“She really doesn’t want you hanging out with Oliver, huh?” said Charlie.
“You listened at the door?”
“I listened at the door.”
“What the hell is she hiding? What the hell are any of them hiding? Isn’t a town where nobody dies enough of a secret? Why does there have to be more?” Nora had crossed through exasperation and was somewhere around the utterly irate mark.
“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Charlie reminded her.
Right. “Any luck in here?”
Charlie shook his head. “Nothing in Dad’s closet, nothing in the desk or under the beds. Maybe Gram and Gramps really did throw them out in the end.”
“Charles did seem pretty certain,” Nora said, immediately losing hope again. It had always been a long shot, she reminded herself. Which brought them right back to the drawing board. Again. And Nora had never been particularly good at drawing. She took after her father in that regard. She looked at the misshapen sketch of a dog, maybe, or a horse, possibly, or potentially a human in need of a chiropractor that hung above her father’sold bed; just one of the many masterpieces of visual nonsense that clung to the walls on thumbtacks. She flopped back down on the bed, facing defeat for the umpteenth time that day, but as she collapsed onto the mattress, she noticed something she hadn’t before. The soft breeze brought about by her falling picked up the edges of the dog / horse / twisty human and revealed lines of scribbles across the back of the page.
Nora leapt back up.
“Charlie,” she said, staring at the paper. This time she scrambled onto the bed and pulled herself to her feet on the mattress, plucking the drawing off the wall with a rip. She flipped it over. The blue pen scrawls were as recognizable to her as the art style of the creature on the other side. This was her father’s handwriting; messy and impatient and too slow for his tumbling thoughts. “Charlie,” she called again.
The bed squeaked and the mattress shifted as Charlie clambered up beside her. “What’s up?”
Without a word, Nora handed her brother the letter. Charlie barely had to glance at it before he understood exactly what he was looking at. It was the same handwriting that had filled all their birthday cards and school lunch Post-it notes and letters from the tooth fairy. The twins knew it better than they’d had the chance to know their father.
“This is from Dad,” said Charlie, though they both knew he didn’t have to say it.
Nora spun around on the bed, taking in the drawings scattered around the room. She guessed ten, twelve, fifteen, maybe? Some were tacked on top of others, just blocking the ones beneath from full view. Others were folded oddly, as if they might be makeshift envelopes for even more. The half-decipherablesketches of unsteady lines and comically bad proportions that had been staring down at the twins since they arrived in Virgo Bay, only half-noticed and only for a bit of loving ridicule, now seemed to hold the key to a door bolted for most of their lives. Nora felt the room spin with her, the doodles on the walls acknowledging her as she properly acknowledged them for the first time.
25
The twins hovered over the pile of letters on the bedroom floor, their father’s handwriting staring up at them with eyes of faded ink. The walls around them stood bare, the room almost seeming to shrink in embarrassment at its naked state.
“So, where do we start?” asked Charlie.
“Just grab one, I guess,” said Nora.
Charlie bent to the pile and plucked out one of the pages, then crossed to his bed and made himself comfortable as he read. Nora took a deep breath and did the same, perching herself on the edge of her dad’s old mattress, her body buzzing too much to strive for anything more reclined.
Hey Charlie Horse,
Nora traced the letters with her fingertips, trying to mimic the way her father’s pen would have moved across the page. She could almost see him hunched over his desk, scribbling to his brother with the same enthusiastic intensity he’d always worn across his face while working on a new project. The light indentsleft in the page by the pen nib were soft against Nora’s fingers. The words were slanted, pulling up to the right. There was no care taken in the penmanship, letters running into one another in a way that said he had no one to impress, that he was writing to someone he loved, that all he cared about was what he was sharing rather than how he was sharing it. Nora knew that hand well. She read on.
Hope you’re good. Did you ever convince Mom about instant coffee? I still think she’d like it if she gave it a chance.
The twins are growing so fast. Nora’s already trying to walk, the little daredevil. We ended up in the ER with Charlie last week after he shoved a pinto bean up his nose. Hannah said he takes after his father.
I know you’re sick of me saying it, but I think you’d love it here, out in the world. We took the kids to the zoo a few months ago, did you know about those?
Give everyone my best. Or the ones who want it, anyway. Hope the rest will get over things eventually.
Later,
Mars Bar
Nora snorted slightly at the sign-off. The thought of her stoic bear of a dad referring to himself as Mars Bar struck her as hilarious. Though she supposed she didn’t know the same MartinBird that Charles or the rest of them knew. Still, there was something about that nickname that rang a bell. She’d heard it somewhere before, she just couldn’t quite place where. It certainly wouldn’t have been from her mother. She’d only ever called her husband Martin or bunny, which was not Nora’s preference. Nora couldn’t think of who else in her life would have known her dad when he was still Mars Bar, but someone must have for her to have overheard it. Would Richard or Ruby have called him that? They didn’t seem the type. It must have been Charles or Patty, though she was pretty sure she’d have noticed. She shook her head. Of all the things she had to worry about, that seemed by far the least important.
“This one’s from when Dad and Mom first met,” said Charlie, interrupting her thoughts. “Did you know Mom had ‘legs like a gazelle and a voice you should have to dial an eight hundred number to hear’?”
“He clearly hadn’t heard her sing yet,” said Nora. “Anything relevant?”
