3. For Henry
"Did you have a fight with Emma?" Mom comes enquiring to me later that evening, just as I'm ready to head out for dinner with the Parkers.
"No, just tired," I say wearily. It's a question I'll never escape, I fear.
Mom and dad's marriage ended with about as much drama as you can expect in a small town. He packed up and left one day and never looked back. Mom became the social pariah for awhile, the twenty-something who couldn't keep her man, and I don't think she ever really recovered from it. She made it through - obviously - but there's always that flicker of unease in her eyes when she glances from me to Emma.
"Don't forget the pie," she says as she thrusts her most precious deep-pan dish, neatly wrapped in tin foil, at me. "Don't stay too long, and tell those poor folks we're all praying for them."
I can sense my mother watching me as I turn my back and walk towards the car. I can feel it, that quiet fear in her - perhaps irrational, perhaps not - that I'll run away and never come back.
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The Parkers live in a quaint, rustic little cottage. I marvel at how much comes rushing back to me as I step out of the car, grab the Shepherd's Pie, and make my way down the cobbled pathway leading to their door. I'd always known where Samantha Parker lived because everyone knew where everyone lived when we were kids.
A memory creeps out from the shadows of my mind - a distant Friday afternoon, the faded nauseating smell of paint on my fingertips, the sound of Aaron's laughter as he swung his backpack at me. A water fight in June, on the last day of sixth-grade. I'd fallen and scraped my knee somewhere here as we'd walked home together. I can't remember much more.
It's exactly the kind of house that city-folk go ga-ga over. I can just imagine Emma clutching at me, gasping "Oh how gorgeous!". It's exactly the kind of place I can imagine a comfortably upper-middle-class family renting for the summer to live out their rustic country life fantasies; to grow baby tomatoes in the back-garden and work on their failing marriage, only to retreat safely back into the familiar comforts of their modernist New York apartments with the arrival of autumn.
It's not an accurate representation of the architecture of our town. In fact, it's probably the most expensive property around - flashy, for our standards. Samantha was known and sometimes resented for, being one of the more well-off kids in town.
As I find myself reaching out to knock on their door, it strikes me as a little odd that I had never once visited her home. Not even that summer when we -
I clear my throat. And knock.
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Dinner with the Parkers is as awkward as I had expected. While Mrs. Parker seems eager - almost too eager - to probe into my life, I am met with chilly indifference from the father. If it wasn't for the fact that these two were grieving parents, I'd have played into it.
Even though Mrs. Parker was the picture of grief at the church, she seems almost transformed in her own home. She's still clearly distraught but I notice how she's sat on the sofa, almost sunken into it, like a child who's tucked themselves into their favourite spot in the living room for an evening of pleasant, undisturbed cartoon-watching. I try to ignore Mr. Parker's stand-offish grunts at my responses and smile and nod and tell Mrs. Parker everything there is to know about me. I let it all spill out, as invaded as I feel, because I sense that Mrs. Parker hasn't had much chance to simply sit and listen and, for once, to be the spectator to somebody else's life.
"And you're working as a...writer, aren't you?" she asks, and I appreciate that she is genuinely curious rather than disapproving. An entire century of Southern authors are studied in our dear country and folks in the South still treat the word 'writer' as disparagingly as one might with 'alcoholic' or 'lazy bum'.
I explain to her what my kind of writing involves and nods along. Journalism can be both exciting and dull, I explain. A career with unpredictable highs and lows, depending on the kinds of people you surround yourself with and what you write about. I tell her about how I nearly got fired because people complained about an article I'd written exploring the nature of empires and America's colonial tendencies in the Middle East. Even Mr. Parker seems to be interested in that part and listens intently, although he scoffs when I suggest that we're in for a world of trouble if we get involved with Iraq.
"Maybe you might write about our town one day," Mrs. Parker says. Her husband mutters her name in a low voice, stern, embarrassed. She shrugs, and smiles tightly at me. I smile back uncomfortably, understanding the implication there. For what else is there to right about, to investigate, in a little town like this other than the one thing that has brought us all here together?
Is this why I'm here, I wonder suddenly, because she wants me to eulogise her daughter in a fancy newspaper in the big city?
Surely I shouldn't be so arrogant as to assume that. And yet, I wonder. What was it that Mrs. Parker said? That Sam had left me a few things?
She seems to understand my expression and the halting, mono-syllabic responses I've started to give her. Straightening her shoulders, she says, "Well I suppose there's no point holdin' off any longer, is there?"
