by Kelly Rimmer
beautiful thing to see.
“My goodness. Congratulations, Patrick. That’s fantastic.”
“It is,” he said, but then he hesitated. “Even if it complicates
my situation even more.”
“Oh?”
“Well, you’re going to leave us soon, and besides, this new
job will mean even longer hours—”
To my surprise, Patrick’s voice broke. I stared at him, stricken,
as the pride in his eyes faded and gave way to the gleam of un-
shed tears. He cleared his throat again, and a heavy silence fell
upon us. I didn’t know what to say.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But you have to admit, it’s hopeless.”
“Patrick,” I whispered, reaching across to rest my hand over his.
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“I won’t turn the job down. I can’t—it will mean a better fu-
ture for these kids. But I’ve been calling childcare centers and…”
“I have, too. I know,” I said heavily.
“One of the lads at work said maybe the wives could help,
that maybe we could set up a roster system and the kids could
go from house to house each day. But you know what Jeremy
is like. He’s such a handful since Gracie died and an arrange-
ment like that is surely going to end in tears. And when Tim
starts school next year, how on earth am I going to handle get-
ting him to school and the kids to a different house each day,
and make my early start? And then what if I get home late? And
what about dinners?”
He sighed heavily and ran his hand over his hair in exaspera-
tion.
“I just keep thinking there’s got to be a way, but maybe there
isn’t.”
“I know,” I admitted. “I’ve been trying to figure it out, too.
It’s just not fair.”
“This really isn’t your problem. You’ve done so much for me
already. I wouldn’t have even made it this far without you.”
“Patrick,” I said, my own voice rough around the edges now.
“Thank you. I’m sure you noticed that caring for the kids is
hardly my strength, but I’ve done my best and—”
“They adore you,” he interrupted me. “You’ve been such a
good influence on them as they grieved. I’m sure you’ve noticed
the little ones have taken to calling you Mommy.”
I hadn’t realized he’d heard them saying that. I felt myself
flush with a muddled kind of guilt.
“I’ve been discouraging them. But Bethany is still a bit con-
fused, and the others are just mimicking her.”
“It’s understandable. They’ve bonded with you so well. You’ll
be an incredible mother one day.” He paused, then cleared his
throat awkwardly. “When you’re ready, I guess.”
I winced, shaking my head.
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“No. I don’t want children of my own. I’m more than happy
to be a devoted aunt.”
“So you won’t marry, then?”
“No,” I laughed softly. “Absolutely not.”
“I don’t understand you, Maryanne,” Patrick laughed quietly.
“You’ve always seemed so determined to break all of the rules.”
“You do understand me, then. Because breaking all of the
rules is exactly what I’m determined to do.”
“What’s so wrong with marriage and kids?”
“Nothing, if they were options instead of the default. I want
more for my life than to be someone’s housekeeper. I want a
career and I want to see other women have the option to make
choices, too, instead of operating as breeding machines for en-
titled men.”
Patrick winced, and then I winced, too, and the quiet sense
of “we’re in this together” somehow evaporated. There was a
long, strained pause before Patrick pushed his chair back from
the table.
“I guess you better get to bed.”
“I guess I should, too.”
Beth
1996
I’m lying in bed the day after Dad’s funeral, trying to will
myself to get up and get dressed, when Hunter brings me the
cordless handset. He’s been off work since Dad passed, but he’s
got to go back into the office today, and he’s already in his suit.
“It’s Ruth,” he tells me, and I give him a surprised look as I
take the phone.
“Hi, there. Everything okay?”
“Not really. I miss Dad and I hate feeling like this.”
“Me, too,” I say, softening.
“I’m taking today off. Want to meet me at Dad’s place to do
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some more cleaning?” She clears her throat, then adds, “And…
bring Noah?”
“Oh, I don’t know—”
“I’ll help with him, Beth. I just could really do with some
squishy baby cuddles today. Please?”
I meet Ruth at Dad’s house midmorning, and as promised,
she takes Noah right off my hands. She sets up the playpen in a
clear space in the attic, and we work at bringing the boxes and
baskets to the dumpster and sorting through the rest of the loose
trash. We swap memories of Dad as we work, and ponder all of
our questions about Grace.
“I just keep thinking all of this would be easier if she was here.
I think that’s why I’m so stuck on understanding what really
happened to her,” I admit. “I have been fixated on these things.”
“You’re looking for closure, Beth. That’s all it is.”
