The hem of the tiny yellow knit cardigan had unraveled, leaving a three-inch trail of acrylic yarn that clung to my silver wedding ring. I twisted the band to free the thread, but the metal caught on a loose loop of wool.
Sophie sat on the living room floor with her legs crossed, a cardboard box of outgrown overalls between her knees. She tucked a loose strand of hair behind her left ear and held up a pair of faded blue denim booties.
“Did Ethan actually wear these, or did you just keep them to make us feel small?” she asked.
“Now, Sophie, some things are kept in cedar chests because they are too heavy for regular shelves,” I said.
I reached deeper into the faded tissue paper at the bottom of the chest, my fingers brushing against the rough cedar lining. My hand closed around a small scrap of cardboard that had slipped beneath the bottom drawer.
It was a yellowed paper boarding pass stub from October 2005, the blue ink faded to a pale, ghostly grey.
“Seat 14C,” Sophie read over my shoulder, her chin resting on my collarbone. “That was your seat on the flight from Atlanta.”
“It was,” I said, holding the paper to the light from the window. “And the woman next to me in 14B was the one who went to the restroom and never came back.”
She had left two infants in carrier seats on the floor of the cabin, their blankets smelling faintly of formula and cold air. For eighteen years, the state of Florida and I had operated on the assumption that she was a desperate stranger who happened to choose the seat next to a grieving woman.
“Who was she, Mom?” Sophie asked, her voice dropping its sharp edge. “We still don’t even know her real name.”
That was the question that had hung over our yellow house under the live oaks for nearly two decades.
I stared at the faded logo of the airline, wondering if the passenger manifest from that rainy Tuesday in October still existed in some federal storage locker.
By one in the afternoon, the sun was baking the flat roof of the county records building downtown. Sophie sat beside me in the basement archives, her fingers flying across the knobs of a green microfiche reader while the machine hummed in the quiet room.
“The Ocala Star-Banner didn’t run any notices about abandoned twins in November of that year,” Sophie said, tucking a loose strand of dark hair behind her left ear. “I’ve been through the whole month twice.”
“Try the regional section of the Orlando paper,” I said, leaning over her shoulder as the bright screen reflected in her eyes. “Sometimes they grouped the regional sheriff reports together on page six.”
Sophie turned the wheel, and the microfiche slides clicked and whined, casting a pale light across her face. “Mom, if they find the person who bought that ticket, what happens to us?”
I turned eighteen on a Tuesday. No cake. No card. Not even a half-hearted “happy birthday.” Just my father sitting at the kitchen table, his wife stirring sugar into her mug, and my stepbrother leaning back in his chair with that look people get when they already know how the story ends.
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