My mother, Madelaine Chastain, was just a baby when Paris was liberated in 1944, but the demure Frenchwoman always put off talking about her family when I asked her, waving her hand about like she was signaling someone unseen to go away lest they spill the beans. A ghost, perhaps. To my knowledge, Maman’s family were all killed in the war. That didn’t excuse her lack of une famille in my eyes. When I asked the faculty staff who came down for the funeral if she ever mentioned any relatives in France, they shook their heads. I admit I was too distraught over her death and exhausted from the toll caregiving took on me to go searching any further. I wonder if I should have. She must have someone I can write to, talk with about my mother’s last few years, her downward spiral into a deep depression that made her believe she was a burden to me. She once said something I tucked away in my mind.

      That I’d have enough to bear if I ever found out about ‘her’.

      Who she was talking about, I never figured out.

      Maman never spoke about my grandparents, insisting they died in the war. As a teenager, I spent hours conjuring up a fantastic tale of them being Resistance fighters, brave partisans fighting the Nazis but making sure their daughter was safe with the nuns since they’d most likely be killed before their country was free again. I’d come up with various ‘looks’, but my favorite was a sketch of my grandmother outfitted in partisan chic – pencil skirt, silky cream blouse, knee-high, brown suede boots, and a bomber jacket cinched in at her waist. A deep navy beret pulled down over one eye, her lips bright with a sizzling red lipstick.

      So unlike my mother. I often tried to get Maman to add a necklace or earrings to her ensemble, but she always pooh-pooed the idea, saying she was a convent girl at heart. After all, glam is my business. Giving actresses the right cut on a dress, the fit of a pair of jeans, the angle of a hat. The retired art history professor never deviated from her black suit, crisp white blouse, low pumps, and square glasses.

      These memories of Maman and fantasies of my grandmother are all I have to cling to. I realize now I avoided a lot of things in my life because I was too busy following my dream of making it in Hollywood. In college, I was picked as the model for the movie studio tour ads, though I never saw myself as an actress or beautiful. The only thing I can lay claim to as anything interesting about my face is the deep dimple on my left cheek.

      Ever since I was a kid I’ve loved to draw… stick figures in my mother’s textbooks, making clothes for my Barbie, working on costumes for school plays. I do visual storytelling, designing costumes specific to that character and give it the cinematic flair to work on the silver screen.

      Maman didn’t understand my love for design or the movies. She loved her history books and her students and rarely talked about anything else. I never pressed her about where we came from and she seemed happy I didn’t. My mother was such a private person, so careful with saying and doing the right thing, even her handwriting was precision perfect. I never wanted to look behind the curtain and see otherwise. No wonder I feel empty inside when it comes to knowing my roots. I suck in a sharp breath and take the plunge to find out.

      Let the unpacking begin.

      I take my time and rearrange the boxes I’ve kept stored here in my study. I do the smaller ones first, blowing off the dust coating the brown cardboard. Cutting the tape with scissors with a reverence that doesn’t surprise me. Taking my time with each packed box as if Maman is watching me, nodding her head in approval.

      I go through her possessions with a careful eye, my heart pounding, looking for clues about my roots in each box. Nothing yet… no wild revelations, but with every box I open, every memory I find helps me cope with her loss. Still, my curiosity tugs at me to find out more about her, to fill in the gap of where I came from. I’m delighted when I find a sealed box of letters written by my parents – I never knew it existed.

      Maman told me years ago my father was American, but my parents never married. How they had this long-distance love affair that culminated when my mother came to America to have her baby. Me. After skimming several letters, I wipe away a tear, feeling the deep love between them, but there’s no hint of my mother’s family, like she was born without a past.

      I find photos of me as a baby, then from my childhood since I grew up in a time before everything went digital. First communion, dressing up for Halloween, teenage angst years where I shied away from the camera. I love handling these glossy four-by-six prints, the color as vibrant as a scene out of Oz. Then I find old movie camera tapes I gave her of my trips to San Francisco and New York for location shoots, cities Maman loved to visit with me. Nothing here that says anything about her life before she settled in California except for a few letters in French. Letters from the convent where my mother lived until she met my father, signed by a nun named Sister Rose-Celine.

      I