Dear Kurl,
Back home at last, and I found both your letters waiting for me in our mailbox. Thank you, Kurl! It’s by far the best Christmas present I’ve received this year. Your letters are heavy in content, I know, but it’s such a joy and relief to hear your “voice” that I felt lighter reading them. I’d like to deliver this reply, and my previous letter, to your house, but I worry about possible interception. Did you receive that one letter I posted in the mail, the one about your brother Mark? I hope it found its way safely into your hands, though I don’t think it contained anything too incriminating, if your Uncle Viktor did happen to read it.
At 3 a.m. this morning in Moorhead, Shayna shook me awake. She’d switched on the halogen lights in the study, and once my eyes adjusted to the glare I saw that she had spread photographs all over the rug between my cot and her sofa bed. “Get up,” Shayna ordered. “Come look.”
It was so cold in the room my nose was numb. Gloria likes to economize on heating at nighttime. My sister had swaddled herself in all her blankets. Rather than unzip my sleeping bag, I wormed to the edge of the cot and flopped over onto the floor.
“Watch it!” Shayna hissed. “You’re messing them up.”
“Where did you find all these?” I said.
“In this thing”—she toed a floral-print file folder—“underneath all that crap in Gloria’s basement.”
“You snooped in Gloria’s basement?”
“Look, will you?” Shayna said. “They’re all of Mom.”
She was right. Raphael with eight candles on her birthday cake. Raphael missing her front teeth. Raphael in a church choir.
“She looks like me,” I said, surprised. I’d always thought I took after Lyle. “Like pictures of me as a little kid.”
Raphael crouching on the grass with her arms wrapped around the neck of a German shepherd. Raphael in a soccer uniform, one foot proudly poised on the ball. Raphael in a turquoise satin prom dress.
“Well, she looks like you more,” I amended. Teenaged Raphael had Shayna’s light brown hair, her pointed nose, her arched brows. Raphael and a friend wearing matching acid-washed jeans, jean jackets, and little bright-colored vinyl purses with long straps. Raphael and two friends posing like models on the steps of a museum or library.
There were so many pictures. Raphael sitting behind a boy on a motorcycle, lifting her helmet high in the air. Raphael on the sofa beside another boy, holding a bottle of beer. Raphael wearing dark eyeliner, her hair dyed black like in the picture at Rosa’s Room. After a while I found myself scanning the array for images from the less distant past. “Is Lyle in any of these?” I asked.
“Lyle?” Shayna exploded. “Who cares about Lyle? This is Mom’s whole life, right here, and we’ve never seen any of it.”
“But they met really young, right?” I said. I picked up a photo of black-haired Raphael playing guitar and held it up for her to see. “She might have been singing with the Decent Fellows already by this point.”
Shayna lunged to grab a photo from the far side of the display, moving so violently that her blankets swept a half-dozen others under the sofa bed. “Do you remember this?” she asked me.
It was Raphael in a hospital bed with her leg in a cast, in traction. Her arm was wrapped around a small child curled beside her, asleep. “That’s you?” I guessed.
“It’s you. Remember? You would have been three or four. I think she slipped on some rocks or something when we were swimming. Maybe at a festival?”
I looked closer. The child’s face was wide and pale, the hair long and feathery. I didn’t recognize myself.
“Don’t you remember?”
I shook my head, and when I looked up Shayna was crying. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s not that,” she said. “It’s like he just erased her.”
“Lyle?”
“Yes. Like, maybe you actually would remember some of this stuff, if he hadn’t gone and destroyed all the evidence of her existence.”
She wiped her face with her blanket and was quiet a minute as I looked at more of the photos. Then she said, “You know that place called the Ace? So it turns out that guy Axel, the owner, is pretty cool. He really liked me, that time Bron and I went to the open mic night. He says he might give me a gig.”
“Like Raphael, on that postcard,” I said.
Shayna nodded. “Mom played there a lot, apparently. Just her and her guitar. Axel says she used to pack the place.”
“Cool,” I said, to make her feel better. But I knew Lyle wouldn’t think it was cool, that my sister was frequenting the Ace. In fact, I strongly suspected that Lyle had never thought it was cool that Raphael played there, either, although I didn’t know why not. Maybe she’d had a falling-out with the Decent Fellows and went solo, and there’d been hard feelings.
I kept all this speculation to myself, though. Things are heated enough between Shayna and Lyle these days; I didn’t want to add fuel to the fire.
Yours,
Jo