We Hope for Better Things

by Erin Bartels

  Linden held up his hands to stop my arguments. “I get it. Really. I think someone might be interested in publishing it. Maybe Wayne State University. William deserves recognition for his talent and his sacrifice.” He pointed at me. “William does.”

  I nodded. He was right. Those photos were not my ticket to a Pulitzer or a new job or even one byline as a freelance journalist. They were William’s legacy. And I was no reporter anymore.

  But Desiree was. And there was still justice to be done in the case of Judge Ryan Sharpe.

  I started pulling the other photos down. “Let’s take these up to Nora.”

  Emerging from the cellar, I waved Linden ahead of me and took a quick detour through the kitchen. I dialed Desiree’s number.

  She picked up on the second ring. “Elizabeth!”

  “No time to talk now, but be on the lookout for a pic from me in the next week.”

  “Of what?”

  “It’s your ticket to the front page.”

  “My ticket?”

  “Some possible evidence in the Judge Sharpe thing.”

  “Really? Then why wouldn’t it be your ticket?”

  Through the dining room I could see Nora, Mr. Rich, and Linden still studying the photos that blanketed the coffee table. If I went back to Detroit, I would never be a part of that scene.

  “Because I’m staying in Lapeer.”

  “What? You don’t want to live in Lapeer. Elizabeth, this is your way back in! It’s your chance!”

  “Maybe it’s my chance to get back into being a journalist. But it’s not my best chance at happiness.”

  “But I can’t take credit for your story.”

  Linden beckoned me into the room with a tilt of his head.

  “It’s not my story anymore,” I said. “Maybe it never was.”

  We said our goodbyes and I hung up the phone. Then I walked into the glow of life and love that began at Nora and spread like sunlight throughout the parlor.

  I held out the photos that had been hanging in the darkroom. “Aunt Nora, when was the last time you saw these?”

  fifty-five

  Lapeer County, April

  I watched Linden’s Mustang disappear beyond the pines and felt an upwelling of joyful satisfaction such as I’d never felt before.

  “Thank you, Elizabeth.”

  I turned to see Nora sitting among the sea of photographs. In her hand she held the last photo ever taken of William.

  “I think you were right,” she said.

  “About what?”

  “This did help.” She placed the photo of William and J.J. atop the rest of them. “I shut the door on this part of my life long ago. I shut out my parents and William’s family and God, and I tried very hard to shut out the memories. Just like I shut up that darkroom.”

  I sat down next to her.

  “The way I was brought up, you didn’t talk about your problems. You didn’t allow yourself to become the object of pity. So I kept it all to myself. But it seems like lately it all wants to get out. And now I feel like I’m finally seeing this life for what it was.”

  I put my hand on hers. “And what do you think?”

  “I think I’ve spent the majority of my life mending things for other people while I’ve been walking around in tatters. Today has me wondering what the last fifty years might have been like if I had forgiven my parents and forgiven J.J. Maybe I would have been happier.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But then I never would have met you, and where would that have left me?”

  She put her other hand on top of mine the way old ladies do. “Long ago I believed that everything happened for a reason,” she said. “That everything that happened before led you to where you are now, and so it all had a purpose.”

  I sighed. “That’s what my mother always says.”

  “I think she’s right. I couldn’t believe it for years and years after William died. But now that I’ve gotten to the other side of it all, I have to believe there must be a plan. We just can’t see the whole picture. Our lives are like this.” She held up the photo of William and J.J. “On its own, it doesn’t mean anything. You can’t look at this one picture and understand what has happened in this country, or even what happened during the riots. But when you add them all up”—she put it back on the table among the others—“then you start to see. There are always hard parts. But so many of those things—later you realize that were it not for them, something else wonderful could never have happened.”

  “Hey, Aunt Nora,” I ventured, “I wonder if I might show you one more surprise?”

  She put a hand to her mouth to stifle a yawn. “I’m not sure I could handle another surprise.”

  “It’s nothing big. It’s outside.”

  She acquiesced with a tired smile and followed me into the kitchen to where my dirty shoes sat on the mat. I picked her windbreaker off the peg by the back door and helped her into it. The sun had nearly set, but there was enough golden light filtering through the distant trees to guide our steps across the muddy backyard. When we drew close to the little tree, I didn’t even have to explain.

  “Oh, Elizabeth.”

  “It’s a catalpa, just like the one William planted for you. I thought maybe you’d miss the other one.”

  “You are so thoughtful.” She stood with her arms crossed over her stomach and smiled.

  I put my arm around her and pulled her close. “So now you have your tree back.”

  “No. This one is yours. You planted it, and you’ll be the one to see it grow.” She turned to look at me head-on. “You know I want you to stay, don’t you?”

  “I told you I was staying. I’ll stay as long as you’ll have me.”

  “No, I mean stay here, when I’m gone. I want you to live in this house and keep its memories. I still have more to tell you, and there are more mysteries to solve. I never did get to ask Aunt Margaret some of my questions. She died just a few months after the riot. Did I ever tell you about the window in the attic?”

