Chapter 8
LINDA
Linda came back into Uncle George's office with a mug of tea in each hand and the firm intention of finally getting Michael to explain himself.
Then she saw the door.
The mugs nearly slipped from her fingers. She stopped dead in the doorway. The heavy brown filing cabinet, the one that had stood in the same spot since she was seven, had been dragged out into the middle of the floor. Behind where it had stood was a door in a dark walnut with a dull brass handle.
Linda swallowed. Her throat went dry, and the steaming mugs of tea were forgotten in her hands. It was a door she hadn’t laid eyes on since she was seven years old.
"Michael," Linda said, and her voice came out small. "What on earth are you doing?"
Michael turned from where he stood in front of it. He didn't say anything for a moment. He just looked at her, and Linda saw on his face the same thing that was rising in her own chest, swift and enormous and impossible to push back down.
"I'm solving our office problem," Michael said quietly. "And finally facing old ghosts."
Linda's eyes instantly filled with a shock of burning tears. She set the two mugs down on the desk before she dropped them as her hands began to shake and her knees didn’t feel so stable anymore.
"That's Dad's door," Linda whispered.
"I know." Michael turned back to the door and nodded.
"We haven't opened that door since..." Linda stopped. She couldn't finish it.
"Since the day he died," Michael said for her.
Linda crossed the office slowly until she was standing beside her brother, the top of her head reaching only to his shoulder.
A place where she'd always instinctively gone when she needed comfort or to feel safe, in the shadow of her brother's physical and emotional strength.
The two of them stood looking at the door together.
Behind it was the office their father had worked in every day for the first years of their lives.
The office that had been closed up and hidden away when James Heart had not come home after what was supposed to be the final time he'd be deployed, marking the end of his military career.
When they'd hugged him goodbye as he shouldered his pack, they hadn't realized just how final that deployment was going to be.
The lump rose in her throat. She didn’t feel the salty tears that rolled silently down her cheeks, and her breathing became shallow as the grief surfaced once again.
"Uncle George could have turned it into anything," Linda said softly. "Storage. A second office. Anything. All these years."
"He never touched it," Michael answered. "He just put the cabinet in front of it and left it exactly as it was."
"Why do you think he did that?" Linda breathed.
"Because he couldn't bear to change it," Michael said. "And he couldn't bear to look at it either. So he hid it and left it whole." His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “Uncle George was just as broken as Mom when Dad died.”
A memory skittered through her mind. The black cars had just left.
Uncle George hadn’t said a word. He turned on his heel and left.
Left a shocked Mom, Michael, and her. Linda had been confused.
Could it be real? Was Daddy really gone?
At first, her young mind had wanted to scream, Where, where did he go?
How can he just be gone? How? How could he just go?
He was supposed to be there for her seventh birthday, he’d promised.
Linda closed her eyes as the memory sliced through her soul.
It had been so long ago, but it still stung badly.
She pictured Uncle George on that day. Linda had run after him.
Still in shock, she wondered if Uncle George was going to find him.
So Linda had run after him. But he hadn’t heard her when she called.
As she rushed into the hotel, Uncle George stormed into her father’s office—this office.
Linda was about to go in. The door was slightly ajar.
Enough to peek in, but before she could go inside, a loud guttural roar echoed off the walls, followed by the sound of crashing.
Her heart pounding, she’d inched further, and her breath hitched in her throat when she saw that Uncle George had wrecked her father’s desk.
In her shocked brain, she’d thought that when they found Daddy, he was going to be so mad at Uncle George for messing up his office.
But then her breath had hitched in her throat when she watched Uncle George break.
He’d collapsed to the floor, shouting, “James. Why? Why did you go again?” Then he'd broken into soul-racking sobs that had shaken his whole body. “How can you be dead, James? You were supposed to outlive me. I’m the eldest.”
That’s when her eyes had widened, and his words had sliced through her like a hot blade.
Linda had stood staring at her uncle, unable to breathe for a moment.
Daddy’s dead? She stood staring at her uncle.
No. He’s upset. They said Daddy was gone.