"No ma'am, I suppose not," I say softly. It's the most candid response I've given her all evening.
Mrs. Parker seems to appreciate that and gets up, motioning for me to do the same. My eyes flit to Mr. Parker and notice that he seems to have lost a little bit of his brusqueness. They both look worn out, ready for me to leave, but I know they need me to see something. I can't help but feel a little curious, as misplaced as the feeling is.
They lead me up their fancy, wood-panelled staircase, past two rooms that are firmly shut, into a much smaller, light-coloured room. Immediately, a girlish smell floods my senses as we enter Samantha Parker's room. I can feel my throat closing up a little, not because the smell is pungent, but it seems to envelope me with too much warmth and softness, too much of her. How can it still smell like her after all these years?
The room is mostly bare now, filled with cardboard boxes with labels on them. But her four-poster bed is still all done up, covered in a childishly frilly duvet that's rosy-pink in colour, and lined up with a few old teddies that stare past me with their beady, insentient eyes.
"It's such a mess," Mrs. Parker says apologetically as if to a guest who would be staying here overnight. "We wanted to keep it how she would've liked but the police ransacked this place and her things were everywhere. She was so tidy, you know, and she liked things a certain way. I couldn't..." She stops and turns around. I look away, to give her a moment.
I step further into the room and look around. There's only one other piece of furniture apart from the bed and it's a round, pudgy armchair placed right next to her windowsill. I can imagine, once, that this might've been Sam's reading spot. I frown. At least, I can only assume that she was a big reader.
I hear someone's footsteps behind me and I turn to ask Mrs. Parker something, only to stop, because it's the father who is staring at me. I feel about ten years old and like I've just been caught doing something salacious in his daughter's room.
"Here," he says, pointing past me to something. "She left that for you."
I turn around and spot a small wicker basket perched atop another one of those huge cardboard boxes. I can see there's been an attempt at jamming it shut but the stacks of paper that have been crammed together peek through anyway. With bated breath, I step forward and reach for it. Suddenly, it feels too real, too ominous, and I look back at the both of them.
"Can someone tell me what's going on?" I ask. "Look, I - I understand you're grieving, and I mean no disrespect, but this is all very strange for me. I barely knew Samantha. Are you sure she meant for me to have this stuff?"
"I told you, Ethel," Mr. Parker says gruffly. "He shouldn't be involved, she was only a little girl - "
"She would've wanted him to know," Mrs. Parker snaps at her husband, her eyes gleaming with tears. "I know she would. And you'd understand if you bothered...if you bothered, at all, to read anything she wrote. Let my baby have her happiness, Gerald, even if she is dead."
"Sweetheart, you know that - "
"Be silent, Gerald." She brushes past her husband towards me. I feel her hands on my shoulders. "I can't pretend that you and Sammy had anythin' goin' on, I know you didn't. And I know you got your own wife and kids, a new life, and I think Sammy would've been real happy for you if she was here. But when we found all of these - all of these letters, they revealed so much to us about our daughter that we never knew about. And I truly believe that she would've wanted you to have these, to have this...piece of her that's still alive. Now don't feel obliged to stay and read 'em, I just thought you oughta know that these letters exist and that you have a right to know."
I can just say no and be done with it. She's given me that choice. I should say no, because how could I breach a dead girl's privacy like that?
And yet...
I glance back at the wicker basket. I think of Sam's hands on my chest. I can feel her hair brushing against my face as we say our last goodbyes, her nonchalant smile, a tightness in my throat, a stirring, a need to say something more. I feel her lips on mine again, her heat, her hands...
"I'd like to be on my own, if you don't mind," I say finally. "While I read them."
Mrs. Parker seems to have expected this answer because she smiles.
"Of course, hon." She nods at the basket. "Everything you need to know is all in there."
She takes her husband by his arm and leads him outside. I hear the door shut behind me.
I sit down on Sam's bed and pull the wicker basket towards me. Shaking, I unclasp it. Several little notes, yellowed with time, fall out but my eyes land an envelope that's been purposefully placed on top. It's got a light scrawl on it - For Henry.
My name.
I turn it to tear open the envelope but see that it's already been done. Sam's mother must've read this first. For some reason, this embarrasses me, and I feel a pang for poor Sam, who would've felt doubly mortified. I pull out a few pieces of paper but hold them carefully, as though they are a carefully preserved artefact. A few flower petals, long since withered away, fall from between the pages.
And then I start to read.
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