Chapter 30. Lenore
Lenore
The remaining days are passing faster than I’d like them to.
On Monday, I invite Shelby over to the house for lunch while her kids are in school. The whining of the storm door and a gentle knock announce her arrival. “Come in,” I call from the kitchen.
Shelby steps into the mudroom, unwinding a chunky plaid scarf from around her neck and hanging it on a hook beside Callan’s barn coat. Her gaze lingers there for a moment before she pushes into the kitchen, red rubber rain boots clopping on the tile. “It smells amazing,” she says.
“Hopefully it will taste amazing, too.” I’ve spent the past twenty minutes darting around the kitchen like a chicken with my head cut off.
A leek-and-potato soup burbles on the stove.
I followed one of my grandmother’s recipe cards that she kept in a vintage cookie tin, but I didn’t have any sour cream on hand, so I substituted it with milk.
A spoon taste test reveals that milk was not a suitable substitute.
I grab a can of Morton Salt and dump some into the stockpot.
While I’m stirring, Shelby looks around the kitchen, eyes trailing along the exposed beams in the ceiling. “God, it’s been forever since I’ve seen the inside of this place.”
“And?” I say over my shoulder.
There’s a beat of silence while she takes it all in. “Not much has changed,” she concludes.
It’s a curious observation. When I stepped through the mudroom a couple weeks ago, it felt like everything had changed.
But the house itself has been a constant, fixed through the centuries.
It was here long before I ever came to Vermont, long before even my grandmother was born.
Hopefully, in the right hands, it’ll be here long after I’m gone.
“When do you have to be out by?” Shelby asks.
“Friday,” I say, “but I’m planning to leave the day before.”
“You’ll be back this time,” she says, not quite a question.
The answer is so obvious, it’s almost laughable. The finer points of my life are uncertain, but about this, I’m sure. Vermont will always be home, for me. I finally understand why Shelby and the others never really left.
“I was always going to come back.”
On Tuesday, I pop into the Hidden Acorn to show Rain the painting that I’ve been working on. She fawns over it, demanding to hang it then and there, but I insist that it’s not quite ready.
On Wednesday, I prepare to head back to the city. I still have two days before escrow closes on the house, but I don’t know what time the keys will change hands on Friday, so the plan is that I’ll leave tomorrow.
I pack away my art supplies and toss clothes into my suitcase, sitting on it to zip it shut.
I make a few trips down to the rental car I’ve hardly used, stowing things in the trunk.
My giant plush snake rides shotgun, seat belt and all, even though there’s no room for it in an apartment shared between four people.
Within the hour, nothing is left in my bedroom but the necessities for one more night. A stick of deodorant, a hairbrush, a change of comfortable clothes to wear on the road tomorrow, and something to wear tonight. The antique portrait of the woman with the aquiline nose leans against the dresser.
I sigh. It doesn’t look like I’ll find answers about the paintings after all, but the least I can do is turn them over to the historical society. A mysterious footnote in the French family history.
I climb the stairs to the attic to dig out the box with the others.
Plastic crinkles beneath my shoes, and I slide my hand along the beam overhead, sucking a breath through my teeth when a splinter pricks my finger.
I tug the chain with a click and the attic lights up. I hold my pointer finger beneath the naked bulb for inspection. A fleck of wood has wedged itself into the finger pad.
“Nore,” a male voice calls from what sounds like leagues away.
Callan and I are supposed to go out for dinner tonight; one proper date before I head back to the city for a while. Until we can figure things out. There are so many unknowns. “In the attic,” I shout back. I squeeze the tip of my finger and work the splinter out between my teeth.
I drag the mangled cardboard box to the center of the room. This isn’t goodbye, I tell myself. I’ll visit the paintings on display in the museum, and maybe eventually, someone will uncover who this “Button” was.
I’m about to haul the paintings downstairs when my gaze snags on the clear plastic bin packed with quilts. The only box I didn’t go through in search of donations for the historical society. It doesn’t feel right to leave them all here.
I set down the paintings and pop open the lid. On top, neatly folded, is the quilt that used to cover my grandmother’s bed. It’s patchwork, faded Americana with block houses and LeMoyne Stars.
I sink to the floor, plastic crunching under my knees, and hug the quilt to my chest. Beneath the musty scent that comes with sitting in a box for too long, there’s still a trace of her Avon perfume, the Oil of Olay she massaged into her hands every night before bed.
Sewing was one thing that was strictly for her, not like the house and the farm inherited from her late husband’s family, or even me and Damien, dropped in her lap. Her life was a series of taking ownership for other people’s decisions, carrying someone else’s burden.
I hoped opening this box would give me some closure. Instead, I’m torn open anew.
Questions bubble up from the wellspring in my chest. Who taught her to sew, and did she love it?
I never asked, and it’s not an answer I’m likely to find anywhere in her journal.
I wish she were here, to give me all the answers.
I wish I had asked the right questions when she was still alive.
Maybe I should have never gone to New York.
I should’ve stayed here, with her, right to the bitter end.
A sob rips from my chest.
Footsteps thump on the attic stairs. My eyes are clouded with tears as a blurry head rises out of the hatch, but even abstracted, I would know that messy sienna-brown hair anywhere, his features a fun house mirror of my own.
Another sob sputters out of me at the sight of him.
“Lenore,” Damien says, faintly alarmed, and sinks to the floor beside me, taking me by the shoulders. “What’s going on?” he asks, gently but firmly. “Are you all right?”
“What are you doing here?” I say, my voice thick and pathetic.
