Authors: Meg Winkler
Laney had enrolled in high school
in January and was thriving as a somewhat normal seventeen-year-old. Her
idiosyncrasies were either ignored or perceived as charming by her classmates.
With a bit of adjustment, she’d really enjoyed the past three months.
Zoey was usually off doing her own
thing. I could never really keep up with her. She was taking a yoga class, a
dance class, and a pottery class. I think she may have even taken up Buddhism,
but I wasn't sure.
Jim kept in touch. He began having
dreams of an attractive young girl—I’d seen her in his thoughts—and did what
comes naturally to us all and left to seek her out. He hadn’t found her yet,
but was enjoying the travel in the meantime. He’d left just the four of us: me,
Alex, Zoey, and Laney, the only members of our family left in New Orleans, to
find the companion of his destiny.
The last time he called, he had
been somewhere in the northeast, taking in museums and historical sites. It all
made me think of Catherina’s story about finding Dante and though I hadn’t
known them long, it still made me a little sad.
After what had happened, we had
simply shut the door downstairs and no one had dared enter the room Catherina
had shared with Dante. Subtle changes occurred gradually around the house
though—books that they had read, pieces of furniture that the rest of us
thought were superfluous, certain ingredients in the pantry—all began to slowly
disappear. It was as if while we were healing, the house was healing itself;
purging itself of Catherina’s and Dante’s memory.
I couldn’t put my remorse behind me
though, no matter how many times my family had either thanked me for what I did
or encouraged me not to hold myself responsible. The fact of the matter was
that I’d taken their mother away from them, or at least from Jim and Laney. I’d
reacted instinctually; maybe that was the most frightening part of it all. I’d
embraced my most animalistic and potentially evil nature, the dead part of my
heart, and struck down one of our own.
“
C’est la guerre,
” Josephine
had said when she’d learned the news:
That’s war.
Most days, I was able to push the guilt back to the furthest
reaches of my subconscious; other days it wasn’t quite so easy.
Thankfully, today it was.
I lounged on my patio, waiting for
Alex to return home. I listened to the sounds of the city and smelled the stale
smell emanating from my neighbor’s kitchen, leftover from the previous night’s
gumbo. My patio; my neighbor; my home. It had become largely that. We made the
home ours, rearranging furniture, and Laney helped pick out new art for the
walls. Catherina would never return and it was hard for my sister to grasp that
reality, but freshening things up had breathed fresh life into the home and had
given us all hope.
“’Mornin’,” the postman greeted in
his deep Cajun accent, walking up the sidewalk.
“Hi, George!” I responded to the
cute little old man. He’d probably been doing this for the past sixty years.
I swung my feet down from the porch
railing and walked down the path that led to the street, meeting him at the
gate.
“Here y’are, ma’am,” he said, as he
always did.
I accepted the stack of mail from
him with a smile.
“Thank you,” I replied.
He smiled with a nod and continued
to the next house. “You have a good day now,” he said over his shoulder.
I waved back to George and strolled
slowly back up to the porch to reclaim my seat, flipping through the mail. There
was a postcard from Jim with a picture of the White House on the front. I
flipped it over:
Miss you guys! D.C. is great. Keep
out of trouble, Jim,
was all he’d scrawled out in his large script. I
smiled to myself. “Keep out of trouble,” yeah, because he’d be angry he were to
miss any of it.
There was the typical junk mail, offers
for credit cards with no limit, coupons…and then there was a small, unassuming
envelope at the bottom of the pile. It was a pretty cream color, but had no
return address. On the front, my name and our address were finely written in
old-fashioned calligraphy.
I flipped it over and broke the
seal. There was a thin piece of paper inside that I carefully unfolded.
“Hello, my love,” Alex called
cheerfully, coming up the walk, but stopped suddenly. The sound of his steps
vanished quickly when he saw my face as I read the paper in my trembling hand.
“What is it?” he demanded fiercely,
but I couldn’t answer. He dropped his briefcase and ran over to me, gripping me
by the arms, giving me a gentle shake. But I still couldn’t answer.
I simply stared at nothing as the
letter floated softly, lazily to the ground. I tried to remember how to breathe
and realized what a complete fool I was to have thought that the actions of
last December would go unnoticed:
We know.