has been disconnected,” an automatic voice announces on the other line.
I am shaking so hard that it takes me two tries to put the phone back on the receiver. I’m shaking as hard as Lyle did on the porch the other day, only I’m not cold.
I look at her name again. Lazos. Walt had never mentioned her last name before. Why does that sound familiar?
Suddenly I can picture it perfectly. The small crimped writing at the bottom of the painting of the baby. Lazos.
I stuff the paper in my pocket. Leaving the envelope and mess on Walt’s floor, I rush outside.
The rungs to the tree house are covered in a thin layer of frost. When I get to the top, I rub my hands together to warm them and then flip the painting around. Before, I hardly noticed the signature. Now that one word means everything. Lazos. Aster Lazos painted this. This is my mother’s painting.
I stick the canvas under my arm and climb back down the tree house. Once again I find myself running across the fields to Lyle’s house. This time I don’t care about the stinging in my legs or the burning in my lungs as I suck in the cool air. Walt is my father and Aster Lazos is my mother.
Lyle’s mom’s rusty white Toyota is parked in the driveway when I approach the house. She’s home. Once again, I race up the front steps and pound on the door. This time I’m not giving up. This time I know it’s a painting of me and Lyle’s not here to stop me from asking about it. I bang against the door, but no one answers. That’s okay, I was expecting that. I bang and bang until my fist aches, and then I pound some more. The door rattles under my fist and the sound of my knocking echoes across the hills.
“Let me in! Please let me in!” I shout.
If she’s listening, Lyle’s mom doesn’t respond. The blinds don’t move.
“Let me in!” I continue to cry, still beating against the door. The knot from this morning starts to grow again in my stomach. It hardens and presses against my insides until I have to sit down. I slump against the back of the door, still clutching the painting. She’s not going to answer.
The sun reflects against the window above me and I consider trying to push the window open to crawl through, but the thought of moving at all exhausts me. I place the painting on the stoop and curl up in a ball. I close my eyes, willing the pain in my stomach to go away. Instead, it spreads through my whole body. I curl up tighter against the cold air and wait for the sun to warm me, but it lacks its usual heat today. The bristly fingers of the welcome mat scratch my cheek, but I don’t move. As cold and uncomfortable as I am, I drift off into a deep, dreamless sleep.
Chapter Eighteen
ASTER! OH, ASTER!” A VOICE I DON’T recognize cuts through my sleep. Someone is shaking me awake. I struggle to open one eye and see a hand on my shoulder. When I close my eye again, I’m not dreaming. I’m having a future flash.
I’m sitting in a sunny living room with a canvas and easel in front of me, a paintbrush in one hand. The canvas in front of me is wet with paint. I study the three glistening apples, one of them on its side. Did I really paint that? It’s better than anything I’ve painted before.
“Nice work, Laney,” someone says. I peer around my canvas and see two floral couches and a coffee table. The coffee table is covered with a white sheet and has three apples perched atop it. Then I notice another canvas across from mine. Paint-splattered jeans stick out beneath it. A face peaks out from behind the canvas. A pale, moon-shaped face.
Lyle’s mom.
My eyes fly open. The same pale face from my future flash is peering down at me, filling my vision. She looks like a washed out version of Lyle. Faint freckles mark her ghostly skin and her hair hangs to her shoulders, a drab, greasy version of Lyle’s red. She’s wearing a stained beige bathrobe.
“You look just like her,” she whispers, her eyes widening. “Exactly like her, but with gray eyes instead of brown . . .”
“Exactly like . . .?”
“Aster, you look like Aster. It’s uncanny really, the—”
“So, you know my mom?”
“Oh child, I’m so sorry I didn’t let you in earlier. I am not myself these days. Can you get up? Let me help you get up and you can come in from the cold so we can talk.”
She steps back so that I can stand, raising her eyebrows when I grab the painting. I look at the canvas and then back at her.
“I took this,” I say, stating the obvious. “I’m sorry.”
“No, no, it’s okay. I’m sorry. Come in, come in.”
I follow her into the house. It takes my eyes a moment to adjust, as the blinds are pulled shut against the light. Inside, it smells like mildewed towels and stale toast. Then I realize we’re in a darkened version of the living room from my future flash—the same floral couches and coffee table, minus the sunlight and apples.
“Sit down,” she says, patting the couch. “Let me get you something. Water? Soda? I’m afraid we don’t have much.”
