CHAPTER 25 Nancy

WINTER 2010

Nancy opens the front door of her parents’ house and enters a space that still smells like the mother she’ll never see again. She surveys her surroundings.

The house is silent except for the tick tock tick tock of the antique grandfather clock in the hallway. He forges on, resolutely counting down the seconds for no one in particular. Nancy feels an odd stab of pity for him, at his lack of awareness that his mistress doesn’t need him anymore. His usefulness has ended, and he doesn’t even know it.

No one told Nancy how difficult this part was going to be. That when your last parent dies, everyone around you is focused on helping you cope with the grief of their passing and plan all the details of the funeral. They send casseroles for the nights when you’re too exhausted and heartbroken to even shower, let alone cook for yourself. Flowers for something bright and pretty to look at before they wither into brown, crispy, rotted stems, leaving you with one more reminder that death is inevitable. As if you didn’t already know.

And no one told her what it would be like after the funeral was over, how it would feel to paw through her mother’s personal effects and clear out her home. A decade older than Frances, Nancy’s dad died years ago, but there wasn’t a lot for Nancy to do then, since her mother refused to move out of the house. Nancy had helped plan the funeral, of course, and gave the eulogy, but Frances’s stubbornness and need to maintain normalcy meant that she didn’t want a fuss and didn’t want help. She planned to trek on as though nothing had changed.

Nancy gave herself a full three days after Frances’s funeral before she bit the bullet, grabbed the keys to her mother’s house, and drove over here with a stack of moving boxes to deal with the inevitable. She knew Michael wouldn’t be any help with this. Since their divorce, things between them have been chilly but civil. He attended the funeral, at their daughter Katherine’s insistence, but he made it clear he was there to support their daughter’s grief, not Nancy’s.

Michael had an affair two years ago, which ended their marriage in a formal way, though things had been going downhill for years. When Nancy confronted him about his infidelity, he threw her accusations of lies and secrets right back in her face. She could hardly blame him, really. The hypocrisy was stark. Michael had wanted to do couples’ therapy after the revelation of his affair, convinced that his infidelity was a symptom of everything else that was failing in their marriage, that they could work things out. But Nancy had refused, fearing she would be forced to reveal more of herself than she wanted to. She stopped working with the Janes when they disbanded after abortion became legal, but she was still keeping plenty from Michael. And a part of her was relieved for it to be over, anyway. It had been an exhausting twenty-five-year marriage, with neither of them ever fully trusting the other after Nancy’s confession in the nursery. They only ever ended up having the one child, though that, too, was a bone of contention between them. Michael always wanted more, but Nancy just couldn’t do it.

Katherine offered to help clear out Frances’s house, which was sweet, but Nancy knew this was something she had to do by herself. Although she has the booties, she assumes the hidden box and Margaret’s note will still be inside the special drawer, and she wants to be alone in the room with that secret.

She climbs the staircase. The stairs and her knees both creak a little with age. As she drags her feet one step at a time, she thinks about the night she discovered the secret of her birth. The night from which there was no turning back. She set out alone and dug too deep for her buried treasure, breathless with anticipation and the promise of possibility. But she couldn’t find her way back out, and there was no one waiting up at the surface to throw her a rope.

She turns the corner at the top of the stairs, running her hand along the banister as she walks down the short hallway toward her parents’ bedroom. It looks the same as it always has. A deep red patterned runner muffles her footfalls across the creaky pine floorboards of the hallway. A weak, icy gray winter light filters through the lace curtains on the window facing the street.

As she reaches for the doorknob, she can see her younger self layered in a translucent mist underneath, like a ghost; the smooth skin of her hand grasping the door handle, recklessly determined to uncover a dangerous truth. Her older hand, with its protruding veins and thinning skin, turns the knob more slowly, aware that all kinds of things can irreparably break if they aren’t handled with care.

Nancy steps into the quiet darkness of her parents’ room and in that moment, as the smells and sights hit her senses, she experiences the crushing realization that she’s now an orphan. Alone.

