hurt…or worse. But as evening became night, a new realiza-
tion was starting to dawn, popping up in my thoughts every
now and again, then bursting like a bubble. It was becoming
unlikely Grace wasn’t coming home unscathed, and there was
something new at stake for me personally. I hated myself for even
thinking about the consequences for myself when I didn’t even
know what had become of my sister, but I had to be a realistic.
I arranged that abortion for Grace. She’d begged me to, and
she’d wanted to go ahead with the procedure desperately, but
that didn’t change the reality that I had broken the law.
And if Grace had been seriously injured, or worse…then maybe
I was criminally responsible for her fate. If Betsy Umbridge’s
boyfriend could spend two years in prison for arranging an
abortion that had gone exactly according to plan, what would
happen to me if Grace was injured…or never came home at all?
Beth
1996
I retreat to the bathroom to wash my face, and when I return
to the table, everyone falls silent.
“I think you guys probably need to talk,” Ellis speaks first,
motioning vaguely toward the four of us siblings.
“I’ll handle the cleanup,” Alicia offers. There’s a moment of
stunned silence. Ruth’s jaw actually drops.
“Seriously?” I blurt, and Tim glares at me. He’s always been
something of a leader in this tribe—and I’ve always been the
most compliant member of our family. I’ve angered him more
today than I have in decades, and I hate it.
“Thanks, honey,” Tim says pointedly to Alicia. “That would
be a huge help.”
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“Noah and I will take Patrick back to the nursing home,”
Hunter offers cautiously. “If you’ll all be okay here.” His gaze is
on me, again asking me a silent question. I nod, then look away.
“And I’ll take the boys back into the living room to watch
another movie,” Ellis says.
Our spouses scramble away. Ruth excuses herself and all but
sprints to the kitchen, returning with a bottle of wine and three
glasses. I reluctantly, awkwardly, explain to my brothers and sis-
ter about the hidden cavity in the bottom of the wooden chest.
By the time I finish, they’re all staring at me, slack-jawed.
“So…wait,” Jeremy says, holding up a hand toward me. “Mom
didn’t die in a car accident?”
“I don’t think so,” I whisper.
“And you think she died in 1959?” Tim frowns, then shakes
his head. “That doesn’t seem right. She was definitely still alive
when I started school.”
“Us, too,” Ruth says. They all stare at me.
“I’m just telling you what it says, guys,” I say weakly. “It’s not
my fault it’s confusing.”
“Jesus Christ,” Tim exhales, pinching the bridge of his nose.
“What the hell are we supposed to do with all of this?”
“I didn’t bring the photo album so I can’t show you the death
certificate. But the notes and the artwork are upstairs.”
“Good. Let’s see them.”
I divert past Dad’s room to retrieve the clipboard while the
other three walk upstairs. By the time I catch up, they’re all star-
ing around the mess. My brothers are visibly horrified.
“You said there were paintings,” Jeremy says stiffly, glaring
at Ruth. “You forgot to mention it’s an absolute fucking disas-
ter zone up here.”
“I told you it was a mess. I didn’t realize I had to qualify that
with an exact description,” Ruth snaps. Tim hesitantly picks up
a basket, then grimaces and sets it back down again. “What’s
in there?”
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Kelly Rimmer
“Empty paint tubes, what looks like it used to be an apple
core and I think maybe a whisk.”
“It’s all random. Just like that,” I tell them. “There doesn’t
seem to be any pattern to the mess.”
“Let’s see these notes you found,” Ruth prompts. I pass the
clipboard to my nearest sibling, which happens to be Tim, and
then I motion toward the bleak canvas still sitting on the easel.
“The date on that canvas matches this first note,” I say. Tim
skims the page, then swallows and raises his gaze to the ceil-
ing. Jeremy takes the clipboard next, and he and Ruth read it
together.
“That’s a suicide note, right? She talks about ‘mortal sin.’
That’s suicide?”
“Everything is a mortal sin,” Ruth scoffs, then sobers. “But
yeah. That doesn’t sound great.”
“How do you even know she wrote these?” Tim asks. I lift the
page to show him the other note, the one that refers to us and
to Dad, and he exhales as he reads it. “Right. And downstairs,
that stuff with Dad and you. What’s going on there?”
“I was asking him about Grace because of these. And the
death certificate.”
“I meant why did he tell you to read these.”
“I think because he heard me and Beth talking earlier,” Ruth
says. “Lisa thinks she has postpartum depression.” I look at her
incredulously.
“No, Ruth, go right ahead and tell everyone my personal
medical information. I don’t mind at all,” I say bitterly.
