by Jo Watson
“Ha ha—” he started, and then stopped when Emelia came bursting into the room.
The smell was instant. The warm, sweet, sticky smell of freshly baked goods. It made my mouth water.
“Oooh, what did you bake, babe?” Ash asked.
“Chocolate croissants,” she said, putting the tray down on one of the tables.
“God—did I mention how much I love you?” Ash reached out and took one.
“I swear, if I wasn’t a baker, you wouldn’t have asked me to marry you,” Emelia replied playfully.
“Sorry, what?” Mike looked flabbergasted.
“Well, we were going to tell you this morning, but you woke us up so early and forced us down into this room and have been talking non-stop since we got here,” Ash said to her brother.
“You guys got engaged last night?” I asked.
They both smiled at me. Beamed. And then Ash slipped her arm around Emelia. “After reading that letter . . . It really made us think about what was important in life and what we wanted. And we want to be together, forever. Those letters inspired us.” She leaned over and kissed her fiancée, and I immediately looked at Mike.
“Really?” Mike asked, with a smile that lit up his green eyes.
Ash nodded as Mike walked up to them and pulled them both into a massive hug.
I felt tears in my eyes again. Not sad ones, this time.
“I guess we have you to thank for this, then—bringing the letters into our life, like that.” Ash pulled me into a hug.
I wrapped one arm around her, tentatively. “I didn’t do anything,” I whispered, full of emotion, and then I wrapped my other arm around her and gave myself over to the hug. Something I don’t do very often.
“You did,” she said, pulling away and smiling at me. “Trust me. You’ve done more than you think.” She said this in a strange tone, and I was just about to ask her what she meant, when she took me by the hand and pulled me towards the food. “Come, you need sustenance,” she said. “I’m sure my brother has big plans for all of us today!”
CHAPTER 55
We parked the car outside a very different-looking town hall. Gone were all the cat cars and cat enthusiasts; instead, it was empty. We’d agreed to divide and conquer today. Ash and Emelia would go upstairs into the attic and search through old photo albums and anything else that was up there, while Mike and I checked out the room under the stage. And, if we found nothing there, we’d check out the library. The tension between us on the short drive had been tangible, like a heavy fog hanging in the air between us. Cold and clammy. We hadn’t said a word to each other, other than me congratulating him on his sister’s engagement, to which I’d really only gotten a half-hearted grunt in response.
“Let’s go.” He jumped out the car and I followed behind him.
We walked into the empty hall. The sound of our feet on the wooden floorboards bounced off the high ceiling and seemed to ricochet off the walls, creating a kind of ominous movie soundtrack. I could almost imagine us as characters from an Indiana Jones film, creeping towards some hidden treasure or other. We reached the stage and stopped. Mike turned to me and made brief eye contact, then looked away.
“Lead the way,” he said, pointing with the crowbar that he’d brought with us.
“Okay.” I got down on my hands and knees and shuffled under the stage, making my way past all the discarded props again. I crawled all the way to the back, to where the sealed door was, and stopped. I turned and looked over my shoulder. Mike was following me on his hands and knees, crouched low, trying to fit under the stage without bashing his head.
“Here.” I pointed at the door and Mike crawled up next to me. As he did, his body brushed mine, and I became hyperaware of his presence.
“Someone really didn’t want anyone to go in, now, did they?” He took the crowbar and slid it under one of the wooden beams that was keeping the thing shut. He gave a large tug and the first beam popped off with a crunching sound as the wood split and splintered. He made quick work of the next one, and the next. He was strong, after all; anyone who could pick me up the way he had the other night was . . .
I shook my head. I really couldn’t afford to be thinking like that again—thinking about that night together.
“You know,” he started. I could hear he was slightly out of breath from the physical exertion. “I don’t think I’ve ever broken into anything before.”
“I don’t think it’s breaking in, if you phone ahead and ask for permission to do it,” I said, referring to the call he’d made to the caretaker of the hall. “What did you say we were doing here, anyway?” I asked.
He looked over his shoulder at me briefly and then went back to cracking the fourth piece of wood. “I didn’t need to say anything; he owed me a favor.”
“Really?” I asked.
“I caught his sixteen-year-old son and some of his friends drinking beer on the beach, a month or so ago.”
“Ooooh! I see,” I said.
“I could have made a bigger deal of it, but I let it slide—with a very firm warning.” He stopped what he was doing for a second, as if thinking about something. “I remember what it was like to be that age.”
“I bet you do,” I said, with a smile. “According to Mrs. Devereux, you were a terror.”
He looked over his shoulder at me again and then stopped what he was doing. “And you?” he asked. “I bet you were an absolute horror as a teenager. I bet you were always in trouble, if your current behavior is anything to go by.”
I thought about the answer to that question for a while. It was a complicated one for me. “I was what I needed to be at the time,” I said thoughtfully.
“What does that mean?” he asked.
“I was never in one place enough to become who I was meant to be, I guess. If the people I was staying with were into sport, then I was into sport. If they were into church, then I was, too. When I was with one set of cousins, I dressed in black and listened to metal, because they did. When I was staying with my other cousins, I was into cycling. Even though I hated it. I was what the situation called for me to be.” I sat there, thinking about it for a while. Thinking about being this little lost person, moving from place to place and never really fitting in.
