Someone remembered Emily's birthday. A card arrived for her at Sean's.
That afternoon, in the mailbox, along with the bills and junk mail and fashion magazines that—now that Emily was gone—no one ever read, was an envelope addressed to Emily Nelson. Same handwriting, same brown ink as the ones in the manila folder I'd found in the vanity table.
It was one of cards that Emily got from her mother every year. The sight of it gave me chills.
Did Emily's mother still think she was alive? Had her caretaker not gotten around to giving her the bad news? Had she decided that Emily's mom wasn't strong enough? Or was there something else? Did some lingering mom intuition tell the old woman that her daughter was still alive?
That same night, I showed the card to Sean. He stared at it, clearly unnerved and upset, trying to look as if he had no idea what it was. He knew what it was.
He said, "The poor old thing is so demented she forgot Em is dead. And Bernice can't bring herself to keep reminding her. I think she's letting Mrs. Nelson believe that her daughter is alive . . ."
For just a moment, I wondered if he could be lying. He'd never called Emily "Em" before. Besides, Emily wasn't dead. Did Sean know that? Were they playing some cruel joke on me? Was I the pawn in some evil plan they'd dreamed up together?
That I didn't know and couldn't ask made me conscious of how little trust there was between Sean and me, though that didn't seem to interfere with there being heat. Not every night, but often enough so that we were both willing to stick around for it. Sean wasn't the cuddliest guy on the planet. I didn't expect him to be. He was British. He was right with me when we were having sex, but afterward he'd grunt and turn away, as if he wanted me gone.
Finally I said, "You have to tell me if this isn't working out for you. If you're having second thoughts. Tell me. Do you want me to leave?"
He said, "What are you talking about, Stephanie?"
It was worse than his saying yes.
The postmark on the envelope was illegible, but I could make out the letters MI. Michigan. Could Emily have sent the card to herself? Was it part of her scheme to mess with my head? Was she somewhere outside, watching us celebrate her birthday with our candle and cake? Without her. What was she looking for? What was she planning?
I asked Sean, "Can I open the card?"
He said, "Sure. Go ahead."
In that same spidery brown ink, it said, as always, To Emily, and From Mother.
Unless Emily had done a terrific job of forging her mother's handwriting, she hadn't sent it. And why would she send a birthday card to herself from Michigan and make it look as if it came from her mother?
The only explanation was that her mother didn't know that she was dead. That she was supposed to be dead. Or her mother knew something I didn't.
I couldn't get the birthday card out of my mind. It became another obsession.
Call it sixth sense or whatever, but I became convinced that I would understand everything if I could only meet Emily's mother and ask her a few questions. It was more than the usual curiosity about where a person came from. I was sure that Emily's mother could solve the mystery of where Emily had gone and why, of how she'd disappeared and why she seemed to have returned from the dead. Even if her mother didn't know what happened, she might say something useful that would make everything clear. Was she as ill as Sean said? She, or someone, had remembered Emily's birthday.
