From This Day On

He hadn’t gotten a real good look at what Amy pulled out, but he knew a pair of women’s panties when he saw them. Why in hell would the woman have put a pair of her own underwear in the time capsule?

His pacing took him to the wall of windows that were the reason he’d bought the condo. He was looking down at the Willamette River, dark but for glimmers of gold reflected from downtown lights. To him, the river always looked primitive despite the way humanity had caged it. He loved driving down to Champoeg and seeing the Willamette the way it had looked to early settlers, broad and powerful, floating between banks of deep forest.

The oven buzzed; he put in the pizza and set the timer. He made himself sit down and respond to emails he’d mostly ignored over the weekend. But his attention was only half on them. He kept seeing the shock on Amy’s elfin face when she pulled the last damn thing in the world she could have expected from the manila envelope.

As usual, he’d dropped his phone on the kitchen counter when he came in the door. Not so usual, when he went to the john he took it with him. He kept staring at it, as if he could will it to ring. Call.

Apparently that didn’t work, because it stayed stubbornly silent. He wanted to phone her, but she’d expressed herself too bluntly for him to mistake the message: Thank you, but I want to be alone. I don’t need you now. It wasn’t as if they were close. Jakob frowned. Close? They were strangers, and that was mostly his fault.

He had the momentary sense of standing on the edge of a dark, terrifyingly deep abyss. He didn’t like thinking about Amy, because those thoughts always brought him to this place, one that felt more like fear than he wanted to admit. As always, he found himself mentally backing away from it.

No point in revisiting their relationship. Fact was, he’d never acted like a brother did to a dearly beloved, or even barely tolerated, sister, and she had every reason in the world to resent him at the very least. The wonder was that she’d actually accepted his offer to accompany her to Frenchman Lake.

If something did upset her, why would she turn to him? She probably had good friends, maybe even a guy she was seeing.

Yeah, but then why hadn’t she asked that guy or her best friend to go with her this weekend? She could have said “Thanks but no thanks” to Jakob then and even gotten a little secret pleasure out of rebuffing him.

Maybe she didn’t have any good friends who lived nearby. Yeah, she’d gone to college here, but then moved away. Amy had only been back a few months.

He reluctantly admitted to himself that she had needed him because she didn’t have anyone else.

And because she needed family? He winced at that word in reference to Amy and him.

Nope, he told himself, not going there.

She’d promised to call him. He took another impatient look at the clock on the microwave. 8:39 p.m. Over two hours since he’d dropped her off.

Call, damn it.

* * *

IT TOOK SOME doing, but Amy found her baby book in a box on the shelf in her mother’s closet. She didn’t even know what she hoped to learn, but she was desperate. Anything. A clue. Somehow she was holding her fear and horror at bay. She’d taken a huge leap by assuming her mother had lied to her all her life.

Please let me be wrong.

The closet was vast. When Mom and Ken bought the house, it had had four smallish bedrooms upstairs, and in common with many houses of this era the few closets were grossly inadequate. Especially for a woman who loved shoes.

So the first thing they did was have walls torn out, and the floor space that had been two of the bedrooms was used to enlarge what had been the only upstairs bathroom up here, along with creating a second bathroom and a giant walk-in closet. The remaining small bedroom was for their very occasional guests. Like Amy. So far in her stay, the only reason she’d stepped foot in Mom and Ken’s bedroom was to run the vacuum cleaner around and whisk a feather duster over the blinds and the top of the end tables and dressers.

And yes, she’d known her mother had a thing about shoes, but not the extent of it. In her search to find anything about her childhood or origins, she’d been excited to find underbed rolling containers. Not so much when she pulled them out to find all four of them held shoes.

Wow, Mom. What a waste of money.

Amy didn’t bother with the dresser. Like her mother would keep daily reminders of her unwanted daughter among her socks, jeans or lingerie, where she’d see it every day.

Oh, ugh. Don’t wanna think about Mom’s lingerie.

