“No, it’s primitive, but it’s obvious that you were working toward something important.” Andrea’s hand had gone to her heart. “I can feel it here.”
Judith patted her hand to her chest, because she clearly felt the same way.
They stood like that, two women with their hands on their hearts, two women who could possibly be sisters, until Andrea made herself turn back to the collage.
She asked, “Do you remember doing this?”
“Barely. That was the year I discovered cocaine.” Judith laughed lightly, as if she hadn’t just confessed a crime to a Marshal. “What I remember was sadness. It’s so hard to be a teenager, but to have such loss …”
“You really captured it.” Andrea breathed deeply, trying to quell her emotions as she took in the minute details of Emily’s life. The frame of photos showed the young girl’s personality—whether she was running on the beach or reading a book or dressed in her band uniform playing the flute, her sweetness almost pierced the camera lens. She didn’t look fragile so much as vulnerable and very, very young.
A group photo was in the top-left corner. Emily was flanked by three boys and another girl. Ricky was easy to spot by her halo of curls, and also because she was the only other girl. Clay reminded Andrea of something Laura had said—that he’d been a breathtakingly beautiful boy. His piercing blue eyes sent a chill through Andrea even from forty years away. She assumed the guy standing beside Clay was Ricky’s twin brother, Eric Blakely, though their hair was different in texture and color. Which left Nardo as the snarky-looking, slightly plump blond with the hand-rolled cigarette dangling from his lips like Delaware’s own Billy Idol.
“Those were her friends.” Judith still seemed clearly anxious for more feedback. “Rather, the people she thought were her friends. Pregnant teenagers didn’t get their own reality shows back then.”
Andrea had found herself transfixed by Clay’s gaze again. She forced her attention onto a faded Polaroid. “Who’s this?”
“That’s my mom with my great-grandmother on my grandfather’s side. She died shortly after I was born.” Judith was pointing to a woman in a stern, Victorian-looking attire with a chubby, happy baby in her lap. “Granny was caught up in her career in those days. Gram practically raised my mother. That’s where the name Judith comes from. I’m the sum of their parts.”
There were more photos representing Judith’s motherless life. First day of school with no one at her side. First school play. First art show. First day at college. All linked together with text from the letter and found objects—a piece of a report card, a diploma, an advertisement for training bras. Though someone was clearly behind the camera, Judith was always alone.
Weirdly, the photographs made Andrea realize how relentlessly present Laura had always been in her own life. Gordon was always taking the photos. Laura was the one helping Andrea frost cupcakes for the school bake sale, showing her how to pin the pattern onto the pieces of material for the dress she wore to her Pride and Prejudice–themed birthday party, standing beside her at every art show and graduation and concert and waiting in line outside the bookstore wearing a wizard’s hat for the next Harry Potter release.
The revelation made Andrea feel oddly petty, as if she had scored a point against a rival.
“Obviously, that’s me.” Judith indicated a series of ultrasounds she’d fanned out in the center to represent the beginning of her life. “My mother had these taped to her bathroom mirror. I think she must’ve wanted to see them every morning and every night.”
“I’m sure she did,” Andrea agreed, but she found herself drawn to the liner notes from a cassette tape that anchored the bottom right-hand corner. Small, torn sections of colored photographs served as a constellation around the handwritten songs and artists.
Someone had made Emily a mixtape.
Judith said, “A lot of the music sucked in the eighties, but I have to admit these are pretty good.”
The ink had smeared. Andrea could only read a handful of the cramped words—
Hurts So Good-J. Cougar; Cat People-Bowie; I Know/Boys Like-Waitresses; You Should Hear/Talks-M. Manchester; Island/Lost Souls-Blondie; Nice Girls-Eye to Eye; Pretty Woman-Van Halen; Love’s/Hard on Me-Juice Newton; Only/Lonely-Motels
She tried to make sense of the tattered constellation around the words, but then she realized the pieces were not from several photographs, but from one. Two icy eyes at diagonal corners. Two ears. A nose. High cheekbones. A lush, full mouth. A slightly cleft chin.
Andrea felt a knot in her throat, but she forced herself to ask, “Who made the tape?”
“My father,” Judith said. “The man who murdered my mother.”
OCTOBER 19, 1981
Emily sat on the exam table inside Dr. Schroeder’s office. She was shivering so hard in the paper gown that her teeth were chattering. Mrs. Brickel had made her take off all of her clothes, including her underwear, which had never happened before. Emily’s bare bottom absorbed the chill of the vinyl padding through the thin roll of white paper. Her feet were freezing. She felt nauseated, but she couldn’t tell if it was the same nausea that had sent her running out of Bible Study last night or the nausea that had made her leave the breakfast table this morning without being excused. One had to be from stress. The other had to be from the sickly-sweet odor of maple syrup, which had always made her queasy.
Right?
Because there was no way that Emily was pregnant. She wasn’t an idiot. She would know if she’d had sex because sex was a really big thing. You felt differently after it. You knew that things had irrevocably changed. Because they had. Sex made you a totally new person. You were really a woman then. Emily was still a teenager. She felt no different now than she’d been this time last year.
Also, girls missed their periods all the time. Ricky could never keep track of hers. Gerry Zimmerman had skipped months of periods because she was on some weird egg diet. And everybody knew Barbie Klein had played so much tennis and run so much track that her ovaries had shut down.
Emily silently told herself the same thing she’d said for the last two days while she waited for her pediatrician’s office to open: she had a stomach bug. She had the flu. She was just regular sick, not pregnant sick, because she had known Clay, Blake and Nardo for as long as she had known herself and there was no way any of them had done anything bad to her.
Right?
She tasted blood in her mouth. She’d accidentally bitten the inside of her lip.
Emily’s hand went to her stomach. She felt the contour of her belly. Was that how it always felt? She’d lain in bed last night rubbing her stomach like Jeannie’s bottle and felt nothing but the usual flatness. Was there always a slight bulge like this when she sat up? She straightened her shoulders. She pressed her hand to her tummy. The flesh curved into the palm of her hand.
The door opened, and Emily jumped as if she’d been caught doing something wrong.
“Miss Vaughn.” Dr. Schroeder smelled of cigarettes and Old Spice. He was normally gruff, but now, he looked irked. “My nurse tells me you wouldn’t say why you’re here.”
Emily glanced at Mrs. Brickel, who was also Melody’s mother. Would she tell Melody that stupid Emily Vaughn had a stomach bug and thought she was pregnant even though she’d never had sex? Would Melody tell everyone at school?