I think of Moony’s pale strands of corn-colored hair in old photographs. I think of her strong jaw and round head and tiny watch. My mother’s hair is dark and red and streaked with colors Moony would think indecent. Her jaw is pointed, and her face has angles and contours I feel I’m only just appreciating. And all of it is making a new kind of sense—the stubbornness and resentment and refusal to give where Moony is concerned. It’s less that Mary doesn’t love her mother, and more that she does. Their differences are myriad, but their sameness is what really kept them apart. Their inability to fully reconcile, right up to the very end, has left my mother bitter and in stark denial of her true feelings. Why entertain a desire you can never hope to fulfill?

“I don’t understand,” I say quietly. “Why wouldn’t she want you to see this? Why keep the cards at all if she didn’t want them found?”

My mother sits at her card table and looks up at me. “She kept them because they were her only connection to her mother, Helen, when she went away.”

“Helen?”

“The little girl in the article—the daughter of Madora Charles.”

I look down at my hands, how every cell knits together like so many stitches to form a chain, and all those chains tie end to end to form…me. The women of my family are like this, knotted together end to end. But I can’t see what we are making. “Where did she go?”

“To the same institution they sent Madora to, many years before.”

We are a repeating pattern, a chain of chaos. I look at my mother and see everything I never wanted to be. “Moony grew up without a mother?”

“For a time,” my mother says, and it’s the first time I’ve heard her say anything in regard to Moony without spite lacing her voice. “Unlike Madora, Helen got out. Eventually. But she was never really right. That place broke her.”

“And Moony?”

My mother shrugs. “She believed a life of smallness and sameness would protect her from her mother’s and grandmother’s fate.”

I swallow air. There is no comfort in it. “What was her unique brand of discipline?” I am afraid to ask, but more afraid not to.