has her!” I point to Ted and he takes a step back from my finger.
“Whoa, wait a minute, I do not have that woman,” he says.
“Of course you do! You took her to trigger me into remembering.”
“No,” Ted says. “I saw that she was missing again, and I called you back to see if her disappearance triggered anything. Just like I told you.”
“You’ve told me nothing but lies!”
“Not this time,” Mara says. “He’s telling the truth.” She narrows her eyes at him. “Or was there more to this Experiment than you told me, Ted?”
Ted laughs. “Of course there wasn’t. Why would I need to take that woman?”
“I don’t believe you,” I say.
I will never believe him again.
Pushing past Mara in the doorway, I run down the hall, opening every door I pass—linen closet, bathroom—even though I know those won’t be the ones she’s behind. I rush down the stairs, round the corner, spring toward the basement and run down those stairs, too. Pulling the string on the lightbulb at the bottom, I look around, whip my head from side to side. There’s the washer and dryer, stacks of old boxes—but Astrid isn’t here.
When I race back up the stairs, Mara and Ted are waiting for me on the first floor. “Where is she?” I ask through my teeth.
“He doesn’t have her,” Mara says. “Trust me, Fern. I can’t speak for Ted, but—whatever you might think of me, I’m not heartless. I wouldn’t let him do that to her again.”
“You just said his work comes first! And he thinks that Astrid is part of his work.”
Mara shakes her head. “Listen to me. I saw her only once while she was here, the day he returned her. She was unconscious in his trunk, all curled up, and she was—she was so pretty, dear. Like a piece of art. But she was fragile, too. I saw how easily he might have broken her. And that’s what she was, lying in his car like that. This beautiful, broken thing.”
Her eyes shine. She clears her throat. “And I told him,” she continues, “that he was never to do something like that again. Not even for the sake of his work. He promised me that he wouldn’t, and I thought the promise would be enough, but sometimes I would think of her—that beautiful, broken thing—and… well. You know how things are between me and Ted now.”
I stare at her without seeing. I don’t care why she and Ted broke up. I care about something else she said. Beautiful, broken thing. The phrase resonates, like a string plucked in my mind. But I can’t remember where I’ve heard it before.
Then I realize: I haven’t. It’s just similar to another of Mara’s phrases—Exquisite Fragments. The title of the project that brought her some success. Named for beautiful, broken things of a different kind.
I picture her Break Room, the pieces of pottery glued to the floor, a mosaic of pain that Mara stepped across, week after week, in bare and blistered feet, just to glue more of it down. I picture myself, a few days earlier, trying to open the door as we packed her studio. I twisted the knob but nothing happened. Ted told me it was locked.
“Mara, give me your keys,” I say.
She blinks at me, and I hold out my palm.
“Now!” I shout.
She walks to the front door. Picks up one of her bags. After digging around for a moment, she extracts a set of keys.
I hurry past her, plucking them from her fingers. Ted follows close behind me. “What’s this about?” he asks.
I ready the key while I jog toward the studio. It’s the blue one. I know that much about my mother—the color she painted the key to the room where she spent so much of my life.
The studio is boiling when I burst inside, and I pray he’s left her something—a fan, a cooler of ice, water instead of Sprite.
“Fern, what are you doing?”
I feel them both at my back as I insert the key into the lock. I expect it to stick as I turn it, one more obstacle before I find her, but it moves easily, and I hear a click.
I think only this as I open the door: Astrid is not a beautiful, broken thing. Beautiful, yes, but not broken. She held her own against Ted in ways I never could. She’s the kind of strong I’m going to teach myself to be. The kind of strong my child deserves.