“Water’s fine,” I tell her, as she pads barefoot into the kitchen. I’m tempted to open the blinds and crack the windows when she’s in the other room, as the air in the house feels heavy and the lack of sunlight is making me feel claustrophobic. Instead, I finger the paper in my pocket and wait.
Lyle’s mom returns and hands me a chipped glass with SoHo 36 Gallery printed in bright yellow on the side. How did a woman with a shed full of incredible art and a glass from a New York City gallery end up in Thornville?
“I’m Helen,” she says, sitting down. “And you must be Elaine.”
“People call me Laney.”
Helen smacks her forehead with her palm. “I can’t believe I didn’t put two and two together. Lyle has been
talking about a girl named Laney, but I didn’t think . . . Laney, Elaine . . . of course! Here you were knocking at my door!”
This makes no sense to me but she doesn’t explain further. She simply shakes her head. I have so many questions to ask her but I don’t know where to begin. I take a sip of water to give myself something to do. The house is as void of sound as it is of light.
Helen clears her throat, looks at me, and then averts her eyes. “I’m sorry again that I didn’t let you in. I know you’re Lyle’s only friend here and I thought you might think badly of him, what with me . . . well.” She waves her hand vaguely over her stained robe. “But I had no idea you were Aster’s daughter!”
I had no idea either, I think.
“I found this painting in your shed,” I say, touching the edge of the canvas. “I’ve been wanting to ask you about it. I know it’s me.”
Helen tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. We both look at the painting. Then the words begin to tumble out of her again.
“It’s you, yes, your mother painted that. She gave that to me years ago. It made her too sad. She was an amazing artist. And she loved you very much, you know. She never stopped loving you.”
“I didn’t know anything about my mother until today.”
“Nothing?”
“I never asked. Walt, I mean, um, my dad told me she died when I was a baby.”
Helen coughs into her hand, perhaps trying to hide her surprise. She stares at the blank wall across the room. With all those incredible paintings in the shed, all of the walls in the house are empty. I wait for her to continue and, when she doesn’t say anything, I begin to worry that she’s forgotten I’m here at all. Then, to my relief, she continues.
“I’m sorry, I’m lost in memories is all. And I’ll confess I haven’t talked to anyone besides Lyle for a while. It’s been a tough couple of years. Anyway, I should start at the beginning. Your mother. Hank and I—”
“Hank?”
“Sorry, that’s Lyle’s father. We had just moved to New York City. He was in school there and I was painting. But we had a new baby and we had no money, just barely scraping by. So we decided to find someone else to share our apartment with us. A friend told me about another artist who had recently moved to the city and was looking for a place to live. We hit it off immediately. She was funny and kind and incredibly talented, though she had a sadness to her.”
“What does she look like?”
“She looked almost exactly like you,” Helen says, shaking her head as if she can’t get over the resemblance. “Oh! Hold on a second.” She gets up. She is gone for so long I begin to think she’s not coming back.
“Here,” she says, when she finally returns to the room. She hands me a picture in a silver frame. I study the picture of two women standing next to a colorful abstract painting. One woman has pale skin and red hair and is smiling at the camera; the other has thick black hair and is pointing at the painting, her face partially hidden by her hair.
“Hank took this of me and Aster at one of my openings years ago,” Helen says. I look more closely at the woman with black hair. My mother. Though I can’t see her face clearly, there’s something about the line of her chin and shape of her longish nose that reminds me of the face I see every time I look in the mirror.
I don’t want to ask, but I know I have to. “What do you mean she looked like me?”
“Oh,” Helen says, tucking a stray strand of hair behind her ear again. “I’m sorry, Elaine, Laney. Your mother passed away three years ago.”
I look back at the picture in front of me and try to take it all in. This morning, I had no idea who my mother was. Now I had discovered her and lost her in a matter of hours.
“Why? How?”
“She was in a car accident. She moved out of New York City nine years ago to a small town in upstate New York, near Lake Champlain. She wanted to get away from people, from the world. She was driving on an icy road one night and she crashed into a tree.”
The stale air in the room feels like it’s choking me. I know it’s rude, but I can’t help it. I turn around and pull the chord on the blinds. Dust particles dance as the sunlight streams across the room. I push up against the window and open it a crack, feeling better as soon as the cool, fresh air pours through. If Helen disapproves, she doesn’t say anything.
“Why did she want to get away from everyone?” I ask, sinking back into the couch.
“She had trouble being too close with people. I guess after losing her and my husband in the same year, I can relate a little bit. Sometimes it’s easier to hold people at a distance. I guess that’s why Lyle and I have been moving around so much. I keep hoping things will be better, but of course they’re the same everywhere we go. Your mother and my husband died within weeks of each other. It shattered my world.”
