Forever, Plus One

by Sophie Love

  “I’d better go,” Daniel said, handing her the plate of toast. “There’s so much to get done. Will you be okay?”

  Emily nodded and took the plate from him. “I’ll be fine. I’ve got my special helper here.” She smiled at Chantelle.

  Daniel ruffled the child’s hair. “Take good care of Mommy. I’m just right next door if you need me.”

  He left quickly, in a blur. Emily heard the sound of the front door clicking shut then began to eat her breakfast in the smallest bites imaginable.

  “Did Matthew make you anything for breakfast this morning?” Emily asked Chantelle.

  The little girl put down her pink pen and looked up. She nodded.

  “I had cereal,” she said.

  There was a despondency in her tone, Emily noted. Something was wrong.

  “Honey, you don’t need to worry about me,” she said. “It’s completely normal to be sick when you’re pregnant.”

  “It’s not that,” Chantelle replied. She turned her attention back down to the elephant in her coloring book and carried on turning it pink.

  “What is it?” Emily asked softly, wondering if Suzanna and Wesley’s news had stirred some latent fears to surface in the child. “You know you can tell me anything.”

  Chantelle chewed her lip. Then she said, “It’s just that I prayed every night for Papa Roy to FaceTime us and he never did.”

  Emily felt terrible for the child. She hadn’t yet had a chance to get used to being disappointed by Roy in the same way Emily had. Chantelle hadn’t been let down by him yet; this was the first time. It must be bitterly upsetting for her.

  And Emily herself was worried about her father. She hadn’t received a response to the letter she’d sent, and wondered whether it had gotten lost in the mail. Or maybe Roy had read the news of her pregnancy and freaked out. Maybe he was out of touch again? Maybe something had happened to him? The more she thought about it, the more upset she felt. But she couldn’t let Chantelle see her worry, so she smiled.

  “Papa Roy still doesn’t have a phone,” she explained. “And it takes a really long time for letters to reach England. They have to cross the ocean, after all.”

  “But are we still going to have a vacation with him?” Chantelle asked, looking perturbed.

  “Of course!” Emily said brightly, though she wasn’t sure herself and was in fact rather worried that the promised vacation wouldn’t happen at all.

  Chantelle didn’t look convinced either. Emily decided that she needed a distraction.

  “Are you excited about the Fourth of July celebrations tonight?” she asked. “We’re having a big party at the inn.”

  “I forgot!” Chantelle exclaimed. “I still need to put up my decorations. It’s going to be sparkly stars this year and shiny streamers.”

  “Sounds wonderful,” Emily said. Chantelle’s creative decorations of the inn were one of her favorite things. “When do you want to start?”

  “Later,” Chantelle said with a shrug. She went back to her coloring.

  Emily realized that the distraction technique had not worked. She thought more creatively.

  “I was thinking of fixing up the baby’s room today. Do you want to help?”

  This time, Chantelle couldn’t contain her excitement. She dropped her pen, immediately done with coloring the elephant on her page though it was only halfway completed.

  “Yes, yes, yes!” she cried.

  Emily beamed. “Come on then. Let’s get started.”

  They went upstairs and along the hall to the room they’d decided would be changed from a guest room to the new baby’s nursery. Daniel had already moved the furniture out, selling some to Rico and repurposing other bits at Jack Cooper’s to sell in the future. Inside there were now only two things; Amy’s Scandinavian-style nursing chair, and Daniel’s hand-crafted crib.

  “Daddy made this,” Emily told Chantelle. “Look.” She pushed it and the cribbed rocked back and forth.

  “That’s clever,” Chantelle said, beaming with pride.

  They got to work stripping the wallpaper and pulling up the carpet. Emily had decided to get a charcoal shag rug to match the nursing stool and to put in a cream-colored carpet beneath it. She didn’t want the room to echo and risk having her crying baby wake up the guests!

  Removing the wallpaper was a tedious job and Emily half wished she’d hired someone else to do it. But she also thought it was a good bonding exercise for her and Chantelle, and Daniel when he had the time. This way it felt like they were all involved with the baby, and would all get a sense of accomplishment.

