I left law school to be near my dad, to help him bear and navigate a cancer diagnosis that arrived only weeks before. He didn’t need me, perhaps didn’t want me, but I felt a compulsion to be near, to help, to . . . I didn’t even know anymore what I’d hoped to accomplish. The irony of it was that I had loved law school. Despite my dad’s constant chirping about my inability to finish anything, until Jason’s call last June, finishing was never in question.
Days after my arrival, Dad secured a sale on the Chestnut house and paid the movers to deliver everything I wanted to my new apartment. It felt like a new beginning with boxes full of my books and treasures, and a few I’d asked to be saved from Amelia’s room. It was her small chair that now sat in the corner of my bedroom. Her old dresser that held my clothes.
I huffed in the approaching dawn. A therapist would have a field day with these thoughts and this room—with my whole life actually.
I opted not to stay last night to help Dad unpack, and left before the pizza arrived. He had set his jaw against talking about the only subject that mattered to me. He’d done it so many times—about school, my jobs, his diagnosis, his treatments, that I recognized it more swiftly this time—and I lied. I claimed forgotten dinner plans with friends and fled.
Rather than make plans with friends and redeem the lie, I came home, ordered my own Florina pizza, and ruminated over endless questions with no answers. I also checked my email every five minutes. Mat hadn’t sent his article.
Then it happened . . .
Around three in the morning, I was either too curious to throw up barriers or too tired to keep them standing strong, and answers emerged. They played out slowly in that netherworld between cognizant thought and subconscious dreams.
I’d been wearing a new pair of jeans. They’d been a November birthday gift I’d saved for our early Christmas trip to London. After all, my jeans were the latest cut and “London is so cool,” my friends said. They had all either visited themselves or pretended well. Oddly, I had never traveled there, despite my dad being British and his family descending from the “peerage,” as Mom called them.
And bangs. I had just cut a full set of bangs. Stress haircutting, one would call it today. It was the same then—we just didn’t have a name for it. What a mistake! My new bangs shot to the sides of my forehead, never laid flat, and never looked right. Two tufted horns pointed downward at my temples, the left side curling up and out.
It also rained our entire trip. We hardly left the London House, as I gather the great monstrosity had been called for generations, and no one came in. Grandmother was quiet and seemed heavy with sadness. I remembered how that surprised me. She wasn’t the same grandmother who had come to Boston only six months earlier for a summer visit, or even three months before for my sister’s funeral. She had talked to me then, played games, and even helped me bake cookies.
In London, she moved slowly, as if through water. She seemed shadowed, as if only a memory of her walked those halls and sat in the front sitting room. Oddly, she reminded me of my dad. Sometimes, even back then, I wondered how to react to him. He never gave me anything to push against—to challenge, to confront, to love.
I hardly recalled my grandfather at all. He was there, I know. In the shadows. Stern. Unyielding. Disappointed. He said a terse good morning at breakfast then ventured out to his club each day. I believed his “club” to be a place where men read, talked, sat, and smoked pipes. The same things my father did every day in Grandfather’s wood-paneled study at the house—minus the pipe.
Mom sat with Grandmother. She stayed by her side, asked and answered questions, met her every request, and when the silence pressed down like a weighted blanket, she read. In many ways, I recognized how alike they looked and acted—despite not being related. That had not occurred to me before that trip and wasn’t remembered until this morning.
I explored.
The London House filled me with awe. Its personality was dark and foreboding as it rose up four floors before me that first morning. Mom rushed me out of the back seat while the limousine driver unloaded our bags. When I tried to follow him to the side of the house and a door at street level, he shook his head and gestured to the front door, bright blue and five steps up from the sidewalk. Mom and Dad had already climbed the stairs.
The plaster and painted white-brick house sat perched at the end of a long street filled with identical houses, each one adjoined to its neighbors in a pristine row. Upon entering, I knew it was full of history and that old glamour Mom always raved about in the black-and-white movies we watched.
The front entry reached two floors high with a curved staircase flowing up to the right. There were indents in the plastered walls set with sculptures. The windows reached floor to ceiling. And there were countless rooms. I spent a day racing through them all—closets, pantries, sitting rooms, antechambers—and days exploring them fully. I was thankful for the endless opportunities to get lost, and the infinite ways to avoid the oppressive silence of the front sitting room.
Stories and secrets lay hidden in each room and I was desperate to discover them. I remembered that—I was hungry to understand something, anything, about who I was and where I came from. Although my mom had been welcoming and open when I was young, my dad was always more remote, and somehow, perhaps because I was named after his side of the family and looked very much like his mother, I felt a yearning to be close to him. Amelia had looked like Mom.
I found snippets of life in each and every room. Leather-bound books with cracked spines. Old coloring pages. Silver brushes. Dolls. Pens, letters, clothing, games, tiny boxes . . . chests cleared out except for the occasional treasure tucked deep in the back. A fan, a lipstick, a comb, a glove. Tiny items that told me nothing but made me feel not so alone.
I was alone because Jason wasn’t there. I was alone because Amelia was gone.
I wouldn’t have been in the attic that day if either of them had been with us. Amelia and I never needed anything more than each other to occupy us. We made up games, puzzles, and challenges. There wasn’t a riddle we couldn’t solve together. But Amelia had been killed by a car running a red light three months earlier. I was a few feet ahead of her and, turning back at precisely that instant, saw the whole thing.
We had created a massive Rube Goldberg machine the day before. It spanned across our two bedrooms, and I wanted to see if the change I’d thought up during math class might make it work. So when the “Walk” light flashed, I ran. Over halfway across the street, I spun around to call, “Hurry up!”
That moment stopped me this morning, as it always did. It brought its usual slowed-time and high-def visuals, along with a hot flash of panic. Everything in those split seconds was magnified into a lifetime and I saw it all again. I felt it all again.