“Why couldn’t you just be yourself?” he asked.
The question caught me off guard. “Um . . . I . . . I don’t know,” I stuttered. “That’s a good question. I guess I don’t know.” Only, I think I did know the answer. I couldn’t “be myself” because “myself” clearly hadn’t been quite good enough.
He nodded at me. He looked like he was going to say something to me, but then stopped himself and pulled the last piece of wood off.
CHAPTER 56
The small room under the stage was exactly as I’d imagined it. It was physically empty, but, at the same time, it was full. It was so full of history and secrets and sweet nothings whispered that you could almost feel it. There was something strangely magical about this little room under the stage and the secrets it held—the hopes, the dreams.
“There’s nothing here,” Mike said, once he’d walked around the small space.
“There is,” I replied, looking up at the dusty beams of the ceiling that were covered in so many spider webs that they looked like a Halloween prop.
Mike looked up. “Where?” he asked, his eyes seeking out the place that mine were seeing.
“There’s nothing here physically, but can’t you feel it?” I knew how I must have sounded, a little woo-woo and esoteric, but I really could feel it. It was as if an energy had been caught in this room, years ago.
“Uh, I think you might have inhaled some hallucinogenic spores from the dust, because there’s nothing in this room,” he grumbled.
I smiled at him. “You could be right, actually. Did you know that the pages of really old books can be covered in fungi that have hallucinogenic properties? You can literally get high from sniffing the pages of an old book.”
He c
huckled. It was small, but it was like music to my ears. I hadn’t heard him laugh in what felt like forever. And it was everything.
“They also think hallucinogenic fungi are responsible for most reports of ghost sightings in old houses,” I added.
“I thought I saw a ghost once,” he said. “I was about eight. I was staying over in Sugar Manor when it happened, actually.”
“What did you see?” I asked, intrigued.
“Well, I was walking up the stairs and I heard a creak behind me, as if someone was following me, and when I swung around, I thought I saw a flash of something white, as if something flew away quickly.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“Screamed. Cried. Slept with Mom and Dad,” he said.
“And you think it was a ghost?” I pressed.
He shook his head. “Nah. Probably just an eight-year-old’s imagination. Also, my friend had stolen his parents’ VHS copy of It and we had all watched it, and it was fucking terrifying.”
“Yup, that will do it. God, I was terrified of clowns, after that film.” I cringed. “I can’t even think of a clown without feeling freaked out.” I looked around the room again. “Crap, and this place is rather reminiscent of a sewer, and now I’m just expecting to see a red balloon come creeping out of the dark corners and—”
I screamed when I felt it and saw it. The furious flurry of something black passed my face, the wind on my cheek and the loud screech in my ear.
“Oh my God, oh my God! What the hell is that?” I flapped my arms around and almost fell to the ground. And then it came again, and again, and . . . “What are they?” I yelled, running in circles as the things whizzed past me. “Are they bats? Are they bats?” I was quite frantic now.
“It’s okay. They’re not going to fly into your hair,” I heard Mike say. But the air around us was full of them, the small room was alive with frantic flapping.
“Oh my God. Oh my God,” I squealed, running around in small circles, covering my face with my hands so nothing would fly into it. I screamed when I felt the swish of a wing by my arm, so close I could feel the rush of air against my skin. And then another wing grazed one of my hands. By this stage, I was quite hysterical. All I could think of were hundreds of bats flapping about in my hair, twisting it into knots, and me having to cut the flapping creatures out in chunks.
Suddenly, I felt two arms around my waist. And then I felt myself being pulled down. The sound in the small room was ear-shattering, filled with the screeching of what felt like a million bats.
I fell to the floor. Not hard, though; something cushioned my blow, something soft and warm and . . . I opened my eyes and looked. My head was on Mike’s chest, his big hands were cradling me towards him.
“Ssshhhh,” he whispered. “Let’s just stay down until they settle.”
His hand across my cheek . . . warm. His hand around my back . . . protective. His smell . . . intoxicating. His soft voice . . . calming. I wrapped my arm around him, across his big chest, and I closed my eyes tightly and waited for the last of the bats to disappear. It took a while until the room was completely silent once more, until they’d flown out of some unseen hole, or flown back to their little devil perches. And, when it was all over, I opened my eyes, tilted my head and looked at him. I could see his eyes were open, scanning the ceiling. And then, slowly, his head began to tilt down. His lips arrived in my field of vision first, followed by his nose and then his eyes and then . . .
Down here with you in this room, Edith, I can pretend I know what it would be like to live together. Sometimes, I imagine this is our house. I can almost see it . . . Me, coming home from work. You’re waiting for me, because you’ve been painting all day, because you’re a great artist and we bought a small house that has a cottage out back that you turned into your studio. The windows are big, so you can watch our children playing in the garden after school while you paint your masterpieces. And, when I come home, you’re all there to open the door for me. My wife, and my beautiful children. That’s what this room is like for me—it’s our imaginary home, the one we’ll probably never get to have. But when I lie here with you on my chest, looking up at me, for a few blissful seconds it’s real. And when I look into your eyes and you into mine, I know I have come home. To you. You are my home, even if we do not have four walls of our own.