She drops the flattened moving boxes and garbage bags she’s been carrying and flicks on the light. It all looks exactly as it did before her mother went into the hospital. The bed is made, but Nancy finds a half-drunk cup of tea resting on the bedside table, the milk now curdled, a brown ring stained into the inside rim. It sits on top of a book her mother will never finish; a delicate crocheted bookmark is tucked in between pages 364 and 365, just nearing the end. The sight of that makes Nancy’s heart ache even more. The thought that her mother would have left anything undone is just so uncharacteristic, but once the brain tumor had regrown, reading became much more of a challenge.

Nancy picks up the novel, walks it back over to the pile of boxes and bags. She supposes she has to start somewhere, so she wrestles the moving box into its proper four-walled placement—earning herself a deep paper cut for her efforts—and sets the book down in it. She’ll keep it and finish it for her mother. She needs to know how it ends.

Nancy works her way through her mother’s closet now. She wants to bury herself in the dresses and sweaters, breathe in Frances’s smell in a sobbing heap on the floor of the bedroom. Or maybe just stay here forever and pretend she’s still a child playing dress-up in her mother’s old high heels, because the thought of being motherless is simply too horrifying to bear. But instead, she pulls the items out one by one and weighs their sentimental value against the limited storage space in her basement, tossing most of them into the garbage bags bound for a secondhand store. Nancy does her best to remember that it isn’t her own mother she’s discarding. They’re just clothes.

And now there’s the personal items to sort through: the trinkets and memory box contents. The things that made up the trappings of her mother’s life, that had meaning to her and marked her most important memories. Some Nancy recognizes, but others remain a mystery in Frances’s death, and Nancy is left with a box of unfamiliar knickknacks and a gut-wrenching assortment of questions that will go forever unanswered.

There is nothing like clearing out your dead mother’s house to make you wonder whether you ever knew her at all.

By the time she reaches the chest of drawers, it’s late afternoon and the fickle winter sun has set. She’s left The Drawer until the end, unsure whether she would have been able to finish the task of packing up the room if she started with this piece of furniture. She knows what’s in there now, yet she’s more afraid to open it than she was all those years ago. Because it’s more threatening now than it ever was before.

When her mother was still alive, Nancy had the luxury of choice; she could choose to reveal her knowledge if she ever wanted to, and somehow that lingering option alleviated some of the weight of the secret. But Frances’s death has eliminated that possibility, and now the finality of Nancy’s decision threatens to choke her. Right up until the end of her mother’s life, Nancy remained about eighty percent sure she made the right decision, but now that twenty percent festers like a sliver in her brain, and for the rest of her life, it will never quite work its way out.

She takes an unsteady breath as she walks over to the chest of drawers with false confidence. Her mother’s jasmine perfume bottle sits among a litter of other products, hand lotions and joint creams. Nancy lifts it carefully—it might be the last bottle—and slides off the gold-plated lid. She spritzes it onto her own wrists, turns them inward and inhales the floral springtime scent. She can feel her nose start to swell.

“Oh, Mum,” Nancy mutters. “God, I miss you already.”

She caps the perfume and places it in the “to keep” box, nestling it into the folds of the Burberry scarf her dad got her mum for Christmas the winter before he died.

Nancy smiles at the bittersweet sting of the memory. After depositing Frances at the nail salon, she had taken her dad out for lunch and some Christmas shopping. They’d made their way downtown on the crowded, steamy streetcar, getting off on Queen Street and stopping outside the Bay. The windows were decorated with several four-foot-tall fake trees, which were spray-painted with a white sparkly substance that made them glitter like real snow. They were surrounded by an array of presents wrapped in multicolored metallic wrapping paper, each topped with a glittery silver bow.

“What do they call this?” her dad asked.

“A window display, Dad.” Nancy looped her arm underneath his. His balance wasn’t good in those days, and the sidewalk was icy.

“Yes, I know it’s a window display, Beetle. I’m not senile, you know.”

Nancy chuckled. “What did you mean, then?”

“I mean this is all a bunch of hooey.” He squinted through his glasses at the store sign high on the wall and frowned. “When Eaton’s was here, now, they knew how to do a Christmas display.”

Nancy refrained with difficulty from rolling her eyes. Her dad often waxed nostalgic about how the closure of Eaton’s department store had signaled the death knell of civil society.

