Spells for Forgetting(28)

My fingers worked clumsily at the buttons of my flannel and I peeled it off, draping it over the back of the chair before going to the fireplace. The thin cotton shirt I was wearing underneath was damp, making me shiver.

I stacked three fresh logs on the grate and took a handful of kindling from the bucket, striking the long match. I stood before it, watching the flames catch the edges of the log until the comforting smell of woodsmoke drifted up to meet me. It slowed the blood in my veins as the warm light glimmered over the house and my eyes drifted from one dark corner to the next until they landed on the small rope dangling from the attic hatch.

After my mother died and Dad moved out to the fishing cabin, the small house had become mine. If what Nixie said was true and my mother kept the letters, there was only one place I could think they would be.

I stood and fetched the step stool from the mudroom, dragging it across the uneven wood floor. It clattered as I set it down below the hatch and stepped up, reaching for the length of rope to pull it open. The ladder slid free and I took a flashlight from the kitchen drawer before I climbed up into the thick scent of old paper and sawdust.

The beam of white light moved over creased cardboard boxes with my mother’s scrolling handwriting in black grease pencil.

Photographs. Keepsakes. Sewing.



I lifted myself up into the small attic and slid the first one out from under a stack of wicker baskets. The corners of the box were held together with peeling strips of tape where the seams had busted more than once. I opened the lid and peered inside.

Toppled stacks of old pictures were littered over the top of several photo albums. I unearthed the first one, thumbing through the pages and turning the album upside down, shaking it. When nothing fell out, I reached for the next one.

I opened box after box, filling the air with dust, until the beam of the flashlight landed on the round edge of a hatbox. My hands froze in the air before I lifted it from beneath the stacks of paper and set it before me. I pried the lid up and my fingers clamped around its edges as my eyes landed on its contents.

Envelopes.

The lid slipped from my hands as I stared at the slanted script that covered the face of the one on top. I hesitated before I took one from the middle of the stack, sliding it from beneath a knotted length of twine and holding it before me.

There, the return address was smeared in bleeding, black ink.

Somerfield

18 Grass Valley Rd

Prosper, OR 97110



I bit down onto my bottom lip, breathing through the sting behind my nose as I opened it. A square of card stock fell into my lap and I picked it up, holding it to the light. An emblem of some kind was embossed on the center above the words Easthart College. I set it down carefully and the letter shook in my hands as I read the words.

    Hannah,

I know I just wrote a few weeks ago, but I have no one else to share the news with. The first thing I do when anything happens around here is sit down at the desk and start another letter. August graduated from Easthart yesterday, and I could hardly believe my eyes watching him cross that stage. Something we never thought we’d see, remember? Getting him to graduate high school was hard enough. I swear you wouldn’t know him these days. I’m so proud I could cry. Who am I kidding? I’ve cried more than a few times. I’ve enclosed the program and a photo I forced him to take, much to his displeasure. Some things don’t change, I suppose.



My eyes dropped to the card again and I forced myself to pick it up. My vision blurred with angry tears as I opened it.

August’s face peered back at me, a shy smile on his lips. The pain in my throat erupted and a hot tear rolled down my cheek. He stood in the dappled light beneath a giant oak tree and his green graduation robe was open, his hat clutched in one hand.

Behind it, a name was underlined on the roster of graduates.

August Somerfield



My lips moved silently over the name. Somerfield. Not Salt.

I closed the program and refolded the paper, not finishing the letter. The words were like a hot knife to the jagged seams that held me together. I didn’t want to find out what lay beneath them.





Fifteen


    EMERY


The truck rocked back and forth as I steered it downhill, toward the cabin. Dawn was just breaking over the trees, but I’d spent half the night pacing before the fire, trying to put it together.

When August and Eloise left Saoirse, they’d left everything behind. There were a few clothes missing from the closets, but the icebox was still filled with food and there was freshly cut firewood stacked on the porch. There was even mail in the letterbox beside the front window. It was as if they’d vanished into thin air.

As soon as word got out around the island, the eyes of Saoirse turned to me for a second time. Everyone, even my uncle, wanted to know where August and Eloise had gone. But I didn’t know. That same sinking feeling I’d had that night returned, dropping in my stomach. I didn’t know, but my mother did.

My eyes cut to the seat beside me, where the upholstery was torn, revealing the seat’s stuffing. The letter I’d opened the night before stared back at me. I had spent the sleepless hours thumbing through the envelopes one at a time, studying the dates and trying to pair them with pieces of memory before starting at the beginning of the stack again. The first one had come only a month after August left. The next, a couple of months after that. There had been at least five and as many as sixteen letters a year, each one opened, their edges softened by my mother’s hands.