The Library of Lost and Found(45)

“I don’t agree.”

The next night, while his wife slept, the puppet maker fastened strings to her wrists, too.

When she woke in the morning, she shook her wrists with dismay. “Fetch me some scissors,” she whispered to her daughters. “I will set you both free.”

“And you must join us,” Mary and Lola said.

But their mother shook her head. “I love your father, so I must stay here. It would break his heart if I freed myself, too.”

Mary and Lola pleaded with their father to let the three of them go, but he wouldn’t listen. So that night, whilst he slept, they asked their mother to cut their strings.

Lola left and never returned, but Mary stayed behind with her mother. “If you won’t leave then I must stay, too,” she said.

“No. You must go,” her mother begged.

But Mary refused.

And the puppet maker’s wife knew that even though Mary was free from her strings, staying at home was like being tied to her crisscross of wood, forever.





18


Boxes

Martha tried to keep busy, to keep her mind off Zelda until she next got in touch, but her nana had a way of invading her thoughts. She pictured the scar on her head and her gap-toothed smile as she laughed on the ghost train. She saw the two of them standing behind the café, as Zelda revealed her time was ticking away.

When she went into the library, she found herself almost blubbing during the children’s storytelling hour. She took out a couple of Nicholas Sparks tearjerkers on loan.

With each conversation Martha had, and with each discovery she made, she felt like she was staring into a child’s kaleidoscope. With each tiny twist, the picture moved and formed a different one.

She should be happy, ecstatic even, that her nana was alive. However, the reality came with a black cloud above it that wouldn’t drift away.

I’ve found something so precious, but I might not have it for long.

She kept thinking about organizing her mum and dad’s funerals.

Thomas died first, on a cold wintery morning. Martha made his breakfast and shouted him to come downstairs. When he didn’t arrive, she found her mum sitting on the edge of the bed. “I can’t wake him, Martha…”

Martha hoped that his passing might bring about a renaissance for her mother, a chance of freedom without the constraints Thomas set for their lives. However, Betty was lost. Her life and routine had been built around him. Everything she did catered for his likes and dislikes, his wants and needs.

Betty had fallen outside, just seven months later, and broken her hip. The doctor said her bones were brittle, from years of dieting. Martha visited her in the hospital twice a day, but her mother didn’t have the will to get better.

It was Martha who visited the undertakers and booked the cars and flowers. She sent out notes to neighbors and organized a buffet in a local pub after the service. Lilian contributed financial support rather than emotional. The two sisters’ worlds, so different, became even more so.

Martha wouldn’t say their parents’ lives were wasted, but they were severely restricted.

I want to support Zelda’s last months, to allow her to be free.

With these thoughts about her parents and Zelda ringing in her head, Martha decided it was time to finally tackle the Berlin Wall of boxes.

She counted them and reached fifty-three. There was an array of different sizes—cat food boxes, washing powder, plain ones from the post office, and she wondered how she had gathered so many together.

She remembered crying as she folded in her mum’s clothes and placed in perfume bottles and ornaments. There were things she should just throw in the bin but couldn’t bring herself to do so. Half-used jars of hand cream and her mother’s scent on handkerchiefs conjured up too many memories. So she had placed things in the boxes and closed up the flaps.

Out of sight, out of mind.

Thinking of Zelda’s words about letting go of the past, she stood on her wooden chair and slid a box off the top of the giant wall.

Opening it up, she found it contained random items, such as an old camera, an Egyptian cat statue, a Russian doll and a few photo frames without prints in them. Although she remembered some of the things, none held any real sentimental value. She repackaged them and marked the box with an X to indicate its contents should go to the charity shop.

Another box was packed full of her mum’s books, the spines all facing upward in a line. Martha ran her finger along them—fashion, astrology, family sagas, feel-good novels. She placed the collection on her To Keep pile, to browse through properly another time. Perhaps she could pass them on to Owen. She liked the idea of other readers getting pleasure from them.

Her fingers lingered on the box before moving it to the side of the room, realizing that her brain had conjured up a reason to contact him again.

With each box she relocated from the Berlin Wall to the charity pile, Martha felt a little lighter, as if she’d been carrying a heavy backpack that she’d just shrugged off. She found the task in her notepad and proudly changed the red dot of lateness to an amber star.

One box contained the rug she used to lie on when she was a girl. As she unfurled it and laid it on the floor, dust motes danced in the air and she ran her hand through them, marveling as they sparkled. She leaned down to straighten the tassels on the rug and then got down on the floor. Lying down on her belly, she grinned as she kicked her legs back and to for a while, with her chin resting in her hands.