  Chantelle was busy scratching paper off the wall with a putty knife. She was wearing a very serious expression as she worked. Emily smiled to herself, proud of how mature Chantelle had become recently.

  “Do you think Sheila will have had her baby by now?” Chantelle asked Emily.

  There it was, Emily thought, the surfacing of Chantelle’s concerns that she’d worried about. Suzanna’s baby news must have reminded the little girl of Sheila’s pregnancy because she’d learned about them both during the same period of time.

  But Emily wasn’t sure what to tell her. Because Chantelle had never shown her the content of Sheila’s letter all those months ago there was no way of knowing for sure how far along she’d been when she’d broken the news initially. She’d sported a neat bump at the adoption proceedings, which could have indicated anything from a large four-month to a small six-month. If it had been closer to six months, it was certainly likely that she’d had the child by now.

  “She might have,” Emily said. “If not, it will be very soon.”

  Chantelle nodded and went back to scraping.

  “How do you feel about that?” Emily asked, cautiously.

  “I don’t know,” Chantelle confessed. “I thought I would feel sad. But now I have a different baby brother or sister on the way so I don’t think I really mind. It’s not like I want to be Sheila’s daughter anymore anyway so there’s no way I’d get to play with her baby.”

  Emily was glad that Chantelle could take such a mature attitude to the whole thing, though she hoped Chantelle might soften as she grew older about cutting Sheila out of her life completely. Emily knew that family relationships could be strained, trying, and damaging at times, but she still kept minimal contact with her own mother because she knew she’d feel significantly worse if she didn’t. They had until Chantelle reached eleven before anything would happen with regards to her having contact with Sheila, so there was plenty of time for Chantelle to digest the situation and change her mind.

  Just then, Emily heard some banging noises coming from outside. She looked out the window and saw that several work vans had arrived next door while they’d been working on the nursery, and were now unloading crates of goods into Trevor’s house. There were also several people with huge spades in Trevor’s yard.

  “Come and look, Chantelle,” she called to the girl. “They’re starting the landscaping work.”

  Chantelle rushed over to the window and watched with bated breath as the diggers took down the fences between the two houses, effectively doubling the size of the inn’s grounds.

  They watched together as the fence came down completely, along with the large trees that Trevor had planted years ago to stop his neighbors snooping on him. Then the diggers started bringing up mounds of soil, landscaping the garden in preparation for Raj’s final work. As they watched, Emily noticed the crew stop and crowd around something.

  “What are they doing?” Chantelle asked.

  “It looks like they’ve found something in the dirt,” she said.

  One of the crew turned then and looked up at the window where they were standing. He waved them down.

  “I wonder what it could be,” Emily said, filled with intrigue, as she and Chantelle left the room.

  They trotted down the stairs and out onto the lawns, then hurried across to the crew. When they got there, they saw Daniel exiting the outhouse as well, approa
ching the crowd with a curious expression.

  “What have you found?” Emily asked the workman who was standing in a large hole.

  He looked up. “It’s a tin box,” he said. He managed to wedge it out of the soil and handed it up to Emily.

  She took the tin in her hands, turning it over. It was rather large, perhaps an old cookie assortment tin. As she wiped the dirt from it, she recognized the faded design beneath, of a Victorian lady sharing a cup of tea with friends at a bistro table. The tin had been Roy’s, one of a myriad amongst his collection of trinkets. As she regarded it, a memory was sparked in her mind, of her father giving her and Charlotte the tin one day. But that was as much as her mind could recall.

  “Is it a time capsule?” she said with a gasp, shaking it gently and hearing it rattle. She felt a surge of emotion as she tried to prize open the lid with her fingertips only to discover it was stuck fast.

  “Here,” Daniel said, gesturing for it.

  She handed it to him.

  “Careful,” she said. “Don’t damage it.”

  Daniel tried, too, to open the tin but it was stuck. “Let’s go inside and use something to pry it open.”

