They went past Henry’s room, too, then dragged him down to their mother’s study. Henry and Lindsey bickered lightly until they stood in front of the record player and watched Candice drop the needle into its spot. A moment later, their mother’s singing voice filled the room, melancholic and gorgeous. Lindsey was so stunned that she fell into the chair behind her. Henry’s eyes glinted with tears.
“What is this?” Henry demanded.
They listened, awestruck, to the entire first song before Lindsey demanded, “And who’s singing with her?”
“I don’t know,” Candice finally admitted. She showed them the empty vinyl case.
“Did you play it because of what Frank’s mom said?” Lindsey asked.
“I don’t know. It got me thinking,” Candice said. “But I was just curious. I thought maybe it was blank.”
“It’s professional,” Henry whispered. “She should have been a star.”
“Maybe she was,” Lindsey said.
“We would have known, surely,” Henry said. “Stella Vanberg would have been a household name.”
Suddenly, Lindsey got to her feet and shot to the shelves of vinyl. She began to sift through them, searching. “There has to be something else around here,” she said. “Some kind of proof of that other life.”
“I can’t believe how Southern she sounds,” Henry offered thoughtfully. “But you remember how sometimes Mom had a little bit of an accent? A little bit of a Southern accent?”
Candice and Lindsey nodded, remembering. Their mother hadn’t sounded like other New Englanders. She hadn’t sounded like anyone else on the Vineyard, nor anyone else in Manhattan. Her accent had been flatter than that. But she’d always told them that that was because she’d traveled extensively before settling down with their father. She’d told them that she’d fought against her typical “New England” accent because she’d wanted to seem like she belonged everywhere.
“I called her out on the accent once,” Henry remembered. “I told her she sounded like a Southern Belle, and she laughed and said that she liked to put on that accent. That it was like a character to her.”
“Did you believe her?” Candice asked.
“I didn’t know anyone who actually had a Southern accent back then,” Henry admitted. “So I figured she was telling the truth.”
Lindsey continued to search through the rest of the albums, looking for any clue to Stella’s music career, while Candice and Henry sat through the next song, wordless.
“Maybe she was pretending to be southern for her music career?” Candice offered.
“Or what if she was hiding her southern accent from us?” Lindsey whispered.
“An entire life of hiding an accent?” Henry tried to laugh. It really did sound absurd.
“I don’t understand how that’s possible,” Candice said.
But the sheer number of things they didn’t know about their mother seemed to multiply. Candice shivered. She felt as though the spirit of their mother was in that record player, speaking to them from a distant past.
Henry pulled out his phone and googled “Stella Vanberg - country singer.” When nothing came up, he googled “Stella Vanberg - country singer - Mountain Dream,” using the oft-heard lyrics from that first song. Again, nothing came up.
Nothing was making sense.
And then, Lindsey let out a yelp. “Here! I got something!”
Henry and Candice got to their feet and joined Lindsey at the shelf, where she tugged out a slender, worn vinyl cover. It had been tucked away with other albums from the seventies, some of them so worn at the edges that you couldn’t read the names anymore.
On the cover of the album were two women so young that they might even still be teenagers. Both of them, incredibly, looked like Sarah, so much so that Candice nearly had to sit down. They were beautiful, smiling, wearing outfits that Dolly Parton herself might have put on back then. Cowboy boots and mini skirts and cute cowboy hats. Above their heads, in lime-green font, it read: Introducing Stella and Sally McGee!
“Stella and Sally McGee,” Henry read aloud.
Nobody knew what to say. Lindsey slid the album out of its case and put it on, only to discover that this record was the same as the one in the unlabeled case. It felt strange that their mother had had two copies of the same album. Then again, Candice thought that she probably would have hung on to as many pieces of her abandoned musical past as she could.
This time, as their mother and a woman—maybe their Aunt Sally? —sang, Henry googled “Stella and Sally McGee, country singers.” Up popped a few old articles from Nashville, Tennessee. The articles were written in 1978, 1979, and 1980.
Henry read bits and pieces of the articles aloud, “Up-and-coming country stars Stella and Sally McGee took the stage at The Blue Cats the other night and brought down the house! Sisters Stella and Sally McGee say the secret to songwriting is‘knowing your own voice and staying true to it.’ Singers Stella and Sally call Nashville, Tennessee, ‘the greatest paradise we’ve ever known.’” Henry shook his head before reading aloud that, in 1979, Stella was twenty-one, and Sally was eighteen.
