Things That Fall

by Mere Joyce

  “Could it be coincidence?” Nolan asks, ignoring my needless question.

  “I don’t think so,” Forrester says.

  He looks through the folder again, searching for more clues.

  Allison sounds perplexed.

  “So, she died, and our dads stopped talking to each other?” She shakes her head, her skinny arms folded across her chest. “Why?”

  “Maybe the grief was too strong,” Nolan offers.

  Kayla’s quick to shoot down his suggestion.

  “If they were overcome with grief, we’d see the memories of Julie everywhere,” she says. “Have any of you ever seen a picture of her at your house? They took the photos, we have proof of that. But has any parent mentioned her … has anyone seen a photo or a keepsake or a home movie?”

  “Not us,” Thomas says.

  He bites the thumbnail of his left hand, and I remember Forrester on the park bench the day of his dad’s funeral, biting his nail before he told us of his parents’ divorce. I bit my nails until I was twelve, my mother’s scolding so incessant I stopped to avoid any more fighting on our monthly night of stargazing. Watching Thomas now and remembering Forrester a week ago tempts me to pick up the old habit — the yearning like what starving dieters must feel when they see someone sitting down to a gourmet meal.

  “Us neither,” Eli says, looking at Kayla. “And you’re right. Grief would have made her presence more prominent. Instead she was shut away in a box of old clothes and some pictures buried in a forgotten container.”

  “Maybe they were glad to be rid of her,” Allison says then. I shoot her a dirty look, but she doesn’t flinch away from my dark expression. “I know it sounds bad, but it could be true. They could have felt obligated to take care of her after Grandpa’s death. After her death, maybe they were relieved and put aside all the memories of her so they could pretend she didn’t exist. Maybe that’s why they stopped talking, too. Out of guilt.”

  I’m desperate to argue against her bitchy accusation about our parents, but it’s hard to find a plausible reason to suppose she’s wrong. As twisted as what she’s proposing is, it would explain everything, which makes her idea better than any other scenario we’ve come up with over the past two days.

  But Forrester puts my aching mind to rest when he cuts in with words firm and certain.

  “No,” he says in his deep voice. “If that was the case, my dad never would have kept her clothing in the attic. It wasn’t stored by accident. Those boxes were the only ones up there. Dad wouldn’t have gone through the trouble if he’d wanted them gone forever. He should have thrown them out, but he didn’t. He kept them for a reason.”

  “What if they were put up there while she was still alive?” Allison asks.

  “That wouldn’t make any sense,” I chime in, relieved to have an argument to cling to. “If she was still alive, she’d have been wearing the clothes. Or they still would’ve been thrown out. It’s not like they were designer pieces. They were well worn and old. They were worthless, except to whoever put them in the attic. Except to Uncle Simon.”

  Eli sighs. “So, we still don’t know why they stopped talking.”

  He sits down halfway up the stairs.

  “But we do know who Julie was,” Kayla says.

  “And we have a good guess that her death was the reason for the fight,” I add.

  “We just don’t know how,” Forrester mumbles.

  His eyes scan the remaining documents in the folder.

  “Anything in there that might help us figure it out?” Thomas asks.

  Forrester pulls out another sheet, this one a torn piece of yellow notebook paper.

  “Just this,” he says, handing the sheet to me. “I’m not sure it’ll be of much use, though.”

  The writing on the sheet is difficult to read. Not only was it done in a shaking half-print and half-cursive hand, it was written in pencil, which has now faded almost to the point of illegibility. I have to hold it up toward the overhead light and squint to work out what the words say. With considerable effort, I see what I think is supposed to read Simcoe Courthouse, November 7, 10:00 a.m.

  “It could be unrelated,” Forrester says over my shoulder.

  “Yeah, it could,” I agree. “But it’s the best shot we’ve got. Nothing else in the folder to give us a clue about what happened at the courthouse?”

  “No, that’s all there is,” Forrester says. “The only other thing is a map.”

  “A map?” Thomas says, sounding surprised.

  Forrester nods. He takes out the folded paper, his eyes wandering over its front.

  “Looks like there’s a route drawn on it, but … I don’t know for what.”

  He hands the map to Thomas before zipping the folder shut. Thomas takes the rumpled paper, pressing his fingers along its front with a frown. He turns the map over, opens the well-creased fold, and then his mouth twists with curiosity as he pries something off the inside page.

  “There’s this, too,” he says. He holds up a small gold key with a brown tassel hanging from its end. It must have been taped to part of the map. “Any idea what it could be for?”

  Forrester looks heavy with confusion as he shakes his head. Thomas gives him the key, and he studies it while the oldest member of our group traces the map’s drawn route with his finger.

  “I think we should check it out,” Kayla says. “The court date, that is. We might not find anything, but at least then we’d know we tried.”

  “We don’t have to,” Forrester says, his tone almost apologetic. “We’ve … well, we’ve finished cleaning up. You’re all free to leave now, if you want.”

  “We’re not prisoners,” I say, sliding my eyes to briefly glower at Eli. “We can stay a while longer. Can’t we?”

