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The next day, Wes headed up to the Sunrise Cove Inn early, before any of the girls woke and joined him in the kitchen. This put a pit in Susan’s stomach. Finally, she’d yanked her sisters all the way to this place, and already, enough of a storm had brewed to keep them all apart.
But Susan wasn’t the kind of person to wallow. She was an action-oriented person, someone who felt the steady dribble of wasted time and dreaded it. She brewed a pot of coffee, put on a pair of cut-off shorts and a tank-top, and set to work on the kitchen itself. It needed deep-cleaning worse than any kitchen she had ever seen. One-by-one, Christine and Lola emerged from upstairs. Neither of them looked like their glittering city-selves in the morning. Both had bags under their eyes; both wore ratty t-shirts that Susan suspected they’d taken from men. Christine poured herself a cup of coffee and watched Susan without speaking for a moment.
“Is today the day you want to start in the house, then?”
Susan stopped her scrubbing, flared her nostrils, and said, “What gave you that idea?”
“Lola! Guess what? Susan’s got her sarcasm turned up to eleven.”
“Fantastic,” Lola called in from the porch, where she performed another yoga stretch.
After a bit of grumbling, Christine led the sisters through the living area, the small parlor that seemed completely untouched since they’d left, and then up into their father’s bedroom, where they were shocked to find their mother’s clothes still hanging as though she was about to return to the house and change.
Lola whistled. “I can’t believe he’s just gotten up every single morning, opened the closet, and looked at these clothes. I think I would have had a nervous breakdown.”
On the far end of the rack hung one of their mother’s favorite lilac dresses, with light lace detail on the top and a skirt that swung out wide when their father twirled her. Christine pulled it out a bit more to get a full view of it. In her mind, her mother twirled out and then twirled back into her father, mid-way through whatever festival dance, seemingly countless.
“Wow, that dress. I can’t believe how dated it looks,” Christine marveled. “In my memory, it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.”
“Let me have it,” Lola said with her hands outstretched. She swung it off the hanger, then swiftly removed her shorts and t-shirt and pulled the lilac dress on. It fit her like a glove. Although her makeup hadn’t been done and her hair was pulled up, she looked glamorous, like she had stepped out from a magazine from another time.
And again, she looked even more like their mother.
Christine and Susan followed Lola’s lead, taking their favorite garments from their racks and zipping, buttoning, twirling, laughing. Christine snapped on the old radio on the bedside table and played tunes from the long-lost nineties summers.
“Let’s get rid of most of it,” Susan said. “But keep our favorite dresses. Dad wouldn’t want all of it to go.”
They made piles of things: the clothes they didn’t remember that could easily be dropped off at a second-hand store, the ratty ones that clearly didn’t belong anywhere except a landfill, and ones that seemed unclear to them and required a conversation with their father. The work went easily and united them. They didn’t talk of anything serious, not of the accident or their father or even of their messed-up lives back in Boston, Newark, and New York.
Afterward, Christine stepped down the hall and peered up at the attic door. “I bet we can put any leftover stuff in the attic to give Dad some more room.”
“Not a bad idea,” Susan affirmed. “I don’t even know if I’ve ever been up there.”
Lola, who’d changed out of the lilac dress by then, burst forward, grabbed the little string, and yanked the attic door down with a flourish. A ladder swung down, nearly whacking them all in the head.
“Hey!” Christine cried.
“Sorry,” Lola said with a laugh.
This was just like Lola. Never thinking before acting. But already, Lola surged up the ladder and entered the dusty attic. “Wow!” she cried. “Hate to break it to you girls, but it looks like there’s more stuff of Mom’s up here.”
Christine grumbled, but Susan snuck up the ladder almost immediately. She had grown addicted to these memories of her mother. She wanted to touch more objects, to try on more clothes, to feel what her mother might have felt.
Sure enough, it seemed that their father had put even more clothes up there, along with several boxes of books, several old high school yearbooks. They’d been high school sweethearts and were featured in the front of the senior issue as “Cutest Couple,” where they found both of their photos since they’d been high school sweethearts.
“Can you believe how young she looks?” Christine muttered, flashing the yearbook around for the other two to see.
“She looks just like Amanda,” Susan said.
“How old is Amanda again?” Lola asked.
“Twenty-two. I can hardly believe it myself.”
“We really have to get her and Audrey together,” Lola said.
Susan’s heart felt squeezed. “Yes. I think that’s a fantastic idea. Both of them are career girls, though. My Amanda just started her own internship at a law firm.”
