She woke at dawn with the dream still on her skin and her grandmother already in the kitchen, and for the first time in her life, Alba Moreno wondered what her birthmark was for.
Chapter 2
What Grandmothers Keep
The house on Breaker Lane was small and white and leaned very slightly to the left, the way old houses do when they've decided to settle into a place and stay. Alba had lived there all her life — first in the room with the lighthouse wallpaper, then, when she was sixteen and too old for lighthouses, in the room with the plain blue walls she had painted herself, badly, with Rosa's help.
Rosa Delgado was seventy-two, four foot eleven in her slippers, and ran her kitchen the way generals ran campaigns. On the morning after the gala she had the radio playing old boleros and a pan of huevos rancheros going before Alba's eyes were fully open.
"You were out late," Rosa said without turning around. "How was the palace?"
"It was a hotel ballroom, Abuela, not a palace." Alba poured coffee and sat at the scarred wooden table. "It was fine. Good money. The pictures will be good."
Rosa turned, spatula in hand, and studied her granddaughter's face the way she had studied it every morning for twenty-five years — a quick, professional inventory: sleep, appetite, mood, truthfulness. "You look like you didn't sleep."
"I slept." Alba wrapped both hands around the mug. She hadn't told Rosa about the strap, or the birthmark, or Vivienne Halden's face. She wasn't sure why she was holding it back. Maybe because saying it aloud would make it real, and she wasn't ready for it to be real. "Just weird dreams."
Rosa set a plate in front of her and sat down with her own coffee. "Eat."
They ate in comfortable silence. Outside the kitchen window, Greyport was doing its gray October morning routine: gulls, foghorns, the far clang of the shipyard. The kitchen had barely changed in twenty-five years. The same scarred table where Alba had done her homework, the same chipped mug with the faded anchor that had been Rosa's mother's, the same calendar from the hardware store with the tides marked in Rosa's careful hand. Alba had photographed this room a hundred times and never once gotten it right — some rooms refused the camera, kept their warmth for the people inside them. She had tried, once, to explain this to a photography teacher in college; he had given her a B and told her to stop being sentimental. Alba had been born in this town, raised in this house, educated at its public schools. She knew the smell of low tide the way other people knew their mother's perfume. Rosa had raised her alone — Alba's mother, Lucia, had died the night Alba was born, and her father had never been in the picture. That was the whole story, told and retold until it was smooth as a stone.
"Abuela," Alba said suddenly, "do you remember when I was little and I asked about this?" She touched her left collarbone through her sweater.
Rosa's hand stilled on her coffee cup. Just for a second. "Your mark? What about it?"
"Kids at school used to say it looked like someone stamped me. Like a factory mark." Alba smiled, but it felt thin. "You told me it meant the moon was watching over me."
"I remember." Rosa's voice was careful. "It was a good story. You liked it."
"I did." Alba looked at her grandmother — the silver hair in its neat bun, the hands spotted and strong, the apron with the faded anchors. Rosa had been a maternity nurse for forty years, had caught half the babies in Greyport, had hands people trusted. "Did my mother have one? A mark like this?"
The silence that followed was a fraction too long.
"No," Rosa said at last. "No, mi cielo. It skips, sometimes. These things skip."
Alba nodded and ate her eggs. But she was thinking about Vivienne Halden's face, the way the woman's hand had flown to her own collarbone, mirror-image, as if answering a call.
After breakfast she went up to her room and pulled the old tin box from the back of her closet — the box of her childhood, which she hadn't opened in years. Inside: a baby bracelet from the hospital, plastic yellowed with age. A lock of dark hair in an envelope. A photograph of Lucia, young and laughing on a beach, her belly round under a sundress. And Alba's birth certificate, creased from being unfolded and refolded a hundred times.
She looked at it now with photographer's eyes — trained to notice what was wrong in a frame. Name: Alba Moreno. Date of birth: October 12, 2001. Place: Greyport, Maine. And at the bottom, the filing stamp: November 9, 2001. Four weeks late. And the attending physician's signature, a scrawl she had never been able to read.
Four weeks. She had never noticed that before. Or rather, she had never thought to wonder about it.
She lifted the photograph of Lucia instead — young, laughing, one hand resting on the round belly under the sundress. "What was he like?" Alba had asked once, when she was nine, meaning her father. Rosa had been quiet for a long moment, shelling peas. "He was a good man who died too young," she'd said finally, which was not an answer and had somehow been enough, for sixteen years.
Downstairs, Rosa was washing dishes with unusual force, the radio turned up louder than necessary. Alba folded the certificate and put it back in the tin, but she didn't put the tin back in the closet. She left it on her desk, open, like a question.
That afternoon she developed the gala film in the little darkroom she'd built in the garage. The frames came up one by one in the chemical bath: the quartet, the cake, the rings, the lighthouse. And then the last frame — the one she'd taken on reflex. The empty space where Vivienne Halden had stood. The cake. The light.