“I could ask you the same question,” he says, “considering you told me you were staying in a hotel.”
That’s right. I never texted him to let him know that I was back at the farmhouse. “Okay, so I told a little white lie.” I sniffle. “I was trying to stop this.”
“What do you mean, this,” he says, looking around at the plastic house wrap and scattered boxes, like we’re talking about meeting in the attic.
“You, worrying about me when you have your own family. Katie,” I squeak. I don’t even manage to say Eloise’s name, because more tears spill out at the thought of her, a whole new person.
“You’re still our family, too.” Damien pats my hair gingerly, which is the best I can hope for from him, as comforting gestures go.
“Katie has her mom there with her. She’ll be fine for a few hours.
We were both worried about you. I called around to local hotels to try to figure out where you were staying, but no one had any idea what I was talking about.
And there was no police report filed about a break-in,” he adds.
Of course. Not hard to track that information down in a small town. “I didn’t call the police,” I say wetly, in a near whisper. “I called Cal.”
My brother arches a cool brow.
I peer at him through watery eyes, my throat constricting around another lie. It won’t come. “I wasn’t at a hotel,” I admit in a small voice.
Damien presses his mouth into a thin line beneath his mustache. “I figured as much,” he says. “Tell me what’s going on.”
I gather the quilt onto my lap and pat the floor beside me. It’s going to take a while to tell it all.
We end up talking for well over an hour, sitting on the plastic lining in the dusty attic.
I don’t tell him everything, of course, but this feels like the most we’ve talked since we first moved here as kids, when the farmhouse wasn’t quite home yet.
I would sneak across the short hall with the toile wallpaper in the dead of night, flinching at every noisy floorboard and unfamiliar shadow, convinced there were ghosts hidden around every corner.
I would shake his shoulder until he woke up and clicked on the lamp, all sleepy-eyed and grumbling.
We’d sit on the braided rug in the dim yellow light, talking or inventing ways to play with the cribbage board we found in the linen closet, the only game our grandmother owned.
“Please don’t go all, like, toxic male parental figure and sit him down in the living room while you menacingly clean your shotgun,” I say at last. My voice has taken on a pinched, nasal quality after a few more bouts of crying. “It’s not his fault I didn’t tell you.”
Damien looks at me askance, sitting with his arms folded across bent knees. “I don’t even own a shotgun.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I’m not going to threaten anybody,” he assures me. “I want to say it’s not my business, but considering you’re my sister, and he’s practically family to me—”
I nod readily. “I know.”
After scrutinizing me for a long moment, he sighs through his nose. “Tell me one thing. Is all this”—he twirls a finger around the attic, at the scattered boxes and bins, the mess I’ve left behind—“some sort of crisis you’re having, or does it actually mean something to you?”
I get the sense he’s not asking about the physical mess so much as the interpersonal one. “It means something,” I say without hesitation.
He nods slowly. “How much of a something?”
I look at my brother and my chin quivers. I can’t say it, because it will sound so ridiculous, so agonizingly vulnerable.
He swipes a hand over his face. “Well. Fuck. That complicates things.”
“I know,” I whisper.
A car horn bleats outside. Damien pushes to his feet and peers out the small window tucked into the peak of the gable. “It’s him.”
I blow out a long breath, steeling myself for what is bound to be the most uncomfortable conversation of my life. I swipe the tears from my eyes and clamber to my feet, smoothing down the front of my T-shirt, putting myself right. “How do I look?”
“Do you really want the answer to that question?” Damien asks. My eyebrow twitches in a wordless Touché and I follow him down the stairs.
“Hey,” he says, coming to a dead halt at the bottom and looking back at me. “Next time you’re having a hard time with everything, remember that you still have family. I know it sucks that Gran is gone, and that our parents were never really there to begin with, but you’ll always have me.”
A knot forms in my throat. I don’t even know whether I have tears left to spend, but he must notice the stilted way that I’m blinking, because fear flickers in his eyes, and he clears his throat. “Plus, you know, Katie and Eloise.”
“Well,” I choke out, “I don’t know about saddling a newborn baby with all my adult problems.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” he tells me. “Babies are the best listeners.”
A weak laugh bubbles out of me. “I suppose they don’t have any choice but to let you do all the talking.”
I clomp down the last couple of stairs, and he hooks an arm around my neck, which makes me flinch on instinct after all the times he’s put me in a headlock and ground his knuckles into my hair. “Calm down, bud,” he says mockingly. I shoot him a withering look as we trudge down to the first floor.
The truck idles outside. I step onto the side porch, one hand braced against the storm door to stop it from battering shut.
Cal has the window rolled down, his blue eyes squinted against the evening sun.
A sleek black sedan is parked alongside my rental car, which is enough warning to smooth over the shock in his expression when Damien steps out behind me.
“Good looking out,” Damien calls drily.
Callan shakes his head, nonplussed. “What?”
“I asked you to keep an eye on her.”
“Damien,” I mutter, warningly.
My brother exhales, nostrils flaring, and jerks his gaze away from his best friend to look at me. “You’ll be okay?” he says, like it’s a question.
I nod. “As okay as can be expected.” In other words, maybe not great, but I’ll keep going.
Damien pulls me into a hug. I shut my eyes tight.
I’ve felt alone, so alone, for months, but my brother has always been there, in spirit if not in person.
Katie has been there. I’ve been alone because I was shutting everyone out, too embarrassed to need anyone, least of all the people who worry about me most.
Cal cuts the engine and climbs out. We break apart in time to see him pull his crutches out of the bed of the truck and pick his way across the dooryard.