“I used to come down here as a kid, you know. My parents would bring us, me and your uncle, to see the new toys that were in the catalogue, so we could pick out something that we wanted for Christmas.”

Nancy guided her father closer to the window as a large group of rowdy teens unloaded from a bus behind them and swarmed like ants onto the sidewalk.

“There were mechanical toys back then. Elves that walked up and down staircases. Wheels that spun. Little train sets chugging along with their whistles.” He paused, smiling. “There was something real about it, the carved and painted wood, the train tracks laid just so. It was…” He trailed off.

Nancy watched her dad as the years fell away, the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes faded to youthful smoothness, the hair turned from gray to brown. She could see him as a child, face pressed against this window beside his older brother, their breath fogging up the glass, deciding which toy they wanted most of all.

“These are just empty boxes, you know.” He waved a gloved hand at the piles of shiny purple and teal presents. “There’s nothing to them. They’re wrapped up all pretty like they’re hiding a nice secret. They want us to imagine what’s inside.”

A chill ran down Nancy’s spine as her father turned away from the window to face her.

“But it’s like most secrets, Nancy. It’s better for us to be left wondering if there’s something inside the box, or if it’s just air. It’s better for us not to know.”

The snow started up again, flecking her dad’s glasses with droplets. The sound from the street became a faint hum as she met her father’s eyes. Nancy was sure he was trying to tell her something, but neither of them was willing or able to name the chasm between them.

“I love you, Dad,” Nancy said instead, pulling him in tightly for a hug.

He wrapped his arms around her. “I love you, too, Beetle.”

Nancy wipes away the tears at the corners of her eyes now, snatching a Kleenex from the dresser and blowing her nose hard.

“Well, let’s do this, then,” she says aloud to the empty room.

She pulls open the top drawer of her mother’s dresser and peers inside. It looks the same as it did all those years ago. Last time she had to keep careful track of where each item was placed as she removed it from The Drawer, but this time she doesn’t need to, and the knowledge pulls at her insides. She lifts out the envelopes full of deeds, her parents’ wills, and other documents she ignored before but knows she’s going to need now.

She opens the box containing her mother’s sapphire engagement ring and slides it onto her right hand. It fits perfectly, and she won’t take it off from this moment onward. She picks up the pearls. Perhaps she’ll give them to Katherine for her thirtieth birthday. Finally she reaches the back corner with the thin leather case.

The memory of this discovery all those years ago comes rushing back to her in a tsunami of grief. Nancy swallows hard and spins the dials, entering her birth date in the English order. She presses down on the snaps and the case pops open. Her breath snags on the sight.

It’s empty.

Nancy stands at the dresser, her mind racing. Her mother must have disposed of Margaret’s note, knowing Nancy would be going through her parents’ home once Frances passed. She supposes she shouldn’t feel shocked, and she doesn’t. Not really. After Frances gave Nancy the booties at her baby shower, Nancy accepted that her parents were never planning on telling her. She closed that door in her heart and moved on, but she had hoped she might be able to keep Margaret’s note.

A decade ago, Nancy finally decided to put her name down at one of the agencies that helps birth parents and children locate one another. A fresh resentment settles over her, but she shakes it off. After all, she’s never heard anything from Margaret Roberts. Both her mothers have betrayed her in different ways.

Nancy leaves the box and wanders over to her mother’s bed, then lowers herself onto the floor and leans back against the bed frame. Not for the first time, she wonders how different things might have been if Frances had been honest with her, or if she had confronted her parents about it. If she hadn’t kept it from Michael.

She’s tried to be a better mother to Katherine than her own mothers were to her. She hasn’t kept secrets from her daughter, at least none other than the Big One. She’s always tried to instill a policy of transparency and truth, to break the toxic cycle. And she’s succeeded, for the most part. She and Katherine are close. Her daughter is an honest woman who wears her heart on her sleeve—much more like her father than like Nancy.

Nancy picks idly at a loose thread on the seam of her jeans as these thoughts roll over one another in her mind, ironing themselves out. After a while, she realizes there’s nothing left to consider. She has a job to do here, and that’s to clean out her mother’s house so that it can be sold. That’s a plain truth, something black and white and industrious.

She gets up, shakes open a garbage bag, and begins to discard the past.