Am I a terrible person for following a stranger out of a laundromat and demanding to know who she was?
I (40F) lost my daughter Maisie four years ago. She was nineteen. Car accident, February, black ice on Route 9. I don’t talk about it much anymore because there’s nothing left to say that doesn’t feel like pulling a scab off something that never healed right.
I’ve been going to the same laundromat on Clement Street for three years. It’s routine. It’s normal. I need normal.
Last Tuesday I was sitting there with my book, not reading it, just holding it, when a girl walked in.
She was maybe twenty, twenty-one. Dark hair in the same messy bun Maisie always wore. Same way of walking, slightly pigeon-toed, like she was always in a hurry but trying not to show it. She had on this faded yellow hoodie and she was carrying her laundry in a garbage bag instead of a basket, EXACTLY the way Maisie did, and I know that’s not rare, I know that, but I couldn’t breathe.
I told myself to stop staring. I opened my book to a random page and stared at the words.
Then she laughed at something on her phone. And that was it.
I don’t know how to explain what that laugh did to me.
I left my laundry in the machine and followed her to the folding table and I said, “I’m sorry, can I ask your name?”
She looked up, a little wary. “Jade,” she said.
I nodded like that meant something. I said, “Do you have family around here?”
She took one small step back. “Why?”
I heard myself say, “You look so much like my daughter.”
She said, “Oh – is she here?”
My friends and my sister Karen (47F) are completely split on what happened next. Half of them say I had a breakdown and I need help, and the other half say any mother would have done the same thing. My therapist, when I finally told her, just looked at me for a long time without speaking.
Because here’s the thing I haven’t told anyone else yet.
When I said “She passed away,” Jade went completely still. And then she said, “What was her name?”
I said Maisie. Maisie Lynne Calloway.
And the color drained out of Jade’s face.
She set down the shirt she was folding and looked at me like she was deciding something, and then she said, “I think you need to see something.”
She reached into her bag and pulled out her phone and started scrolling, and I watched her face the whole time, and something in my stomach told me to grab the phone and run and never look at whatever was on that screen.
She turned it toward me.
What Was on the Screen
It was a photo.
Maisie. My Maisie, grinning that too-wide grin she had, the one where her left eye almost closed. She was holding a red plastic cup at some party, wearing the green flannel I bought her at a thrift store on Haight when she was seventeen. I hadn’t seen that photo before. I’d never seen it.
I said, “Where did you get this.”
Not a question. It came out flat.
Jade said, “She was my friend. We met freshman year. I didn’t know her long, maybe eight months, but she was – ” She stopped. Pressed her lips together. “She was one of those people.”
I didn’t ask what she meant. I knew what she meant.
Jade said she’d transferred out of State in November of that year, moved back to Portland with her mom after some family thing she didn’t explain. She and Maisie had stayed in loose touch. Instagram, mostly. Then February came and she’d seen a post from one of Maisie’s other friends, one of those devastating posts where someone puts a photo and just a date, no words, because there are no words, and Jade said she’d sat in her car in a Safeway parking lot for forty minutes.
She said, “I always thought I’d come back someday and we’d pick it back up. You know how you think that.”
I knew how you think that.
The Flannel
I asked her about the photo. When it was taken, where.
She said October, a house party on Judah Street, someone named Derek’s place. She remembered Maisie had been cold walking over and kept pulling the flannel over her hands, using the cuffs as mittens. She said Maisie had complained for the entire six-block walk that she should have brought a real coat but then said, “but then I wouldn’t have the flannel” like that settled it.
That was Maisie. That was so completely, exactly Maisie that I had to look at the ceiling for a second.
I’d donated that flannel fourteen months after she died. I couldn’t anymore. I put it in a bag with some other things and dropped it at Goodwill on a Tuesday morning and then sat in the car and cried so hard I gave myself a headache that lasted two days. I’ve thought about that flannel more times than I can count. Whether someone bought it. Whether they know.
I didn’t tell Jade any of that.
What Jade Was Like
We ended up sitting in the plastic chairs by the windows, both of our laundry going around in separate machines, neither of us watching it.
Jade was studying to be a dental hygienist. She lived four blocks away, had been going to that same laundromat for almost a year, and somehow we’d never been there at the same time until Tuesday. She had a boyfriend named Tim who she described as “fine, he’s fine” in a way that told me everything. She’d grown up in Portland, her mom was Filipino, her dad had been out of the picture since she was nine. She talked with her hands.
