Chapter 28
THE LAST PHOTOGRAPH
When Len Ebely calls after church, he doesn’t sound alarmed or suspicious. He doesn’t ask any worrying questions. He doesn’t demand to know who the camera belonged to. He just says the photos are done and we can come get them anytime.
I stare out my kitchen window waiting for Jude to pick me up—memories from yesterday’s float building and last night’s dream, along with the prospect of seeing these photographs, coalescing into a jumble of nerves.
By the time Jude pulls to a stop outside, it takes every ounce of restraint to walk at a normal pace.
I slide into the passenger seat and quickly pull the belt across my lap—a safety precaution, sure. But also a necessity. Like if I don’t anchor myself in place, I might float off the seat. Not until I’m properly buckled do I dare a look at Jude.
His gaze lifts to my hair.
“What?” I say, flattening my palm over the crown of my head, where every so often, a cowlick misbehaves.
“It’s nothing. You just have, well …” He reaches across the console, and with a touch so light I can barely feel it, he teases something free.
A speck of glitter twinkles on the tip of his finger.
We share a smile.
“I think my hair might sparkle for eternity,” I say, picturing Jude with his sleeves rolled up, a hammer in hand. He didn’t have to help me pick up the glitter bins. He didn’t have to stay and build floats, either.
But he did.
And when a glitter fight erupted, he didn’t stand on the sidelines, either. Brooding Jude Vandenberg joined the fray, and somehow, his arm ended up around my waist, both of us laughing at the absurd amount of glitter in my hair.
My smile widens at the memory.
Jude’s gaze dips to my lips.
And the playful vibe melts into molten lava. The heat is too hot to take. Breaking eye contact, I tuck a strand of hair behind my ear and give my throat a nervous clear. Effectively dousing the moment in cold water.
Jude shifts his car into drive.
I curse my cowardice.
And my own morbid curiosity.
Because I know what I’m about to ask. I can feel the question rising within me. No amount of self-control will tamp it down.
I fidget with the strap of my seatbelt. “Hey, Jude?”
He glances at me as we ease to a stop in front of the gate.
“What happened to your parents?”
For a moment, he looks stricken.
And I want to take it back, strike it from the record—this question that badgered me throughout the entirety of church.
But I can’t rewind time.
The question has been asked.
The gate groans opens, and I think he’s going to plead the fifth.
But then he turns onto the street and says, “My dad died of pancreatic cancer when I was ten, shortly after he married Isabel. He didn’t tell me until after the wedding, but I think he knew before.
Sometimes I think I’m the reason he married her.
So I wouldn’t be alone.” He scoffs at the irony.
As soon as his father died, Isabel shipped him off to boarding school, absolutely alone.
“And your mom?” I ask.
“She died when I was born.”
I may have braced myself for the answer, but it still comes like a wallop—an aggressive hit that knocks the world off kilter.
Jude doesn’t notice.
His grip is tight on the wheel, his attention fixed steadfastly on the road. “She died in labor. Or I guess, shortly after labor.”
He looks at me, then, and whatever he sees must be alarming. His foot comes off the gas pedal. “Are you all right?”
I don’t answer.
I can’t answer.
My breath is stuck.
“Selah?” The car slows to a near stop.
I tell him I’m fine. Everything’s fine. He can keep driving. Then I set my trembling hands on top of my knees and take a shaky breath. “I’m sorry,” I say. “It’s just … that’s really sad.”
It’s true.
But it’s not the full truth.
I can’t bring myself to tell him that.
It’s one thing to dream about long-ago tragedies in his family’s past. It’s quite another to dream about him and his parents.
“Yeah, well. I was just a baby, so … ” He lifts his shoulder, like not having memories of his mother means he’s not allowed to grieve his mother.
My breath gets stuck all over again.
He drives on, and I slide my hands beneath my knees, like burying them might bury the memory. Of that tiny little cap. Of the baby all alone in the plastic basinet. Of the woman, bleeding out on the delivery table, and the man, falling to his knees in the hallway of a hospital.
I can’t stop picturing it.
It plays on a loop in my mind until we reach Len’s house.
This time, his garage is closed. So we stand on the sagging porch and ring his doorbell.
Len answers holding a manilla folder with the words 35mm, Oct 12, 28 exposures written on the front in neat script.
“I’m sorry to say, only a few turned out decent.
Most were either blank or warped. It could be light damage, or age.
” With a shrug, he hands me the folder. “I guess that’s what old film will get you. ”
“What do we owe you?” Jude asks, reaching for the wallet in his back pocket.
Len waves him off. “Don’t worry about it. It didn’t take long, and like I said, there’s not much there.”
We thank him and return to Jude’s car.
He drives us to a nearby park and cuts the engine.
I open the folder in my lap.
There’s a tissue-thin sheet between each photograph. The first several are blank. The ones after, warped. But are they warped because the film went bad? Or are they warped because they were taken in a different dimension?
