Lock & Mori

by Heather W. Petty

  The day I asked Mum to teach me how to flip the coin like she did, she’d instead taught me how to palm the coin and make it disappear. It took two more days for me to learn to walk the coin between my fingers and flip it to my palm first, and when I’d mastered that, she gave me the coin to keep.

  “Keep it in a secret place, Mori,” she’d said. “This is just between you and me, yeah?”

  “A secret?” I had whispered.

  Mum had smiled and looked around us before leaning close to whisper back. “People who share a secret are bound together forever, but only if they keep it.”

  I’d nodded and smiled and felt very grown up, to have a secret with my mum against the world. And she’d said forever, not just for life, so I supposed we were still bonded. I swiped my eyes and slumped down onto the steps of our front stoop. I’d never told anyone about the coin—never even showed it to the boys. I heard them thunder through the house, one of them screaming at the other, a sure sign Dad was at work. Another wave of pain swept over me, and I stared out at the cars surging past to distract me from it.

  Soon, the white noise of traffic blurred things enough for me to go back in. I dressed quickly and escaped once more to the streets. Sherlock waited for me on the sidewalk, greeting me with only a nod. I didn’t feel like being around him just then, but I’d promised to take him to the memorial, and I would. Still, I didn’t talk during our walk to the Tube, and he seemed okay with that. Sherlock appeared lost in thoughts of his own, really.

  “Is everything all right?”

  Sherlock forced a grin. “What could be wrong?”

  And that was the extent of our conversation for the whole of the trip to Mr. Patel’s memorial.

  The parish was a drab yellowish brick on the outside, but the chapel was beautiful. Giant white columns stood ominously in all four corners of the room. A chandelier hung low enough to create a spiderweb shadow across the parquet floor of the main aisle, the sparkle of the glass ornamentation competing with the various stained-glass windows to welcome in the afternoon sun.

  But despite all the formality of the decor, the service itself was quite casual, an odd mix of Mr. Patel’s Hindu tradition and their family’s Protestant beliefs. All the people on the left side of the chapel were dressed in white, and took turns draping the stage and urn with garlands of flowers. A man in white linen robes called speakers up by name, each of whom shared an anecdote that either caused their own tears to spill or earned a sobbed laugh from Mrs. Patel, Lily’s mother. We were seated with the rest of Lily’s school friends, on the opposite side of the chapel in the second row, so I had a direct line of sight to Lily—her mother on one side, her Watson on the other. Lily sat still, her eyes glued to the large printed photo of her father that stood in the corner.

  I remembered that stillness.

  Lily’s mom cried freely, her gaze only rising to the photo twice through the whole service, each time with a slight wince, like someone had pricked her with a pin. There was something completely familiar in her mannerisms. She would rest her tissue-clad hands in her lap, and then scoot them up to her knees. Down at her sides, crossing her chest, then remembering herself and letting them fall to her lap once again. She was lost. She didn’t even know what to do with her own body anymore.

  It had been the same with my dad. He couldn’t sit still at our mom’s memorial either. But not all spouses acted that way.

  I’d spent an entire month of Saturdays after my mom passed attending various advertised memorials, just to study the mourners—to figure out how I was supposed to be feeling, or maybe acting. Because all I felt was numb—a numbness I knew showed on my face and in my every movement.

  I’d seen loads of women who sat with a quiet strength, the tears in their eyes never falling throughout the service. Some seemed disconnected from the service entirely, as if wandering through the secret rooms of their mind, thinking things we’d never discover. I even saw one woman who whimpered through the entire service, held up on all sides by grand­children. I watched as she reached out and petted each of their ginger heads in turn, and how they snuggled closer to her at the contact. I remembered thinking I would have been the one grandchild to scoot away from them all, separate myself, not wanting to be touched. Not that my grandmother would have dared touch me.

  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.

&nbs
p; 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.”

  I was pretty sure there wasn’t strictly a “we” involved in this gossip-filled concern, but Mr. Patel’s troubled youth was exactly when he had known my mom, and I was desperate to learn more about that. “Troubled?”

  “Aye,” she said, patting my back with more vigor as she leaned in to drop her voice even lower. “In with a wrong crowd. I trust you won’t be doing the same?”

  I risked a glance and caught the woman searching the table.

  “I could have sworn there was a photo here,” she muttered. “Female at the center of it all.”

  “A girl?”

  The woman clicked her tongue and sighed. “Ah, but there always is. And this one had the face of a cherub. On the street she was the picture of innocent beauty, but inside lived a wolf.” The woman shifted her gaze to my face before I could cover with the tissue. “Ah, there now.” She paused. “You look a bit like her, you know.”

  Her gaze dropped to the table, and I shot a look over my shoulder. People started to rise from their pews, including Sherlock, who was beelining through the crowd for me.

  “If I could just find the photo, I’d show you.”

  “I’ve got to go,” I mumbled, stepping into the first surge of people making their way out front. I spilled out onto the street and turned back just as John Watson was walking a stiff, unemotive Lily away from the chapel. Her mother stared after her but quickly turned back to greet the attendees.

  “Well, this was a waste of time,” Sherlock pronounced from his sudden appearance at my side.

  I frowned and started to walk in the opposite direction of John and Lily, toward our Tube entrance.

  “Do I take from your silence that you learned something?”

  “There is always something to learn,” I said.

  Sherlock pulled out a cigarette and lit up. I felt my scowl deepen.

