Chapter 29. Lenore
Lenore
I wake alone the following morning, crisp light pouring in through the curtainless window, pooling at the foot of the bed.
My clothes hanging over the shower rod have dried overnight, so I change into them and wander downstairs, wood creaking beneath my feet.
Duke stirs from the dog bed in the corner with a groan and ambles over to greet me.
I squat down to scratch his head. The recliner in the living room is upright, a throw blanket sagging onto the floor.
Faint music drifts from the kitchen. I straighten and wander toward the sound, and Duke follows, nails tapping on the floor behind me. An old AM/FM radio with a collapsible antenna sits on the windowsill above the sink, crooning staticky eighties hits. The sliding glass door is ajar.
I step out onto the small deck, overlooking the backyard. It’s cold and bright, dew shimmering in the grass. Thomas reclines in a plastic Adirondack chair, steam curling over a mug of black coffee.
“Lenore French,” he says, like it’s a greeting. Like he’s a herald announcing guests at a party. After a beat of awkwardness, he pushes himself out of his chair and extends a hand. His dark blue eyes narrow as he shakes my hand roughly. “I don’t remember you being so tall.”
“I wasn’t always,” I say vaguely. Actually, he might’ve gotten shorter in the three years since I saw him last. In many ways, Cal looks like him.
I didn’t notice it so much as a child, when adults still seemed like an entirely different species from the rest of us, but I can see the similarities now.
Unlike his son, Thomas has always been stockier, with a rounded nose.
His salt-and-pepper hair has a blunted look, not quite a flattop.
“Callan’s gone to the store to get a few things for breakfast. Didn’t want to wake you,” he says with an awkward chuckle. He drags another chair across the deck, its plastic legs jolting over wood planks, and gestures for me to sit. “Coffee?”
“Sure.” I can’t tell whether this is weird, me waking up here, sitting down to drink coffee with Cal’s dad, who I haven’t seen since the wedding, when he broke the news to us about Gran’s disease. I use my arm to wipe away rainwater puddled on the plastic seat before sitting down.
Thomas clatters around in the kitchen and returns a moment later with a freckled enamel mug. “Careful. It’s hot.” I reach out to accept it, curling both hands around the mug for warmth. Thomas grunts as he lowers himself into the chair. “How long are you in town for?”
“I’m headed back to the city in a few days.”
His wiry eyebrow twitches noncommittally and he slurps from his mug, staring out across the yard.
It’s a neat backyard, orderly. A low hedge brackets the otherwise boundless property on either side, separating the house from its neighbors.
Beyond that, rich woods crowd together, rust-colored ferns in the undergrowth.
An earthy smell clings to the damp air in wake of yesterday’s rain.
“I’d like to stay longer,” I explain, “but escrow closes at the end of the week, and three weeks is already a lot to take off from work.”
“You have to do what you have to do, just like the rest of us.”
I don’t know what to say to that. I test sip my coffee. It’s cooled enough to drink.
“Can I ask you a question?” I say after a long moment.
“Shoot.”
“You worked for my grandmother for—what—twenty years,” I say. “Do you think she was happy?”
Thomas blows out a breath. “I knew your grandmother from the time I was three years old. Depends on when exactly you’re asking about.”
“I didn’t know that,” I say. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. Everybody in Whitbury knows everybody, after all, but there are so few adults in my life left to turn to for answers.
He dips his chin in a short nod. “Used to babysit me on the weekends.” His mouth twists in a wry smile, tinged with sadness.
“It felt a little like I was returning the favor, in the end. Most people, you know, they’d have their kids to take care of them, but…
” He trails off, looking over at me with one eye squinted against the silvery morning light.
“No one ever expected him to turn out the way he did. Your father.”
I don’t say anything. It strikes me, not for the first time, how unfair it all is.
My grandmother was already sixty-three when a stranger showed up on her doorstep with two children in tow, asking the impossible.
Gran never complained. Never said a word against anyone until that night at the wedding, when she told me in no uncertain terms that I had abandoned her.
Now that she’s gone, it feels a little like I owe a debt I’ll never have the chance to repay.