She was nothing like Maisie, actually. The more we talked the more I could see that. Different laugh once I heard it up close. Different energy, more cautious, more guarded where Maisie had been loud and a little reckless and too trusting of everyone. But she’d known my daughter. She’d walked six blocks with her in the cold and listened to her complain about forgetting her coat. She had a photo I’d never seen.
She had eight months of Maisie I didn’t have.
I asked if she had more photos.
She scrolled for a while. She had seven. Seven pictures with my daughter in them, varying levels of blurry, party lighting, red cups, the specific low quality of photos taken by twenty-year-olds who are not thinking about documentation or legacy or the fact that there will be a morning four years later when a stranger will be sitting next to her mother begging to see them.
I asked if she’d send them to me.
She said yes before I finished the sentence.
Karen’s Opinion
My sister Karen thinks I need to “process this with my therapist before I go any further.” That’s a direct quote. She said it twice, the second time slower, like I was having trouble with the words.
Karen lost Maisie too. I know that. She was her aunt, she loved her, she still has the macaroni picture frame Maisie made her in third grade hanging in her kitchen, and I know Karen’s protectiveness comes from a real place. But Karen has also spent four years worrying that I’m going to shatter, treating me like something kept in a box, and sometimes I want to say: I’m already shattered. You can’t protect me from that. It already happened.
My friend Donna, who has known me since we were both thirty-two and working at the same insurance office, said she would have done exactly the same thing. Donna cried when I told her. She asked if I was going to see Jade again.
I didn’t know how to answer that.
My Therapist’s Face
I told Dr. Reyes on Thursday. She’s been my therapist for two and a half years. She has this thing where she doesn’t rush to fill silence, which I hated at first and now find I depend on.
When I finished telling her, she was quiet for what felt like a long time.
Then she said, “How did you feel when you were sitting with her?”
I thought about it. I said I felt like I was doing something I wasn’t supposed to be doing. Like I’d found a door I wasn’t meant to open and I’d gone through it anyway and I didn’t know yet what was on the other side.
She nodded. Wrote something.
She said, “And now?”
I said I didn’t know. I said I’d looked at the seven photos forty or fifty times since Tuesday. That I’d zoomed in on Maisie’s face in each one, trying to read what she was thinking, trying to figure out what that night had been like, who else was there, what she’d talked about, whether she’d been happy. That I’d stared at the green flannel until my eyes went dry.
Dr. Reyes said, “What do you want to happen next?”
I said I wanted to meet for coffee. Just once. I wanted to hear more. I wanted to know what eight months of my daughter’s life looked like from the outside.
She said, “That sounds like something worth thinking about carefully.”
Which I think is therapist for: I’m not going to stop you but I want you to know what you’re walking into.
What I Think I’m Walking Into
I’m not confused about what Jade is. She’s not Maisie. She’s not a replacement, she’s not a sign, she’s not anything mystical. She’s a twenty-two-year-old dental hygiene student who happened to be friends with my daughter for eight months and happened to walk into a laundromat on Clement Street on a Tuesday in November carrying her clothes in a garbage bag.
She knew Maisie when Maisie was nineteen and alive and complaining about the cold and holding a red cup at some party on Judah Street.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
But I have spent four years trying to hold onto a person who is gone, trying to keep her edges clear in my memory, terrified of the morning I wake up and can’t quite remember the exact sound of her laugh. I have seven new photos I didn’t have last week. I have the story about the flannel and the six-block walk. I have a name: Derek, Judah Street, October. Small pieces. Corners of a picture.
I texted Jade yesterday. I said: no pressure, but if you ever want to get coffee and talk about her, I’d really like that.
She replied in four minutes.
She said: I’d really like that too. I have stories.
I read that and had to put my phone down on the kitchen table and stand at the window for a while, looking at nothing.
I have stories.
Four words. I keep turning them over.
I don’t know yet if the coffee happens. I don’t know if it helps or if it breaks something open that I’ve been carefully keeping closed. I don’t know if Karen’s right and I should slow down, or if Donna’s right and this is just what you do, you follow the thread wherever it goes because what else are you going to do, let it drop?
I know that my laundry sat in the machine for an extra forty minutes while I talked to a stranger about my dead daughter, and I didn’t care even a little.
I know I’m going to say yes to the coffee.
I know I’m going to hear the stories.
—
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For more tales of shocking revelations and intense family drama, check out My Husband Said He Lost His Grandmother’s Ring. I Found It on a Stranger’s Hand at His Work Party., My Son Didn’t Get a Permission Slip. The Reason Changed Everything., and My Father-in-Law Left Me Something. His Wife Grabbed My Wrist to Stop Me From Taking It..
