“Alright.” I stuck it into the ground and cleared some of the dirt from where she was making a hole, bending low enough so that the slide would hide me from view if Melinda happened to look out of the kitchen window. “Are you looking for something specific?”
“Not really,” she said slowly. “Gold would be nice – or candy.”
“Gold or candy, got it,” I said seriously. “Well, I'm sure we could find something if we dig far enough.”
I moved the plastic shovel away so that she could spear the ground with the trowel again, successfully spraying dirt in all directions as she went. As it sprayed over my khakis and her dress, however, she paid no mind.
“Which would you prefer?”
“Sorry?”
“Gold or candy?” she asked.
“Oh. Either's fine, really.”
“You don't have a preference?”
I smiled as the high-pitched note struck the air and sat back a bit, letting the shovel fall loosely in my hand as I watched her strike the ground again with the trowel.
“No, I'd be happy with either.”
“I think I'd prefer the gold. Only, Oliver says I won't find anything because I don't know where to look.”
“I think this is the perfect spot. It's where I'd hide treasure.”
“Is it?”
“Definitely.”
“What do you look for when you dig for treasure?”
Another spout of dirt flung up from the trowel and I barely managed to shut my eyes in time before it hit the back of my eyelids.
“Well, right now I'm looking for a key.”
“A key?” Ava asked, pausing to glance over at me. “What's it go to? A treasure chest?”
“Not exactly.” I brushed the soil from the front of my sweater and smiled at her. “It goes to a locked room.”
“And the room's filled with treasure?”
I paused as a slight pang of guilt came over me at the excitement in her eyes, but quickly pushed the feeling away.
“Yes.”
“Ooh – what kind of treasure?” she asked, her eyes widening until the full iris could be seen within the whites.
“It's a … it's sort of a … a secret message,” I said. I licked my lips as my mouth went dry. “I've come here to look for it, actually.”
“Really? It's here in Amsterdam?”
“Yeah, it's – it's the house, actually.”
“There's treasure inside the house?” Ava said, exclaiming so loudly that I glanced over to where her siblings were playing to ensure that they hadn't heard.
“Yeah, but it's – it's sort of a secret, Ava. Can you keep a secret?”
She pressed her lips together and nodded earnestly.
“Right,” I said. “Well, it's actually hidden in my father's office. Only … now he's locked the door, so I can't get to it.”
“Has he locked it because he doesn't want you to have it?”
“No, no, of course not,” I said, sensing that she wouldn't be as eager to help me if it meant going against my father's wishes. “He doesn't know about it.”
“Why don't you tell him?”
“Well, I ...” I bit my lip and scraped absentmindedly at the dirt as I tried to think up an answer, hardly thinking that it would do me any good to say that I didn't want to share the treasure with him. “Well, he doesn't really believe in … secret treasure. He – ah – thinks it's imaginary.”
Ava let her chin fall to her knees.
“That's what Oliver and Emily say, too.”
“Yeah.” I gave a well-placed sigh and mirrored her action, dropping my head to rest on my arm. “And I think if I could just find the message and show it to him then he'd believe me, but I just can't figure out where the key is.”
Ava's eyes lit up.
“I know where the key to Dan's office is,” she said.
“You do?”
“It's on his key-ring.”
“Oh, right.” I nodded, having realized that that was where it would be despite hoping that he might have tucked it away in his dresser. “Well, I don't think he'd really like me taking it from his key-ring.”
“I don't think he'd mind. Sometimes I take Mum's car keys to unlock the glove-compartment – that's where she keeps the caramels.”
“Yeah? It's just … I don't want to upset him. I haven't seen him in a while, so I don't know what he'd say if he caught me taking them.”
“I could get them for you, if you'd like,” she said.
“No, I don't want you to get into trouble, either.”
“I won't get in trouble – Dan never gets angry with me.” She smiled and sat back on the grass, dropping the trowel into the shallow pit as she did so. “I could take them from his pocket when he comes home and hangs up his suit jacket. He wouldn't notice as long as you put them back before the morning.”
I shifted my eyes over her face, the feeling of guilt returning as I took advantage of her naivety, but my desire to find the message from Jack overwhelmed the one to warn her to never trust someone like me.
“Thank you, Ava.”
She slipped it to me before dinner, pressing it into my hand as she crossed the threshold into the kitchen and circling about me to go to the table. I slid it into my pocket before sitting down in the sixth chair and kept my eyes downcast on my plate as the food looped around the table, taking a careful spoonful of spinach and a roll as they were passed to me but not looking up to meet my father's eyes. My stomach was turning more than ever, and the idea of trying to swallow anything that was being served only made the feeling worse, but I chewed at the bread even so in a last attempt to appease him.
“Did you have a good day today?” he said, looking at each of Melinda's children in turn.
They answered sporadically, vying to speak and overriding one another in order to do so, and despite the way that their voices clanked in my skull and brought out the headache that had been waiting just behind my eyes all afternoon, I was pleased to have the attention on something other than me. I shifted in my spot as the key jabbed into my leg, worried that if I so much as lifted my eyes that either he or Melinda would know that it was there.
