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It’s mostly the same from what I remember. My mum’s favourite colour was lavender—the floral curtains, the bedsheets, and comforters—all of it had specks of that colour. She always used to say she didn’t have a choice because her parents named her Hyacinth. I flick the switch, powering on the huge silver and iron chandelier hanging in the centre of the room.
The whole room ignites in a flash of bright light. I squint, closing the doors behind me and taking in the room. It’s changed a bit. It’s certainly cleaner than I remember it ever being when it was still Mum’s room. She was always a little bit messy. I don’t even think it was intentional—it was just how her brain worked.
I walk deeper into the room, stuffing my hands in my pockets. I don’t touch anything, but I look. I look at everything, committing it to memory, trying to remember if that’s what it looked like the last time I saw it. Her paintings still hang on the wall, but it’s the picture sitting on the bureau that makes me pause.
It’s a picture of Mum.
I stare at it, my fingers tingling with the urge to touch it. She’s whole in the picture, her lopsided half-smile and sad eyes evident to me now I’m older. It’s been a long time since I remembered her like this. More often than not, when I think of her, the image that flashes before me is what she looked like when I found her in the greenhouse.
Moving closer to the picture with an outstretched hand, I pluck it from the bureau. There’s a creak when I do so, right under my left foot. My eyes fall from the picture in my hands to my foot, and I depress my toes again. Yep, it definitely creaks.
Not the soft, natural creak from the wooden panels throughout the house, though. This time, it’s hollower. In fact, it sounds like the loose floorboard in my old room, the one I hid all my trading cards in so my father couldn’t toss them into the fireplace when he got angry.
Is there…?
On a whim, I kneel and start feeling around the edges of the creaky floorboard. At first, I think that the lack of sleep has made me delirious. But after a few seconds of shimmying, it starts to come loose.
By the time it comes loose in my hand, I’m holding my breath.
Beneath the floorboard is a metal tin. It’s small and narrow—the kind of thing you’d probably keep your jewellery in if you were a housewife from the 40’s.What the fuck is this?I reach up and set the picture back where I got it. There’s an ‘H’ on the tin, carved with something sharp, like a razor.
Plopping down in a sitting position, with a leg on either side of the hole in the floor, I take the tin in my hands. It’s slick with dust, coating my fingers in a dark brown grime. I brush it off as best as I can, my mind still reeling. I just found a strange little box in a loose floorboard of my mum’s old room. What are the odds? From the looks of it, it’s always been here.
My throat goes thick. This is obviously a piece of my mum—more connected to her than this room and her house. Should I even be looking at this? If she went through all this trouble to hide it, what’s inside the tin? When I’m able to anchor myself back in the present, there’s a slight tremor in my fingers as I start to fiddle with the lid.
If it’s here, then she wanted to keep it hidden. It could be something mundane, like something she bought she didn’t want my dad to find out about. Or it could be something more important, something I didn’t know about her.
When the lid comes free, I don’t open it immediately.
Somehow, it feels like whatever I’m about to stumble into is important. Important enough to change the trajectory of my life, and I fucking hate that feeling. I know what my future will be. I know how the choices I’ve made will shake out.
This—this could change things for the worse.
Or for the better.
That’s the sliver of hope that has me pulling off the cover with bated breath, bracing myself for whatever I’m about to see.
It’s anti-climatic.
There’s nothing immediately sinister or classified about the contents. It’s just a collection of journals. The only thing that strikes me as odd is that I thought I had all Mum’s old journals. I remember arguing with my father for weeks when he wanted to get rid of them—he thought it was time for us to move on from Mum and wanted to torch all of her possessions as some sort of “healing process.”
I was able to save the journals, but little else.
Unlike the ones I have that are all bound in black leather, these three don’t seem like a matching, chronological set—they’re a hodgepodge of colours. There’s a single gold ribbon holding them all together. I take them from the container and set the tin aside, pulling on the ribbon.
I crack the first one open, revealing yellow pages and black ink.
These are Mum’s, alright.
I would be able to recognize her chaste penmanship anywhere. I skip through the three of them to find that they’re not all from the same time. The oldest one is dated from before I was even born, while the most recent one is a year before she died.
This is odd.
But I’m turning the pages, still. I start reading the oldest entry, and I hear her voice in my head, almost like she’s narrating it to me.
SIXTEEN
ALIZE
