Letter Thirteen #2
I considered this—but not for long. “If you don’t know the answer to that question, then you haven’t been paying attention to what I’ve been trying to tell you about my dad. If he wanted to keep me away from her, he would. If only I had a way of finding out the truth…”
That’s when it hit me. I grabbed your wrist to check the time. “Let’s go,” I said, standing up.
“You can’t leave in the middle of practice,” you replied, peering up at me.
“I’ll tell the coach I have period cramps. Come on.”
With a sigh, you lifted my tennis racket and bag off the ground.
About fifteen minutes later, you stood behind me on the Harrises’ front stoop as I knocked on their door. When no one answered, I used my key to enter.
“What are you doing?” You paused in the doorway, eyes big. “Do you normally let yourself inside their house when no one’s home?”
“Funny how you’ve never once asked Michael that question, even though he does the same thing at my house all the time.”
“Yes, but Michael doesn’t have the same sort of…habits you do.”
I rolled my eyes. “Are you coming in or not?”
“Fuck’s sake,” you mumbled, entering with your head down. You softly closed the door.
Filled with nervous anticipation, I headed straight to John’s study. The wall-to-wall bookcases. The books.
Why had I never thought to check inside the books?
A daunting task, to be sure, but no more daunting than inspecting over a thousand volumes to check that each book in John’s collection was, in fact, a book, and not some hollow box masquerading as a book.
This, I had done over the course of three nights once, back when my dad had gone to Europe for business and left me with the Harrises.
I’d snuck downstairs while everyone slept, happily losing hours of sleep every night to search all 125 shelves, searching until I could barely hold my eyes open or stand.
For the record, I’d found three such imposters. One filled with cash, another with valuable heirloom jewels, and yet another with sentimental objects that had been stowed away for safekeeping. But nothing that had given me any clues about my mother.
“What’s the point of this excursion?” you grumbled.
“Answers,” I said breathlessly, throwing open the study doors. Like you, Casey—like those pictures Michael had found—the answers I craved most might be hidden in plain sight.
Like I always did when entering John’s study, I stopped to breathe in the wonderful scent of old books. Earthy and sweet. Like smoked vanilla. You halted, transfixed, your mouth agape. “Oh my God,” you said, slowly walking forward. “Wow.”
“I thought you’d been here before.”
“To the house,” you said, crossing the room, my backpack and tennis racket still hanging off your shoulder. “Upstairs to Michael’s bedroom. Never here.”
You stopped in front of the fireplace on the center back wall, your gaze riveted to the painting above the mantelpiece. It’s giant, overbearing, and undeniably the focal point of the room.
The profile of a Caucasian woman’s face.
Her eyes are shut. Her nose is perfectly straight and handsome, her mouth pretty and full, in varying shades of red.
She floats in a sea of heavy brushstrokes—haphazardly swept across the canvas.
Blacks and browns. Maroons and cobalt blues.
No rhyme or order to the colors, no order to her.
A spark of yellow here, a bit of white where a shirt collar would be.
Hair that’s maybe sandy blonde, maybe brown.
Still, she’s majestic and beautiful, even among the chaos.
An interesting fact about John? He’s a collector.
Of happy memories, like the family pictures that adorn the hallways and shelves and tabletops of the Harris home, quite a few of which feature me and my dad.
Of art, like the hazy landscapes, abstract splatters, line drawings, and old portraits (some of them similar to Garland) that are propped above mantelpieces and on little gold easels, often layered alongside other pieces of art—the painting in the study an outlier, markedly different from the rest.
Of books, both old and new, like the hundreds which filled the green-gray shelves all about the room, many of them passed on from John’s dad after a renovation.
Something of a history buff, he reads books on presidents and wars, empires and Ancient Rome.
But he loves the classics, too, and the best writers are all there: Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, Charlotte Bronte, Jane Austen, James Joyce, Maya Angelou, and his personal childhood favorite: J.
R. R. Tolkien. Specifically: The Lord of the Rings Trilogy.
Every edition ever made. Including an incredibly rare first-edition printing of all three, in mint condition, signed by Tolkien himself.
A Christmas present from my dad a few years prior to your arrival.
