Looking for Jane (92)
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 grey 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 tumour 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.