I have a folder at home labeled Elle. Per the Maisey Organizational System, it has all things Elle in it. Her birth certificate. Social Security card. Vaccination records. Certificates of excellence from school. A funny picture of her with her hair all disheveled, cuddled under a blanket and sitting on the heat vent, one of her favorite places to be.
Mom doesn’t organize things the way I do, by which I mean to say she actually organizes them. Social Security cards will be in a file so labeled. Vaccination records will be under vaccination records, probably with a separate folder for each family member. I can’t imagine what would be in a folder with my name on it, unless it’s childhood drawings or school papers.
The folder feels empty, but I open it anyway. All I find is a tiny little sticky note that reads, Shred this.
A hollow space opens in my chest where my heart is supposed to be. This—whatever this is—is about me. My mother had Maisey secrets and told my father to destroy them.
I blaze a trail back to Dad’s office. The shredder under the desk is jammed with a wad of paper stuck so tightly that I can’t pull it free. Unplugging the electrical cord to prevent any accidental shredding of my fingers, I anchor the base between my feet and tug with both hands. No dice.
There are scissors in the desk, and I use those to saw away at the paper, cutting and tearing it free just above the shredder blades. I’m holding eleven half-sheets, their bottoms mangled, the top halves legible. Eight of them are my mother’s old medical records. The tops of the pages hold only demographic data: her address, date of birth, allergies, medications. Whatever she saw the doctor for is missing, and I move on.
Page nine is a different kind of paper, smaller, the sort that comes on one of those refrigerator magnet to-do list pads. It’s pink and has a butterfly and flower on the right. A cute little header says, Life Is Short, Do It Now.
A list is written in my mother’s decisive script. Half of the page is missing, presumably lodged in the shredder. The part I can read says:
Don’t forget to shred this when you’re done.
1. The medical records
2. Birth certificates
I’ll never know what was meant to be number three.
Page ten is a different type of paper yet again. Loose-leaf, college-ruled. At the middle of the page, neatly centered, my mother has written in bold black ink:
Shred this first.
Chapter Eight
My heart is in my throat, interfering with my breathing. My hands are shaking as I shuffle to page eleven, where my mother has written these words:
My poor Walter. You deserve answers to all your questions. I wish, for both our sakes, that I could give them to you. I think it would be comforting for you to know the truth. But I don’t think you could keep the secret, and it must never be told.
And yet, the closer I come to death, the more difficult it is to keep silent. I want to talk about my past. I need to talk about it. Memories are bursting me at the seams.
Maybe if I write it all out here, that will help. Maybe if I write it as if I am telling it to you, after all, that will grant me some absolution for my sins. I am convincing myself, here, that it is safe to write what is hidden. If it’s not safe, it seems a risk I must take because guilt and remorse and regret are gnawing away at my insides just as surely as that treacherous vessel in my brain is eroding under the pressure of my own blood.
Justice of a sort. What Maisey might call karma, although I’ve never believed . . .
And there it ends. No page twelve. No clue as to what she might feel remorseful about.
A quaking starts in my belly and spreads into a full-body tremble. My thighs feel as substantial as jelly in an earthquake, and no amount of willpower from me will steady them. In my empty chest, a dark fear blossoms, and with it, a memory, sudden and stark.
Me, exploring my parents’ closet, and my mother’s rage at catching me there. I feel the sharp sting of a belt whipping across my buttocks and the backs of my thighs. Rebellious tears burning my eyes against my will. Mom yelling at me.
I have small gaps in my memory. I’ve forgotten events before. Usually they come back to me gently, sliding into place as if they’ve never been away. Sometimes memories get temporarily buried under other things, but then life shifts, and they surface as a small reminder, no more.
This memory is not like that. It is neither subtle nor quiet; it enters my awareness with all the violence of a detonation, blowing my world sky high. It breaches an emotional dam at the center of me, allowing words and images, sensations and emotions to tumble around and around, all mixed up together.
My breath rasps in my throat. My heart threatens to beat its way out of my rib cage.
Did I have a friend over? I have a sense of not having conducted my exploration alone.
Marley. My God. How could I have forgotten?
Marley was my constant companion, more real to me than my actual schoolmates. We read books and played games, and on that fateful day, explored the no-fly zone of my parents’ closet.
That day was the end of Marley. Not because of the beating, but because I heard my mother weeping.
“This Marley business has to end,” she’d sobbed, clinging to my father. “I can’t endure it. I can’t.”
What had we done that was so terrible? Played princesses in the closet. Dressed up in what must have been Mom’s wedding dress. Uncovered an old suitcase . . .
Oh my God. The suitcase. The two pink blankets. That picture.
The short hallway between me and my parents’ room feels like a mile at least. I run, bumping into the wall with my shoulder, fumbling with the door knob.
A wall of smell assaults me as the door swings open. The bed is unmade, covers tossed back in a rumpled mess. A blue bed protector pad covers the sheet, and a trash can by the bed overflows with more. I try to picture my mother lying here, unconscious, my father bathing her, changing her. My mind recoils, and I press both hands over my nose and mouth, holding my breath, fighting my gag reflex.
Trying not to look at the bed, I make a dash for the walk-in closet. When I enter, I pull the door closed behind me. The closet smells spicy and secret—cedar and another unnamable fragrance made up of Mom’s perfume and Dad’s cologne—but my mother’s illness has also invaded here. There’s a big open box still half-full of bed protector pads. Two sets of brand-new sheets, still in the plastic, with a note in her handwriting that says, You may need these.
Later, I tell myself. I will deal with all this later.
The suitcase still occupies its accustomed place in a back corner. I fall on my knees in front of it, my heart beating in my throat. My trembling fingers fumble with the latches, and I hold my breath as I open the lid.
The pink blankets are still there, but they are wadded up, no longer perfectly and precisely folded. The picture of a young girl wearing my mother’s face, holding two babies wrapped in pink blankets, is missing.
All these years I have forgotten about this picture. Now it seems like the most important thing in the world, a priority beyond restoring order to this house or figuring out what to do about my parents. Retracing my steps to the study, I dump out the shredder basket on the floor. Mostly the papers are standard white paper. The remnants of the to-do list are jammed around the shredder teeth.
And mixed in with the ordinary paper, thicker pieces of a photograph.
Sorting these out from the others, I carry them to Dad’s desk and sit down, forcing my blurring eyes to focus as I reassemble the picture. I expect it to take forever, but it’s easier than a jigsaw puzzle, and the strips line up with little effort.
My memory has proved accurate. Two pink bundles. Two babies.
Logic, Maisey. Don’t jump to conclusions. There could be any number of explanations. Maybe she’s holding someone else’s babies. Sure, Dad shredded the picture, but he’s not rational. It doesn’t have to mean anything.
I go back to the filing cabinet and search it, methodically, one file at a time, looking for my birth certificate.
It’s not there.
Memory shows me my father, burning papers. If the fireplace was his recourse when the paper shredder failed him, my birth certificate is likely ashes, along with the rest of whatever my mother was writing.