Thomas watches me, brow crinkled in mild concern. “Is everything all right?” he asks, in the tentative way that people ask when they feel obligated, and not because they’re prepared to deal with the fallout.
“Fine. Yeah.” I turn my head so that he doesn’t see me swipe tears from my eyes. “I guess I meant in the general sense. Do you think she felt … I don’t know … fulfilled, in the end.”
Did she think it was all worth it? I suppose that’s what I’m really asking, but there’s nowhere to turn for the answer to that question.
People with dementia sometimes experience terminal lucidity, where their memories come flooding back right before they pass.
I wasn’t there in the moment with my grandmother to know whether it had happened to her, but I can’t help wondering what she would’ve remembered if it did.
“I don’t know that it’s up to me to say,” Thomas says slowly. “I know that she loved you kids, and she loved the farm. I think she was happy.”
I sniffle and nod, staring into the gritty dregs of my coffee.
A hand reaches over and gruffly shakes my forearm, like he means to shake me out of this funk.
“Don’t let the wondering eat at you, kid.
Life is a whole series of ‘what-ifs,’ from the day you’re born ’til the day you die.
You can wonder all day whether you should’ve followed the other fork in the road, but that doesn’t change where things already ended up. ”
Later that morning, Callan gives me a ride back to the farmhouse. It’s a beautiful autumn day, the woods their fiercest colors, the sky a vast expanse of blue, like the weather owes us an apology for yesterday.
I crank the window down, cold wind ripping through my hair. At the single stoplight in town, we share a shy smile, like we have a secret. I might not be happy with every facet of my life, but right now, I feel at oddly at peace with that. Content, for the first time in a long time.
“I’ll text you after I’m done at urgent care,” he says as we idle in the dooryard.
I give him a swift kiss before climbing out. The house is still as I enter through the mudroom, pumpkin pine floorboards groaning beneath my feet. I head upstairs to grab a change of clothes and then head to the shower, washing away the rainy must of yesterday’s hike.
Afterward, with damp hair and dry clothes, I sit on the edge of the bed and crack open my grandmother’s journal.
NINE YEARS AGO
Sunday, August 27
For the first time in eight years, I have the house to myself again.
Perhaps in wording it this way, I make it sound as though it is a relief; it is not, exactly.
Lenore left this past week for college. One hopes when raising children to instill in them the confidence and independence to strike out on their own, and yet, paradoxically, there is a distinct melancholy that comes with them not needing you anymore, what I suppose others might call empty-nest syndrome.
I’m not sure I can claim this house as a “nest” at all, as both Lenore and Damien were already quite independent when they came to live here.
Perhaps it was a nest once, for Daniel, but arguably not a very good one.
I think for Lenore and Damien, it was perhaps more a layover on their way to another destination.
The best I can hope is that it provided comfort and stability in the interim.
My phone chirrups on the nightstand. I swipe my eyes and lean over to peer at the screen. It’s a text from Damien.
I’ve debated countless times talking to him about the journal. About the closure I’ve been searching for because of words spoken to me alone in Gran’s bedroom, after Damien went back outside to break up the wedding reception.
Ungrateful.
I’d left her here, after all she’d done for me, and she wasn’t about to let me forget it. Even as she was forgetting. I’ve never been able to reconcile that.
My eyes drift absently to the antique paintings, leaned against the dresser.
I thumb the corner of the page, peering at the date on the next entry, seven years ago.
If I’m ever going to find the answers I’m looking for, it’s here, in the final pages my grandmother wrote.
My pulse hammers in my throat. I could read it and get it over with, like ripping off a Band-Aid, but I can’t seem to bring myself to turn the page.
These last words are all I have left that are new, that are unknown.
As soon as I read them, I’ll have to say goodbye.
I’ll have to accept that it’s the last I’ll ever hear from my grandmother.
No more late-night conversations with me seated cross-legged at the foot of her bed, a tatty paperback bodice ripper folded on her lap with a dollar bill used as a bookmark.
I use the silk burgundy ribbon to mark my place, and then I tuck the journal inside the cardboard moving box with the other mementos of my grandmother. The velvet ring box. Her favorite books. The gold wristwatch ticks in the otherwise silent bedroom, time tiptoeing past.