What's Left Unsaid

by Emily Bleeker

  Momma kissed each of our heads and said she loved us and then weakly passed my brother to my daddy. When he took William, Momma traced Daddy’s thick, calloused fingers.

  “See these hands?” she said, sad like she held a thousand sorrows instead of a tiny newborn. “They will keep my babies safe when I am gone.”

  Daddy didn’t correct her that time. He stared, kissed her fingertips, took my brother, and rushed us out of the room so Momma could sleep. She never woke up.

  Never woke up. The image of her father taking his last breath, Hannah on one side, Pam on the other clutching his hand, flashed through her mind. When he didn’t take another inhale, Pam kissed his cheek and said, “Goodbye, my love, I’m glad you have found rest.”

  But Hannah wasn’t glad. She didn’t have the room inside her to be “glad” in any way that her father was gone. He’d promised that he’d be okay. A professor of mathematics at Columbia College, he comforted his children and his wife with statistics when he was first diagnosed, stating the odds of survival like they were an equation that was beyond basic. It was the only time his numbers didn’t add up the way they were supposed to. And even though she knew he didn’t choose to die, and even though she knew it was crazy, she felt abandoned in a way, and she wasn’t even a young child like Evelyn. She returned to reading, curious how the death of a parent affected young Evelyn and her siblings.

  Left with four small children, Daddy did the best he could. An aunt who lived in a small Mississippi town took William and has had him ever since. Daddy’s daughter by a former marriage then kept house for us for a while. She was rather fond of me, and I was crazy about her. She came down with pneumonia the following year and died. Daddy then sent in an advertisement to a city in Tennessee for a housekeeper, and Mrs. Brown arrived at 11:00 p.m. one January night to keep house for us.

  That took away our last chance for complete happiness. Every day I think this thought: if it weren’t for Mrs. Brown, I wouldn’t be crippled in this chair.

  There is more to tell, so much more, but my hands are tired, and I have to wait till next week to get more paper from Mrs. Stallion. Please don’t try to send a response here. I left the address and my last name off on purpose. Mrs. Stallion wouldn’t look kindly on my meddling and digging up old dirt. But someone should know what happened to me, and if Marion says I can trust you, then I will listen to her.

  Sincerely,

  Evelyn

  Hannah put the letter down, tears swimming in her eyes. She could see why the “article” had been rejected. It was long, had too many details, and was written like a letter home rather than a polished feature or the serial fiction of the time. But it also sounded human and real, and Evelyn came across on the page like a friend. This woman knew what it was like to suffer the sneak attacks of life and end up wounded. She knew the domino effect that could be initiated by one traumatic loss that would lead to a mess of tiles on the floor.

  In Hannah’s life it had started with Alex’s infidelity, which tumbled her into a deep and paralyzing depression and addiction, which toppled into losing her job, which crashed into wondering why she needed to be alive at all, which dropped into an attempt on her own life, which collapsed into moving in with her parents and watching helplessly as her father faded and then disappeared in front of her eyes. Hannah didn’t end up in a wheelchair at the end of her spiral, but she did end up paralyzed and living in a place where she was numbing herself with monotony and memories.

  Right now she knew Evelyn’s first domino, the loss of her mother, and her last, paralyzed by a bullet that was meant to take her life. But what about the in-between?

  CHAPTER 4

  Hannah rummaged through the loose boxes close to where she found the first letter. The day was a blur of frustration and chaos, emptying boxes and leafing through pages aimlessly. She developed a plan: She couldn’t just dig through the documents recklessly. She needed a systematic process to get through the piles in a productive and organized manner. She scanned the documents in the next four filing cabinets and dug through countless random boxes, hoping to find another article with Evelyn’s story.

  For nearly a week she’d go home smelling of the browning, crinkling paper she’d spent scanning. Lately, there was a mysterious itch that started at her scalp and crawled down to her wrists as she handled some of the older pages. But it didn’t make her give up. She popped an allergy pill and kept on digging.

