It’s only after the birth of her second daughter that Laura Winslow begins dreading the visits to her parents’ house. When her oldest was small, she loved bringing her home for long weekends in Chicago, watching the girl burrow into her old bed in the room Carl and Harriette never redecorated, the house a perfectly preserved relic that still felt like home.
But on Laura’s last visit, she watched her daughters playing together on the living room rug and was seized with something that felt like terror. The image of two little heads bowed together, whispering and giggling. She’d been inside this moment before, she was certain, and now she was watching it from some place far in the future. The air around her daughters darkened and wavered, and Laura felt the years bending around them. But when the girls called to her, the memory she’d been trying to grasp vanished and she couldn’t tell what had her so shaken.
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Now, her daughters sit at the kitchen table while Laura and her parents bake cookies. The girls stir food coloring into bowls of frosting. Their fingers are coated in bright pink sweetness and Laura looks up at the sound of their conspiratorial whispering, those voices like a cold wind at the back of her neck. She watches them lick the frosting from their little fingertips, all innocence, but something inside her is rattled, seeing the two of them here in her old kitchen. She feels like she’s recalling a scene from a movie, that she’s already seen this image flickering in front of her, and she stares for long moments at the girls.
Her parents notice nothing, though. “Look at them,” Harriette says, beaming at her granddaughters. “Looking just like their mama, two little Lauras here.”
Laura smiles at her mother and bends down to kiss the crowns of the girls’ heads. She doesn’t say so, but she can’t see the resemblance. To Laura, her daughters look only like themselves. Wholly new, wholly unique. But when the girls smile up at her, she catches a flash of something else in the younger girl’s eyes, a familiarity she can’t place, and it makes her turn away for a moment to catch her breath.
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It’s unnerving being here, she texts her brother later that night. Déjà vu or something, but I don’t know what I’m remembering. You feel like that at home sometimes? She watches the dots move across the screen, darkening and fading, as Eddie texts back, but the answer is a simple nah, not really. And then, a minute later, home’s home, you know? Laura can almost see him shrugging her off.
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The following evening, the girls bicker at dinner, the older one giddy about staying up late and her younger sister jealous and pouting. Then, the little one sneaks a pinch of her sister’s thigh, and Laura feels the twinge on her own leg like a rubber band snapped against her skin, trying to remind her of something. She puts a hand to the ache, presses it to her skin like it might help hold her together.
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“Isn’t that how it is for all of us, though?” Maxine asks her at the bar that night, the kids home with Laura’s parents. She and Max twirl black stirring straws in their martini glasses, drawing circles in the liquid. “You can’t go home again, right?”
“I guess so,” Laura says. Though this doesn’t feel true to her, either. It used to be easy to come home, to slide back into the place of her memories, her recollections of her own childhood simple, technicolor-vivid and fixed in place in her mind.
Even Max looks the same to her, all these years later. She knows they’ve both grown older, but every time she visits, she sees Max’s features shift into the teenage face of their high school days. Or maybe she’s just imagining that, layering a younger Max onto the middle-aged woman sitting next to her. An easy thing to do to the faces that accompanied you through your childhood, Laura believes, the ones you can’t ever really forget.
Max’s words don’t reassure her though, and when the bartender walks by again, Laura asks for her check, suddenly anxious to get back to the house, to check on her daughters.
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The girls are curled up on the couch with her father when she gets home, laughing as Carl quickly grabs for the remote, hiding whatever show the girls have tricked him into letting them watch. Their mouths are coated in bright candy colors, a happy sugar high radiating off them, and she feels foolish for worrying, as if the girls were in danger of anything other than their overindulgent grandparents allowing them extra TV or dessert.
Carl shoos them off to bed and they dash for the stairs. Four braids bouncing on their shoulders as they stumble up the steps in their nightgowns, four feet pounding the stairs and Laura is frozen again. She feels like she’s listing to the side, the world tilting her toward some memory. She’s poised at the edge of it, about to fall in, but then she pulls herself back and she’s running, rushing up the stairs after the girls.
“Mom!” they shout, turning back, and then the spell is broken, the terror slipping out of her body. It’s still there, though, hovering somewhere in the air. Laura backs down the stairs.
“We’re just going to play before bed,” the girls say. “Why are you following us?”
In case you don’t come back down, Laura thinks, the words writing themselves in her mind before she understands them. Her own thoughts not even her own in this house anymore.
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At night, she dreams of her girls playing hide and seek in the house. She’s watching them from the outside for a while, then in the body of one of her daughters, roaming through the house and hearing her sister call to her, “You’ll never find me, you’ll never find me.” The song echoes off the walls of every room in the house, and when she wakes up the echoes keep coming, a voice riding the very air of the house.
Then she’s out of bed and down the hall, back toward her own room where the girls are asleep, and when she slips into the bedroom she isn’t surprised to find the roll-away cot empty. Even as the panic rises in her chest like a wave, she feels as if she’s always been waiting for it.
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But no — both girls are still there. The little one has crawled into her older sister’s bed, the two little bodies twined around each other in sleep. Laura kneels at the bed, stares at them for long minutes, counting their fingers the way she did when they were newborns in her arms. Ten and ten. She sits down on the empty cot, where she can still see the faint impression of a girl on the mattress. Her hand hovers above the spot and she hears the voice echoing again, calling to her. It’s in air, it’s in the walls, it’s whispering itself down her spine and spreading under her skin. It’s screaming to her, in a register just below hearing, but Laura feels it there.
She knows now that she’s forgotten something. There’s a black hole at the center of her memories. She feels herself orbiting it, a dense emptiness in the middle of her parents’ home. She wants to let go and be drawn in, to find the lost thing at the center of this absence, but she’s scared it will pull her under, that she might disappear too.
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In the morning, she packs up the girls and leaves before breakfast, sputtering excuses about work and the girls missing their father, and it’s only when they’re in the car and driving away that Laura feels something inside loosening, allowing her to breathe again.
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She keeps one eye on her daughters in the rearview mirror the whole way. They stare out of opposite windows, their fingers laced together on the center console, and it’s there again, the uncanny sense of a missing memory. But here, with the Chicago skyline shrinking in the rear window and her parents’ house far behind them, it’s easier to ignore. She lets the lost memory dissipate in the wind blowing through her open window. The girls are here with her now, and they’re fine. Even if their mother is losing pieces of herself, her daughters will always have each other.
It’s what she always tells them when they fight, what she tells them again an hour outside of the city, as they get restless in the back seat and begin to snap at each other.
“You’re so lucky to have each other,” Laura reminds her girls. “I always wished I had a sister,” she adds, and she says it easily, with no terror, with no echoes, without even a second thought.
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