“It’s called rumination,” I tell her, sighing. “Repeatedly pon-
dering a concept or thought without completion. Obsessing on
ideas. It’s classic behavior from someone who’s depressed and I
should have seen it for what it was.”
“Right, Beth, we’re going to stop talking about should haves
and just talk about moving forward. Everything is awful right
now—we just lost Dad, you’ve got postpartum depression and
all of this confusion with Grace and these notes isn’t helping.
We can’t do much about Dad, except give it time. But you can
think about therapy and medication, and you and I and the boys
can clean out this attic.”
“Practical, as always.” I give Ruth a sad smile. She throws a
paint rag at me playfully. “Do you have memories of Grace?”
“Yeah. I do,” she says softly. “I remember lots of random
things. Her reading us stories, mostly. And she wasn’t a great
cook, so we were forever eating her dreadfully bland eggs. Oh—
and Jeremy and I were desperately jealous because we thought
you were her favorite. You were always sneaking into her bed at
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night and she’d let you stay there, but if we tried it, she’d carry us right back to our own beds.”
“You were…what… three when she died?” I say, thinking for<
br />
the first time in a week about that perplexing death certificate.
“And I would have been two. It’s extraordinarily young for us
to have retained permanent memories.”
“I know you think the certificate says it was 1959, but you re-
ally must have read it wrong. I know we were older than three.”
Ruth shrugs. “I remember her taking us to our first day of el-
ementary school in 1960.”
I sigh.
“I can check that death certificate when I get home, but I’m
pretty sure I read 1959.”
“Is it handwritten?”
“Parts of it, yes.”
“Maybe the handwriting is poor. She must have died in 1961
or maybe even later.”
“It would have to be pretty awful handwriting for me to read
1961 as 1959,” I laugh weakly. Ruth shrugs.
“Look, we were very young, but I do trust my memory. She
definitely took me and Jeremy for our first day of school, and
she can’t very well have done that if she’d been dead 2 years by
that point. Right?”
“Right,” I sigh. Besides, if Grace did die in 1961, that means
I was four when she died, and it makes a little more sense that
I’d have memories of her.
We get back to work cleaning and sorting, and we’re mak-
ing great progress. Ruth finds several notes in a pile under one
of the tables, and then I find another scrunched up in a clean,
empty paint can. I leave Ruth and Noah and pick up some
treats from the bakery a few streets over that Dad used to love,
and when I get back, she has my son giggling hysterically as she
pulls funny faces.
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It’s adorable, and I watch from the door for a while, not want-
ing to disturb them.
“Get in here,” Ruth calls when she realizes I’m there, and I
cautiously approach. When I come into view, a huge, joyous
smile crosses Noah’s face, and I feel something soft and warm
inside…something close to affection. I scoop him up and hug
him close to my chest, and I suddenly get what Ruth meant
when she said she needed squishy baby cuddles.
Whether or not I’m providing Noah everything he needs
is still in question, but in this moment, he’s providing me with something new. I feel a flush of love and gratitude for my son
as my arms close around him—the warmth of his body against
mine, the softness of him in my arms—these things are a mag-
nificent focal point for my thoughts, and I’m startled by a real
sense of purpose for my life.
Dad is gone, but life must go on for the rest of us, and despite
everything, a baby like Noah is the perfect representation of the
way life works in cycles.
By late afternoon most of the loose trash has been dealt with.
I never thought I’d miss the chaotic mess up here, but there’s
something particularly sad about watching the “to-sort” pile
shrink until it’s just a handful of wrappers, especially since there’s
still an unmatched canvas on the table.
“Maybe we’ve accidentally thrown the last note out,” Ruth
says.
“God,” I sigh. “Wouldn’t that be disappointing?”
We sit together to sort through the last of the trash, and soon
we’ve cleared it all, without finding any more notes.
“We can check through the ‘to-keep’ pile again,” Ruth sug-
gests. I flip quickly through the notes, checking the dates against
canvases, just in case we’ve missed counting one.
“We’re definitely missing the note that goes with that really
dark one,” I say, holding up the bleakest of the canvases. “But
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the date is April fourteenth…maybe the canvas just represents
her death. Maybe there isn’t even a note to find.”
“Maybe,” Ruth sighs.
We hear the faintest ring downstairs, and Ruth grimaces as
she climbs to her feet from the floor.