  She had copied the letter, so she didn’t have to carry the frail original document around, giving her the ability to read and reread it anytime she had a spare moment. And her notebook pages were full of names, leads, phone numbers, websites, and plenty of dead ends. But it was a much-needed mental escape from the usual twister ripping through her thoughts.

  And although she did submit the application her mom had been nagging her about, she hadn’t lost her drive and curiosity in the time she spent shuffling through the files. Every day as she walked down the stairs to the basement, she’d think, If I don’t find anything today, I’ll ask for a new assignment. But then every night when she walked up the stairs, she knew—there was no giving up. And by day five she’d decided that even if she never read one more word written by Evelyn, just the act of searching was a valuable exercise.

  On the sixth day, she started in on a filing cabinet with browning manila folders and labels that had peeled away from a stiff, crackled mystery adhesive. The dates on the files were in general proximity to the 1935 date on the first article. She went through those pages slower than she had through the cabinet with more modern files. And when a red R started showing up in the corner of the items in the middle drawer, she read the first sentences of each page, hoping to find Evelyn’s voice again.

  That’s when she found it.

  Yes! Hannah cleared her sticky throat and sat in the dusty green vinyl rolling chair by the corner desk. As she scanned the article, it didn’t seem to be the next one in Evelyn’s story, but it wasn’t too far off from the story of a little motherless eight-year-old folded up in the original pages. She devoured the letter, almost too fast, like gulping water after a long run.

  It started the same as the first article with the address of the newspaper and Monty Sr.’s name on top. There were a few sentences of greeting, but then the narrative picked up where another article must’ve left off, and immediately Hannah was there, back in 1925 with a nearly ten-year-old Evelyn.

  I’d kept house for Daddy then, all on my own. I sent Myrtle to school, Vivian to a neighbor’s, and after the house was cleaned up, I went to school myself. It wasn’t hard, at least not as hard as living with Mrs. Brown, who had a temper and looked harshly on my every mood. But Daddy still didn’t have a job, and we’d run out of Momma’s preserves long ago, and her quilts couldn’t keep us as warm as fuel in the fireplace or coal. So when Daddy got a job in Memphis, I let out a sigh of relief and wrapped my arms around his big ole shoulders as a thank-you. But that’s really when the heartaches and unseen troubles began.

  Hannah clutched the pages and forced herself to read slower.

  On my tenth birthday, we again find Mrs. Brown, the ex-housekeeper, in our lives. Daddy never told us why she up and left that night, disappearing like that magician we saw in Coldwater. She’d been living with her daughter and son-in-law in Memphis, and Daddy said he’d run into her in the street one day, though I doubt it was an accident (Myrtle says I’m too conspiratorial in my thinking).

  At first, we all got along pretty well till it was clear Daddy had taken a liking to the housekeeper. Mrs. Brown had always had a dull, sour face, and I could not figure out for the life of me what Daddy saw in her after being in love with such a beautiful woman as Momma. She was rightly labeled, though, in the name Brown. She never brought a lick of light into the world and did her best to dampen any glimmer of hope around us all with constant complaints and criticisms. Daddy didn’t seem to notice, but us three girls saw.

  On November 1, my daddy and Mrs. Brown were married.
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  The information hit Hannah like a punch in the gut. How treacherous must it have felt for Evelyn’s father to have replaced her beautiful mother with a wretch. It must’ve been a slap in her face, a stab to her mother’s memory. Hannah knew what it was like to be replaced, and it had made her question everything about herself. If Evelyn’s momma, who her father loved so dearly, could be replaced by an inferior version, and if her brother could be given away to strangers, Evelyn must have wondered what that meant about her value, her future.

  With Mrs. Brown in the house (Daddy made us call her Mother), we kept boarders, and Daddy kept working. There was a lot of work to be done in the house, with Mother there now and the two boarders, who needed feeding and caring for.

  I liked having the strangers in the house, one a teacher at the high school, and the other a Yankee bookkeeper saving up to bring his girl to Mississippi, where his business had transferred him. The men were genteel and treated me like I was nearly a lady. They also kept Mother from screaming at me when they were home because she couldn’t stand the embarrassment. I tried to stay away as much as possible when both of the misters (as my sisters and I called them) were not home.

