The rubber band broke off in her hands.
Laura must have been in her early twenties when the pictures were taken. The 1980s were on full display, from her blue eyeshadow to her pink lipstick to the blush strafing up her cheeks like a bird’s wings. Her normally dark brown hair was shockingly blonde and over-permed. Giant shoulder pads squared off her short-sleeved white sweater. She could’ve been about to tell everybody who shot J.R. Ewing.
The only reason Andy wasn’t smiling was that it was clear from the photo that someone had repeatedly punched her mother in the face.
Laura’s left eye was swollen shut. Her nose was askew. There were deep bruises around her neck. She stared into the camera, expressionless. She was somewhere else, being someone else, while her injuries were documented.
Andy knew that look.
She shuffled to the next Polaroid. The white sweater was lifted to show bruises on Laura’s abdomen. The next photo showed a gash on the inside of her thigh.
Andy had seen the horrible-looking scar during one of her mother’s hospital stays. Three inches long, pink and jagged even after all of this time. Andy had actually gasped at the sight of it.
“Ice skating,” Laura had said, rolling her eyes like those two words explained everything.
Andy picked up the next stack of pictures, which were jarring, but only in their differentness. Not Polaroids, but regular printed snapshots of a toddler dressed in pink winter clothing. The date stamped on the back was January 4, 1989. The series captured the little girl rolling around in the snow, throwing snowballs, making angels, then a snowman, then destroying the snowman. Sometimes there was an adult in the photo—a disembodied hand hanging down or a leg sticking out below a heavy wool coat.
Andy recognized the toddler as herself. She had always had the same distinctive almond shape to her eyes, a feature she had inherited from her mother.
Going by the date on the back, toddler Andy would’ve been almost two years old when the series of photos was taken. That was the same time period that Andy and Laura had lived at UGA while Laura finished her PhD.
That kind of snow did not happen in Athens and especially not in Belle Isle. Andy had no recollection from her youth of ever taking a trip up north. Nor had Laura ever told her about one. Actually, when Andy revealed her plans to move to New York City, the first thing Laura had said was, “Oh, darling, you’ve never been that far away from home before.”
The last two photos in the box were paperclipped together.
Phil and Laverne Randall, her birth father’s parents, were sitting on a couch. A painting of the beach hung on the wood-paneled wall behind them. There was something very familiar about the expressions on their faces, how they were sitting, even the shadow of a floor lamp that was cast along the back of the couch.
Andy slid away the paperclip to reveal the second photo.
Same people, same expressions, same postures, same shadows—but this time Andy, maybe six months old, was sitting in the Randalls’ laps, balanced on one knee each.
She traced her finger along the thick outline of her baby self.
In school, Andy had learned to use Photoshop to, among other things, superimpose one image onto another. She had forgotten that, before computers, people had to alter images by hand. What you did was take an X-Acto knife and carefully cut someone out of a photo, then you sprayed the back with mounting adhesive, then positioned the cut-out piece onto a different photo.
Once you were happy with the result, you had to take another photograph of the overlaid images, and even then it didn’t always turn out right. Shadows were wrong. The positioning looked unnatural. The whole process was painstakingly delicate.
Which made Laura’s skill that much more impressive.
During Andy’s early teens, she had often stared longingly at the photo of her Randall grandparents. Usually, she was mad at Laura, or worse, at Gordon. Sometimes, she would search the Randalls’ features, trying to divine why their hatred and bigotry were more important to them than having contact with their dead son’s only child.
Andy had never really focused on the section of the photo that her baby self was in. Which was too bad. If she’d made even a cursory study, she would have noticed that she was not actually sitting in the Randalls’ lap.
Hovering would be a better word to describe it.
The racist Randalls were a difficult subject that Andy did not bring up to her mother, the same way she did not bring up Laura’s own parents, Anne and Bob Mitchell, who had died before Andy was born. Nor did she ask about Jerry Randall, her father, who had been killed in a car accident long before Andy could establish any memories of him. They had never visited his grave in Chicago. They had never visited anyone’s grave.
“We should meet in Providence,” Andy had told Laura her first year in New York. “You can show me where you grew up.”
“Oh, darling,” Laura had sighed. “Nobody wants to go to Rhode Island. Besides, it was so long ago I’m sure I can’t remember.”
There were all kinds of photographs at home—an abundance of photos. From hiking trips and Disney World vacations and beach picnics and first days of schools. Only a handful showed Laura alone because she hated having her picture taken. There was nothing from the time before Andy was born. Laura had just one picture of Jerry Randall, the same photo Andy had found online in the Chicago Sun Times obituary archives.
Jerome Phillip Randall, 28 yrs old; optometrist and avid Bears fan; survived by a daughter, Andrea, and parents Phillip and Laverne.
Andy had seen other documents, too: her father’s birth certificate and death certificate, both issued in Cook County, Illinois. Laura’s various diplomas, her birth certificate from Rhode Island, her social security card, her driver’s license. Andrea Eloise Mitchell’s record of live birth dated August 20, 1987. The deed to the Belle Isle house. Immunization records. Marriage license. Divorce decree. Car titles. Insurance cards. Bank statements. Credit card statements.
Daniela Barbara Cooper’s driver’s license. The Ontario car registration. The HEALTH card. The Plymouth station wagon with a gun in the glove box and supplies and money in the trunk that was waiting in a storage facility in an anonymous town.
The make-up bag hidden inside the couch in Laura’s office. The padlock key taped behind the framed photo of Andy.
Everything I’ve ever done is for you, my Andrea Heloise. Everything.
Andy spread out the Polaroids of her mother on the desk. The gash in her leg. The black eye. The bruised neck. The pummeled abdomen. The broken nose.
Pieces of a woman she had never known.