“Told you it was hard to hear,” I say lightly as she passes, and
she rolls her eyes at me as she sprints downstairs. I stare at that
last, bleak canvas…and then at the clipboard, lined with notes. I
pick up the clipboard and run my gaze again over that first note.
I know this desolate wasteland. I recognize the subtext of
desperation and isolation. Read the notes, Dad said. She would have helped you.
I’ve been desperately curious about the notes, and the only
reason I’ve managed to wait this long to read them all is that I
promised my siblings we’d do it together. Even so, I haven’t felt
ready to read them. Not until now.
“Temptation getting to be too much?” Ruth asks me quietly as
she steps back into the attic. I startle, and give her a guilty glance.
“I wasn’t going to read them without you guys. Who was on
the phone?”
“Jez. He was just checking in, but I told him we’ve finished.
He’s going to call Tim and they’ll meet us here tonight to read
them together.”
I meet her gaze.
“Good. I think I’m ready.”
She nods.
“Yeah, Beth. It’s time.”
Tim, Ruth, Jeremy, Hunter, Ellis and I gather around Dad’s
dining table that evening, passing yellowed pages around like a
production line. If I wasn’t already exhausted, seeing life through
Grace Walsh’s eyes would have wrecked me. I have felt alone,
and I have felt lost and isolated, but even my experiences over
these past few months don’t compare to the life she describes.
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Ruth and I are crying long before we get to the end, and at
one point she drops a note onto the table and pulls me into a
hug so tight, her muscles shake.
“Are you sure you can deal with this right now?” she chokes.
I nod, squeeze her back and reach for the next one. I know I’m
not the only one feeling strangely guilty, like I’m betraying
Dad’s memory.
“This isn’t the Dad I knew,” Ruth and Jez say again and again
as we peek into Grace’s world.
“Something doesn’t add up,” Tim keeps muttering.
But all we can do is keep reading. And by the time we reach
the bottom of the pile, we’re all in pieces. Maybe we should
have waited longer before we tackled this—Dad’s loss is still so
raw—but by the same token, we won’t move on until we put
these questions to bed.
Hunter is at the end of our little production line, and when
he finishes the last note I blurt, “Do you all agree…it sounds a
lot like she took her own life?”
Tim hesitates.
“There’s no way to be sure, is there?” my sister says cautiously.
“Oh, come on, Ruth,” I groan. “She couldn’t stand the idea
of going through the depression again and she took herself back
“Probably,” Ruth says, but then she gives me a sharp look.
“But we can’t be sure. Do you really think Dad would have lied
to us for all of these years if she killed herself?”
“Yes,” I say immediately. “That’s exactly why he would have lied. Especially if he blamed himself. And given the things he
said before he died, and the fact that we know he read these
notes, we can be pretty sure he did blame himself.”
“There’s a lot to process in all of this,” Jeremy murmurs.
“So this note says that Mom had a sister. This Maryanne she
talks about,” Tim says suddenly, glancing around us all.
“Seems so odd that we might have an aunt out there some-
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where and Dad never thought to tell us about her,” Ruth says,
tilting her head.
“Doesn’t seem odd to me,” Jeremy shrugs, motioning towards
the notes. “It’s pretty obvious they didn’t get on.”
“Dad called me Maryanne a few times in those last weeks when
he was really confused,” I say, throat tight. “Remember that last
day? When he apologized to me? He was calling me Maryanne.”
Tim reaches across to squeeze my hand.
“You know, guys… .we could…”
“Track her down?” I finish for him when no one else does.
My throat is suddenly dry.
“It’s probably not going to be easy,” Jeremy says. “We know
her maiden name was Gallagher like Mom’s, but Maryanne is
probably married by now and probably has a new surname.”
“Leave it with me,” Ruth offers. “I can at least try to find her.”
“Can I…keep the notes?” I ask hesitantly. I feel heat on my
cheeks as the moment stretches, with my siblings and husband
all staring at me, each obviously waiting for someone else to talk me out of it. Ruth speaks first.
“Honey, obsessing on those notes is not going to help you—”
“Or maybe it will help me a lot,” I interrupt her. I don’t even
know if this is true. I just feel like I want to read through them
again, to feel her close to me again. I’m painting a new picture
in my mind of the Grace I’ve always remembered.
Despite her depression. Despite her misery. She made me feel loved
and she made me feel safe. Maybe I can do that for Noah, too.
Hunter gives me a thoughtful look, then asks quietly, “What
was it she wrote about loneliness?”
