Secrets of a Charmed Life (32 page)

When we had removed enough of the books, we pushed the bookcase out of the way and there it was: the crawl space door, painted shut. Gwen ran downstairs and quickly came back with a screwdriver. Before I could ask if her mum would want her to, she started to pry the painted seam open. The seal broke with a cracking pop. Gwen pulled the door open and then sat back.

She told me to go ahead and see.

My pulse was drumming as I crawled halfway in and reached up above the door frame. I felt dust and cobwebs and droppings but no box.

No box.

Gwen ran downstairs again and returned with a torch. She asked if she could give it a try. I worked my way out and she crawled in, clicking on the light as she went. I could see the beam dancing on the confines of the little space.

I told her I had placed the box on the ledge on the inside of the door frame. She swung the light around to shine it on the back side of where the door and the wall met.

It wasn't there.

She crawled out again and we both sat there looking at the dark space we had unearthed.

Sorry,
Gwen finally said.

I was sorry, too. The numbness was already settling on me, like a heavy coat against wintry gusts that would chill to the bone if they could get to you.

We closed the door, and returned the bookcase to its rightful place and the books to their shelves. Then we went back downstairs.

There didn't seem to be a reason to stay, so I thanked her again and asked her if she was going to get into trouble for having let me in.

She shrugged like she didn't care.

I told her I'd be happy to talk with her mother by phone and let her know how kind and helpful she had been, but she just smiled and said I didn't have to do that.

I told her to give her mother my name and number just the same.

When I left, she was standing at the door, watching me drive away.

She's not going to give her mum that piece of paper with my name and phone number on it.

That girl is just like you were, Emmy. Wanting to make her own way in life, and the world isn't willing to grant her that freedom.

I guess I am just like her, too.

When I got home and told Simon what had happened, he asked me what I was going to do now. I know what he meant. He wants to know what this means for us.

I can't answer him.

I feel as if I am underwater. Suspended. Hovering between where I was and where I want to be. I am in no place to decide.

I am sorry I lost your brides, Emmy. I am so very sorry.

Julia

August 5, 1958

Dear Emmy,

I am trying very hard to do what I said I would do—and that is live with the fact that the brides box is gone. I told Dr. Diamant before I started looking that I would be okay with not finding it. I told Simon the same thing.

Simon said this evening he wished he had talked me out of looking.

But then I would always wonder,
I said.

And he said sometimes wondering is better than knowing.

Dr. Diamant told me truth is a strange companion. It devastates one moment and enthralls the next. But it never deceives. And because of that, in the end, it comforts.

Julia

August 7, 1958

Dear Emmy,

I think we might be done here.

Simon thinks it might be a good idea to lay you to rest. He wonders if maybe I could use this journal to memorialize you. I could burn it, and its ashes could be your remains. He read in an article that people who grieve the loss of a loved one where there is no body often need something to burn or bury to find ultimate release. That's how we say good-bye to people. We clasp them to our chest, weep over their lifeless form, and then send them back to the earth.

I could do that with this journal.

I need to ask Dr. Diamant what she thinks.

Julia

August 11, 1958

Dear Emmy,

Dr. Diamant says the journal is mine to do with as I want. The journal has always been more about me than you. Isn't that funny? Here I am writing all these words to you, words you will never read. And it's not a problem because the journal has always been for me.

I don't think I can toss this into the fireplace.

Not yet, anyway.

But I think I can be finished with writing in it.

We are done, aren't we, Emmy? I did all that I could to find you, all that I could to restore to you what I took from you.

Dr. Diamant assures me that with all that I have told her about you, you would have forgiven me. That you did forgive me.

I think maybe if we end it here, perhaps I can learn to believe it. Maybe not as quickly as Simon would like, but if I know anything about time, it is that it stretches to walk with you when you grieve. The rest of the world may zoom past at breakneck speed, but when you are learning to live with loss, time slows to the pace of your breathing.

I will never forget you, Emmy.

But I need to release you.

Your sister always,

Julia

August 15, 1958

Emmy,

I can hardly believe what has happened.

Gwen found the brides box.

She found it.

In Rose's old room.

She called me this morning as I was getting ready for work.

I am stunned beyond words.

She wants to meet me in Stow to give it to me. I don't even care that she doesn't want me to come back to Thistle House.