  I shook my head.

  “Now there’s a story for you.”

  The next Sunday morning I came downstairs to find Aunt Nora dressed to the nines in a pale pink suit, heels, and jaunty pillbox hat.

  “Wow. Did you make that outfit?”

  “Long, long ago. But I understand from my clients that vintage is in.”

  “I wish I could sew something like that.”

  “You will. You’re learning fast. We’ll get you onto lined jackets in no time. But now we better get on the road.”

  The parking lot at Mr. Rich’s enormous Baptist church was packed. I let Aunt Nora out at the front of the church, where her door was opened by a well-dressed black gentleman who offered his arm to her. Two more men stood a few feet away, holding the doors of the church open. I thought of the simple hut my parents were worshiping in with poor farmers and fishermen and smiled. What a strange and wonderful family we were all part of.

  I parked and hiked back to where Nora waited in the foyer with Linden, who then guided us through the river of beautiful people streaming into the sanctuary. I kept an eye trained on Nora, hoping that the carnival atmosphere wasn’t too much for her. It was nearly overwhelming me. I felt practically naked as one of very few white women, and the only woman in sight not wearing a hat. But she seemed calm and delighted to be shaking hundreds of hands and hugging strangers.

  The music was soul stirring and full of genuine joy. The minister spoke of redemption and rebirth. All around me I heard murmurings and shouts and affirmations, “all rights” and “uh-huhs” and “amens.” I felt as though I were making up for missing a year of church all in one morning. I also felt that I had something I needed to do.

  When Linden and Mr. Rich left to retrieve the cars, I placed Nora in the care of some women and stole away to a quiet corner of an empty classroom. I pulled out the phone I had silenced for the service and dialed Vic Sharpe’s number. After the third ring, I prepared to leave a voicemail. Then the ring
ing stopped.

  “Elizabeth?”

  “Thank you for taking my call.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  I took a breath. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry. For everything.”

  The line was silent.

  “Vic?”

  “I’m here. I—thank you, Elizabeth. I appreciate that.”

  I wasn’t sure what else to say.

  “Look,” he said, “maybe I should have gone about all this a little differently. I let my anger get the best of me. If you want your job back—”

  “I don’t.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. I have a better job now. A better life. I’m good.”

  “Okay. Well, let me know if there’s ever anything I can do for you.”

  Everything happens for a reason.

  “Vic, have you ever thought of investing in the arts?”

  “I’m listening.”

  Several minutes later, I met Nora at the lobby door.

  “You sure seem to be in good spirits,” she said.

  “I am.”

  I had much to be thankful for. I was also grateful that I had been wrong in my assessment of James Rich when I first saw him walking into the Lafayette Coney Island. He wasn’t wasting my time. He was there at exactly the time he needed to be.

  Maybe God was in control. Maybe there was a plan. And maybe, just maybe, he had written me in there somewhere too.

  The next morning, I sat down to another sewing class in Aunt Nora’s crowded workroom. Matthew smirked at me from the doorway. But his smug disapproval would not deter me. There was a house full of fabric waiting to become something useful, something beautiful, something that some young woman generations down the road would find, unfold with rapturous wonder, and use as her own doorway into the past.

  Epilogue

  Lapeer County, Some Time Later

  One hot August morning, much like the day I had first come to live in the old farmhouse, Aunt Nora didn’t get out of bed. I found her lying peacefully, unmoving, beneath Mary Balsam’s colorful crazy quilt, and I knew at once that she was gone. I pulled a chair over to her bedside, took her cold hand in mine, and wept as I never had before, much as anyone would weep over the loss of their best friend. I would miss her terribly, even the her she had become.

  Ours was an unusual friendship. The closer we got, the farther we drifted apart. The hints of confusion I had noticed when I’d first moved in had grown over the next year, until she forgot who I was. Strange snippets of long-ago conversations crossed in her mind with the one she was having at any given moment. It was hard at first to keep up, but eventually we settled into a rhythm and followed her rippling thoughts wherever they led.

  Sitting there at her side, I recalled the last odd chat we’d had just the night before. It had started with me updating her on a few clients who had detailed requests I couldn’t quite fulfill with my still-intermediate sewing skills. But it quickly devolved into something else.

  “I used to make beautiful clothes,” Nora said.

  “Yes, I know.”

  “I used to quilt. What ever happened to that yellow quilt?”

  “It’s at the foot of my bed. Do you want me to go get it?”

  “You know there’s a bed in this house that was made by an escaped slave.”

  “Really? Which one?”

  “I think it’s in the back now. They moved it there after Mary died.”

  “The bed in my room was Mary Balsam’s bed?”

  “I don’t know what room you’re talking about.”

  “I’m sleeping in the back bedroom. By the attic stairs.”

  She looked at me as though I had spoken in another language. “I don’t understand you. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”

  I let it go and hoped that maybe she’d bring it up again. It did no good to try to steer our conversations. It was like trying to steer a train.

  Now I would never have the chance to hear any more about it.