  Eli’s expression isn’t as pissed off as I expected it would be. He looks more jaded now, as if the revelations of the last ten minutes have knocked all the fight out of him.

  He brings a fist to his mouth and lowers his gaze.

  “Yeah, we can stay,” he says, the words muffled against his knuckles.

  If Eli’s still willing to stay, there’s no use even asking anyone else. For at least a little while longer, none of us are going anywhere.

  Eli

  Turns out infidelity runs in the family.

  Fuck.

  I don’t care about this Julie woman. Perhaps that makes me

  an asshole.

  But I think I was already there,

  so maybe this pushes me

  into total bastard territory.

  I might care later.

  Who knows?

  Right now I’m enraged beyond the point

  of experiencing any additional emotions.

  They all know our dirty secret. And Ali’s not even bothered.

  Of course she’s not.

  She wouldn’t even be bothered if they knew

  Dad’s pulled us in,

  uses us as his alibi.

  He’s only picking Ali up today

  so he can stop at her house

  while Ali sits in a coffee shop,

  ignores the fact that Mom’s at home,

  oblivious,

  cooking dinner and thinking her life still makes sense.

  Our grandfather did it, too.

  How sick is that?

  I want to know if Dad was aware,

  before the baby arrived

  and blew everything open.

  Did he care?

  Was he proud of his father for getting another girl into bed?

  Was he as sickened by it

  as I am?

  He’s the bastard,

  not me.

  I’m just the coward

  who can’t build up the nerve

  to tell Mom.

&
nbsp; If Ali would join me, I’d do it.

  But Ali thinks things are better with her not knowing.

  Ali doesn’t want her world rocked

  any more than it’s already been.

  But shit.

  Our grandfather

  did it, too.

  What if Dad knocks his new woman up? Would he keep

  the baby,

  flaunt it around us like it’s a miracle

  and not a curse?

  Why does history repeat itself?

  I won’t be like that.

  I won’t.

  I won’t.

  I won’t, but Ali

  might.

  That scares me even more than the idea of telling Mom.

  Do I let family secrets eat away at us

  until we don’t talk anymore,

  until we hide relatives and leave it to future generations

  to try and work out puzzles

  that should already be complete?

  I’ll get home before Dad and Ali do this afternoon.

  It’ll just be me and Mom. If I tell her …

  If I don’t tell her …

  Breathe. Just breathe.

  I don’t want to be

  a coward

  anymore.

  Thomas

  BOBBING IN THE WATER, my eyes closed, my spatial awareness obscured until the world is twisted — wild and moving, calm and still.

  “I’ll map it all out,” my uncle says. “And in October we’ll take her away from that damned place and go.”

  “Found the guns!” Forrester yells, splashing into the bay and washing me out of my hiding place.

  Nolan

  B: Good morning! You awake yet?

  Sitting in a circle, documents and pictures spread everywhere over the wooden boards of the living room floor, I don’t have to think of the inevitable conversation Thomas and I will have on the car ride home. Turns out, solving a decade-old family mystery is a good distraction from trying to decide whether I’ll scold my brother for keeping up his plans to leave or assure him Bea will be okay once he’s gone.

  Me: Are you kidding me? I’ve been up for hours, sleepyhead. We’ve already finished cleaning the cottage.

  Preoccupied as we all are with the topic at hand, I seem to be the only one who’s remembered he has a phone out here — which means I’m the hero of the hour. Hailey’s got the birth and death certificates, and Kayla holds the records from the group home. Thomas studies the map, Allison and Eli search through pictures, and Forrester twirls the little key in his fingers, the brown tassels fluttering like helicopter seeds falling from the maple trees outside. But no one has me beat. In a situation like this, the World Wide Web can’t be topped.

  B: Wonderful. Does that mean you’re on your way home?

  “Simcoe Courthouse,” I say, typing quickly so I can respond to Brandon between page loads. Connection or not, the speed is atrocious out here, so I have plenty of time to minimize my browser without anyone noticing.

  Me: Not quite. Turns out we sort of uncovered a major family secret.

  We’re going to do some detectiving before we leave.

  I can’t wait to tell you later. It’s insane!

  “Do you think we’ll find anything?” Kayla asks, brushing hair behind her ear as she sits cross-legged next to Hailey. “I can’t fathom how we’ll find what we’re looking for.”

  “We’re starting with the courthouse,” Allison says. “That’s a pretty good place to begin.”

  Kayla shoots her an annoyed glance — one Allison fails to notice — while I flip back to my results page to find it still loading.

  “I know we’re searching for the courthouse,” Kayla says. “But how likely is it we’ll find actual information about the case? We don’t even know what it was about or if it has anything to do with Julie.”

  “Let’s just get to the courthouse first,” Thomas breaks in, trying to keep things mellow.

  He’s been weird since he discovered that map. His fingers run the length of the pen-marked route as if it’s some kind of fragile treasure.

