Free The Shadows: A Novel by Alex North Page A

and unmoored.
    But the strangest thing was the photographs, which I found gathered haphazardly in a shoebox, filling it to the brim. I emptied it onto the bed and then spread the photos out, forming an overlapping mosaic on the sheets. There was no order to it. Different points in the past mingled freely, resting above and below each other; people and places from separate ages sat side by side.
    I was there.
    I picked up a photograph of me as a baby, cradled in my mother’s arms. I was crying, but while she looked exhausted, she was smiling. There was one of me on the driveway, maybe about three or four years old, toddling along and grinning happily at someone outside of the frame. Six years old, riding a bike with training wheels. A school photo at eight or nine, my home-cut hair slightly ragged and my cheeks dotted with freckles. My eleventh birthday, with my hands thrust in my pockets, my thin shoulders a coat hanger for my clothes, standing awkwardly beside the cake she had made for me.
    And she was there too.
    It wasn’t the ones with me in them that caught my eye so much as the older photographs: images so faded it was like the paper they were printed on was forgetting them. There was a black-and-white photo of my mother as a little girl, lying down in the grass and smiling shyly at the camera, a book splayed open before her. In another, she was a little older, standing outside a house I didn’t know, shielding her eyes against the sun.
    But it was the shots of her as a teenager that struck me the most. She had been beautiful, and the photographs caught her in unguarded moments, her face unlined, a whole life ahead of her, her eyes sparkling as she laughed. I found a staged group shot of five people sitting on steps. I didn’t recognize three of them, but my mother was on the right, next to a teenage boy I realized with a jolt was a young Carl Dawson—a boy who would eventually grow up to marry Eileen and become James’s stepfather.
    In the photo, he was turned to her. My mother’s hands were on her knees and her face was frozen in an expression of wild delight, halfway between shock and laughter, as though he’d deliberately said something outrageous just as the picture was taken.
    You can do so much better, you know?
    I blinked, then gathered the photographs together and put them back in the box. When I thought of my mother, it was always as a presence—a role, almost—and it was strange to be faced with a truth that should have been obvious: that she had been someone with her own dreams and aspirations, who had felt the same as I had, and who had once had a life that existed entirely outside of her relationship to me.
    None of which got me any closer to what I needed to know.
    It’s in the house.
    I walked out into the hallway and rubbed my forehead. Perhaps there should have been a sense of relief that I hadn’t found anything, but having committed to the enterprise, I felt frustrated. Absence of evidence was not evidence of absence. The fact that I hadn’t found anything didn’t mean there was nothing to find, only that I would never be sure.
    The silence was still humming.
    Come on, house, I thought. I’m trying here. Meet me halfway.
    But of course the house said nothing.
    The window here faced out onto the backyard and the face of the Shadows. I stared out for a time, looking at the trees that stretched upward, forming a wall of fractured foliage that seemed to go halfway to the sky.
    And then I looked up a little farther. Directly above me, I saw the thin outline of a hatch in the ceiling.
    The attic.
    The humming in the house intensified a little.
    In my mother’s present condition, there was obviously no way she could have gotten up there, but I had no idea when her physical health had started to fail, or how quickly it had deteriorated. And while I didn’t relish the prospect, the attic was the one area of the house I hadn’t searched.
    So I reached up and pressed the edge of the hatch.
    It