We lingered longest in the living room, where dozens of framed photos sat on a bookshelf next to the window. They were almost exclusively of her brothers. Handsome, beaming boys from toddlers to teenagers. “Their names are Ryan and Calvin,” she told me with a beaming smile. They were close, clearly. But it was strange—only a few of the photos hadWinona also in the frame. The parents were conspicuously absent.
I picked up a single photo of a woman—the brunette version of Winona, eyes down-turned as she read a book to a tow-headed preschooler in pigtails.
“Your mom,” I said. It wasn’t a question, because it was obviously her. Even with her face tilted down, the resemblance was uncanny.
“It’s the only photo I have of her.” Winona’s voice was matter-of-fact, and she lingered on it long enough I saw the flash of sorrow in her eyes. They were close. Or had been, before she passed.
Winona smiled softly, her finger tracing the book in the picture. “She gave me my love of reading.”
Her hands went to her wrist, to the tattoo printed there.
“What does it say?” I asked, unable to bite back every bit of curiosity poking at me.
She cleared her throat, looking down. “'Meet me at the library'. It’s from a note she left me once.” She smiled briefly, but it was loaded, like the line meant so much more than a note. Of course it did, or she wouldn’t have memorialized the words.
But Winona tugged her sleeve back down, sharing nothing more.
Maybe the library was a special place for them. Or had been.
I turned back to the photos. I wanted to see more of her. To know everything about her lineage and who’d made her the person she was. I honed in on a smaller frame containing a young man on a fishing boat. He looked no older than twenty or twenty-one. His smile was guarded. Shy, maybe. But there were those same sapphire eyes.
“My father,” Winona said. “Died in a swell before I came along.”
So the boys had a different father than Winona.
Upstairs, she cracked a door into her brothers’ room. If it wasn’t clear from the photos, it was here: this was a childhood bedroom, with its two twin beds replete with matching checkered bedspreads.
It was her brothers she’d looked after.
I didn’t ask her how that came to be, though I was starting to get some kind of picture. Her reluctance to share made me sure it had something to do with what had made her flee her home.
Suddenly though, it clicked.
I’d made a thousand guesses about Winona’s past, needing to know where to direct my fury. I’d thought it was a bad boyfriend. But she’d taken on the huge responsibility of becoming a parent at what, sixteen? Seventeen? She was so young in those early photographs of her and the boys, her expression so haunted, and her mother was nowhere to be seen.
It wasn’t a scorned lover who was the villain in Winona’s story. It had to be the boys’ father—her stepfather. I was certain. And he’d been rich. That’s what she’d said that night in my kitchen, right?
I was also filled with a renewed rage at what she’d been forced to do. But I made myself calm down. As much as I wanted to demand she tell me his name, to end the night telling Sal to get the jet fueled up so I could go to Newfoundland myself, and what, beat the shit out of an old man? I needed to let Winona tell her story on her own time. Maybe she’d never tell me, and I’d have to be okay with that.
She’d just barely let me in. I needed to focus only on that.
I forced myself to pay attention to what was right before me. Winona, showing me glimpses of her life. This room, with, I noticed now, two very different sets of posters lining the walls. One was robots and science-y things; the other close-ups of food and cafes, and a chef with an autograph across the bottom corner.
“I’ll let you guess who’s studying engineering and who’s in culinary school,” Winona said, her voice sardonic but laced with unmistakable pride.
My heart clenched as I looked at her. She was so strong, to go through what she did and stand here telling me about these boys like it was perfectly normal, she’d fled with babies and raised them to men secure enough to be sure of what they wanted. I wanted to hold her in my arms. And burn whoever dared hurt her, past and present.
“They’re united in some ways, of course,” Winona said, either not noticing my intense gaze or maybe used to it by now.
She showed me the back of the door where an array of women in swimsuits covered the entire panel. “Foolish kids. Just because I didn’t read them bedtime stories in high school, they thought I wouldn’t see these.”
I laughed, relieved at the glimpse of normalcy. Though I coughed when she narrowed her eyes at me.
I brushed my hand over hers, my attention now only on her, on us here together. “Show me your room, Winona,” I said. “I want to see where you sleep.”
“You know that’s worse than wanting to jump my bones, right? Or not wanting to.”
I didn’t care. I needed to know where she lay her head at night. What made her feel safe and comfortable.