You, me, forever.
CHAPTER 57
I quickly sat up, turned my back to him and straightened my hair anxiously. The moment was officially over—he’d made that very clear when he suddenly looked away and started sitting up, pushing me off him. I tucked my messy hair behind my ears, and gathered myself towards myself, as my grandmother used to say. I’d never fully understood that expression as a child, but, as I’d gotten older, it made more sense to me. On many occasions, I’d had to gather together the scattered Becca debris, the little chunks of myself that had become loose and dispersed themselves in a usually very disorderly fashion. I’d had to pick all those pieces up and then click them back into place, where they belonged.
“So—” Mike stood up—“what are we looking for?”
I climbed to my feet and dusted myself off. My legs and back were covered in spider webs and dust—and, I suspected, some bat droppings, too. Wait—don’t bats carry rabies?
“We thought that maybe she’d stashed her favorite book here,” I replied.
I felt a little lost, stranded between this moment and the one that we’d just shared, staring deep into each other’s eyes while my head had been on his chest and my mind was remembering moments from the letters. But Mike didn’t look lost in any moment, he was busy walking the perimeter of this small room. He walked it in a very police-ish manner, running his hand over the stone walls.
“Looking for a hidden compartment?” I asked.
“I don’t know what I’m looking for. This place seems totally empty.” He stopped walking the perimeter and turned around, surveying the room from a different angle.
“I’m sure whoever closed it up cleared everything out,” I said. “The chance of finding something in this room, after all these years, does seem incredibly small.”
“Don’t be so sure about that,” Mike said, looking up at one of the beams on the ceiling.
I looked up, too, but couldn’t see anything. “What?” I asked.
“This.” He reached up and pulled something down.
I moved closer. “What is it?” I looked at the rectangular object wrapped in cloth and my heart started to beat a little faster. I had this strange, uncanny feeling that I knew what it was. And I couldn’t wait to see it. I pulled it from Mike’s hands and, without a second’s hesitation, unwrapped it, and, when I did, I gasped.
After all this time, I was finally looking at him. His voice had lived in my head for days, now, and I felt as if I’d gotten to know him. But seeing him for the first time brought tears to my eyes. I ran my hand over the edges of the burnt canvas. This must have been the only painting left of him. And, like the diary, it had been fished out of the fire. I gently wiped the dust off the picture with my palm.
“It’s him,” I said quietly, in absolute awe. “The man who wrote the letters.”
I looked into his eyes first, and I was overcome with this feeling that I knew him. I had seen these very eyes in my dreams at night, and imagined them reflected in his letters. They were big and brown, and she’d painted them perfectly, capturing what can only be described as a bright spark, right in the center of them. His eyes were smiling, as was his mouth. It was open, mid-laugh, as if the artist and her subject had just shared a joke. His cheeks were indented with big dimples and his face was dotted with just a tiny amount of stubble. And then there was the color of his skin, the thing that had become absolutely everything. I traced my finger over his cheek; the light caramel color of his skin was almost golden because of the warm light the picture had been painted in.
So much attention to detail had been frozen on to this canvas: the tiny freckles that dotted
his skin, the laugh lines in the corners of his eyes, the deep lines etched into his forehead, the individual hairs of his eyebrows. The painting was so realistic that, from far away, one might have thought it a photo. But, on closer inspection, one could see the small, individual brush strokes that made up the face. Each one vital and important in its own way, capturing something of the subject. His light, his laughter, his spirit, a little piece of his soul. Captured, mixed into the colors, painted in a million strokes and saved for posterity.
I looked at the old cloth that the painting had come out of and wanted to weep. This painting should not have been hidden behind a dusty ceiling beam. This painting was created with more love than I’d ever seen, and, as such, should have been hanging proudly on a wall for all to see, as a celebration. People should stand in lines to see this painting, to look into the eyes of someone who was truly loved, deeply, with every breath and every beat . . . Now, how many people can truly say that they know what that’s like? To love against all odds. To love with courage and strength when the world is trying to pull you apart.
“We should take this home and hang it on the wall,” Mike said, next to me, as if he’d been inside my head, thinking the same thoughts that I had been. “This deserves to be seen.”
I nodded. I couldn’t open my mouth to speak, because so many emotions were suffocating me right now. Besides, what words could I use, in a moment like this? It seemed too big and too momentous for words. Words didn’t do it justice, as I looked at him on the canvas.
We hadn’t found what we thought we were looking for, but we’d found everything.
CHAPTER 58
After not finding anything relating to her favorite book, Pride and Prejudice, in the room, we headed to the library. Not that I had any idea what we were looking for there. We both agreed there was no way her letters would be stashed inside a copy of the book, just sitting on a shelf, waiting to be found. I held the painting in my hands as we drove; I hadn’t been able to look away from it since finding it.