My earliest memories are of grandparents. Not mine, but I suppose they had to be somebody’s. My grandparents moved across England like it was their job to live-test as many houses as they could before they died. I couldn’t blame them for hating their houses enough to want an escape. Their lives were so noxious, they’d probably escape their own skin if they could. Unfortunately, they kept escaping that toxic together, and it was the together that made their homes so toxic.
Instead of blaming each other, they blamed the houses, even when it meant hemorrhaging their fortune in fees and underwater mortgages or abandoning an unsellable cottage to the elements. My mother left at age fifteen, when the money ran out and they were forced to live in a tight little row house on Baker Street—our house now, as it turned out. Her sister, my aunt Lucia, escaped into a hateful marriage of her own only to return when her husband ran off to Austria or Australia or somewhere else that started with an A.
My memories, though, are of someone else’s grandparents—the kind who live out in the countryside. Cornwall, perhaps. They both had long, flowing white hair, hers kinked with a natural curl, his spreading down his cheeks to cover his chin. Their house was blue, and the backyard lush and green with grass and fruit trees and giant garden plants that reached for the sun from soil so rich it looked black.
I’d toddled along the tiny path that allowed them to tend their plants, and they’d picked ripe fruit and vegetables for me to taste test. I remembered liking the tomatoes and strawberries best. I’d also liked when they looked from me to each other, and then moved to hold one another around their waists, as if there were magnets in their loose-fitting gardening trousers. Magnets that only attracted each other. Magnets that didn’t let go, even when I ran up to show them a ladybug or flower blossom I’d discovered in the shadows under the leaves.
My parents had magnets as well. Not the kind that fit together with a gentle click, more the kind that pulled and strained until one side or the other was yanked savagely back into place with a large thunk that sent shock waves through them both. I do believe they loved each other, just not in that gentle, peaceful way the grandparents in the garden had discovered. My parents loved each other with blustering rows and stormy silences. They did nothing halfway, nothing -subtle. They wrapped around each other to kiss in the kitchen, -wrestled around the living room screaming with laughter, and fought so loudly, only his badge kept them both from being hauled away on a domestic.
As loud as they were, I don’t remember a single word they said in those fights. Only the noise. Now our house was always quiet. Us tiptoeing our way around the sleeping, sobbing giant in the corner room. Him brooding and grunting and hiding himself away from us. I sometimes wonder if he misses the noise like I do.
I wondered if Lily’s house was quiet now too. I wondered if Mrs. Patel still felt the pull of a magnet buried under six feet of earth.
“What do you see?” Sherlock breathed into my ear.
I shook my head in answer, but I knew he wouldn’t leave it alone, so I excused myself and sidestepped my way out of the pew to escape down the far aisle. The back of the chapel felt like another world. A collage of pictures was spread about a table, snapshots of Lily’s dad with his family through the years.
He hadn’t lived a very posh life, but he’d had a lot of friends and had done a lot with them. There were pictures of them sitting around a fire pit smoking, basking in the sun on a canal boat, bundled up for some snowshoeing. By the time I reached the far end of the table, my gaze was skimming around the remaining pictures, looking for something of interest—something to give me pause.
I found it.
My mother’s face, younger and smiling brightly for the camera, flashed out at me from the sea of faces. I didn’t believe my own eyes at first—what with the way this whole day had pointed me to her memory. But when I looked away and looked back, she was still there. When I lifted the snapshot from the table, she was still there, the arm of some bloke I’d never seen in my life around her shoulders, her arm around the waist of a woman with bright blue hair, and Mr. Patel standing behind three other men.
Before I could study it more, I heard footsteps approaching and slid the picture into my handbag, pulling out a tissue in the same movement in case I was seen. I swept the tissue across my dry eyes and used the ruse to search the rest of the pictures for another glimpse of my mother’s face. But there were no more of her.
“He certainly lived a full life.” A white-haired woman reached out to pat my back, and I realized just in time that I was meant to be crying over these memories, that crying people were meant to be grateful for a pat on the back from a stranger, not repelled by it.
I nodded and let my hair fall down to mask my tearless face. “Yes.”
“We’re glad of that. After all the troubles of his youth, we weren’t sure he wouldn’t have ended up locked away. A life wasted that would’ve been.”