I’m overjoyed, but angry too. I glare at Corinne. “When I asked you about the album, you said you threw it away. You said you threw everything away. And all this time . . . you’ve been keeping these things from me. When you knew she would have wanted me to have them. Why?”
“You’ve answered your own question,” she replies stonily.
“You did it to spite a dead woman?”
“No. To spite you.”
Her words knock the breath out of me. I was a child when our mother died. Lonely. Lost. And she purposely withheld the very things that might have offered some comfort. “What have I ever done to you, Corinne? Please help me understand this kind of hatred.”
She’s silent a moment, frowning as she studies the backs of her hands, as if they belong to someone else. Finally, she drops them to her lap and looks at me. “You weren’t born when Ernest died. It was just me. She had a bad time of it. She would shut herself up most days, but when she was having a good day, she would call me to her room. She would brush my hair and sing to me. I was her darling girl. Then you came and I became an afterthought. And then when Father sent her away, I was expected to look after you—the sister I couldn’t stand the sight of. I was sixteen, on the verge of having a life of my own. Or so I thought. But I did what was expected of me. I’ve always done what was expected of me. Including marrying George Hillard, who made my skin crawl. But not you. You were too good to marry the man Father chose for you. You wanted the paperboy.”
“Yes,” I say quietly, not daring to look at Hemi. “I did.”
“And that was all that mattered, as far as you were concerned. What you wanted. You needed to learn your place. To do your duty as I was made to. And you would have, with him out of the way. Instead, you slipped the hook when the story broke and left me to clean up the mess—again.” Her eyes flick to Hemi with open disgust. “You brought him to us. Helped him dredge up all that filth and drag Father’s name through the mud. He was ruined. We were all ruined! And you can stand there and ask what you ever did to me? If I could hurt you in even the tiniest way, I was glad to do it.”
She says it all without shame, without batting an eye, and suddenly I understand just how her hatred has warped her. I look down at the contents of the box with fresh eyes. Personal items grudgingly hoarded like trophies from a battlefield. But why keep them at all? And then lie about it?
It strikes me suddenly that Corinne’s withholding of our mother’s things hasn’t been about a grudge against me but about something else entirely, something she refused to admit, even to herself. “You wanted them,” I say softly, understanding at last. “You wanted them for yourself. Because they were hers.”
She turns her face away. “Do you want them or not?”
“Yes. I want them.”
“Take them, then, and get out.”
I scoop the box up into my arms; then, before I can change my mind, I lift out the hairbrush and lay it on Corinne’s pillow, a gift she doesn’t deserve. She doesn’t see me do it, but Hemi does. Our eyes touch briefly as he relieves me of the box. I pick up my purse from the bed and head for the door. I don’t say goodbye. I don’t look back. I’ve gotten what I came for and now want only to be away from Corinne and out of my father’s house.
TWENTY-TWO
MARIAN
Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.
—Charles W. Eliot
I feel a dull sort of closure as we climb into Hemi’s car, a sense of loose ends being tied up. The fall of the Mannings is all but complete. But our story—Hemi’s and mine—isn’t over.
We’re silent for much of the drive back. I stare out the window at the passing cars and blurring landscape, trying to process everything that’s happened in the last few weeks. Ethan and Ashlyn discovering the books. Hemi showing up out of the blue with a forty-year-old letter in his pocket. Corinne’s admission that she’d purposely thwarted my hopes for happiness. And soon, the last piece of the puzzle. The one I’ve held back.
That four decades of secrets have unwound themselves in so short a time seems impossible but inevitable, too, in some tiny part of my consciousness. Haven’t I always been braced for this day? When Hemi’s book arrived and I saw what he’d written—How, Belle?—wasn’t I already preparing for this inevitability? I was. Of course I was.
Ashlyn’s words have been festering all day.
Closure.
Is such a thing possible? When anger and loss have been your companions for so long that you can’t imagine waking up without them burning in your chest? When the face that has haunted you for so many years is suddenly before you, threatening to reopen wounds you believed scarred over? Ashlyn seems to think so. A belief I can’t help feeling comes from personal experience, though she never said so. She claims it’s a matter of deciding. And so I’ve decided. But before closure, there must first be a reckoning.
Mine.
And yet I’m not quite ready to shoulder all the blame.
Beside me, Hemi broods behind the wheel, his expression carefully shuttered as he navigates rush-hour traffic. I feel his eyes stray to my side of the car now and then and sense that he might be about to say something, but when I turn to look at him, he looks away.
“Are we not going to talk about any of it?” I ask when I can no longer bear the quiet. “What she said and what it means?”
He keeps his eyes fixed on the road, his hands wrapped tight around the wheel. “What is there to talk about?”
His response stuns me. “Perhaps we could start with the fact that we’ve both had it wrong all these years, and that I was telling the truth last night when I told you the letter you showed me was meant for Teddy and not you. I think I deserve at least that.”
He says nothing for a time, pretending to be interested in something in the rearview mirror. I wait, watching him. I used to know his face so well, every plane and shadow, but the years have hardened him, making him unreadable.
“And then what?” he says finally. “After forty-three years, we’re both sorry. Then what?”
The bitterness in his voice cuts me to the quick. “Then . . . we forgive, Hemi. We stop all the blaming and who hurt who first. It won’t change what we’ve lost. Nothing can change that. But it might pave the way for some kind of closure. For both of us finally being able to let it go.”
I hold my breath, waiting for him to respond, to give some sign that he’s heard me at all, but he remains mute, unreachable. I turn my face to the window, staring at the highway blurring past. Forgiveness. Closure. Such pretty words. But they felt false as I uttered them. Because I know there’s more to come. Much more. And much worse. Perhaps the unforgivable. And yet I must say it. Confession, they say, is good for the soul. But not here, with horns blaring and cars whizzing past. I need to be on my own ground when I tell him.
“Hemi,” I say abruptly, before I lose my nerve. “I need you to come back to the house with me. When we get back to the hotel, to my car, I need you to follow me home.”
He looks at me finally, his face slightly softened. “Are you not feeling well?”