I have called in sick to work. I begged Simon to let me use his car.

He wants to come with me but I told him no. We can't both call in sick.

And I want to go alone.

Emmy, after all this time. I am bringing home your brides box.

August 15, 1958

Evening

My dear Emmy,

As I write this, the brides box is just to the right of my bent elbow. I could reach out and run my fingers across it with my other hand if I wanted to.

There are signs of neglect on its top and the hinges have corroded to uselessness. The top doesn't stay on unless you bind it shut, which is how Gwen found it.

And Emmy, the drawings are inside. Just like you left them.

The paper has yellowed and the sketches have faded, but I can still make out nearly every feature you drew if I look close. The images are a bit ghostly, but not unpleasantly so. It's almost as if you have materialized from beyond the grave to return to me.

It's as if you have given the brides back to me, not I who have given them back to you.

How like you to look after me, even after all that I did to you.

Do you want to know how Gwen came to find them?

I was right about her not telling her mum that I had come by before. She didn't tell her. She was afraid her mother would get after her for letting me in. Her mother's overprotectiveness is apparently an enormous bone of contention between them.

And between you and me, I think she liked having a secret that she could keep from her mum. I don't approve of it; I'm just saying that's what I think.

Anyway, she said she couldn't stop thinking about me after I left. She felt bad for me, and she went back inside the crawl space in the yellow room twice, making sure the brides box hadn't fallen into a hollow of some kind in the framing.

She was in her bedroom, Rose's, thinking about it when it occurred to her that if our bedroom had a crawl space, maybe the one she was sleeping in did, too, and that I had just remembered the room wrong. In her bedroom, a cedar chest lines the far wall. Gwen didn't want to move it when her mother was home; otherwise she'd hear her pushing it across the floor. So she had to wait a couple of days until her mum had to go to Oxford on business. She emptied the chest and pushed it away from the wall. And found an identical crawl space door.

The brides box was inside, on the framing of the door, just like I had placed it in our bedroom. Rose had found it and put it in her room; I'm sure that was what happened. That wardrobe was on another wall when Rose had the room that Gwen is sleeping in now. Remember how Rose liked your drawings? She must have found the brides box after we ran away, took it, and put it in her own room. I know it was her because she wrote her name on the top of all the sketches, Emmy. She wanted the bridal gowns to be hers. So she made them hers in the only way she could. And she obviously never told Charlotte.

Gwen didn't want to tell her mum about the discovery because that would necessitate a conversation about why she went looking for it. And that was why she asked to meet me in the village to give me the box.

Oh, Emmy. She seemed so happy to be part of something wonderful that was just hers. Her mum wasn't privy to it, so she couldn't spoil it for her or take it from her. So like you, so like you.

I told her so.

I told Gwen she reminded me of you. And that I hoped she would change her mind and tell her mother about me and the brides box. It was our secrets that pulled our worlds apart, Emmy. First yours, and then mine.

But Gwen said her mother would have a conniption. They would have a huge fight over it, and, in the end, her mother would never leave her alone at the house again. Not at Thistle House and not in Saint Paul when they went back to the States.

I offered to come to Thistle House and explain things but Gwen told me not to. They only have a couple more weeks left before they head back to America. She doesn't want to spend them handcuffed to her mother.

I asked her why her mother worries about her so. Gwen said she's always been that way. She lost family members in the war, her father had told her, and it was too difficult for her to talk about it.

I feel for Gwen, poor thing.

And I feel for her mother.

Terrible things can happen to you that leave you unable to risk trusting the world with what you love; I know this better than anyone.

I don't want to live handcuffed to my regrets anymore, Emmy.

I hadn't really understood that was how I had been living until Gwen described it that way.

I tried one last time to convince her to let me go back to Thistle House and talk to her mum, but Gwen said her mother was in Oxford that day, apparently meeting with a long-lost half brother who had contacted her mother out of the blue.

I was jealous in an instant, Emmy, that Gwen's mother could have a long-lost half brother suddenly crawl out of the folds of the past and reconnect with her. I told her how wonderful that was.

But she just shrugged and said it would have been nice to know before now that her mother had a half brother.

I wished her safe travels back to America and a happy life.

She seemed sad to see me go.

I was strangely sad to leave her.

It was a little like saying good-bye to you all over again.