“Ha! And mine will be a journalist. They take after their old mothers,” Lola said, letting out a small laugh.
Christine remained quiet. She stepped toward what looked like a dusty old chest in the corner and bent in front of it. “This looks really old. I don’t remember it at all. Do either of you?”
Susan reflected. “I remember Mom’s dad giving over a lot of antiques at one point. Maybe this is one of them?”
“Maybe,” Christine said. She reached for the lock that hung off of it and yanked at it. It wasn’t locked and whipped apart. She then removed it and slowly opened the chest.
Inside was even more of their mother’s memorabilia. In fact, it seemed like their father had made this into a kind of shrine to her life. At the top were several photographs of their mother in various stages of motherhood. There, she held Susan and only Susan, her only baby at the time, while seated on a dock with her feet hanging in the water.
“Look at that hair!” Lola whispered. She lifted the photo and gazed at it with enormous eyes.
There were more—so many more photos, with complete photo albums from various stages of their young lives, and several pictures of their father and mother together. Their wedding photo remained in a frame, their father broad-shouldered and handsome, beaming down at his young and beautiful bride.
“I wanted Mom at my wedding so bad,” Susan mumbled. “When I was a bridesmaid for other girlfriends, I would watch them with their mothers. They always said the sweetest things right before walking down the aisle. It always seemed so big and so important.”
Christine continued to remove things from the chest delicately and line them up on the floor. These were obviously things they would keep, back up digitally, and maybe even divide amongst them.
“Woah,” Christine said again. Her eyes were locked on something else in the chest. “There are some diaries down here.”
Lola gasped. “I didn’t know Mom wrote in a diary!”
“She always did,” Susan insisted, knowing that maybe at age twelve, that hadn’t been the kind of thing Lola was looking out for.
Christine removed the diaries and placed them next to the other photographs. Then, she stopped dead as she peered deeper into the chest. Her face looked stricken. It was really like she had seen a ghost.
“Christine. You look scared. What’s up?” Lola asked as she chewed her bottom lips in anticipation.
Christine reached into the chest with shaking hands and drew out three sealed envelopes. On each of the envelopes, their mother had written out their names in perfect penmanship:
Susan
Christine
Lorraine
The three girls stared down at the weather letters. It seemed like their mother had just sent them. Like she knew, they were all together for the first time and had chosen this moment to pass them along.
“How... how did she write these and leave them for us?” Lola blurted. “What are they?”
Susan shook her head. Her heart sank into her stomach. “I have no idea.”
“What did she want to write a letter to us about?” Christine demanded. “Did she have secrets or something?”
Susan considered her own affinity for secrets: all that she hid from her sisters, all that she hid from her children. All that she hid from herself.
But Lola erupted with anger and passion and fear. She looked on the verge of toppling over. “No. I cannot handle this right now,” she blurted. Tears swelled in her eyes.
“I just. I don’t understand,” Christine whispered.
Lola fled. She nearly fell down the ladder, but gripped the rungs at the last minute and landed on the hallway floor safely. Christine hustled toward the ladder, too. It seemed like they ran from ghosts. Susan sighed and collected the photographs and other memorabilia and returned them to the chest. She placed the diaries and the letters on top.
“What did you want to tell us?” she whispered.
Downstairs, she found Christine and Lola out on the porch with a bottle of wine opened. It was only noon, but it felt as though they’d time-traveled from a great distance. Susan collapsed on the porch swing next to them and accepted her own glass. The three of them didn’t find words for a long time.
“It’s like she knew,” Lola murmured. “She knew we would be here today. She knew that we needed some way to come together.”
“That’s ridiculous. Mom has been dead for twenty-five years,” Christine returned.
“I just felt like she was always honest with us,” Lola said. “Unlike Dad.”
“But how much could we have possibly known about Mom?” Susan said suddenly.
Both Christine and Lola gave her perturbed looks. “What do you mean?” Lola demanded.
“Just think about all the secrets you have kept from Audrey over the years,” she said, looking directly at Lola. “Think about everything you had to keep to yourself if only to keep her safe or keep a little piece of yourself for only yourself.”
Lola shook her head vehemently. “I tell Audrey everything.”
Susan had a feeling that wasn’t truthful, but she couldn’t insist on it. They sipped their wine and gazed out at the water, each stirring in their own panicked thoughts. Obviously, whatever lurked in those letters had the capacity to change their lives forever. And maybe they weren’t ready for that just yet.