32. Imogen
IMOGEN
I grab my toiletry bag from the bathroom and stuff it with every stray thing of mine.
My posters are off the walls, books boxed away.
Even Amelia’s things are getting folded into piles and tucked into cardboard.
She’ll finish her room when she gets home this afternoon; then we’ll go to sleep, and tomorrow morning, I’ll have the movers load everything up and take it to Seattle.
My last task before Amelia comes home is boxing all Mom’s clothes we’re keeping and folding up her bedding—getting her room finished.
After I play Toss or Keep in her bathroom, I collapse on the sheets, her citrus perfume, its orange and sugarcane notes, enveloping me, hugging me.
After a moment’s break, I hoist myself back up, shove clothes into boxes, and strip her bed down to the bone.
That’s when I notice the jewelry box on her nightstand.
The big mirrored one that used to live high on her closet shelf.
I lift it, ready to pack it whole. Amelia and I can go through it together later. I’m sure we’ll want everything.
I’m taken off guard by its heft. My wrist flexes awkwardly under its weight.
I fall against the bed with it, narrowly missing dropping it on the floor.
Sitting on her bare mattress, I bring the box onto my lap as the drawers fall open, exposing a trove of necklaces.
The top holds a dainty gold locket, scallop edged.
I pop it open with my red thumbnail to find a baby photo of Mom: curly blond tufts, a toothless grin, eyes brimming with mischief.
I smile tenderly at it and return it to its drawer for now.
The lower drawer holds pieces I don’t recognize.
They’re older, heavier, probably my grandmother’s.
Then I reach the bottom drawer.
There’s no jewelry inside, only photographs. A stack of glossy 4x6 prints, dated in the margins 1997, 1998. Me and Amelia as infants. I thumb through them, still smiling, admiring photos I don’t recognize. Most are Amelia and me in the same clothes, different colors. Such a twin thing.
The final photos in the stack are from the day Amelia and I were born.
In a pair of scrubs looking down at Mom in grinning bliss is a man.
My mom is holding us, one in each arm, looking high off birth’s euphoria, her blond hair in a palm-tree ponytail.
I squint hard at the picture, looking at the man beside her, in scrubs.
Even with a surgical cap, I can tell exactly who it is.
Emmett Holloway. My stomach knots. Why was he there, delivering Amelia and me? He’s a business owner, not an ob-gyn.
Maybe he was just there, a friendly face when she had no one else. When my father had already abandoned her. Still, something about it is off.
The identity of my father has been a curiosity I have buried deeper with time.
I always worried I’d insult Mom by seeking him out—as if I needed anyone in my life but her.
Since he left so callously and nonchalantly, like being the father of loving twin daughters wasn’t motive to stick around, it was evident that we didn’t mean anything to him.
And if I fell down the rabbit hole of rabbit holes trying to find him, only to be rejected in the end…
that would have been worse than never knowing him at all.
Peering at the photos, I stare at Emmett, full of questions.
Today’s events have proven that he knows more than he’s letting on.
Innocently approaching him about these photos could be the best way to weasel out other answers—including those regarding the texts he and our neighbor in the black house have been exchanging…
I’ll pop over there quickly—see what I can get out of him. No harm, no foul. It’s the only option I have left.
I tuck the photographs into my pocket, snap the jewelry box closed, and throw on a coat. After locking the front door behind me, I stalk down the driveway, ready to drag it all out of him.