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.
She takes an unsteady breath as she walks over to the chest of drawers with false confidence. Her mother’s jasmine perfume bottle sits among a litter of other products, hand lotions and joint creams. Nancy lifts it carefully—it might be the last bottle—and slides off the gold-plated lid. She spritzes it onto her own wrists, turns them inward and inhales the floral springtime scent. She can feel her nose start to swell.
“Oh, Mum,” Nancy mutters. “God, I miss you already.”
She caps the perfume and places it in the “to keep” box, nestling it into the folds of the Burberry scarf her dad got her mum for Christmas the winter before he died.
Nancy smiles at the bittersweet sting of the memory. After depositing Frances at the nail salon, she had taken her dad out for lunch and some Christmas shopping. They’d made their way downtown on the crowded, steamy streetcar, getting off on Queen Street and stopping outside the Bay. The windows were decorated with several four-foot-tall fake trees, which were spray-painted with a white sparkly substance that made them glitter like real snow. They were surrounded by an array of presents wrapped in multicoloured metallic wrapping paper, each topped with a glittery silver bow.
“What do they call this?” her dad asked.
“A window display, Dad.” Nancy looped her arm underneath his. His balance wasn’t good in those days, and the sidewalk was icy.
“Yes, I know it’s a window display, Beetle. I’m not senile, you know.”
Nancy chuckled. “What did you mean, then?”
“I mean this is all a bunch of hooey.” He squinted through his glasses at the store sign high on the wall and frowned. “When Eaton’s was here, now, they knew how to do a Christmas display.”
Nancy refrained with difficulty from rolling her eyes. Her dad often waxed nostalgic about how the closure of Eaton’s department store had signalled the death knell of civil society.
“I used to come down here as a kid, you know. My parents would bring us, me and your uncle, to see the new toys that were in the catalogue, so we could pick out something that we wanted for Christmas.”
Nancy guided her father closer to the window as a large group of rowdy teens unloaded from a bus behind them and swarmed like ants onto the sidewalk.
“There were mechanical toys back then. Elves that walked up and down staircases. Wheels that spun. Little train sets chugging along with their whistles.” He paused, smiling. “There was something real about it, the carved and painted wood, the train tracks laid just so. It was…” He trailed off.
Nancy watched her dad as the years fell away, the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes faded to youthful smoothness, the hair turned from grey to brown. She could see him as a child, face pressed against this window beside his older brother, their breath fogging up the glass, deciding which toy they wanted most of all.
“These are just empty boxes, you know.” He waved a gloved hand at the piles of shiny purple and teal presents. “There’s nothing to them. They’re wrapped up all pretty like they’re hiding a nice secret. They want us to imagine what’s inside.”
A chill ran down Nancy’s spine as her father turned away from the window to face her.
“But it’s like most secrets, Nancy. It’s better for us to be left wondering if there’s something inside the box, or if it’s just air. It’s better for us not to know.”
The snow started up again, flecking her dad’s glasses with droplets. The sound from the street became a faint hum as she met her father’s eyes. Nancy was sure he was trying to tell her something, but neither of them was willing or able to name the chasm between them.
“I love you, Dad,” Nancy said instead, pulling him in tightly for a hug.
He wrapped his arms around her. “I love you, too, Beetle.”
Nancy wipes away the tears at the corners of her eyes now, snatching a Kleenex from the dresser and blowing her nose hard.
“Well, let’s do this, then,” she says aloud to the empty room.
She pulls open the top drawer of her mother’s dresser and peers inside. It looks the same as it did all those years ago. Last time she had to keep careful track of where each item was placed as she removed it from The Drawer, but this time she doesn’t need to, and the knowledge pulls at her insides. She lifts out the envelopes full of deeds, her parents’ wills, and other documents she ignored before but knows she’s going to need now.
She opens the box containing her mother’s sapphire engagement ring and slides it onto her right hand. It fits perfectly, and she won’t take it off from this moment onward. She picks up the pearls. Perhaps she’ll give them to Katherine for her thirtieth birthday. Finally she reaches the back corner with the thin leather case.
The memory of this discovery all those years ago comes rushing back to her in a tsunami of grief. Nancy swallows hard and spins the dials, entering her birth date in the English order. She presses down on the snaps and the case pops open. Her breath snags on the sight.
It’s empty.
Nancy stands at the dresser, her mind racing. Her mother must have disposed of Margaret’s note, knowing Nancy would be going through her parents’ home once Frances passed. She supposes she shouldn’t feel shocked, and she doesn’t. Not really. After Frances gave Nancy the booties at her baby shower, Nancy accepted that her parents were never planning on telling her. She closed that door in her heart and moved on, but she had hoped she might be able to keep Margaret’s note.
A decade ago, Nancy finally decided to put her name down at one of the agencies that helps birth parents and children locate one another. A fresh resentment settles over her, but she shakes it off. After all, she’s never heard anything from Margaret Roberts. Both her mothers have betrayed her in different ways.