  They all went inside the inn and into the living room. Chantelle watched with excitement as Daniel fetched his flat-head screwdriver from his toolbox and began to prize the lid open.

  Finally it popped off and clattered to the floor. Emily winced. Daniel looked up at Emily with a grimace. “Sorry.”

  Chantelle grabbed the lid. “It’s okay. Not damaged or anything.” She handed it to Emily.

  “So?” Emily asked Daniel. She bit her lip, feeling apprehensive at the thought of seeing what was inside.

  “You were right,” he confirmed with the nod of his head. “It looks like a time capsule.”

  He held it up to Emily.

  She took it in her hands delicately, cradling it, knowing that there was only one person who could have buried it: Charlotte. Memories returned to her as she looked at all the little items inside, some damaged by water, but most remarkably intact. Small plastic toys, trading cards, and drawings. Emily saw a handwritten note and pulled it out. She recognized Charlotte’s childish scrawl instantly.

  When I grow up I want to be a doctor. I want to live in a house by the beach like my daddy, but in a lighthouse, not a normal house, and my big sister Emily can live there too. We’ll have five cats and a turtle. There will be chickens in the garden so we can eat eggs every day.

  Tears sprung into Emily’s eyes. She folded the paper away, holding it against her heart.

  “What did it say, Mommy?” Chantelle asked.

  Emily looked tearfully at the child, her mind conjuring the image of Charlotte in her face more strongly than ever. “It’s a letter my little sister wrote about what she wanted to do when she grew up.” A tear trickled down her cheek. “But she never got to grow up.”

  Chantelle touched her arm lightly. “Why don’t you tell me and Daddy about her? That’s what Gail says to do, when you miss people. To think of some happy memories about them. That way they don’t feel so far away.”

  Emily smiled, touched by Chantelle’s words, by the fact she wanted to cheer Emily up and take away her tears. “Okay,” Emily began. “Charlotte loved animals. And drawing. She was very creative. She loved to party, to decorate the house and make cards.”

  As Emily spoke, she realized how she could just as readily be describing Chantelle. The similarities between her sister and the young girl were striking, almost eerie.

  “What animal was her favorite?” Chantelle asked, her expression conveying to Emily genuine interest in Charlotte. It occurred to Emily then that she’d never really spoken at length about Charlotte to Chantelle. But the child was clearly curious about the aunt she’d never get to know.

  “Well, she loved dogs,” Emily said, think of Persephone, Toni’s golden Labrador that Charlotte had adored. “But I don’t know if they were her favorite animal.”

  Chantelle looked up at Emily with her big blue eyes, something glittering behind them that made her look suddenly older than her years. “I wonder if it was turtles,” she said. “Or cats?”

  Emily’s breath caught. She glanced briefly at Charlotte’s letter, at the mention of turtles and cats. She herself had no memory of Charlotte being fond of turtles or cats so there was no way she’d mentioned it in passing. Chantelle must have made a lucky guess, she told herself in an attempt to quell the spooky sensation tingling up her spine.

  “Maybe,” Emily said, her voice thinning.

  “What else was she like?” Chantelle quizzed Emily.

  “I don’t remember too well anymore,” Emily explained, feeling a little sad at the fading memories, at the ones lost forever. “She had a wonderful imagination. She liked to dress up and play make-believe games.”

  “Like pirates?” Chantelle asked. “Hunting for treasure?”

  A jolt hit Emily then as she recalled the treasure chest she’d found in the attic when she’d first come to the house. It had sparked a memory in her of the imaginative games the two had played together in their youth. Chantelle must have found the treasure chest, Emily told herself sternly. There was no other explanation for it… was there?

  The tingles in her spine grew stronger and stronger. She’d felt Charlotte’s presence in the house before, her spirit watching over. Was she here now?

  She looked at Daniel. He seemed to be in his own world, completely occupied with work-related documents, forms, and letters that he was studying intently. He wasn’t paying any attention to them at all. It was as if Emily and Chantelle were existing within a protective bubble, just the two of them, the outside world fading to nothing.

