He keeps boxes of Mum’s stuff in Tamsin’s old room. I’ve rarely looked at them since they came into being, and now I remember why.
He divided who she was into categories. Perhaps he had to. People talk about grieving as a process, and he processed the hell out of this.CLOTHES. BOOKS. SHOES. MISC. PAPERWORK.
I set down my coffee cup, pull out theMISCbox. I need to work quickly: like me, Dad’s fairly reliable in his habits and routines but, ever the would-be copper, he does a good sideline in catching people out.
The box is full of photographs bundled up with rubber bands, old articles she’d ripped from newspapers and magazines. Ticket stubs and trinkets, like the handblown glass ring dish Dad gave her for Christmas one year. Boxes of jewelry, even a couple of bottles of perfume. (I don’t dare touch them, let alone lift them up. I’m too afraid to be reunited with her scent, to feel the warmth of her arms around me again. During chemo her skin became too sensitive for perfume, and she kept saying she didn’t feel herself without it. For a long time after she died, the house didn’t feel like itself either. Not when the kiss of her fragrance had been permanently extinguished.)
I flick through the photographs. They’re mostly family ones that didn’t make it into the albums downstairs. None offer any clues. So I turn to the box markedPAPERWORK. I guess I’m imagining a birth certificate or a stash of letters. Some other paper-based link to my past, maybe. But there’s nothing. Just reams of financial and insurance correspondence, a fat wodge of hospital letters. It’s strange to see the first one, the letter to Mum’s GP from her consultant, confirming the results of the biopsy.
A few words on a page, and all our lives were changed forever.
I look down at my notebook again, at what Dad said to me in mydream. The sadness curls and boils inside me, made even more potent by the memories I’ve just been sifting through.
Then, downstairs, a door bangs.
“Joel?”
My sister. I relax. “Hey,” I call out.
“Saw your car.”
“Hold on.” I cram the stuff back into the boxes, leave them where they are on the carpet. Jog downstairs to greet her. I feel a shoring-up inside as we hug, remembering the news she’ll be sharing next spring. It helps, a bit, thinking of new life when I’m once again knee-deep in loss. “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”
“On my lunch break.” She lifts a carrier bag. The sleeves of her fuchsia shirt are rolled up to the elbows. “Just putting some bits and pieces in the fridge.”
“Like what?”
“Stuff he can heat up.”
I stare at her. “How long have you been doing that?”
“It’s no big deal.” She turns away from me, heads into the kitchen. Opening the fridge, she starts stacking it with plastic boxes.
“Since you left home?”
A shrug. “Oh, maybe. It started back then, I suppose, and I just... never wanted to stop. It seemed mean, somehow.”
I’ve seen those boxes in there so many times. I always just assumed Dad to be mildly neurotic about his personal nutrition. Had never even thought to ask.
It’s something children do, take care of their parents as they get older. Did I never think to ask because on some level I sensed something wasn’t quite right?
A flash flood of sadness. I feel it physically now, whenever I look at Tamsin. We might only be half siblings: is that why we’re so different in appearance? Tamsin and Doug with their rust-red hair and eyes the color of summer sky, versus me, dark like their shadow. I’d get the occasionalcomment from classmates when I was younger, but Mum reassured me she looked nothing like her sister, either. To me that was explanation enough. So I just accepted it, made it my stock response if anyone ribbed me. Thought nothing more about it.
I try to calm my mind with cheerier thoughts. Like Amber’s stellar upcoming performance in the nativity play. And the bike she’ll get for Christmas, unbeknown yet to even Tamsin and Neil.
As Tamsin finishes organizing the contents of the fridge, I attempt to refocus. “Hey, Tam. Do you know if anything weird ever went on between Dad and Mum?”
“Weird how?” She straightens up.
Her frown flags my thoughtlessness. I can’t let her think I’ve uncovered evidence of an affair or something. Not before I have proof, anyway. “Never mind. Forget it. Shouldn’t have said anything.”
“You know,” she muses, her thoughts clearly drifting, “I do sometimes wonder if we should get Dad dating.”
I force a smile. “Can’t imagine Dad letting his guard down enough.”
She smiles back. “I know someone else like that.”
I shift the weight to my other leg.