They’d said sorry to inform you, but your husband, Captain James Heart, is gone.
That’s the part she and Michael had heard when they finally got to the front of the house.
Lost in the line of duty. They had said gone and lost, not dead. They hadn’t said dead!
Suddenly, there was no air. Her young self had clutched at her throat.
She’d needed air. Linda had turned and bolted.
She hadn’t known where she was going. She’d just run.
Michael had found her twenty minutes later, cuddled into a tight ball in her secret spot on the beach.
Her eyes were swollen from crying, and her little body shuddering from the cold and wracking sobs that had ripped through her heart.
Uncle George had sealed the room after that. No one went in there ever again except the cleaning crew once a week, under strict instructions never to disturb anything other than the dust bunnies that crept in over time.
“Linda?” Michael’s voice pulled her from her thoughts. “Are you okay?” His voice was soft, and his eyes were filled with emotion. She knew he was having the same thoughts and reliving memories similar to hers.
“I’m fine,” Linda nodded, giving her brother a watery smile as he reached down and wiped the tears from her cheeks.
“I can do this alone,” Michael told her.
“No,” Linda said, adamantly shaking her head. “It’s time.”
Linda reached out and touched the cool brass handle with determination.
"Okay, together then.” Michael took her free hand.
"Together," Linda whispered.
Michael's hand closed over hers on the handle.
The two of them turned it at the same time.
The latch gave with a soft click that sounded way too loud in the quiet office.
The door swung inward on hinges that should have shrieked after half a century but didn't, because Uncle George, it turned out, had been quietly oiling them all along.
Linda stepped through the doorway beside her brother, and the breath went out of her.
It was their father's office, exactly as he had left it. Her eyes fell on the papers and the cracked paperweight that had broken with the force from Uncle George shoving it off the desk. They were still there, but back on the desk.
The room was the same size as Uncle George's, the mirror image of it. The blinds on the far window were drawn shut, so the only light was what spilled in from the office behind them, soft and gold across the floor. But Linda could see everything she needed to see.
The desk. Their father's big oak desk, the twin of George's, sat in the center of the room with a leather chair behind it.
There was a blotter on the desk, a pen stand, and a brass lamp with a green glass shade.
There was a coffee cup beside the blotter, washed clean and turned upside down on a folded cloth, the way a person left a cup they meant to use again in the morning.
"It's clean," Linda said, and her voice cracked on it. "Michael, it's completely clean. There's no dust. Nothing."
"Rosa," Michael said quietly. "Or the cleaning crew has been cleaning it at least once a week for fifty-two years.”
"Oh." Linda pressed her hand to her mouth, holding back a sob as the emotion hit her even harder. "Oh, Michael." She sniffed. Her hand reached out for her brother’s. It closed over hers. Warm and comforting.
"I know." Michael's voice was heavy with his own emotions.
After a few moments of standing there, Linda moved into the room slowly, her eyes going everywhere at once.
There was a low bookcase along one wall, the spines faded but upright.
There was a coat stand in the corner with a man's jacket still hanging on it, a tan summer jacket she could almost, almost remember her father wearing.
There was a wide corkboard on the wall behind the desk, and Linda's heart turned right over when she saw what was pinned to it.
Drawings.
Children's drawings. Dozens of them, layered and overlapping, every one of them faded soft with age, but every one of them was still there.
A crayon house with a lopsided sun. A blue boat on a green sea.
Two stick figures holding hands under a rainbow, one tall and one small, with the word DADDY printed above the tall one in careful wobbling capitals.
"Those are ours," Linda breathed.
"That boat's mine," Michael said. His voice had gone rough. "I remember drawing that boat. I was so proud of that boat."
"The house is mine." Linda moved closer to the board, her fingers hovering over the brittle paper without quite touching it. "Look. I signed it. Linda, age five. Look at my terrible little L."
Michael let out a sound that was half a laugh and half something else.
"He kept all of it," Michael said. "Every scrap we ever gave him. Look at the board, sis. There's no room left on it. He pinned up every single thing."
Linda's eyes were streaming now, and she didn't bother to stop them.