Page 63 of Dreams of Falling
“Thank goodness,” Mabry said, lifting Ellis to get a better look.
A memory hit me, and my mouth actually salivated. “Did your mother make her special cake?”
“Of course. She knew you were coming.”
“Some things never change,” I repeated, laughing this time.
But Mabry didn’t laugh. Instead, she peered closely at me, her green eyes just like her brother’s. “Learning who you are and changing aren’t always the same thing, you know. Sometimes we think we’ve changed, but all we’ve done is grow into the person we were always meant to be.”
While I was still mulling over her words, she took the casserole from my hands. “Bennett’s in the garage, sorting through those boxes of papers that belonged to our grandfather. Said to send you back when you got here.”
Anticipating my next question, she said, “And no, Mama and I don’t need your help in the kitchen. We’ve got it covered.”
I smiled at her departing back, wondering how I’d learned to survive without a friend who knew me better than I knew myself.
I walked down the driveway—two dirt tracks with a grassy strip down the middle—toward the detached garage at the back of the house. As long as I’d known the Lynches, they’d never used it to park cars. It had always been filled with what Mabry, Bennett, and I had thought of as treasure. Old, discarded toys and clothing from differenteras, ancient tools and holiday decorations, and an entire assortment of forgotten detritus of past lives. It was heaven to us as children, and as I approached it, I felt a thrum of nostalgia.
Inside, Bennett sat on a steamer trunk in front of an ancient card table shoved against the far wall. Several stacks of papers were piled in front of him, and he was slowly flipping through the pages when I greeted him and he looked up.
“Hey, Larkin,” he said, and the sound of my name did something twisty to my insides. He stood and shoved the steamer trunk over to make room for a chair with a vinyl cushion that wore most of its stuffing on the outside. “Your pick,” he said, indicating the seats.
“I think there’s room for both of us on the trunk. I can’t see you sitting on crumbling foam.” I sat down on the trunk and slid over, absently patting the space next to me while glancing down at the papers. There were several nearly transparent official-looking forms with smeared black type as if they’d come from an ancient mimeograph machine, and a small pile of yellowed newspaper clippings.
“What am I looking at?” I asked, painfully aware of Bennett sliding onto the trunk next to me, and trying not to notice how close he was, or how I felt a jolt each time his forearm brushed mine.
“These were all in a single folder. It was with a bunch of other files that had probably been in my grandfather’s desk drawer when he was fire chief—nothing original or confidential. This was the only file that seemed to contain information about a single case.”
“The fire at Carrowmore?”
Bennett nodded, then began rifling through a stack, pulling something out from near the top. “I thought you might want to see this.” He slid one of the clippings in front of me, and I found myself holding my breath. “It’s a photo of Margaret, your grandmother, but it looks just like you, doesn’t it?”
I nodded, staring at the strange yet familiar face in black-and-white of my grandmother in her wedding dress. She wore a lace veil that framed her oval face and looked to be light blond like me, her eyes and nose and lips shaped exactly as my own. Her jaw was softer, hercheekbones not as pronounced, but there could be no denying that we were closely related.
A longing to have known her, to remember what her voice sounded like or what it felt like to have my hair stroked by her hand consumed me, constricting my throat as if filling it with ashes. I studied her face, desperately wanting to understand why her memory had been erased from my past. In that photo she seemed to be looking at me, begging me to hear her story, as if in hearing hers, I would finally understand my own.
“It’s her obituary,” Bennett said softly.
I nodded, taking note of the day she died. October 16, 1954. “The day after Hurricane Hazel, right?”
“Yes. And the day of the fire. What’s really interesting is that my grandfather kept all of the nonrecords and records in a file together in his office. And he chose to bring them home when he retired.”
“Were our families close, then?”
He shook his head. “Not according to my mother. She says her family first met Ceecee and Ivy when they moved into the house on River Street after the fire. Ivy and my mama started school together and became best friends.”
“Maybe because it was such a tragic story, he wanted to save a reminder of it,” I offered.
“We’re talking about my grandfather here, remember. I don’t think he had a sentimental bone in his body. When he moved out to the fishing cabin after my grandmother died, he got rid of everything except for a few essentials. And this box.”
He pulled out the official-looking form I’d glanced at before and moved it in front of me. Even thoughGeorgetown County Fire Departmentwas written at the top of the page, it took me a few moments to realize what I was looking at.
Bennett tapped his index finger to lines at the top. “Your grandmother’s name.”
I followed to where he pointed, and I realized I was looking at a box on the form labeledDeceased. Next to it,Cause of death: smoke inhalation.
I let out a sigh of relief. I’d been imagining my grandmotherburning to death, one of those horrible ways to die that always made the hypothetical “Which would you prefer?” lists. But she’d died instead of smoke inhalation, which was, although still awful, maybe not as agonizing as being burned alive.
My gaze slowly slid to the box below it, the one labeledCause of fire. And there, in plain black ink on yellowed paper, the single wordundetermined. Beneath it, in pale blue pen, someone had handwritten the wordsuspiciousand underscored it twice.
