The Wrong Train by Jeremy de Quidt

Author:Jeremy de Quidt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.

The funeral had been the week before. Sammie hadn’t gone, but her mom and dad had. It was sad in the way that only unattended funerals can be, they’d said. Just the two of them and the old lady’s coffin.

They’d had to collect the old lady’s things from the home too, but that was on another day, and Sammie’s mom did it. By the time Sammie got in from school, her mom was back. She’d already dropped a bag of the old lady’s clothes off at a charity shop, but there’d been a photo album too, and her mom had kept that. It was on the counter in the kitchen in a gray plastic bag.

“What relation was she?” asked Sammie.

She pulled the album out of the bag and turned it over in her hands. It had a worn, black leather cover and it smelled of stale perfume.

“Grandma’s cousin,” her mom said. “That’s why I kept it—I thought there might be pictures of Grandma in there as a girl. It goes back years.”

“You never told me about her.”

Her mom shook her head.

“She lived most of her life in hospitals and homes of one sort or another—even from her teens. She wasn’t quite right in the head, or something like that. Anyway, it was hers. I thought you’d be interested to see it. They said at the home it upset her if they ever got it out—but they didn’t want to throw it away. It had just been left in a box. We don’t have to keep it.”

“No, I’ll look at it,” said Sammie.

She put the album back in the bag.

* * *

Her mom and dad were out that night—weren’t going to be late, they said, back by ten thirty. So after they’d gone, Sammie had a bath, then settled herself down at the big table in the kitchen with a cup of tea and got the album out again.

The smell was even stronger this time—of old cardboard and stale perfume, like it had been kept somewhere damp for years. She wasn’t so sure she wanted to look at it anymore. The smell got on her hands. It was so strong it almost made a noise in her head—a long discordant note—and she thought it was the fridge, but it was like it was the album and the smell doing it.

She turned a few pages with the tips of her fingers. It was just like any old album—baby pictures, christening, toddler years, dressing up in the yard, days out, school—all neatly written up with where and when. “Patricia’s first birthday,” “Playing in the garden at Bridge Road.” Things like that. Sammie could see the girl growing up with each page she turned.

She was about to close it, had almost stopped paying any real attention to the pictures, when something made her stop and look more carefully.

There’d been five or six pictures now of the old lady when she must have been about Sammie’s own age, and Sammie couldn’t understand why they were in the album at all.

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