Carly sat looking at it for a long time. She didn't cry. I'd thought she would. But she sat there in that little plastic chair with her knees up around her chest and looked at a story she'd written when she was the age our daughter was now, and her face did nothing at all. It was like watching someone stand perfectly still on ice that was starting to crack.
"I don't remember writing this," she said finally.
"I know," said Mrs. Fjelstad.
"I don't remember it at all."
"I know. But you did write it." Mrs. Fjelstad reached into the pocket of her green cardigan and took out a second folded paper. Newer, whiter. She put it on the table next to Carly's story, and I saw it was a photocopy of Elsie's, the lighthouse story, all three pages of it. "And she wrote this. Thirty years apart, in the same room. I've read a few thousand of these, Carly. I don't believe in a lot of things anymore. But I believe that when a seven-year-old sits down to write a story, she writes down exactly what's happening to her, whether she knows it or not."
Carly pushed the papers away from her, both of them, an inch across the table. "That's not fair," she said. "You don't know anything about my life. You saw one thing. You saw one thing today, on the worst day, on a day when I had been up since five and I had eighteen kindergartners and a sign and a cooler and nobody to help me because my husband is never, ever here." She didn't look at me when she said it. She didn't have to. "You don't get to sit there in your rocking chair and decide I'm my mother because of one cupcake."
"No," Mrs. Fjelstad agreed. "I wouldn't do that because of one cupcake."
She got up out of the rocking chair, which took her a moment, and went to her desk, which was the only thing in the room not half packed, and opened the bottom drawer and took out a manila folder. It wasn't thick. Maybe twenty sheets. She brought it back and sat down again and opened it on her knees.
"I keep notes," she said. "On all of them. Most of it's nothing. Who can't sit still during read-aloud, who's afraid of the fire drill, who needs to be moved away from whom. This is Elsie's." She turned the pages slowly. She didn't read them all out. She read some. "September eleventh. Elsie has no lunch, says Mom forgot. Gave her half of mine. September twenty-sixth. No lunch. October third. Permission slip for the aquarium trip not returned; I called the home number twice, no answer, Elsie stayed at school with the first grade that day. She told the other children she didn't like fish. October twentieth. Parent-teacher conference, no-show. I emailed. No reply. I checked with Ms. Pham, who told me Mrs. Ostlund attended Finn's conference that same afternoon, forty minutes long. November. Elsie's coat. She wore a fall jacket until the week before Thanksgiving, and on the twentieth of November it was nine degrees in the morning. I gave her a coat from the lost-and-found and told her it was a prize. She still has it. It's purple."