Jude and I lean over his console, studying each one with care.
The light bends strangely. Straight lines appear fragmented.
The perspective is off, and each one has a hazy, unnatural glow.
Anytime we come to a photograph of a person, the face is blurred, like the subject moved too fast to catch.
One is entirely black, except for a pair of off-centered glowing red pinpricks that give me the heebie-jeebies.
I shuffle past it, quicker than the others, to the first photograph that’s come through.
Simon Vandenberg, smiling as he reaches for the camera, like Daisy had taken it without his permission and he was objecting, but flirtatiously.
I stare at this boy, frozen in time, shortly before he would vanish, and I wonder if Len Ebely knew who this was when it came through in his dark room.
There’s a second picture of Simon from a different angle, his attention cast downward.
Then I shuffle to the final image and a gasp tumbles from my lips.
Simon must have reclaimed the camera and turned it on Daisy. He snapped a picture of this girl he met in a library and traveled with through a supernatural doorway. This girl he so obviously loved. The mysterious Daisy Buchanan.
Only she’s not a mystery any more.
I may not have seen her face in years, but I would recognize it anywhere for its strong resemblance to my own.
Daisy Buchanan was my mother.
I sit on Dad’s recliner waiting for him to come home, my mind unable to process. There’s the picture in my hand and everything it means on one side, and all that I thought to be true on the other.
Like my nightmare when I was a little kid.
A trauma dream. The monster wasn’t real.
According to Dr. Penny, it was a visual representation of my mother’s addiction.
I tried to save her from it, but I wasn’t strong enough.
Addiction won. But what if it didn’t? What if that dream I had so long ago was every bit as real as the dream I had about Jude’s mother?
A gust of wind pushes against the window panes. I haven’t bothered with the lights, and the day is cloudy. So when Dad steps inside, it takes him a minute to notice I’m here, sitting in the dark.
“Hey,” he says. “What are you doing over there?”
I don’t move.
Dad grabs a soda from the fridge and cracks it open. “Everything okay, kiddo?”
“Mom lived here,” I say.
“What’s that?”
“She lived here, in Foggy Hollow.”
Dad cocks his head.
“And you didn’t tell me,” I say.
“Selah, sweetheart, what are you talking about?”
I stand from the chair on shaky legs and hold out the photograph. “She lived here, and you lied about it.”
He said we needed a fresh start.
But this was never about a fresh start.
He was chasing her ghost. While getting me therapy.
“Selah, I don’t understand what you’re ...” But before he can finish, his attention snags on the picture, and his words slide into oblivion. He takes the photo from my hand. “Where did you get this?”
“Simon’s bedroom.”
“Who’s Simon?”
The question cracks through the numb shell around my brain, and out from the fissure leaks a tremble of indignation. I can’t believe he lied to me.
“Vandenberg.” I jerk my hand toward the manor. “This whole time I’ve been obsessed with the cold case and you didn’t think I’d want to know Mom was friends with him? That they were—”
More than friends?
Simon certainly thought of her as more than a friend.
But Dad just stands there, blinking at the photo. “You got this from Simon’s bedroom?”
“From a disposable camera. Jude and I found it under a loose floorboard.”
“This picture was on that film?”
“Yes.”
He sets his hand on top of his head, his wedding ring forever in place.
I narrow my eyes at it. “Did we move here because of her?”
“Selah, we moved away because of her.”
My father isn’t a good actor. He doesn’t lie, which is part of the reason this came as such a shock. How could he keep this from me? But now it seems he hasn’t. Now, I think he’s just finding out for himself.
He shakes his head. “Are you sure this isn’t some sort of mix-up?”
“It’s not a mix-up,” I say. “He wrote about her in his journal. They hung out together before he vanished.”
Dad sinks onto the sofa, truly dumbstruck.
“What are the chances?” he finally asks.
It’s a rhetorical question.
And yet, if Twig were here, he’d probably know.
I’m sure they’re smaller than point zero eight.
Still, Dad grapples for logic. For an explanation.
Because my father is a logical guy who thinks most things can be explained.
After all, I never had a prophetic dream when I was little.
That was a trauma dream. Induced by my drug-addicted, here-again-gone-again, deeply troubled mother.
Soon enough, Dad will come to terms with this new tidbit of information, and he’ll chalk it up to wild coincidence.
But not me.
Never me.
My mother lived here.
She went through some doorway between dimensions. She stepped into something supernatural.
I think about the other night.
Before I saw the light turn on in the manor, I dozed off and had a small snip of a dream. I was chasing someone down a hallway. And that someone whispered my name. In a voice that sounded an awful lot like my mother’s.
Come find me.
My skin prickles.
What if it didn’t just sound like her? What if it was her? What if she’s been here this whole time—stuck on the other side, trapped with Simon and his family? Maybe this is why I’ve always felt such a strong connection with Foggy Hollow.
My mother is here.
And she’s trying to get out.