I waited until the house had grown silent that night before even shifting on the mattress, staring vacantly at the outlines of dolls and children's toys lining the shelves and floor through the dark as I clutched the key firmly in my hand. When the only sound came from the air-conditioning turning on and off periodically, filling the room with a cold chill and then slipping back into stuffiness, I slowly swung my legs out of the bed and placed them upon the floor, letting my eyes focus on the path from the door to the staircase.
The office was the first one on the right, and in the darkness I had to feel for it along the wall. Squinting, I knelt down in front of it in order to unlock it without making too much noise and carefully swung the door open. It was a small room, mostly filled by a large writing desk made of dark wood that contrasted with the contemporary furniture in the rest of the house, and the surface of it was overtaken by a mess of papers. I stepped over to it carefully, avoiding stepping on any of the loose files stacked beside it on the floor, and slid between it and the chair to sit down.
My father wasn't as neurotic as Karl was, though he had always seemed rather neat when I was growing up. Looking at the papers and assortment of pens and notes scattered atop the surface now, though, I realized that he had only seemed that way because my mother had been so disorganized. There were half a dozen scribbled out post-it notes that he had failed to throw away, and there was a ring of tea staining one of the documents. The sight of it on the page irked me more than the picture of him and his new wife framed in the corner of the desk: he would have never consented to drink anything other than coffee for the entire time that he had been married to my mother.
I lifted a few of the papers to look beneath them, eyeing the business forms and transcripts to make sure that they bore no connection to me before moving on to the drawers. Opening the top one,
I shuffled through the household bills, looking idly at the expenses he extended to his new family, before moving on to the next one.
The folder labeled 'Enim' was in the very bottom drawer. I tugged it out from between the stacks of old work files and put it atop the desk to flip through it. Just as I had known he would, he had organized the statements concerning my withdrawal from Bickerby and admittance into the treatment facility by date. I continued to go through it, flipping more hastily as I grew impatient to find the mail that he had kept from me, but when I reached the end of the file it wasn't there.
“Fuck,” I muttered, shutting it and tossing it back to the drawer. The room was so cluttered that it would make finding anything impossible, and I forsook any attempt to be quiet as I began to search the rest of the drawers. He had so many folders that were overstuffed with bank statements and money transfers that it was a wonder he could ever get anything done, and I was for once relieved to have inherited my orderliness from Karl rather than from him.
I shut the last drawer to the desk and circled around it to get to the boxes stacked off to the side of the room. He had evidently not finished unpacking his belongings since getting married months before. As the familiar burning returned to my throat, I kicked aside a box filled with keepsakes that was blocking my path: it toppled over and smacked loudly across the floor. I could hear the sound of a bed creaking from overhead, but just as I considered sneaking back to my room and waiting until the morning to continue, the pile of mail came into my view.
It was half-hidden behind another stack of boxes, and I had to shove them over towards the bookshelf in order to get to it. Each envelope had already been opened and looked through, and the papers shoved back inside were crumpled from a lack of care. I scanned through a magazine sample before quickly tossing it aside and opening the bank statement that showed that the inheritance money from my mother’s death had been added to my account on the fifteenth of March months before. It was more than I had expected it to be and yet it didn't seem high enough, as though the number was some sort of statement as to how little her life had been worth.
I tossed aside an advertisement and an offer for a credit card before reaching for the final envelope. My hands shook as I peeled it open, but when I looked down, there was nothing more than an unremarkable flier tucked inside. A weight pressed itself against the base of my throat as I stared at it, and when I tried to swallow I found that I couldn't. I dropped it to the ground as a sudden emptiness came over me. Jack hadn't sent me anything after all.
“Enim?”
I startled and looked around. The door to the office had reopened and Melinda was staring in at me, a frown pulling down over her eyes. She squinted to look over to where I sat amongst the mess on the floor.
“What are you doing down here?”
Her voice was quizzical, though I could hear the accusation lying beneath it. I ran my tongue over my teeth as I thought of a way to answer her.
“I … I couldn't sleep.”
“So you came down here?”
In the silence that had worked its way between us, I listened intently for any sign that my father had awoken, as well. The house around us was thankfully quiet.
“Well, I … I was actually hoping to find that picture of me that Ava mentioned the other night. She said it was in here.”
“Oh.” She nodded, though I doubted whether she believed me. Stepping into the room, she looked over the boxes carefully before pulling one down and opening it up. “Here it is.”
The picture had been taken years beforehand at an event that I hardly remembered. In it, I was standing next to my mother beneath the bluish lights from a stage, our blonde hair turned greenish as it flooded over us, and the backdrop to a mystical place was visible behind me. It was the lake scenery from the opera Rusalka that I had adored so much. I had nearly forgotten that my father had waited for the opera house to clear so that I could see the stage closer up. I flipped the picture over and read the date that had been scribbled in the upper-hand corner: March 1999. I couldn't imagine what had enticed him to keep that one instead of any of the others that would have been perfectly suited to join the others on the mantel.
