Page 43 of Fractured (Not Quite a Billionaire)
To somebody else, it might look like an old mended vase, not even good enough to donate. To me, it was a reminder of my mother hugging a weeping Karen and telling her, “You didn’t mean to. You’ll help me mend it, and it’ll be as good as new, you’ll see. A crack is just a place where something got loved extra-hard, and somebody made an effort to fix it.”
That cracked vase would look nothing but out of place on Hemi’s dining-room table or the marble sarcophagus, and it was nothing I could leave behind. Letting it go was good, but Hemi was right that some things, you had to hold on to. For now, I was lifting the lid off the cardboard box and doing my best to keep myself under control.
“It’s been a long time since we looked in here,” Karen said. “I used to want to ask, but…”
“Yeah,” I said. “I wasn’t too good about that.”
“Why? How could you be so tough? It was like you just moved on.”
It was true, and it wasn’t. When we’d come home from the funeral home on a gorgeous May day, I’d packed up my mother’s things, had thrown away the sheets and pillowcases on the double bed because I couldn’t bear to use them, had made it up again, and then had moved Karen and myself into the bedroom.
“Some things,” I said, “you just have to do, because there’s nobody else to do them, you have no choice, and you know they aren’t going to get any easier.” I didn’t want to think about that day anymore, so I reached into the box and picked up the item on top. Unfortunately, it was the tattered scrap of blue that had been Karen’s baby blanket. Blue, because her father had wanted a boy, and had thought that buying blue things would do it. He’d been a big believer that wishing could make it so, as stupid as that had seemed to me even at nine. The baby was alreadymade,I’d said, and he’d said, “Nothing is set in stone. You’ve got to believe,” which was justdumb.Also unscientific.
“Want it?” I asked Karen.
“No,” she said. “Not really. I don’t remember it. I guess it’s been in the box too long.”
I tried to shove aside the memory of her in her travel-sized crib, tucked between this couch and the wall. Of her waking at five in the morning, aged two, shaking the bars, and saying, “Hope. Wantout. Out,”in her insistent little voice, until I got up and brought her to sleep on the couch with me, one of her skinny monkey hands clutching her blue blanket, the other one latched onto my pajama sleeve.
I hadn’t needed a security blanket. I’d had Karen. My baby monkey, hanging on.
I set the scrap aside and lifted out a file folder, saying, “We’ll keep this, too, even though we probably don’t need it. Just for memories. For a record.”
Karen opened it. I didn’t look. I knew what it held. Our mother’s birth certificate, and her death certificate. Some letters from her parents that she’d saved. Nothing I needed to see.
While she was looking at the letters, I picked up her blanket, folded it small, and tucked it into the folds of the afghan. It might not mean anything to her, but I couldn’t throw it away like it was trash. It was our past.
The last thing, then. My mother’s photo album. I said, “We’re keeping this, too.”
Karen set it in her lap and said, “Want to look?”
“Not today. You go ahead.” Then I got up and packed the Belleek vase, looked through the cabinets, and thought,What is there here that I can put into Hemi’s cupboards? What is there that he’d ever want to use? What is there that meets his standards?
Nothing.
I picked up the box again, shoved down the panic that was trying to paralyze me, and said, “I’ll go do the bathroom and under the bed. And I guess I’ll call Charles pretty soon. There’s not much else here that we’re going to need.”
Hemi
I was knee-deep in spreadsheets, all three monitors on my desk pressed into service, when my phone rang.
The fella at the front desk said, “I have Hope and Karen Sinclair here for you,” and that was when I realized I’d never given either of them a key. I shut the laptop, and the monitors winked into darkness.
Ever since they’d left, I’d wondered if I should have gone with them. But what would have been the point? I couldn’t do that sorting for them, and it would only be a couple hours’ work. There was nothing of value in that apartment. They could’ve come to me with the clothes on their backs without losing much. When they got to the apartment door, though, I had it open.
Hope came in first, a stack of dresses over one arm, her old suitcase in the other hand. “Hi,” she said. “We just brought a few things.”
I glanced at the garments. “Take them off those wire hangers first and use the wooden ones. If there aren’t enough, we’ll buy more.”
I could’ve sworn she flinched, but then she nodded and disappeared into the apartment, and I stood there, my hand on the doorknob, and wondered what I’d said wrong.
Karen was still standing there, too, holding a little duffel and a green plastic rubbish bag. I frowned at it absently and said, my mind still on Hope, “I told you to leave anything you didn’t want. Charles will take care of it.”
She hefted the green plastic and said, “Yeah. Well. This is my clothes. I don’t have a suitcase.”
“No?” I’d loaned her and Hope some good-sized ones for our holiday, but I hadn’t realized Karen didn’t own one at all.
She must have noticed me looking startled, because she said, “I’ve never gone anywhere before.”
