Ava blinked in disbelief. ‘So his solution is …this?’
It wasn’t just cardboard blocking the windows – her father had taken the yellow seat cushions from the settee and pushed them up against the glass. They were held in place by two precariously balanced dining chairs, which he’d stopped from sliding back against the hardwood floor by dragging the curiosity cabinet over and wedging the chairs in place. The overall effect was precarious chaos that looked ready to topple any moment.
‘And you didn’t think to stop him?’ Ava said, stepping back into the hallway – where her brother was dragging her bags inside. ‘To talk some sense into him?’
‘Yes of course I—’
‘Or even say “Pa, just to check, but have you lost your senses”? You thought, what? Leave him to it?’
She marched past him, checking the kitchen, the scullery. Only the kitchen still had light coming into it, from the high,narrow window along the southern wall. No doubt because Oliver had threatened to stop cooking altogether if he wasn’t able to let a thread of air into the place.
‘Now just hold on a minute here,’ said Oliver, following her and dumping her coat unceremoniously over one of the chairs. ‘You haven’t been here for months. You haveno ideawhat has been going on.’
‘Because you mentioned none ofthisin your letters!’ She turned to him, feeling the worry that had whittled her down on the train transforming into something prickly, something hot. ‘Only page upon page about how much you despised working at the theatre, just as you hated working at the rug shop, the telegraph office, and the coopery. Not once did you say: “Oh, and by the by, Pa has turned the house into a crypt.”’
‘Yes, well,’ Oliver blustered. ‘I thought perhaps you would have enough to worry over – what with Jem, and—’
His name was like a hot poker to her skin, and she felt her cheeks flush. ‘I did notleavebecause of Jem.’
She’d left because it had all been too much. A failed engagement was mortifying enough, but a failed career, a humiliating exit from the stageatopthat? She couldn’t fathom how one dragged oneself up from such depths – and she hadn’t tried. She’d chosen another path instead, and told herself there was purpose to it. Meaning to it.
And perhaps there had been, in the end. Although not the sort she’d been seeking.
She watched her brother pause, heard him huff a sharp breath through his teeth. ‘I know how much Jem hurt you. And I know how much the theatre rattled you. And—’ He reached to rub his good hand against the back of his neck. ‘I suppose I thought I would be protecting you if I could just fixthismyself.’ She watched the muscle in his jaw flicker. ‘But I couldn’t even do that. Instead, I had to go and break something else. Because that’s all I ever do.’
He looked down to his arm, to the sling, and to Ava’s surprise she saw wetness welling in his eyes.
‘Your arm will mend,’ she said. ‘It was just a bicycling accident.’
‘I’m not talking about my arm, Ava. I’m talking about …everything.’
‘Not everything is broken, Oliver.’
‘Isn’t it?’ He turned to look at the precarious stack of furniture against the windows, and she turned to look with him, and felt something within her twist.
In the first few months after her mother had passed, she’d wanted to do something similar. Wanted to shut the world out entirely, and exist in the darkness – for that was how everything had felt without her mother. Dark. Endlessly so – and senseless.
Somewhere within her, that feeling was still there – though each year that passed leeched some of its power. But time had not helped her father. It held no sway on his grief – that much she could see, now.
He still mourned her as though it were yesterday.
‘When did this begin?’ she asked softly.
‘A few weeks after you left. So … June’
‘And now it’s September,’ she muttered. ‘Where is he?’
‘Upstairs. But Ava—?’
‘I know,’ she huffed. ‘Don’t be too hard on him.’
Ava lit a candle stub to carry up, watching her shadow pass the blank spaces on the wall where her mother’s paintings had once hung. She could still picture them as she walked up the creaking steps, the blue-yellow petals of an iris, neat pencil lines showing through oily green paint, like the veins on a leaf. Now, the wall was bare, though the stairs still creaked in all the same places, and she winced as the third-to-last gave a great, yawning bellow.
‘I’m asleep,’ called her father’s voice through the doorway.
Ava padded to the door, resting her forehead against it. ‘You talk rather coherently in your sleep, Pa.’
‘Yes, well. Someone was clomping around downstairs.’
