Threadbare Hearts

The bus smelled like wet wool and fried dough, and I was three stops from home when I saw my mother's face on the side of a building.

Not her face exactly. A photograph of her face, blown up eight feet tall, plastered across the brick wall of the old textile mill that had been abandoned since before I was born. She was young in the picture. Younger than I am now. Her hair was long and dark and loose, the way she never wore it, and she was laughing at something off-camera, something I couldn't see, someone I didn't know. The caption underneath, in letters tall as my body: *Missing Since 1994. Have You Seen Her?*

I pulled the cord. The driver swore at me in two languages, but he stopped.

The rain had started sometime while I was underground, riding the train from the hospital where I'd spent the morning holding my grandmother's hand while she forgot my name for the fourth time that week. The poster was getting wet. My mother's laugh was running down the bricks in gray streaks.

I stood there in the drizzle and did the math. 1994. I was born in 1996. So either my mother had been missing for two years before I existed, or someone had made a mistake, or the world had finally started lying to me the way I'd always suspected it might.

A woman walked past with a stroller and didn't look up. A man in a suit took a photo with his phone and kept walking. Nobody else stopped. Nobody else stood in the rain staring at a ghost.

I took out my phone and photographed the poster. Then I photographed the building, the street sign, the puddle at my feet that held a piece of my mother's chin. I don't know why I did that. Evidence, maybe. Or maybe I just wanted to prove to myself later that I hadn't imagined it.

The thing is, my mother wasn't missing. My mother was dead. She died when I was six, in a car accident on the highway, and I remember the funeral, the small white coffin that wasn't a coffin at all but an urn, because there hadn't been enough of her left to bury. I remember my father's hand on my shoulder, heavy and shaking. I remember the smell of lilies, which I still can't stand.

So either the poster was wrong, or my whole life was.

I walked home. It wasn't far, maybe fifteen minutes, but the rain made it longer. I kept my head down. I didn't want to see any more buildings that knew things I didn't.

Our apartment was on the fourth floor of a building that had been nice once, back when the mills were running and the river wasn't brown. Now the elevator made a sound like a dying animal and the hallway lights flickered in a rhythm that felt almost intentional. I took the stairs.

My father was in the kitchen when I came in. He was standing at the counter with his back to me, cutting an apple into slices so thin you could see through them. He always did that. Said thick slices were for people who didn't respect fruit.

"You're wet," he said without turning around.

"It's raining."

"I know it's raining. I'm asking why you're wet."

I hung my coat on the hook by the door. The hook was loose. It had been loose for three years. I'd asked him to fix it maybe a dozen times, and he always said he would, and he never did. That was my father. A man of good intentions and loose hooks.

"I saw something," I said.

He turned then. He had a paring knife in one hand and an apple slice in the other, and for a second he looked like a painting, something old and sad and European. Then he ate the slice and the painting was gone.

"What kind of something?"

"A poster. On the old mill."

His face didn't change. That's what I remember most about that moment. His face didn't change at all, and that's how I knew.

"It said Mom was missing. Since 1994."

He set the knife down on the counter. Carefully. Blade facing away from him, the way he'd taught me to do when I was old enough to hold a knife. He wiped his hands on a dish towel that had been clean two days ago.

"You shouldn't have seen that," he said.

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only answer I have right now."

I wanted to scream at him. I wanted to throw something. The apple slices, the dish towel, the whole goddamn kitchen. But I didn't. Because there was something in his voice that I'd never heard before, something small and scared and tired, and I understood, in the way you understand things without wanting to, that whatever he was hiding, he'd been hiding it for a long time. Longer than I'd been alive. Longer than my mother had been dead.

"Dad."

"Not now." He picked up the knife again. Started cutting another apple. His hands were steady, but his breathing wasn't. "Please. Not now."

I went to my room. I closed the door. I sat on my bed and looked at the photograph on my phone, my mother laughing at something I couldn't see, and I thought about all the things I didn't know. All the things nobody had ever told me. All the questions I'd never thought to ask because I didn't know there was anything to ask.

The rain kept falling. The city kept moving. Somewhere out there, someone had put up a poster with my mother's face on it, and that someone knew something I didn't, and I was going to find them.

I didn't know then how long it would take. I didn't know how many seasons would pass, how many versions of myself I would have to become, how many times I would have to lose her and find her and lose her again. I didn't know that the poster was just the first page of a story that would take me thirty years to read.

But I knew one thing, sitting there in my wet clothes with my phone glowing in the dark.

I knew that my mother had laughed, once, at something I couldn't see. And I was going to find out what.