LEXI BLUM

Lexi’s mother went missing on a cloudy Friday morning in November. Her parents’ next-door neighbor telephoned around eleven.

“You’d better come right away,” Eric said. “The cops are here. Your mother is gone, must have wandered off.”

Her mother had become increasingly vague and forgetful over the past month. Her father didn’t believe in consulting any other health professional. He diagnosed his wife’s condition as Alzheimer’s and insisted he was perfectly capable of managing her care.

Lexi told her co-workers she had a family emergency and sped the three-plus miles to Azalea Court. A city police cruiser blocked the narrow lane, so she drove past the blocked entrance, continued on Prince Street, and turned into the Community Gardens to park on the gravel road. Turning off the engine, she wondered about her mother wandering off. It wasn’t uncommon in people with dementia, but Lexi wasn’t convinced Iris had dementia. Her mom had been acting strange the past few weeks. Forgetful and vague, yes, but also unhappy and evasive and secretive.

She unfastened her seat belt but didn’t move, staring at the back of her parents’ house beyond the garden and the cruisers. She tried to slow-breathe through the worry, but she couldn’t make herself get out of the car.

Lexi’s parents had moved to Azalea Court in August 1953, two months after the Rosenbergs were executed—her mother told her that many times, always in a whisper as if the FBI was listening in. Iris had certain things she was religiously passionate about, even though she hadn’t been inside a synagogue for decades. One of those things was putting a menorah in the bay window of Number Two and silently lighting the right number of candles. Another was more recent and involved refusing to help her husband with the book he was writing. “It’s your version of heaven and hell,” she told him. “I don’t want any part of it.”

Living on Azalea Court was okay when Lexi was young. Donnie next door was the same age and the two of them ran happily wild on the state hospital grounds. They climbed the old copper beech trees and strung ropes and pulleys across the Mill River to exchange secret messages back and forth in tin buckets. Their favorite activity was sneaking into the hospital buildings after dark. They called it ‘adventuring.’ They vaguely understood that the hospital was a sad place, and that the people confined there were sick in different ways, but never thought about it much beyond that. One time they stole fresh baked brownies from the kitchen. Some spring evenings they watched as girls in pastel skirts came in a bus from the women’s colleges to dance and flirt with the patients and staff. “Community service,” her mother explained when Lexi asked about it. Then one night, the summer they were ten, while searching for an entrance to the mythical underground tunnels that connected the hospital buildings, Donnie and Lexi stumbled on a male attendant moving around on top of a patient whose nightgown was pulled up to cover her face. They never talked about it, but that was the last time they went adventuring at the hospital. Lexi moved out of her parents’ home at Two Azalea Court when she was eighteen and never lived there again.

Lexi was not proud of how long she sat in her car that morning, unable to face her father. But she finally pulled herself together, as he had taught her when she flipped out about solving algebra equations in seventh grade or left a science project until the weekend before it was due. “Pull yourself together and do the right thing,” he’d say.

Walking through the Community Gardens, Lexi marveled at how some people carefully prepared their plots for winters and others just left the detritus of the harvest to fend for itself under the coming snow and ice. There might be a useful metaphor there, but if so, she couldn’t find it. Landscapes and gardens were her business, but she blocked out her professional gaze as she walked, surveying the patchwork squares in browns and beige, just in case her mother rested on a frozen bench under someone’s shriveled grape arbor or huddled between barrels stuffed with shovels and rakes and watering cans waiting for spring.

Lexi always knew something was different about her family. When she was little, she understood that her father had a sadness inside. He was older than her friends’ fathers, less likely to get down on the floor and build windmills with Tinker Toys. She wondered why her parents didn’t have a big family of aunts and uncles and cousins like Donnie’s family or raucous parties with college friends like the people who used to live in Number Four. She also wondered why she didn’t have a brother or sister. Oh, how she wanted a sister! That would make the family more balanced, more even: two parents and two kids.

Maybe it was her lack of extended family or close friends that made her so curious about Harriet. Lexi was fifteen when she discovered Harriet. She shouldn’t have been snooping in her mother’s things, but Iris was at a PTA meeting and her father was watching a news show and wouldn’t let Lexi change the channel to anything interesting. Bored and lonely, she sat at her mother’s dressing table and tried on her necklaces and silly clip-on earrings. The photo was in the bottom of Iris’s pink satin jewelry box, under her favorite string of pearls. Her mother looked so young and happy it made Lexi’s throat ache. Elbows linked, her young mom and a curly-haired stranger stood grinning widely in front of an old-timey shack with a sign that said Ferry. On the back, written in her mother’s careful script: Harriet and me, 1949. Lexi carried the photo into the living room and waved it at her father.

“Who’s Harriet?”

He looked up. His eyes darted from Lexi’s face to the photograph in her hand and back to the TV. “Where’d you get that?”

“In Mom’s jewelry box,” she said. “Who’s Harriet?”

“Give me that. It’s not yours.”

She rolled her eyes. It was her response of choice that year. “Not yours either. Who is Harriet?”

“You shouldn’t have taken that,” her father said. “Your mother will be furious.”

“Who is she?”

“Who?”

“Harriet!” She hated it when he got like that. Purposely vague. “Stop acting stupid,” Lexi said. “She was Mom’s friend?”

He hesitated, then said, “Her best friend, from growing up on the island.”

“So how come I’ve never met her, never even heard of her?”

“We don’t talk about it. Those were terrible years.”

“Why? What happened?”

Her father turned up the volume and held out his hand. “We lost track of her years ago. Give me the photograph. And never bring her name up again. For your mother’s sake.”

Lexi stared at his face, trying to read his expression. Reluctantly, she handed him the photo.

She had no idea why she thought about Harriet now, decades later, as she walked slowly towards her parents’ home. She wished she had kept that photo and asked her mother about it. She only knew that her parents had some sort of important secret and it involved Harriet. But it was nothing that could help now that her mother was missing.

A uniformed policeman stood at attention on the porch. Her father was a private man and would hate having a cop at his door. Maybe he was hiding something, perhaps he felt guilty about something bad from long ago, but he was still her dad and she loved him anyway. How could she hold both of those things in her heart? She felt sorry for him too, on top of worrying like crazy about her mother.

What a mess. But Eric’s phone call didn’t surprise her. Lexi had always half-expected something awful to be revealed about her parents, about her father. Standing on the sidewalk and watching the uniformed cop on their front porch, she couldn’t bring herself to climb the steps. Lexi loved her parents, of course she did. But her mother hadn’t been herself recently, and her father had never been an easy guy.

Somebody had to be his daughter, but this was not the first time she wished that somebody wasn’t her.