  “Nothing but some general info,” I mutter, scrolling through unhelpful results consisting mostly of city websites listing one-paragraph histories and an office phone number.

  “Try looking for archives,” Allison suggests. “I worked a job a couple of summers ago where we digitized a bunch of text records for some city archives. It’s possible they’ve done the same thing up here.”

  I type in “Simcoe archives” and then flip back to my messages.

  B: This whole weekend is insane. You might have to make a movie about it.

  Me: You might be right. We’ll talk storyboards later.

  My knee bounces with frustration as I wait for the message to be delivered. Even a damned text takes a full minute to send out here. How do people live with connection speeds this slow?

  “The archives don’t have anything that recent,” I sigh when I get back to the search. “I’m mostly seeing stuff from the 1800s.”

  “Shit,” Hailey mutters. She makes a trip to the kitchen, rummaging through the fridge before bringing back two armfuls of pop and water. “So, what are we going to look for next? If the court date doesn’t tell us anything …”

  “We’re not finished with the court date yet,” Allison interjects.

  Thomas grabs a can from the pile Hailey’s placed in the middle of our circle. He pops the tab, the cola fizzing as the seal peels open.

  “We can try newspapers. They might have something,” he suggests.

  B: Sounds very romantic.

  Me: You know you love it.

  “And what the hell are the papers called?” I ask.

  The question is snarkier than I intended. Flicking back and forth between slow texts and even slower page loads is getting on my nerves.

  “How should we know?” Allison snaps. She crosses her arms over her chest and looks vaguely similar to the girly child she once was. “None of us lives up here.”

  “We don’t even know if the court thing happened in this area, anyway,” Hailey says. “Simcoe’s a region, not a specific town.”

  “Even if we guess right, there’s no guarantee we’ll find a news clipping. If the case was small, the papers wouldn’t care,” Eli adds.

  “Well, we have to try something,” Allison huffs. “Why don’t we figure out which towns are a part of the region. Or find out what area the courthouse is actually in. Then we could look up that paper first.”

  “We don’t have all day to do this, you know,” Eli argues. “We can hunt through county papers at home. There’s no point wasting a bunch of time pinpointing small towns on a map to try and guess which one might have been interested in an old court case.”

  “Why don’t we do a more general search?” Kayla offers.

  She sits hunched into herself, and her arms are dotted with goosebumps. We haven’t put the heat on, and it’s cold now compared to yesterday. If the sun were still bright, the rays might heat the room through the windows. But the clouds are rolling fast, leaving only pockets of blue sky. Kayla probably didn’t pack a sweater.

  “We have pretty much nothing to go by. How much more general can we get?” I say, glancing down with the buzz of my phone.

  B: Strangely enough, I do.

  Good luck with your detectiving.

  Talk soon. xx

  I smile, while across the circle, Kayla rolls her eyes.

  “Instead of looking for the place, why don’t we start with the person?” she says. “Open a search engine and look up Julie. Julie Annabelle Hacher. See what comes up.”

  Kayla’s suggestion is pathetically simple, and in that regard it’s perfect. I turn my smile to her as she takes a bottle of water and sits back with it, placing the bottle by her
side but not unscrewing the cap.

  “Julie Annabelle Hacher,” I mumble, staring at the phone again as I search the name. This time the page load is quicker, and I’m scrolling through results in a matter of seconds. “Here’s her obituary.”

  I open the link as Thomas slides close to me and peers at the phone over my shoulder. Usually this is a serious offence, one that would earn him an elbow to the stomach and a few swear words to get him out of my space. Considering the circumstances, however, I give him a pass on the elbow jab and let him look.

  The obituary is short and ordinary. Printed in the Barrie Examiner in September 2006, it relates how she was loved and how she’ll be missed. The text mentions she was predeceased by her father, our granddad, but it makes no reference to our grandma or to Julie’s biological mother. No sibling names are printed, either — it only states that she was survived by five half-brothers. Four half-brothers now.

  I’m surprised to see the obit has the audacity to mention her ten nieces and nephews as well — the seven of us plus Liam, Marissa, and Tate. Out of the ten of us, Tate’s the only one who might stand a chance of remembering her, while Liam probably wasn’t even born the last time his sisters were in her presence. The obituary makes no mention of a court case, but it does tell mourners to make donations to the Ontario Rett Syndrome Association, which confirms Hailey’s diagnosis of her condition.

  I read the obit aloud, and then we continue. I find a short article on some charity camp day in 2002 with Julie included in the group picture below the article’s headline before I pass through a lot of unrelated pages — blogs of people named Julie or Annabelle, and a number of French websites, too. The search seems hopeless when I reach the end of the first page of results, but after continuing half-heartedly to page two, the next entry proves to be what we’ve been searching for.

  “Family Fights for Half-Sister’s Burial Rights,” I recite.

  I didn’t think we were making much noise as we sat and waited to find something. But after I’ve read the article’s headline, we’re all so quiet I can hear the trees rustling in the wind outside and Runner’s gentle panting where he and Star lounge by the back windows.

  “The fight,” Kayla whispers.