One John had quietly told Nic was “way too much” for him to accept, until my dad—in a voice that had sounded unexpectedly soft and fragile—told him, “I really want you to have them.”
Out of curiosity, I’d looked it up, and a collection that rare would’ve cost my dad hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Which is why, following that Christmas, I rang in the New Year extra surly and pissed at my dad.
Pissed he would go out of his way to blow that kind of cash on John, when the gift I wanted required minimal effort and very little, if any, money at all: a dog from the animal shelter.
But John wouldn’t hide secret photos in the rare editions—he didn’t like those books to be tampered with in any way.
Michael said he’d discovered the pictures of my mom among the law books.
But which law book? Nearly an entire wall was devoted to them.
Old Harvard Law Review volumes, some browned with age.
Legal encyclopedias. Annotated copies of Massachusetts General Law, federal statutes, old court reporters, and casebooks.
While I scanned the shelves, trying to decide the best place to start, you moved away from the classics to the history section, where a few family photos sat on the cabinet below the shelves, including that one of my dad and baby Michael at the Harrises’ wedding—the very one in which they’d cropped out my mom.
You picked up a photo of Michael and John. “Charming,” you said with a sigh, then put it back.
“Come help me look through these books.”
“Look for what?”
“I don’t know.” I wrung my hands, feeling antsy. We needed to hurry. “Anything.”
“I’d rather go home.”
“Why?”
“I don’t feel comfortable snooping where I don’t belong, and I don’t approve of you doing it, either.”
“Okay, Mr. Secret Identity. You stalked your own brother until you’d slithered your way into our lives.”
“Slithered?” You pulled a face, hands jammed inside your pockets. “Bit harsh.”
“I’m just stating facts here.”
“Tell me what you’re looking for,” you said through clenched teeth, “and I’ll consider it.”
“That picture I showed you of my mom? Michael found it hidden in one of these books and gave it to me this past Christmas. It’s the first picture I’ve ever seen of her—even though I’ve been asking to see a photo of my mom for years.
I’ve asked everyone—my grandparents, the Harrises, my dad—for a simple description of my mom, and no one ever bothered to tell me I look just like her.
If John had pictures of my mom hidden in this room, maybe he has more hidden—something with her full name on it, maybe, or a clue that’ll make it easier for me to look her up myself. ”
You considered this. “Have you ever thought that maybe there’s a reason behind all the secrecy? That maybe they’ve hidden these things to protect you?”
Of course I had. And I didn’t care. The more they evaded my questions, the more I needed to know why. What weren’t they telling me? What was the dark, mysterious thing my dad didn’t want me to know about my mother?
“Sometimes the answers we want most,” you said, now staring at a photo of John and Michael on Christmas Day, five-year-old Michael—in a pair of plaid Christmas PJs—sitting in John’s lap, grasping one of his presents, both of them laughing, “are the ones capable of hurting us the most.”
“Okay, I don’t have time to be reasonable right now,” I said, growing more anxious by the second. “I have thirty minutes until Bree gets home from fencing practice. If you aren’t going to help me, just go.”
I turned to the bookcase and grabbed a legal encyclopedia that must’ve weighed five pounds. With a sigh, you ambled up behind me and reached for a volume off the shelf above my head, your chest briefly making contact with my shoulder blade.
We’d searched through only a handful of books before we heard the telltale creaking and clopping sounds of someone on the stairs—which ran parallel to the study. We froze.
“Shit,” I whispered.
As we put our books back, John appeared in the doorway. “Elliot,” he said, drawing out my name, “what are you doing in here?”
“I need to borrow a book for school. English Lit. Paper due next week. Very important.”
His blue eyes flicked to the bookcase before returning to me. “A paper on the law? For English Lit?”
“Did I say English Lit? I meant U. S. History. Specifically, like, certain laws that were put into place by our founding fathers.” Not the best explanation, but I hoped it would do.
“I see,” John said, clearly suspicious, arms crossed over a white t-shirt, like the kind guys often wear under their dress shirts. “Hey, have you taken anything from this study recently?”
“Like what?”
“Anything at all.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said innocently.
“I think you do.”
“I really don’t, though.”
“Elliot, you know exactly what I’m talking about, and I need them back.”
“Need what back?”
“Cut the shit, okay?” John stepped forward.