Free Baby by Patricia MacLachlan Page B

throat.
    “You will be disappointed,” he said.
    “I’m not disappointed,” I said loudly. “I’m not!”
    I reached over and tore off one end of the envelope, blowing inside the way Grandfather always did.
    Inside were two small packets of money, the bills fastened with paper clips and a torn piece of paper on each. One said CAT . The other said JOURNEY . The paper clip over my name was bent, as if Mama might have tried to make it right and hadn’t. I stared at that paper clip for a long time.
    “There are words,” I said. My voice rose. “There are words! Our names are there. Our names are words!”
    There was silence. The sound of my voice hung in the air between us. Cat turned to face me.
    “Journey, you keep the money. Do whatever you want with it.”
    She began to cut the carrots again, this time calm and steady.
    “I’ll put it in the bank,” I said. Grandmasmiled at me from the stove. Grandfather peered at her through his camera and snapped a picture. I stood, suddenly angry, wanting him to stop taking pictures.
    “I’ll start a travel account!” I shouted. Surprised, Grandfather put down his camera.
    “So that when Mama tells us where she is, Cat and I can go visit! We’ll take a bus … or a train. Something fast.”
    I looked down at the letter in my hand.
    “She forgot the return address,” I said.
    Cat turned at the counter to stare at me.
    “She forgot, that’s all,” I said softly.
    Grandma wiped her hands on her apron and came over and put her arms around me. I smelled onion and something like flowers, lilacs maybe, and I burst into tears.
    “Ah, Journey,” Grandma murmured.
    I heard the click of Grandfather’s camera.
    “Why does he do that?” I asked, my voice muffled in Grandma’s shoulder. I leaned back to look at Grandfather. “Why do you do that? Why?”
    “Because he needs to,” said Grandma softly.
    “I don’t understand.”
    “I know,” she whispered.
    *  *  *
    My bedroom was sun-dappled and quiet, the smell of lilacs strong through the open window, mingling with the lily-of-the-valley from under the bush outside.
    “Journey?”
    The door opened and Grandma stood there with a bowl of soup in one hand, an album in the other. She set the bowl on the table by my bed. Then she opened the album. It was full of pictures, pictures of people I didn’t know—men in black suits and white starched shirts and broad-brimmed hats, women in flowered dresses, and children with bows as big as balloons in their hair. Grandma pointed.
    “Me,” she said, “when I was Cat’s age.”
    In the picture Grandma sat in the garden swing, looking straight at the camera with a great smile on her face. Tables were set up in thegarden with food and pitchers and bowls of flowers.
    “This was taken on a long-ago Fourth of July.” Grandma closed her eyes. “Nineteen thirty, I think. The day I met your grandfather.”
    “You look happy,” I said.
    Grandma nodded and looked at the picture.
    “The camera knows,” she said.
    “The camera knows what?”
    She turned more pages.
    “And here is your mother, same age, same day, but many years later. Grandpa took that picture. He didn’t have so fine a camera as now, of course.”
    In the picture the girl who was my mama sat behind a table, her face in her hands, looking far off in the distance. All around her were people laughing, talking. Lancie, Mama’s sister, made a face at the camera. Uncle Minor, his hair all sunbleached, was caught by the camera taking a handful of cookies. In the background a dog leaped into the air to grab a ball, his ears floating out as if uplifted and held there by the wind. But my mother looked silent and unhearing.
    “It’s a nice picture,” I said. “Except for Mama. It must have been the camera,” I said after a moment.
    Grandma sighed and took my hand.
    “No, it wasn’t the camera, Journey. It was your mama. Your mama always wished to be somewhere else.”
    “Well, now she is,” I