The Song That Didn't Fit

Sleep wouldn’t come. I lay beneath my quilt, staring at the stripe of light under my bedroom door as it narrowed and vanished. In the dark, I replayed every moment with Nora, trying to find the part that didn’t belong.

Dad had said we first met her in a bookstore downtown. The explanation had seemed ordinary enough when he gave it to me. Now it sounded flimsy, like a little patch of cloth stretched over something much larger.

I listened for his steps. When the familiar weight of them crossed the hall and stopped inside his bedroom, I stayed where I was. I gave it another hour, though every minute made me more certain I had to look.

Then I pushed off the covers and lowered my feet to the floor. The boards were cold. I didn’t have a plan, exactly. I only knew that asking Dad would bring his gentle, worried expression and another answer about missing Mom.

He would probably tell me I was imagining things. Grown-ups said that when children noticed something they didn’t want to explain. So I kept quiet, opened my door, and started down the stairs.

I knew which step complained, the one just above the bottom, and edged around it. The living room held a faint wash of streetlight. Lemon cleaner and Nora’s lavender soap lingered in the air, neither like Mom’s sweet vanilla perfume.

Her scent was different, but it filled the house all the same. I went to the oak shelves and crouched beside the lowest one, where Dad kept our family albums beneath his rows of reference books.

There were six, all with blue covers, arranged in order. Mom had saved nearly everything: birthdays, trips, ordinary days. Together, the books followed my parents from their wedding through the beginning of my childhood.

I chose the oldest, marked with a silver label for the years 1995 to 1999. They were the years before I came along. I settled on the rug and opened the stiff cover.

The clear sleeves made soft, papery noises as I turned them. In one photograph, Dad looked so young that I almost didn’t recognize him, standing in a suit that hung awkwardly at his shoulders.

Beside him, Mom wore her wedding dress. Her dark hair was pinned up, and her green eyes seemed bright even in the faded picture. I studied her features, then pictured Nora from the night before.

The likeness wasn’t the kind people meant when they said two strangers could be mistaken for each other. Their jaws had the same line. One eyebrow lifted just a little unevenly; their noses bent at the same angle.

But Mom had told me she had no brothers or sisters. When I asked about grandparents, aunts, or uncles, she’d smile and say our family was just the three of us, together against everything.

I kept turning pages. There was a Maine holiday, Dad with a disastrous haircut he’d given himself, and a picnic beside a lake. Then my fingertip met a rough spot that didn’t feel like a photograph sleeve.

I stopped. The album’s spine seemed lumpy beneath the cover. Holding it open, I traced the inner edge and found broken-looking paper ridges. They weren’t worn with age. Someone had cut pages away.

At least three were gone. The edges were tidy in places and ragged in others, tucked so far down in the binding that I might never have seen them if I hadn’t been searching.

I leaned close to the book. A tiny triangle of glossy paper had been trapped in the crease, left behind by whoever removed the pages. I eased it out with one fingernail, careful not to tear it.

The scrap was barely bigger than a postage stamp. On it, I could make out a blue sleeve, an arm, and fingers curled around a small bunch of wildflowers.

Beside that arm was another one. It wore the same shade of blue, and its hand held a matching bouquet. The two sleeves sat close together, almost touching.

I stared at the picture’s sliver. Two people in twin dresses, holding flowers in the same way, stood side by side—or had, before the rest of the photograph disappeared. My stomach tightened.

I shut the album and returned it to the shelf, then hurried upstairs with the fragment pressed in my damp palm. In my room, I tucked it inside a hollow bead from my craft kit and hid it at the back of my sock drawer.

By morning, the kitchen seemed almost aggressively ordinary. Toast burned near the counter, coffee steamed, and Dad sat at the table in his work clothes, reading from his tablet. Nora stood by the stove, turning eggs with a plastic spatula.

Dad asked whether I felt any better, still focused on the screen. I slid into my chair and said my fever was gone. I watched Nora’s face while she brought over my plate.

She smiled and said she’d been concerned about me the night before. Then she mentioned that I’d fallen asleep as soon as she finished singing to me. She said it as if that explained everything.

I nudged the eggs with my fork. Nora didn’t know she’d given herself away—or, at least, she didn’t know I was listening for a mistake. I would test what she knew about our home, about Mom, and about me.

I meant to keep watching Nora until I understood why she seemed so much like my mother. And I meant to discover what she and Dad were keeping from me.