Chapter 2 - A Museum of My Childhood
Eleanor didn't gasp or throw her wet arms around my neck. There was no rush of joy.
She just held that little locket in her shaking, wrinkled hands and stared at the photograph.
"I'm sorry," she said, her voice breaking apart. "I don't remember this little girl."
It felt like a hand reaching into my chest and closing around my heart.
For twenty years my family had told me one story: my mother died in a house fire in our old neighborhood off York Street. The fire crews never recovered a body, but the house had burned down to the foundation, and everyone agreed no one walked out of that.
I was ten.
An aunt took me in afterward and raised me the rest of the way. At twenty-one I met Marcus. But I never stopped turning that night over in my mind, wondering.
And now my mother was sitting in my bathtub. Breathing. Alive.
And I was a stranger to her.
When we came downstairs, Marcus was waiting in the living room, still in his coat.
I walked straight up to him with tears running off my chin. "You knew. You knew and you brought her here on purpose."
He shook his head slowly. "I wasn't sure, Camille. I swear I wasn't."
He told me that at the kitchen he'd noticed two things about Eleanor. Her age, roughly. And a long, rope-like burn scar running across the inside of her left wrist. Years back, I'd once mentioned to him that my mother had burned that exact wrist on a hot oven rack when I was small.
"I told myself it was probably a crazy coincidence," he said quietly. "That's the only reason I brought her here instead of calling you. I didn't want to hand you hope and then rip it away."
I dropped against his chest and sobbed until my ribs hurt.
The next morning we took Eleanor to see a well-known neurologist in a medical building near Cherry Creek. After a long afternoon of brain scans and memory testing, the doctor sat us down.
The physical and emotional trauma she'd gone through two decades earlier, he said, had caused a severe form of psychogenic amnesia — her mind had walled off an entire life to protect her from it.
"Don't push her," he warned, kind but firm. "Don't quiz her. Old photos, familiar places, certain smells, a song she used to sing — any of it might turn a key. But it has to happen on its own. If you force it, you'll only frighten her."
So over the next few weeks I turned our house into a museum of my childhood.
I dug out every photo album we owned. I baked the cinnamon rolls she used to make on Sunday mornings, the ones that filled the whole house with the smell of butter and brown sugar. I played the old jazz records she used to put on while she dusted. I drove her to the little park on Tennyson Street where she used to buy me a cone after school.
Nothing.
Eleanor smiled at all of it — polite, warm, patient. But the light of recognition never came into her eyes.
One afternoon she pointed at a framed black-and-white photo on the mantel. A tall man stood next to a young Eleanor, his hand on her shoulder.
"Who is that?" she asked.
My throat tightened. "That's my father. David."
"Where is he now?"
I didn't answer.
"Camille." She held my eyes. "What happened to him?"
I stood up, walked over, and turned the frame face-down on the mantel. "That can wait, Mom."
I couldn't tell her. Because for twenty years I had believed my father was dead because of me.
A week later I decided to drive her back to the block where our house used to stand. The lot was a drugstore now, part of a little strip mall with a nail salon and a sandwich shop.
Eleanor looked out the car window with a blank face. "I'm sorry, honey. None of this looks familiar."
"It's okay, Mom," I said, and tried to keep my voice from cracking.
We got out and started walking up the sidewalk toward a park at the end of the block.
Then a truck horn ripped through the air, followed by the scream of tires grabbing at pavement. A pickup had come off the road and jumped the curb — driver looking down at something, doing at least forty — and it was coming straight at us.
I locked up. I couldn't move an inch.
Eleanor didn't stop to think.
She threw herself sideways and shoved me with both hands, hard enough to send me sprawling.
I hit the concrete on my palms and knees. The truck passed close enough that I felt the wind off it before it plowed into a light pole halfway down the block.
When I got up, my mother was on her knees on the sidewalk, chest heaving, her whole body trembling.
Then she started to cry.
But it wasn't the truck.
She turned and looked at me with an intensity I hadn't seen since I was ten years old.
"Cammie."
My heart stopped. Nobody had called me Cammie in twenty years.
May you like
She pressed both hands flat against her temples, tears pouring down her face.
"I remember," she gasped. "I remember what happened to your father."
