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Desiree scrambled to her feet, feeling strangely nervous, and she didn’t realize until she opened the door that they were standing exactly where they’d first met a lifetime ago
In Chapter Three, Early meets Desiree on the porch, which is precisely where they met when they were teenagers. As Early and Desiree rekindle the attraction of their youth, they also see that they don’t know each other well in the present. What links them, and what continually moves them toward each other, is the ghost of their past attraction to each other. It is as though the thwarted past, in which they were prevented from pursuing their romance because of Adele’s prejudice against darker people, lives on in their present. Early also reveals that he’s drawn to help Desiree find Stella because of his sorrow for their past. Early sees that Desiree is filled with grief about being separated from her sister. Though Early enters Desiree’s (and Stella’s) present, he seeks to help them repair something that happened years ago.
On the bus, she fiddled with the rosary beads, imagining her mother traveling away from Mallard on a bus like this. Except she hadn’t been alone, Stella beside her staring out into the dark… She’d never seen a desert before—it seemed to stretch on forever. Another mile ticked by, carrying her further from her life.
In Chapter Four, Jude leaves Mallard, taking a bus to her new life at UCLA. As she travels for miles in an unfamiliar landscape toward her unknown future, both her mother’s past and her own past haunt her, as though they are invisible passengers riding with her. She sees her mother and her aunt about the same age she is and traveling out of Mallard on a similar bus, which evokes the way that the past tends to repeat itself. She also reflects on the life she is leaving behind in Mallard, recalling memories of the pain and abuse she suffered in the town since she was a child, and she resolves that she will never return. This suggests that, in some ways, Jude’s impetus in moving toward a new future is to both rewrite her mother’s history and escape the pain of her own past.
Well, you know what happened next. She knew too, even before she flipped the picture over. Memory works that way—like seeing forward and backward at the same time. In that moment, she could see in both directions.
This quote begins Chapter Fifteen after Jude comes to Kennedy’s play and gives her a picture of their mothers together, proving to Kennedy that their mothers are twins. This is the first time the two have seen each other since the cast party, when Jude told Kennedy that her mother has been lying to her for her whole life. Just before Kennedy looks at the picture, she realizes that she knows what she’s going to see, noting the strange way that memory catches up with the present and informs the future. In this moment, Kennedy realizes that on some level, she’s always known that she doesn’t truly know her mother. Her own past has informed her life in ways she’s never understood but still intuited. Just as her mother’s abandoned self has haunted Stella throughout her life, her mother’s distance and dishonesty have haunted Kennedy’s life, without her knowing it. When she sees the photograph, Kennedy’s past begins to make sense to her, and her life will never be the same.