“I knew something was going on with you,” Jeremy says, tilt-
ing his head at me. “Are you okay?”
“I—” I want to protest and to assure my siblings that they
don’t need to worry about me, but this time I don’t. “I don’t
know. But reading that—” I point to the note in Tim’s hand “—I
can’t help but wonder if there’s a genetic component.”
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Tim hands the second note to Jeremy, and Ruth steps closer
to him to read along.
“I just need to know,” I admit, throat tight. “I just need to
know what happened to her. If she…”
“You should have told us about this,” Tim says abruptly. At
my pointed look, he runs his hand through his hair, then says
in exasperation, “All of this, Beth! The stuff you found in Dad’s
chest. These notes. Christ. And the depression.”
“I don’t get it,” Ruth sighs, looking up from the note. “Why
on earth didn’t you tell us? This is…a lot.”
“I didn’t know how to explain,” I say weakly. “I was worried
you’d try to take over. I was worried you’d worry about me. It
was overwhelming. Maybe I wasn’t thinking straight.”
“I get it,” Jez sighs. “A few bits of paper and suddenly I’m
questioning the entire way we’ve understood our upbringing.”
He points toward the clipboard, then adds, “I mean…this refers
to Dad, but she isn’t talking about the Dad we know. Right?”
�
��We don’t even know if they’re real,” Ruth protests. “You
can’t let two random bits of paper—two unsigned bits of paper—
make you question anything. Especially not the way you see
Dad. That’s completely unfair.”
“It’s not just the notes,” Tim says heavily, glancing at me.
“The death certificate Beth found raises questions, too. Why
would he tell us she died in a car accident if she didn’t?”
“It would be unforgivably disloyal to judge a man who can’t
defend himself, based on any of this,” Ruth snaps. “He’s so con-
fused, and there could be a perfectly reasonable explanation he
just can’t share.”
“Such as?” Jeremy says incredulously. Ruth opens her mouth
to snap a reply back at him, but Tim cuts them both off.
“Squabbling isn’t going to help, is it? The only hope we have
of understanding this is if we find the rest of the notes.”
“Well, that I can agree on,” Ruth murmurs. Jeremy nods,
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Kelly Rimmer
too, and then they all look at me, and it suddenly occurs to me
that we are, at last, a united force.
I wanted the truth, but maybe I didn’t have the strength to
find it until I had allies. Now, realizing that we’ll be a team,
I’m less afraid of what we’ll discover up here, and simply deter-
mined to find it.
“Okay, boys, this is what we’re going to do,” Ruth announces,
snapping on her project manager voice. “You two are going to
handle the big items—boxes, baskets, furniture and so on. Empty
them over here, and then take them up to that end of the attic.”
“We’re starting this today?” Tim asks, but he’s already roll-
ing back the sleeves on his shirt.
“I don’t have anywhere to be. Do you?” Ruth says.
“The second note was in a pile of junk food wrappers,” I tell
them. “So check everywhere. Listening to what Dad said down-
stairs earlier, I think he probably planned to throw these notes
away once he finished the paintings. So they might already be
scrunched up, like the second one was, or even just dumped in
some random place among the chaos.”
“Got it.” Tim mock-salutes us. Ruth turns to me.
“You and I will sort through the smaller pieces of trash. We’ll
make two piles—a keep pile, a toss pile. Jez, in between helping
Tim, you can ferry the trash down to the dumpster.”
“We won’t get this whole space done today,” Jeremy warns
us. “Not unless we work till midnight.”
“We don’t actually need to get the whole space cleared out.”
Ruth shrugs. “We just need to see if there are any more notes.”
Jeremy finds a third note under a discarded plate by one of
the windows, the back smeared with paint. He reads it silently,
and then offers it to me and Ruth.
“Is it like the others?” I ask, staring at his hand hesitantly.
“Yeah.”
“Does the date match a canvas?” Tim calls from the other end
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of the room. Jeremy takes the note as he checks the canvases on
the table, then nods.
“Put it with the clipboard, then, because we’re probably going
to find more,” Ruth murmurs, returning to her sorting. “I’ll
read them in order when we’re done.”
“Beth?” Jeremy checks, and I nod.
“Yeah. I want to do that, too.”
We have three notes now, three out of eleven, assuming there’s
one for each canvas. Jeremy sorts carefully through the pile of
Dad’s canvases, then removes the relevant three and rests them
on the floor. He pauses at the unique canvas.
“You said this looks like the ring you found.”
“I’m sure of that much, at least,” I tell him.