  I called Mr. Rich, and simple funeral arrangements were made. After a call to Tyrese’s friend in the legislature, I managed to get permission to have Nora buried in the backyard by the catalpa tree.

  When the guests had all gone and Tyrese had hugged and kissed me one last time, I shut the front door and wandered from room to room in the huge, empty house. In Nora’s bedroom, Matthew was lying on the bed.

  “You know you’re not supposed to be up here.” I picked him up. He twisted out of my grasp and ran off, leaving a clump of orange fur behind on the crazy quilt. I picked it up and then ran my hand over the embroidered designs, looking for more. Instead I found a large, hard bump. There, secured by thread at the end of a chain of stitches, was a lever lock key.

  The long-forgotten trunk in the attic flashed into my mind. Nora had hidden the key to the darkroom in a drawer. Had she hidden the key to the trunk in Mary’s quilt? Though it felt like I was slicing into the Mona Lisa, I snipped the threads that held the key and walked, trembling, up two flights of stairs into the attic.

  By the glow of a bare light bulb, I knelt before the trunk and slid the key into the lock. It turned.

  Inside, a rolled-up paper sat upon a green silk lining, awaiting discovery. The dried rubber band fell apart as I tried to remove it, and the paper was stiff. I unrolled it to reveal a large black-and-white print of the angriest man I’d ever seen. I thought of all the beautiful and poignant pictures I had seen as Linden and I collected the materials for the book of our great-uncle’s photography. In all of the prints and all of the negatives, I had never seen this one. Had William taken it? It certainly bore his distinctive mark. Why, out of all the amazing pictures he had taken, would someone keep this unpleasant one packed away for posterity?

  I searched the back for some notation of the subject, but it was blank. I’d have to see what Linden made of it, but the oversized coffee table book billed as The Definitive William Rich Collection and financed by Vic Sharpe would forever be incomplete.

  I set the print back in the trunk, bumping it in the process. The lid slammed shut, startling a mouse that scampered out of a hole, over my bare foot, and across the floor, where it disappeared. Strange. If a mouse had been in the trunk, I would have seen it. I lifted the lid again. No droppings, no stains, no shredded fabric. No mouse.

  I pushed my finger into a hole on the outside and wiggled it around. I couldn’t see anything moving on the inside of the trunk. I ran my fingers along the inside bottom of the trunk until I found a slight indentation just big enough to get a fingerhold. I pulled and the bottom came loose, revealing a large, shallow compartment filled with shredded paper.

  I picked at a piece of it. It looked very old. Then I saw slanted writing and a fragment that said Love, Geo.

  “No!” I cried aloud.

  How long had these letters been here, intact, before mice got to them? Had they been here when I moved in? Had Aunt Nora known about this secret compartment? Had she been able to read them before they were destroyed? I nearly started to cry as I sifted through the mess. It wasn’t fair. This had all been hidden away so that it would one day be found. And now it was gone.

  For one crazy moment I thought maybe I could work it all out, put the pieces back together. At the very same moment, I knew it would be impossible. Nevertheless, I scooped up the mouse’s nest and packed it gently into a large ball. This old house was finally ready to give up the rest of its secrets, and I was going to do whatever it took to preserve them. Because if I didn’t, no one would.

  Aunt Nora had been wrong when she said that history was written by the victors, for the victors in one generation may turn out to be the villains of the next. And the only way to get closer to the truth was to refuse to quit searching for it. All it took to lose one’s history was a single generation that didn’t take the time to learn it and pass it on. I would do my part to keep it alive.

  With the nest removed, I spied one more item in the botto
m of the secret compartment. The photograph was small, not much more than two by three inches. The heavy cardstock edges had been chewed by the cursed mouse, but the image was clear and haunting and incomprehensible. A light-skinned black boy of perhaps five or six years old looked into my eyes out of the distant past, seemingly pleading for someone to acknowledge him. To make him known. I flipped over the photograph. Written in fine script in ink that had faded to brown were the words our boy.

  I didn’t know who this boy was or how his photo had managed to escape destruction. But I did know one thing.

  He had blue eyes.

  Author’s Note and Acknowledgments

  It was 2012 when I first started thinking about the story that would become We Hope for Better Things. It was before a string of highly publicized deaths of African American men and boys at the hands of white police officers. It was before the murders of nine black worshipers in a Charleston church. It was before white nationalism was making national news—again.

  As I researched, wrote, revised, and sought publication for We Hope for Better Things for the next seven years, I was constantly reminded of its unfortunate timeliness. This novel was not written as a response to those events. It was written in the midst of them, born out of my own struggle to comprehend the scope, understand the roots, and empathize with the victims of racism in America. It was an attempt to reckon with something that could not be reconciled.

  I am well aware of the dangers of writing about such a subject. I am aware of the possibility that I have gotten something wrong. I am aware of the pitfalls of writing characters of color as a white woman. I have striven to faithfully and respectfully represent every character, whether white or black, male or female, protagonist or antagonist. I have done my best to avoid stereotypes and cultural appropriation. I have vetted the story with African American friends and been the grateful recipient of their critiques.