  “Yes,” Emily replied. Her voice was becoming a whisper. “Like pirates.”

  She looked into Chantelle’s eyes and saw that same flicker behind them; of knowing, of deeper understanding. Was it Charlotte?

  “Following treasure maps,” Chantelle said. “Steering the boat through storms at sea.”

  Emily could hardly catch her breath. Chantelle wasn’t asking questions anymore. It felt more like she was telling Emily how it was, like she was recalling a memory rather than guessing at one.

  “A stuffed parrot companion,” Chantelle continued. “Peg legs made of wood.”

  As she spoke, it felt as if she was adding to Emily’s memories, bringing to the forefront things she had forgotten. The stuffed toy bird they would wrestle over—not a parrot but a toucan, though it was the closest thing they had available. And peg legs they would try and fail to tie to their knees, usually dissolving in laughter at their attempts to walk.

  A chill swept through Emily’s entire body. “Maybe we should put this away,” she said, motioning to put the lid back on the tin. She was getting too freaked out.

  “But we’ve hardly looked inside yet,” Chantelle said.

  Emily faltered. She couldn’t be certain whether Charlotte’s spirit was with them but she could definitely feel something, and it compelled her to continue looking through the contents of the tin.

  There were more toys, some cassette tapes, a wilted daisy chain that disintegrated when Emily touched it. Then she found more paper. Another letter. She opened it up.

  This is the first box but not the last box. If you want to find the next one you will need to swim!

  Emily frowned and handed it to Chantelle. “It’s a riddle,” she said, thinking instantly of their father. This was just like him. Had Charlotte been inspired by Roy? Or helped by him to lay a treasure hunt of time capsules? “A clue to another box.”

  “How exciting!” Chantelle exclaimed.

  Emily looked at her and saw the child once again, not Charlotte, nor that knowing look that had lingered behind her eyes. She just looked like an exuberant kid, excited at the prospect of a time capsule treasure hunt. Even Daniel, sitting on the couch, seemed to have suddenly returned to the present. The eerie moment was over, leaving Emily with a strange feeling in her chest.


  “Do you think there’s another box at the beach?” Chantelle asked Emily. “That’s where people swim.”

  Emily shrugged. “I have no idea. But if it is, there’s a chance we won’t ever find it. The beach is very big.”

  “We can’t give up!” Chantelle exclaimed. “We’ll buy a metal detector to help us search the beach.”

  Emily loved the girl’s enthusiasm for the project, but felt in her heart that they would never find the next capsule. The clue could easily be directing them to one of the islands off the coast of Maine, and Daniel had told her there were thousands of them. They’d never find it!

  “That’s a lovely idea,” Emily said, agreeing with Chantelle. She didn’t want to dash her hopes. Plus, it warmed her heart to know that her daughter cared so much about Charlotte.

  They put everything back in the tin. It had been a wonderful discovery and Emily knew she would treasure it forever, even if they never found the next capsule. But her heart felt heavy at the same time. Feeling Charlotte’s spirit had unsettled her, and looking through the tin that she’d once so diligently filled made her absence feel suddenly bigger.

  Just then, she felt Chantelle’s arms wrap around her waist. She hugged the girl, feeling comforted by her presence, consoled by her.

  “I think Mommy needs cheering up,” Chantelle whispered loudly to Daniel.

  He was watching them patiently. Emily looked at him and smiled her pride at how caring and sweet their daughter was.

  “What do you think we should do to cheer Mommy up?” Daniel replied in an equally loud whisper.

  “I think there’s supposed to be a fair down on the beach for the Fourth of July,” Chantelle said. “We could go and see what it’s like. Yvonne said she would be there.”

  “I think that’s a very good idea,” Daniel said. “Why don’t you ask Mommy?”

  Emily pretended she hadn’t heard a word of their whispered conversation when Chantelle drew out of the hug and announced, “Mommy, I have an idea.”