“And he said downstairs the others are of the curve of her
stomach,” Ruth says quietly. Jeremy picks up one of the other
canvases and we all stare at it. Before, when I was looking at
this series of canvases, it was difficult to know what to focus
on—they are busy, with layers of different colors and materi-
als. Now that Dad’s given us a clue, it’s easy to recognize the
shape of a pregnant woman’s belly and I can’t believe I missed
it the first time.
“These are beautiful,” Jeremy says suddenly. He looks up at
us, his gaze brimming with emotion. “I’m not really a fan of
art, but there’s so much emotion here. I can feel the sadness. His regret. Her isolation.”
“The theory is that with Dad’s kind of dementia, as the lan-
guage centers atrophy, the visual centers of the brain overcom-
pensate. I read a paper where a woman who was in decline like
Dad described the way her imagination went into overdrive
when she got sick,” Tim says. “Neurologists think we can learn
a lot about how the brain works from cases like Dad’s—” He
makes a sound of triumph, then lifts a note up out of a basket.
“There’s a splash of paint on it, but it’s legible. It’s another of
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the early ones,” he tells us as he carefully puts it in place on the
clipboard, and Jeremy removes another canvas to the floor.
We get distracted for a while after that, when Ruth uncov-
ers her Grade 4 report card, and we all chuckle at her teacher’s
comments about how she was stubbornly determined to rule over her
peers rather than to learn. Jeremy finds a copy of a long-forgotten photo of a camping trip we all took to Gardner Cave when we
were preteens—the trip that sparked his love of geology. Tim
then finds what looks suspiciously like mouse droppings, and
we decide to take a break, swarming downstairs around hot co-
coas. Hunter reappears, with Noah in tow.
“Sorry it took me so long,” he murmurs, embracing me from
behind as I linger at the kitchen countertop with my siblings.
I didn’t even realize he was coming back—he’s been gone so
long I just assumed he’d just taken Noah straight home. “It took
a while for your dad to settle back in at the nursing home. His
oxygen saturation was far too low. The nurses had to call the
doctor to adjust his medication.”
“I shouldn’t have upset him,” I say, throat tight.
“He’s dying, Beth,” Tim sighs. “Look, I know I was harsh ear-
lier about you raising your voice at him, but like I keep trying
to tell you, we’re past the point where any of these things will
make much difference.”
“I do know that,” I mutter. When I think about the future,
it’s all a blur. I have no idea how much longer we have with
Dad—I get that the end is looming, and that’s why we had to
move him into the hospice. But I don’t dare ask about the time
frame. I’m certain Tim has an idea, but I just can’t bear to know
if we’re talking
days, weeks, or months.
“I assume you want to stay, honey. I just came back so you
can feed Noah,” Hunter says quietly. “Maybe Jez can drop you
home when you’re done here?”
I check in with my brother, who nods, so I curl up in Dad’s
armchair to feed the baby. Through the window I’m watching
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Ellis and the boys, who are back out in the cold, throwing the
football—their faces red as raspberries now; the joy in their ex-
pressions as they play together is such a contrast to the heavi-
ness inside the house.
Tim approaches as I’m burping the baby. He perches on the
armrest of the chair opposite me, and says very quietly, “I’ve
been thinking. Especially about what you said earlier.”
“I said a lot of things earlier.”
“About Dad. About…what’s coming for all of us. About your
postpartum depression.” His tone is gentle, his gaze soft on my
face. “Look, I’m a surgeon. I don’t know much about mental
health—just the basics. But I do remember colleagues talking
about postpartum depression when it was added to the Diagnos-
tic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders a few years back.
I know just enough to know this is a big deal. You need to go
home with Hunter and leave upstairs to me and Jez and Ruth.”
“Tim, you’ve known for like two hours that I might have
this condition, right?”
“Right. I mean, I suspected something was going on, but it
didn’t occur to me it was this serious.”
“Okay, fine. I just need to point out the utter hypocrisy in
you telling me what I can and can’t handle when you didn’t even
know I was unwell three hours ago.”
Tim opens his mouth, then closes it. His lips are pursed now.
My brother is frustrated. Good. So am I.
“I’m just worried about you.”
“Good. Thanks. I appreciate that.” I hand him Noah, and
then straighten my clothing as I shake my head. “I knew that
when someone had a mental illness, they have to deal with the
stigma, but it’s even worse than that. As soon as anyone suspects
you’re mentally ill, they start treating you like you’re fragile—
like you could shatter if you’re exposed to stress or even just a
loud noise. And at the time in your life when you need emo-