She also ignored Ken’s section of the closet, which took up about a quarter of it. She could see the gaps where he’d removed clothes and shoes to take to Australia for the two-year stay. It was harder to spot gaps in Mom’s side, because she owned a truly ridiculous amount of clothes as well as the shoes.

Banker-style cardboard boxes marched along a high shelf. Amy dragged a chair in and took them down, one at a time.

Tax returns and files about expenses on the house. Slap the lid on, heave box back onto shelf.

Next.

Bank statements. Credit card slips. Receipts. Amy had always known her mother was obscenely well-organized, but this was ridiculous. Did she keep every scrap of financial information forever?

Amy had reached a corner. She could only remove this box because she hadn’t put the previous one back in place. It weighed less, she realized right away as she lifted it down, which meant it wasn’t packed with dense files as the other ones had been.

She stepped carefully to the floor, set the box on the seat of the chair and lifted off the top.

For a long moment she stared without comprehension. Then an involuntary sound escaped her and she reached out.

Her blankie. Oh, my God, she thought, I’d forgotten it. How could I? How she’d loved this blanket—no, really more of a comforter, with batting inside. The back side was flannel, worn thin by her childish grip. The front was a cotton fabric in swirled lavender and darker purple imprinted with white horses leaping over puffs of white clouds. Some machine quilting kept the three layers together.

She lifted it out of the box and held it close, burying her face in the soft folds the way she’d done as a child. Her smile shook as she remembered the major temper tantrums she’d thrown when she couldn’t find “horse blankie.” How funny that she couldn’t even recall when she’d lost interest in it. She’d had no idea what had ever happened to her much-loved blankie.

Mom had kept it? Amy was knocked off balance by the unimaginable.

After a minute she set it aside and took out another of her childhood treasures, a stuffed puppy that wasn’t as white as it had once been. She wound up the key on the bottom. Tears dripped down her cheeks when it played the familiar tune, “(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?”

Oh, Mom. Had she felt anything when she packed these things away? Or had she briskly assumed Amy might want them someday when she had her own children, and never given them another thought?

There were other toys here, too, including a couple she didn’t remember at all. One was a plastic rattle with tiny tooth marks in it. Hers. Finally, at the bottom of the box, were the baby book and a photograph album. Those, she decided to take downstairs to the kitchen table.

She had trouble making herself open the cover of either book or album. Seeing the contents with new eyes was going to hurt.

Baby book first. There was a time she’d thought the fact that her mother had filled it out so carefully meant she must love her daughter. By the time Amy was a teenager, she knew better; the precise entries, the school pictures glued to appropriate pages, were only another manifestation of Mom’s anal personality. Give her a form to fill out, and she was a happy woman.

The details were undeniably all there.

The card from the hospital was attached to the first page. Yes, Baby Girl Nilsson had indeed weighed six pounds fourteen ounces.

Before she went further, Amy booted up her laptop and went online to a site that had a chronology of child development. Then she compared the dates Mom had noted for “first smile,” “rolled over,” “sat up alone” and so on with the chronology. Amy had been early each step of the way. Perhaps because she was little and wiry, she’d barely bothered with crawling, instead walking at eight months and running not much later.

She closed her eyes momentarily. How could she ever have believed she was premature?

She flipped back to the first page, where her mother had written her name, the hospital where she was born, her birth date. Amy’s gaze snagged on two lines that were blank. Mother. Father.

Yet another thing she’d never noticed. A huge thing, given Mom’s personality.

She was almost numb by now. Not entirely; a tsunami was building somewhere deep inside, ominous in its power, but it was still subterranean enough to be ignored.

There were lots of photos of her in the album, mainly, she knew, because her father—oh, God, not my father—had enjoyed taking pictures and had adored her.

A few included Jakob, fewer still Mom or Dad himself. Those were the ones she stared at the hardest, with eyes that burned. She didn’t look like anyone else in the family. A part of her had always known that, but justified it. There was the aunt with red hair. She did have brown eyes, like Mom...only they weren’t at all the same shade of brown as her mother’s. Kids didn’t always look like their parents, she had told herself.

She bore absolutely no resemblance to anyone else in her family, including her only biological relative, her mother.