“Thanks,” I said, letting the hand holding it fall to my side. Melinda gave a cautious smile, her eyes still searching behind me for what I had really been doing.
“Yes, well, perhaps you should go back to bed.”
“Right,” I said. “Only, I'm not very tired.”
Her smile faltered at my tone, but she fought to keep it from falling into a frown. Pressing her hand to her throat as she cleared it, her mouth stretched back upwards.
“Of course.” She stepped around me to right the box that I had overturned and then reached down to scoop up the mail that I had littered about the floor. As she shuffled them back into a neat pile, the last one that I had opened was turned outwards towards me. “Well, if you'd like to stay up, you could watch a movie in the other room, or use the computer. I can show you where it is.”
The name and address on the envelope facing me was as unremarkable as I had initially thought, but the postal code in the corner was anything but. My eyes fixated on the part of it that wasn't covered by her fingers and my heartbeat hastened beneath my sweater: it had been sent from France.
“I'm fine in here,” I said slowly.
“Well, I don't think Dan would like you … looking around in here. He's very private.”
My eyes snapped back to hers.
“Well, I'm his son. We don't really keep things from one another.” I held my hand out. “Can I have my mail back, please?”
She tucked it closer to her.
“I think you should ask your father before going through his things.”
“They're not his, they're mine.”
“But they were sent to him, so I think you ought to ask his permission.”
She was using a tone that I wasn't familiar with: my mother had never been one to scold me. Perhaps it worked well on her own children, but regardless of the rings circling around her finger, it had no impact on me.
“Do you know why it was sent to him?” I asked her. The familiar contempt returned to me the longer that we stood together, and the idea that my father referred to her by the same nickname only spurred me on. “He didn't tell you, did he? Why he gets my mail?”
“I … hardly think it matters, Enim. It's between the two of you.”
“You're not curious?” I said. “Don't you wonder why he doesn't want to talk about it?”
“I know it's a very painful subject for him,” Melinda said firmly. “It's not my right to press him about it.”
“Right, you're just his second wife. Nevermind about the first one.”
She turned her cheeks in as she surveyed me, suddenly crossing her arms as though she had just noticed how cold the room had grown; the mail was crushed beneath them.
“I think you should go back to bed, Enim, and I think you should speak to your father about this in the morning.”
“I don't really sleep, though,” I said. “It's part of the illness.”
“I … Well, like I said, you could read or use the computer, or –”
“How'd he tell you she died?” I said, cutting through her sentence. “What'd he say it was? Cancer? An accident? Complications from some disease?”
Melinda grew quiet, her mouth just a thin line.
“He just didn't say anything?” I asked. I was readying myself to tell her everything that my father had never wanted her to know, to spill each and every one of his secrets and plaster them to the walls so that his new family could see exactly what the old one had really been like, turning their sympathies into disdain at what type of husband and father he had really been. “I guess that makes it easier for him – he doesn't have to keep up with the details of his lies. What'd he tell you happened to me? That I had cancer, too? That I fell off a cliff and hurt my leg? Or that I was horribly ill, but he saw no reason to stay in New England with me when he
could be living happily here with you, just like he did with my mother –”
“He told me that you died.”
She looked at me firmly, but her eyes quivered in their sockets so much that she might have been looking at anything in the room at all, and when she spoke again her voice was no more even.
“He told me that you were insane, and that you killed that doctor when you tried to kill yourself,” she whispered. Her voice was unspeakably quiet but it shook the room as though the walls had caved in around us. Even in the darkness I could see the white of her skin shaking as her jaw trembled, and her hands clutched at her arms to keep them still, crushing the envelopes further between her fingers. “He said – he said when he went to see you, it was terrible: that he didn't recognize you, and that you died from your injuries a week later.”
Her tongue darted out to lick her lips, which had evidently gone as dry as mine.
“Do you know how surprised I was to see you on my doorstep?” she asked. “I thought you must have been a ghost. I can't even tell you what I thought – not because your death wasn't true – I could handle that – but because I knew that the rest of it is.”
Her entire form was shaking, though mine seemed to have frozen in place. I could see the reflection of my blue sweater in the blacks of her eyes, but I still couldn't imagine what she saw in front of her.
“Imagine what I thought when I saw you there – when I recognized you – and had to invite you inside, and sit with you through dinner, and let you sleep in my daughter's room,” she continued, trying to keep her voice low, though the undertone cracked against the air. “You're right: I don't know what happened to your mother, and I don't know what happened to you, but I do know that any father who would rather say that his only son is dead rather than speak the truth must have an incredibly good reason to do so.” A strangled sound came from her throat. “Get out of this room.”
“Give me my mail.”
She brought her hand back in an attempt to keep it out of my reach, but I snatched it before she could do so and yanked it back. As it slid from between her clenched fingers, she stumbled back with a look of uncertain surprise before turning and leaving the room. I could hear her footsteps on the stairs as she went to wake my father, and I quickly shoved the pamphlet into my pocket before limping out of the room after her and turning in the other direction to get to the front door.
Song to the Moon (Damnatio Memoriae Book 2) Page 12