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JAMES AND I go to the neighbor’s house and find the door locked, so we break a window. We fidget, but we get the job done. We find clues smirking everywhere: images of our home from decades before, family photos in what appears to be a timeline on the mantel, and we wonder how we missed them before: An engagement photo. Parents—baby. Parents—small boy—baby. Parents—two small boys. Parents—one boy. Parents—one boy—one baby. Parents—one boy—one girl. A father—two children. Two children as teens, alone. We read them like a story. We put together our version of the tale, the one we plan to spout confidently at grocery stores and bars. The family lost a boy and had a third child, but the girl was her own, could never replace the son who’d died. We realize that every story we heard in town might have truth, but we decide that just because this assumption we’ve formed about this story is our own doesn’t make it any more legitimate or reliable than those we were told, and so we keep hunting.
We pinch oily pillows off the couch to sit on it and slide toward each other and realize the center springs have lost their strength. I stand to let James have his space as he flips through a binder to find news stories carefully arranged and yellowing in plastic protective sheets. He reads me the death notice for Alban Kinsler again, hoping something will have become clear since he tracked it down at the library. I pull stacks of velvet jewelry boxes off the bookshelves, but all of them are empty. James shows me a birth notice for Eleanor Kinsler, seven years the junior of Rolf, and I sit again. We page through prayer cards for names that don’t match up with what we’re looking for and newspaper articles marking the sorts of historical events that seem worth recording—centennials and local ribbon-cutting ceremonies—the stuff of small-town life. A death notice for Bette Kinsler, survived by husband Frederick, son Rolf, daughter Eleanor, reunited with son Alban. We find a real estate listing for the empty lot on which our home would be built. We find a prayer card made for Eleanor’s funeral and perform the backward math of calculating her age to have been twenty-five at the time of her death. A newspaper story beside it shows a picture of the lake with the caption that the body of a young woman was found on the shore by a jogger.
Still it is not enough. We navigate the house easily, a mirror image of our own. I go to the kitchen, trying not to breathe in the rancid odor. Even the flimsiest of plastic containers are huddled together for reuse, all marred with a smear or speck of food unaddressed by scrubbing. I have the urge to stack them by size: yogurt cups into margarine tubs into gallon ice cream buckets, but I stop when I see the mouse droppings on the counter and then, when I realize what the tiny flecks are, I see them everywhere. I pull open the oven and then the dishwasher and the refrigerator, all unplugged, all filled with paper, mostly sheets folded into thirds: bills and statements and characterless summaries of the resources Rolf consumed in his life.
We climb the stairs to hunt for more. The master bedroom is perfectly arranged, but buried in dust, as if it hasn’t been touched in decades. We open a wardrobe to find beautiful silk dresses and neckties, but no suggestions. James forages through a secretary desk, but uncovers only receipts. “A new car for only 580 dollars!” he exclaims, but moves on quickly.
I examine water damage on the wall near the ceiling and try to read a face into the spots. Slowly, I’m discovering the way my habits have conformed to the shape of the house.
A dresser drawer feels heavy even after I’ve pulled out the girdles and camisoles jamming it full. I convince myself of a false bottom and pry my nails around the inside edges and lift the thin sheet of veneer to discover cash and envelopes. I carefully lift the flap of the first, and the glue sticks a little. Inside, I find a letter addressed to Alban from “Mother.” I ask James to retrieve the album of clippings from downstairs so we can compare dates, and he does. The letters are all posted after Alban’s death. In them, Bette expresses her overwhelming grief. She praises Alban as her “Cupid child,” perfectly beautiful, skilled, full of love. She writes, “I cannot bear to look at your brother. I know that your footing could not have faltered in that tree. How I wish the Lord had taken him instead of you.” Other letters call out what must have been Eleanor’s nervous locomotion, framing it as a sort of perfect energy around which they all revolved. “Her mind is so full of ideas. Her hands and lips always moving to write or say something that is already beyond my comprehension. She reminds me of you, my love, of what you would have become had Rolf not forced you from this life.” Other letters show Bette’s unraveling, admitting that it would be easiest if she joined Alban, that she can’t force herself from bed most days so stuck is she in her dreams of this reunion, that she takes more and more of the pills prescribed by the doctor to calm her nerves and convince herself out of the house. “I dread the moment your brother’s evil will resurface and take Eleanor from me, too. I have grown fearful of him. Your father disagrees, but he has always been blind to emotion, assuming the best in people and stepping away when something is too hard to deal with.”
In another bedroom—one it is apparent has more recently been used—we hunt through shoeboxes. We find to-do lists broken into the addresses 891 and 895. Rolf’s signature on documents for both. We find a framed photo on his bedside table of a young man and young woman. The young man looks directly at the camera, while the young lady, her hair rumpled, pulls away, staring off toward the woods behind her. If we didn’t know better, we might have assumed it was Rolf and his young bride. We know, though, it must be Eleanor, anxious, even then, to hide.
James takes my hand, puckered and tarnished by the dirt that shakes off everything we touch. He recalls the children in the woods, shouting to each other, balanced in the trees, dropping. I mention the way the water at the beach threatened to pull us into it, that gentle sidestroke whistling us home. “The cave?” James asks. We don’t have a hint about the cave, but we can create stories. We know enough now to see sense in it without understanding specifics.
James shifts and turns, looking for more, and I splinter into silent tears beside him. It is too much to know all of this now, after I accepted that it might have been contained within me. How do I return from that horizon?
“Read this.” I hand him a journal, not unlike the one we found in our home, this one written in an adult hand, the script grown flawless.
I pointed at a bottle of poison and asked my father what it was for. He refused an answer and hid it from me.