AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Just a few errands,” Carmella said. “Feels like there’s never enough time.”
Carmella waved goodbye to Aria from her car, then reversed into the road and drove out toward the Remington House. Last night, she’d texted Elsa about their mother’s things, about where Elsa kept them, and Elsa explained they were under her bed at the Remington House. Carmella was welcome to go through them when Elsa was at work.
Carmella parked in front of the Remington House and used her key to enter, calling out, “Hello?” Deep within the house, Alyssa’s voice hollered back, “Hi!” A moment later, she appeared with a huge smile and a tiny baby bump. “Carmella! What are you doing here?”
Carmella’s cheeks burned with embarrassment.How could she explain her plan?
“Elsa found a few boxes of our mother’s things,” Carmella said. “I’ve been reading her diary from 1977 and 1978, and I was curious if there were any others.”
“Oh! Cool. Have you learned any family secrets?” Alyssa asked.
Carmella wanted to sit on the floor with Alyssa and dig deep into her mother’s past, to tell her each of the aching memories Tina had written across the page. But Carmella knew that telling Alyssa these things before Elsa knew was a serious crime. So, she said, “Just a lot of stuff from when I was a baby. It’s fascinating to me, at least.”
Upstairs, Carmella dropped to the ground beside Elsa’s bed and pulled out several of their mother’s boxes. One of them was full to the brim with other diaries which spanned other years, both before and after the affair with Oliver, until her death when Carmella had been a teenager.
Carmella removed the diaries from the box, hunted through the corners, and then went through her mother’s jewelry box. She then flipped over each box and shook it, listening for some sign of a key clinking.
Where on earth was the key to the sea cottage?
Ever since Carmella had read about it, she’d been hungry to go to this magical place, a home that seemed to be the single greatest solace to Tina during the months after Oliver’s death. It sounded like Carmella and Elsa had spent a lot of time there, so much so that Carmella even took her first steps there.
But Carmella didn’t remember going to the cottage at all, which meant that Tina had stopped bringing her children there at some point.Had she continued to go there as Carmella and Elsa had gotten older? Had it remained in her name? Or had something else happened to it after Tina’s death?
Unsure where to turn, Carmella placed her face in her hands and sighed. If the key wasn’t in her mother’s final collection of possessions, she had no idea where it could be.
Slowly, Carmella began to return Tina’s things to the boxes, assembling everything as orderly as possible so as not to annoy Elsa. When she stacked the diaries, she flipped through several of them, noting the day Colton had been born, the day Carmella had started kindergarten, and the day she’d visited Oliver’s grave over ten years after his death and told him that she continued to love him. Each of the diary entries was heartbreaking, even in their simplicity, and Carmella found herself sobbing in the light that flooded Elsa’s bedroom, overwhelmed with the tragedy of her mother’s life.
The final diary was only half-full. Tina had begun it three months before her death, and it recounted plenty of normal days from the lives of Carmella, Elsa, Neal, and Tina back in the nineties. On one page, Tina had written a shopping list, including a Twix, a candy bar Carmella had loved. This very simple detail shattered Carmella.
As Carmella flipped through the diary, it occurred to her that the book itself was a lot heavier than it should have been. She flipped it over to take stock of it, then heard a dramatic clank from within.Could it be?Quickly, she flipped through the pages, then discovered a sort of “hole” within the back cover, wherein Tina had placed an ornate key.
Carmella tugged the key from the hole and gazed at it, stunned. This was the only key she’d found within all the possessions, making it her only hope.
Carmella hurried back to her car, waving to Alyssa and Maggie as she went, then started the engine and sped off. According to the hints Tina had written in the diary, Carmella knew almost exactly where the seaside cottage should have been if it still existed. She drove there immediately, hardly able to breathe.
Carmella drove very slowly down the back country road, which had never been paved, peering through the line of budding trees and high weeds. If she wasn’t mistaken, it seemed that one area of the road’s weeds was slightly shorter, slightly younger, as though, at one point over the past few years, someone had driven through. Too terrified to turn her car down the path, Carmella parked her car on the road, locked it, and dove through the weeds, which attached themselves to her pants and her sweatshirt. A thorn snagged on her arm, and she jumped at the sharp feeling through her skin. She was reminded of one of her favorite books as a child,The Secret Garden.
When Carmella reached the line of trees, she grabbed a thick branch and peered over it to find a beautiful stone cottage directly along the water. Because the trees had overgrown in front of the cottage, it couldn’t be seen from the water. The trees had cocooned it over the years, as though they’d wanted to reclaim the space.
Carmella pushed herself through the weeds to find a stone trail and then, miraculously, a very cracked and broken driveway. A shiver raced up her spine when she imagined that her mother had once parked her car there, hungry to meet Oliver.
Still, Carmella couldn’t be sure that the house was her mother’s, not until she tried the key.
At the door nearest the driveway, Carmella removed the key from her pocket and took a deep breath. When she pushed the key through the lock, it entered easily and clicked, but when she tugged at the door to open it, the wood wouldn’t budge. The winds, rain, and saltwater had affected the wood over the years, so it now bulged against the doorway. Carmella removed the key from the lock, suddenly very sad.How could she enter?
Carmella walked around the side of the cottage to find the front porch that had once looked out over the water. Carmella sat on the stone steps and tried to picture her mother as a young woman with two young daughters, sitting there on the porch and writing in her diary as Oliver cooked for her inside. Tina had thought Oliver was her secret to a better life.But what if Oliver had taken her away from their family?Colton never would have been born. Maybe Tina would have had another child, who would have been Carmella’s half-sibling. Maybe Tina wouldn’t have disliked Carmella so much because Colton never would have died.
Suddenly too overwhelmed to remain on the property a moment more, Carmella jumped up and fled through the weeds and trees back to her car. She started the engine and pressed her foot on the gas, hurrying away from her mother’s dark memories. But when she returned to downtown Edgartown, she couldn’t just go home. She’d only been gone forty-five minutes and booked Aria for three hours.
More than that, she just couldn’t carry this story alone anymore. She had to tell Elsa.
Carmella drove to the Katama Lodge and parked out front. Her hands were clammy, and she struggled to get a full breath. As she entered the front door, the receptionist, Theresa, who’d taken over after Mallory had begun to pursue law greeted her happily and said, “You shouldn’t be here! You’re not back to work till June.” But Carmella waved her hand and said something easy, something Carmella couldn’t remember after the fact, that assured her Carmella just “couldn’t stay away.”
Carmella knocked on Elsa’s door and was grateful to hear Elsa’s voice on the other side. “Come in!” Carmella opened it to find Elsa and Janine seated together, both with green smoothies.
“Carmella!” Janine and Elsa greeted her in unison.
“What are you doing here?” Janine popped up to hug her, and Elsa did the same.
