Chapter 11 - The Boxes in the Garage
“Tell me,” I said.
Claire didn’t hesitate.
“Phoebe’s things. He asked me to help him make space before I moved in. Now everybody acts like I broke into his house and stole his dead wife.”
I closed my eyes.
“Did he ask you to tell Margot she didn’t belong?”
“You won’t even listen.”
“I’m listening. Those are still two different things.”
She hung up.
I called Emmett.
He answered on the first ring.
“She called you.”
“Yes.”
He was quiet for a long moment.
“Come over tomorrow. Please.”
While Margot was at school, he opened the garage and showed me three plastic bins on a shelf.
Phoebe’s name was written on the lids in his handwriting.
I recognized the striped sweater in the top bin.
I had bought it for her twenty-ninth birthday.
She had pretended to love it, then worn it so often that I eventually believed her.
“I asked Claire to help pack the clothes,” Emmett said.
“I couldn’t keep opening that closet and expecting Phoebe to be standing there.”
“You were allowed to put clothes away.”
His face crumpled with relief, and that made me angry in a way I hadn’t expected.
Not at him.
At the years he had spent thinking grief required him to leave every object exactly where my daughter had touched it.
Then he took out a photo album.
“I saw this in the box afterward. I left it.”
There was the part he needed to say.
“Why?”
“Because the house felt easier without everybody looking at what we’d lost.”
I opened the album.
Phoebe stood in their kitchen holding a wooden spoon like a microphone.
On the next page, baby Margot slept on Emmett’s bare chest.
“Easier for you,” I said.
“Yes.”
He didn’t blame Claire.
He didn’t tell me he had been confused.
He stood beside those boxes and admitted that he had accepted the silence because it hurt less.
“I’m not asking you to keep a museum,” I told him.
“But Margot needs permission to remember her mother without checking the room first.”
We carried the albums inside.
The clothes stayed in the clean, labeled bins.
Some would be saved for Margot.
Some, when Emmett was ready, would go to people who could use them.
My daughter was not in that sweater.
I knew it even while my hand refused to let go.
Emmett waited until I folded it myself.
“I miss her too,” he said.
“I know, son.”
That afternoon, he put the albums on a low shelf where Margot could reach them.
He sent me a picture of her sitting on the floor, turning a page.
Then another message arrived.
Claire agreed to counseling. Tomorrow at four.
May you like
Under it, he added one more line.
I’m afraid I already know what she’s going to say.