  I started learning housekeeping at Daddy’s request and found I was better at that than I was at school, but my disposition seemed to grow worse instead of better.

  Hannah almost related too much. Her father had been caring, understanding of Hannah’s deep dive into depression, checking on her daily with phone calls and occasional swings by the apartment. But Hannah’s mother, Pam, couldn’t see why Hannah wouldn’t just get out of bed and get on with her life. And though her friends were sympathetic and unified in a tide of anger and outrage at Alex at first, as weeks turned to months, and anger turned to sadness, which turned to despair, her friends dropped out of the picture one by one, which just made Hannah feel less worthy, less wanted. It wasn’t until after Hannah met her therapist, Laura, in the hospital that she understood that the symptoms of depression don’t always look like basic sadness and that her ill temperament was one of them. Evelyn must’ve felt the same coil of anxiety and despair that had spring-loaded Hannah’s easy temper. It was impossible to blame her.

  Mother and I didn’t get along together at all. I was always doing something I shouldn’t do or wasn’t doing something I should do. Like when I put too much starch in the misters’ shirts and had to wash them and dry them again before Mother found out. But she did find out and slapped my hands for being wasteful. Or when the stew boiled over and doused the fire in the stove because I was doing my homework while trying to tend dinner. I worked very hard to do the things that I thought she would like, but for some reason, I just couldn’t.

  She would whip me. Never when Daddy was home, but soon she took the horsewhip to me every day for the littlest error. I’ll admit, I got stubborn after some time of it. If she was going to whip me anyway, she might as well know what I thought of her and her plain frock and her ugly, crooked nose and her face that looked like it had never held a smile. But it only made her whip me more.

  Even now, stuck in this chair, I can remember the pain of the twine and leather hitting my legs and back. I wish I could remember what other things felt like, like running or dewy grass or even pinchy heeled shoes, but I can’t. Yet I can still feel the whip and can remember how it burned each time the fabric of my dress grazed my raw skin. When Daddy came home, it was always the same way. She would have a “heart spell” and I would have to ask her forgiveness. My only redeeming feature was that I was always sorry and could ask her to forgive me.

  Daddy had forbidden her to whip us with that thing, but after some time, the tink of the shiny silver handle against the plaster on the wall where it hung was enough to make me straighten up. Besides, Mother didn’t listen to Daddy anyway. She made his food and wore his ring, but I don’t think she loved him or even cared about him. And when he started getting sick, she’d water down his stew and cut his bread helping in half, saying he didn’t need as much because he wasn’t out working much of the day “like all the other husbands.”

  I remember one day when Daddy had started to become increasingly weak. I tried to switch his stew with one of the misters’. Mother caught me. Her daughter, Louisa, and son-in-law were visiting for the night, and they were sitting in the front room entertaining the boarders, so she whispered, “You sneaky little thing. I saw what you did.”

  She smacked my face. I was so displaced that the tray dropped from my hands, spilling stew all over the clean floor and chipping one of the bowls. I knew I was in for it then, so I tried to run, but she caught me. I fought her back, but then her daughter came in to check on the commotion, and she hit me too and then held me down so Mother could whip my back till blood soaked into the gingham.

  I’ll never forget Mother’s face, and whenever the preacher screams of demons possessing bodies, I think about Mother on that night. When the spell passed and the whip went still, Louisa told Mother to tend to dinner and then dragged me up the back stairs to my bed, handling me roughly as she changed me into my nightgown. She told me I’d never be forgiven if I didn’t beg Mother on my hands and knees. She said that I was making Daddy ill with my behavior, and I had better change or he’d die.

  The thought of Daddy dying hurt worse than the welts on my back and legs. Back then, I thought that if Daddy died, I’d want to die too. But foolish girl that I was, I didn’t know what death was other than something that happened to everyone I truly loved.

