“That's what I get out of it,” Sam says.
“That's lovely,” I mutter, wiping my fingers on a napkin and tossing it onto the table. “Here’s the thing. We all want to think we know exactly how someone should react in any given situation. We want to pretend we have it all figured out, and if someone is acting a different way, that we know for sure what’s going on in their mind. That’s not the case. Nobody ever knows how they are actually going to react to something happening until it happens to them. Until they are standing in that situation and staring down the barrel at it, they don’t know what they would do. And neither does anyone else. You can tell a lot about someone from their emotions and how they act. But you can also tell nothing at all.”
“Speaking of deep hidden secrets and lovely mysteries unfolding, what do you say we head over to the storage unit?” Sam asks.
“Wow. You truly are working on becoming a master of conversation segues, aren't you?” I say flatly.
“I dream big. Come on. Eventually they're going to want me back at the station. but we're just a couple of minutes away from the storage unit, so we might as well swing by.”
He pays for lunch, and we make our way to the storage unit. Part of me expects to see more damage done to the door, or even the new lock snapped off. Instead, it looks like no one has bothered the area since I was here yesterday. I glance over at the woods. I don't feel the same strange awareness this time. Climbing out of the car, I gesture to the door to the storage unit.
“This is it,” I tell him. I walk up to the door and release the firm new lock. The door opens, and I pat the top of the first plastic tote. “This is the one I went through yesterday. It's a bunch of Christmas decorations I don't recognize. None of them seemed massively old. I mean, a few of them have some years on them, but I wouldn't quite make the leap to these being precious heirloom pieces.”
“You don't remember any of them?” he asks.
“No. None of them look familiar. I don't know why they kept it.”
Moving the box of Christmas decorations to the side, I pry open the next box. It doesn't seem to be much more than clothes. At the very bottom of the box is a pair of shoes. They look familiar, but I can't quite place them, and that makes me squirm slightly. I open the third box, and my heart jumps a little.
“What is it? What did you find?” Sam asks.
“Pictures,” I tell him. “This whole tote is full of pictures. Look, it's my grandparents when they were younger.”
“It looks like a wedding,” Sam says, taking the picture and looking down at my grandmother and grandfather gazing at each other as they danced in each other's arms. “There are people in the background, watching them.”
He shows me the picture again.
"They got married when they were much younger than this. Here," I point to the picture, "this is my father, see? This must be when they renewed their vows. My grandmother told me about that. Apparently, I was there. I was very little, but I was there."
I pick up a handful of other pictures and start flipping through them. Sam stares into the box with a hint of awe.
"There could be thousands of pictures in there. That's incredible," he says.
I barely hear him. I force myself to swallow and feel like the rock in my throat sinks down, then rises right back up.
"I only need this one," I manage to say, staring down at the picture in my hand. The rest slip out, some sliding back into the tote while others fall from the side of the box and ended up on the floor.
"What is it?" he asks.
I touch my fingertips to the picture.
"My mother."
Chapter Nineteen
I always thought my mother was the most beautiful woman in the world. I never had the opportunity to see her dance in Russia. There aren't any video recordings, only pictures of her on the stage. In her pristine costumes, her elegance and poise were breathtaking. She commanded the attention of every single person in that room. It's why she was celebrated and loved. But the world of ballet wasn't enough to hold her. It wasn't deep in her heart. When an injury took her off stage, she had a choice. She could have fought her way back, by pushing her body to recover, and demanding to take her spot again. If she hadn't been able to perform at the same level, she could have become an instructor and led her own company.
But that wasn’t her dream. She wanted so much more than a life that was chosen for her in Russia. She dreamed of coming to the United States and crafting her own reality, her own future. She wanted love and a family. It took incredible courage for her to walk away from the security of the role selected for her when she was still so young, from the only world she had ever really known. It took even more to pack up what she could bring with her and come to a completely new world, a new country where she knew no one and had to start completely over.
It doesn't matter that I never got to see her dance. I can imagine it in my mind. I know her face and her smile. I know the way she seemed to float and glide even when she was just walking. She was still the most beautiful woman in the world.
It's been so long since I even looked at a picture of her. My father didn't like to keep many of them around. I think he felt like they anchored him in place. Like if he thought of any one location as where she was, he wouldn't be able to leave it. And he always needed to be able to leave. But I can remember the images of her that used to hang around the house and fill the one album on the shelf in the living room. Even when he was willing to put them on display and look at them constantly, there weren't many pictures of my family, especially him and my mother.
At least, I didn't think there were. It was always understood that taking pictures created a trail. When there was an image of you in a certain place, it links you to that place. It leaves a footprint. People can follow your trail. That was always a threat hanging in the backs of our minds. I never knew why. They never told me, and I didn't ask. Questions also created trails. Once you knew something, there was no way to not know it anymore. That information sat with you and created an invisible tether to all others who knew it. It was safer for me to know nothing and to just go along as I was told.
Yet this box is overflowing with pictures I've never seen. Hundreds of images not kept in any order or contained in books or envelopes. It just looks like somebody took them and tossed them in here to keep them out of sight. The one I'm holding now has my mother laughing in front of a big blue house. She looks young and happy.
“Where is that? What's that house?” Sam asks.
I shake my head. "I don't recognize it. I don't know where that is."
“Do you still have the pictures you took of the papers you got from Iowa?” he asks.
Taking my phone out of my pocket, I pull up the gallery and hand it to him. He scrolls through the images until he gets to the deed to the house. Taking out his own phone, he inputs the address into a mapping website and then turns the screen toward me.
“It's the same house. That's the house in Iowa,” I confirm.
I hand Sam the picture of my mother, so I can go through more of the pictures. Several of them are of the exterior of the house, the porch that wraps around it, baskets of flowers hanging from hooks. Others are of a garden in the back and a winding brick path leading to a mailbox. Deeper in the stack, I start finding pictures of the inside. A sudden wave of memory hits me, and I grasp onto Sam's arm.
“What is it?” he asks.
“I know this house,” I tell him. “I remember it. It's not much, but I remember being here. This room was the dining room, but it was just the three of us, so we didn't need the formal table and everything. So they emptied it out and turned it into a playroom for me. There was a section of the floor where the stain settled darker, and some of the grain looked like an 'E'."