I sat in the driver's seat for several minutes before starting the engine.
The keys were in my hand, but I kept turning them over instead of putting them into the ignition.
I had told myself I was going to find an address.
That sounded simple enough.
What I had not admitted was that I was afraid of what I might remember when I got there.
I had spent nearly fifty years not thinking about that place.
Not deliberately, at least.
Life had carried me forward, and I had allowed it to.
There had been work, marriage, ordinary disappointments, and the thousand little responsibilities that filled the years.
The past had become something I visited only when an old photograph or a familiar smell brought it back.
Now it was waiting for me somewhere ahead.
I started the car.
The road out of Mom's neighborhood was one I knew well.
I drove past the grocery store where she used to send me for flour, the pharmacy where she collected her prescriptions, and the bakery that had replaced the small shop we once visited together.
I had passed those places hundreds of times.
That morning, each one seemed connected to a different version of my mother.
The woman who had held my hand when I was little.
The woman who had baked birthday cakes for my children.
The woman who had come home with a black suitcase and refused to tell me where she had been.
I could not make those versions fit together.
At the first traffic light, I considered turning around.
Mom was alone at home.
She had barely eaten, and she looked as though she might fall asleep in the middle of a conversation.
I should have stayed with her.
But I had tried asking questions.
She had given me nothing I could use.
I needed to understand what I had seen in the camera.
I drove on.
The address came back to me in pieces.
A street name first.
Then the shape of a corner.
Then a building I remembered seeing from the passenger seat of a car when I was young.
I repeated the street name quietly, afraid I would lose it.
When I reached the older part of town, the roads seemed narrower than I remembered.
Some houses had been renovated.
Others had been replaced with buildings that looked nothing like the places I recalled.
I slowed down more than once, checking the numbers on the fronts of the houses.
I passed a row of brick homes and felt my grip tighten around the steering wheel.
Brick.
That was what I had seen in the first photograph.
A brick house with a plain entrance and a narrow strip of ground beside the front steps.
I drove farther.
Then I saw the street.
For a moment, I thought I had remembered it incorrectly.
The trees were larger.
The pavement had been repaired in several places.
A house near the corner had a new front door painted a bright color.
But the street itself was still there.
I pulled over.
I did not get out immediately.
I sat watching people walk past, each of them going about an ordinary morning.
A man carried a paper bag.
A woman pulled a child along by the hand.
Someone opened a garage door.
Nothing about the street suggested that it held anything important.
That was what unsettled me.
The places that change our lives do not always look different afterward.
I got out of the car.
The air smelled faintly of damp leaves and exhaust.
I walked along the pavement, looking at the buildings.
I had no photograph in my hand, only the memory of the image on the old camera.
I tried to remember the exact arrangement of the doorway and the windows.
I tried to remember where Mom had stood.
The details kept slipping away whenever I tried to hold them still.
I took my phone from my pocket and opened the photograph I had managed to remember.
I had not brought the camera with me.
I had left it in the suitcase, just as I had found it.
Now I regretted that decision.
Still, I could recall the image clearly enough to compare the general shape of the building with what stood before me.
I continued down the street.
At the next corner, I stopped.
Something in the arrangement of the houses felt familiar.
Not merely similar.
Familiar in the way a childhood bedroom can remain recognizable even after the furniture has been changed.
I looked across the road.
There was a brick house with a narrow entrance and a low wall beside the front path.
I stood staring at it.
The building had been altered, but the basic shape was there.
I knew that house.
I had known it as a child.
The realization came with such force that I had to put one hand against the wall beside me.
I could not remember the last time I had thought about it.
I could not remember when I had stopped thinking about it.
I only knew that the sight of it brought back a feeling I had not experienced in years.
A tightness in my stomach.
A sense that I had arrived somewhere I was not supposed to be.
I looked at the front windows.
They were different now.
The curtains had changed.
The entrance had been repaired.
There was no reason to believe the people who lived there had any connection to my family.
Yet I could not leave.
I remembered being small enough that the front steps seemed enormous.
I remembered Mom standing nearby.
I remembered her telling me to wait.
The rest of the memory would not come.
I closed my eyes and tried again.
A sound.
A voice.
The feeling of someone's hand closing around mine.
Then nothing.
I opened my eyes.
The house remained still.
I felt foolish standing there, trying to recover an old memory from a building that might have changed hands many times.
I turned away.
That was when I noticed the street number.
I stopped walking.
I read it once.
Then again.
It matched the number that had been sitting at the edge of my memory all morning.
I took a step closer.
There was no sign of Mom.
No familiar car.
No black suitcase.
Just a house with a front door and a small patch of ground beside the steps.
I stood there long enough for a passing cyclist to glance at me.
Then I forced myself to walk back toward my car.
I had found the place.
But I still did not know why the photograph had brought me there.
And I still did not know what my mother had been doing for the seven days she claimed to have spent with Margaret.
Click here to continue reading: PART 6: The Childhood Memory I Found at the Old Address Was Not Enough to Explain Why My Mother Had Returned So Afraid
The Woman Waiting at the Station Looked Like My Mother, Until I Noticed What She Was Holding
Part 5 of 12