  The pages trembled in Hannah’s hands as she imagined the pain of the whip tearing her skin, and how impossible it must’ve seemed to escape. No wonder Evelyn had considered death preferable to life without her protector. Evelyn was a child. This was her home and her supposed family. If she left—where would she go? And worse—no one was helping her. It stirred a disquietude in Hannah that said, “Do something.” But this was in the 1920s—barring time travel, there was nothing she could do other than read.

  Even with that, for the first time ever, I did not beg for Mother’s forgiveness, and she never offered one apology. I grew rather mean to Myrtle and Vivian. They loved me dearly, and I did love them, yet they were afraid of me. They would never tell Mother anything I did or said. And as Daddy got sicker, his son by a former marriage (a brother of the sister who died) took my little sister that Christmas, and it nearly broke my heart, for I did love her so very much, though I hadn’t been as kind to her as I might have been. And the frailer Daddy got, the more I wondered about Mrs. Brown. She was endlessly cruel and as hard as iron and hated all of us, even Daddy. I thought about the broken bowl of stew and the individual serving she always had me bring Daddy. I couldn’t say it out loud, I barely dared to think it, but my thoughts lingered on the possibility that Daddy wasn’t just getting old—he was being poisoned.

  This poor girl, Hannah thought, sitting up in the squeaky old chair. Evelyn had endured the loss of nearly everyone she held dear in her formative years, and was forced into hard labor at a young age and beaten regularly. It was unnerving knowing that these were the least of her traumas. In a matter of four years, that child was headed toward an even more violent confrontation.

  It felt like when Hannah and Alex had decided to follow the Cubs to Cincinnati for a game in the summer of 2016 when the World Series hopes were building. On I-74, a group of college-aged guys sped past them in the right lane. Hannah, in the passenger seat, sleepy from watching fields and small towns droning by in a comforting blur, lazily followed the speeding vehicle with her gaze when it swerved. The overcorrection was just enough to send the car off-balance and, as though it were happening in slow motion, the 1992 Chevy shifted just enough to make the tires on one side lift and start a barrel roll off the paved highway and onto the tall grassy knoll past the gravel shoulder. The car flipped four times, and Hannah watched as the young men in the back seat of the Beretta tumbled around like rocks being polished. She knew it was bad. She knew people didn’t walk away from accidents like that without sea
t belts and miracles.

  Reading Evelyn’s story was similar—Hannah, the helpless stranger, was peering through a small window into a world of chaos that would inevitably lead to tragedy. And just like with that burgundy car, no efforts to change the outcome for those anonymous figures through the window, even with Hannah’s call to 911 and Alex’s attempt at first aid, could keep them from having funerals after that kind of disaster.

  There was nothing left to do but watch and bear witness to the end of a life, and the only way to do that was to keep going. Hannah opened the empty lower drawer of the metal desk, the rollers screaming as she pulled on the handle. She placed the new article inside it, flat and minuscule in the spacious space. She shoved the drawer closed, noting the echo as it slammed into place, and reset her focus from the hollow drawer to the seemingly endless lines of cabinets. It wouldn’t be empty long—it was the least she could do.

  CHAPTER 5

  The sun was setting as Hannah exited the basement, closed the green door behind her, and slid into her office chair. It had been a long but productive day. She’d found two additional articles and added them to the newly minted Evelyn drawer. On a roll with her scanning, Hannah hadn’t had time to read the letters all the way through yet, but she’d taken pictures with her phone and was counting down the minutes until she could hole up in her room and devour them slowly, like she was eating a plate of tender BBQ ribs.

  Waking up her computer, this time she bypassed any temptation to open social media and skipped to a search engine instead.

  Hannah had been working on confirming that Evelyn’s story was true. If so, it must’ve been a somewhat notable scandal in a small town like Senatobia, but it was nearly a hundred years in the past, and all Hannah had to go on was a first name and a general location.

  It took a few searches for Hannah to find her groove. But over the past few days, she’d come to discover enough information about locations and a few small leads from the names mentioned in Evelyn’s article that her empty notebook had started to fill with notes.