  “Not here. Just a bunch of stories, most of which are likely fiction, meant to show the dead man to be far greater than he was. Typical.” He took a deep drag and blew it out to the sky.

  I stopped walking. In my mind, he kept walking without me, beating me to the station so that I could take a different train. In my mind, he evaporated so that I could be alone with the picture of my mother, free to study it at my leisure without his prying eyes. No one ever does what I want.

  “What is it?” His eyes brightened as they met mine. “You know something! Tell. It’s the rules.”

  I shook my head. “Don’t get your hopes high. It’s nothing a quick search wouldn’t have uncovered.”

  I paused but was too distracted to think of something to tell him. I was determined not to touch my handbag, or look at it too much. Then again, I didn’t want to be seen to avoid it. And the more these directives spiraled around my mind, the fewer ideas I had for some great reveal. In the end, I said, “I just heard a bit of gossip, which may not be true. But this woman said Mr. Patel had been in trouble when he was a kid.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “She made it sound like his trouble was with the police.”

  The light left Sherlock’s eyes and he took another long drag from his cigarette, and then tossed it into the gutter. “Nothing of note. Still, a wasted day.”

  I didn’t know why his declaration upset me like it did, but I couldn’t even speak to him after that. I took perhaps too much time to offer him a directed glare, and then I stormed down the road, leaving him the way I’d just wished he would leave me.

  Unfortunately, I stormed in a direction opposite the train and ended up walking the six blocks to the stop at Monument. It, of course, didn’t have my line, so I ended up taking the bus, walking to Moorgate, and catching a late train back to our station. By the time I got to Baker Street, I could think of nothing I wanted less than to go home. I walked to the park instead, as if I were hearing its call.

  I practically fell onto my beloved bandstand. I resisted the urge to crawl across it to my seat on the other side, but I was tempted. Later, I would blame the fact that I was too exhausted from the day to explain how I could fail to notice my smoking gent standing in the shadows beyond. When the scent of Sherlock’s cloves finally did strike me, it sent me into the foulest of moods.

  I decided to pretend he wasn’t there, which worked for a while. He smoked, and I stared out across the lake, wishing the light from the rising moon would strike him into oblivion like a million bolts of lightning all at once. Violent fantasies aside, the longer we stood in silence, the less worked up I became, until finally he rubbed out the filter of his clove and walked over toward me.

  “I’m sorry,” he said with finality, as though his words were the solution to something and not the opening of our conversation.

  I shrugged and kicked my feet out a few times, letting my heels fall back to strike against the cement with a rubbery flop.

  Sherlock cleared his throat and came around to face me. “I am sorry.”

  I slid down from my perch so that we were eye to eye—or would’ve been were he not eight inches taller than me. “For what?”

  He was taken aback by the question—looked almost indignant about it, really, which lightened my mood for some reason.

  I said, “You don’t even know what to apologize for.”

  I turned to go, and he stopped me with a soft, “Wait.”

  I met his gaze again, determined not to let him off the hook, though my anger somehow managed to evaporate for no good reason at all.

  He dipped his hand into his pocket and brought out his pack of cigarettes, then thrust them back in and sighed. “It’s for whatever it was I saw in your eyes before you left me at the church. I’m not sorry for saying what was obviously correct, but I am sorry for causing that.”

  I stared him down until he was forced to look away, which would have made me smile on any other night. How he managed to insist on his own rightness and still make me feel better, I’d never have been able to say. But he looked so handsome standing there with his hands in his pockets, his eyes open to the sky, as if the very air held answers to the question of me. I couldn’t help myself. I grasped the lapels of his wool coat and drew him down so I could press a soft, chaste kiss. His struggling to free his hands made me smile against his lips. But I spun out of reach before he could hold me in place.

  “What . . . ?”

  I must admit watching the great mind of Sherlock Holmes struggle to ask even a single question was perhaps the best part of that wretched day. Other than the kiss itself. I caught my fingers touching my lips and turned my back to him, looking over my shoulder briefly to say, “Looked like you needed
a distraction.”

  I walked across the lawn to the lit-up path. Listening to his hurried steps as he scrambled to catch up with me was definitely the second-best part.

  Chapter 8

  I had too much in my head when I went to sleep that night, and spent most of Sunday staring at the picture of Mr. Patel and Mum. I took time between homework assignments to memorize the minutiae of the background until I was sure I’d know the room they were in were I to walk into it by accident, regardless of any changes to the decor. I’d been reduced to naming the people by appearance to keep them in my head. There were seven in all—Mr. Patel, my mother, the Blue-Haired Girl, the Man in Green, Striped Man, Mustache Man, and the man with his arm around my mom, whom I called Stepdad.

  When I finally went to bed Sunday night, my sleep was troubled. Each member of the snapshot played a part in my dreams, leading me down paths, promising to reveal their identities if we could just get to the paths’ mythical end. I woke with the quest at the forefront of my thoughts and was so distracted, I washed my hair three times and only realized I’d forgotten to put on makeup entirely when I was most of the way to school.

  It wasn’t like me at all to have flitting thoughts. I was out of control. Off plan. I should’ve told Sherlock I wasn’t interested in his little crime the very minute I discovered my mother’s picture at the funeral. I should’ve placed the photo in my little box of my mother’s things and left it for after school—after I’d graduated and escaped Baker Street and all that held me there. After I’d discovered a way to take my brothers with me.