I take in Helen’s stained bathrobe and greasy hair and think about Lyle coming home every day to this stuffy house. I think of Walt lying to me.
“It’s not fair, just doing what’s easier,” I tell her. “It’s not fair to the people around you, the people who should be close to you, people who need you.”
“It’s not,” Helen agrees. “I haven’t been a good mother to Lyle these past few years. I keep uprooting him and taking him from one place to another. You know, he was the one who suggested Colorado. He met your mother years ago and remembered that she spoke fondly of it here. He didn’t know about you. I had no idea whether you were still here, but I asked him, the first day of school, if there was a girl named Elaine in his class, but he said no. I never made the connection with Laney . . .” She shakes her head. “No, I haven’t been a good mother lately.”
“My mom left me on a stoop in the cold,” I remind her.
“It’s true,” Helen says. “And I can’t even imagine how that must feel. But try to understand. You see, Aster had a special reason for struggling with people.” She pauses and bites her lip, as if trying to decide something.
“What do you mean?”
“I know this might sound crazy to you, but she believed that she had . . . visions. She claimed she saw things about people, about the future. She found out she was pregnant with you on the day she married your father. When she touched his hand at the wedding, she saw a vision of him next to a huge fire. Wanting to protect you, she left him before even telling him she was pregnant. When you were born, she saw you in the fire too. Only you didn’t make it out. Most people would probably ignore those visions, but for some reason she really believed they were going to come true. She couldn’t take loving you and believing that she was going to lose you in a fire. It broke her heart to do it, but she left you with your father to escape those terrible visions. That’s when she moved to New York.”
I remember the note in my pocket. It’s about the fire, Walt. When I touched your hands at our wedding, I had that same vision. I thought it would go away when I left, I thought maybe I could save her by taking her away from you, but nothing changed. As soon as she was born and I touched her, I saw the fire again. I had been so overwhelmed with discovering the identity of my parents and being angry at their deceit that I somehow didn’t fully register this important information. My mother had future flashes, just like me. And just like me, she saw a fire.
“What time is it?” I ask, wiping my suddenly sweaty palms on my jeans.
“Time?” She’s clearly thrown off. She stumbles as she stands up to check the clock in the kitchen. “Four fifteen. Lyle should actually be home by now,” she says, sitting back on the couch and picking nervously at a hangnail. “He keeps having these bike accidents. I know it’s silly, but I get a little worried when he’s running late.”
“What was he wearing today?” I ask.
“Wearing? You want to know what he was wearing?” Her forehead wrinkles.
“Please.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Let’s see. Some jeans? His gray T-shirt? That shirt was the last gift his father gave him and he wears it pretty much every—”
/>
“I have to go.” I stand so abruptly that I knock the water glass over next to me. It spills on the table and sloshes onto the floor.
Helen jumps in her seat, startled by my sudden movement. “I’m not sure I under—”
“You’ll let me in next time I come back?” I ask, hating to leave with so many questions unanswered.
“Oh, of course. I should have, I mean, I would have before. It’s just that I haven’t been up to—”
I don’t wait to hear her explanation. I leave the painting of me on the couch and bolt out the door.
It’s not until I’m almost a mile from Lyle’s house that it occurs to me that in my unnerved state, I wasn’t thinking clearly. I should have asked Helen to give me a ride. Helen mentioned Lyle’s bike accidents, so I know that he biked to school today, which means he should be returning on the road. Remembering the letter and my mother’s vision of the fire had caused me to panic, imagining that he wasn’t showing up because he was caught in a fire. But he’s not going to burst into flames in the middle of the road on the way home from school. The real danger is that he’s late because of Axel. And what am I going to do if I see Axel attacking him? Nothing. There’s nothing I’d be able to do. Should I turn around and get Helen to come with me? But what if he’s just running late for no reason? Lyle told me to stay away from him. How would he feel about me racing down the road with his mom looking for him? These thoughts churn as I run.
I’m thinking as I pound down the long stretch of flat road and I’m thinking when I pass the dusty spot where Axel knocked Lyle off his bike and I’m still thinking about those questions when I reach the top of the hill and look down and see the school. Nowhere between the school and me is a boy on a bike.
I stop running and walk the rest of the way to school. There’s no rush now. Lyle must not have biked after all. Maybe his mom didn’t notice that he left his bike at home today. He probably took the path home. He’s probably pushing open his front door right now. I tell myself this, but don’t quite believe it.
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