“No,” Lark said. “I don’t. There’s just a whole lot I never asked her. Because I was waiting for her to tell me. I guess I’m not that good at talking about what matters either.”
Lark was looking more and more large eyed, and slightly upset. But she still didn’t speak. She grabbed the edge of the packing tape on the box and tore it open, and when they opened it, they found folded material inside. A lace tablecloth, which Lark took out and set aside, and then under that, a yellow blanket. Lark frowned. “This is it,” she said, taking it out and spreading it on the bed. There was part of a bumblebee embroidered on one side, and in the center, part of a tree. Though it wasn’t finished. Mary watched Lark stare at the item, watched as she got yet more pale.
“What?”
“Nothing,” she said, dragging her fingertips over the soft material. Mary looked back down into the box, where she saw two books, and an envelope containing what looked to be more envelopes.
“Maybe there’s explanations in these.”
There was a nondescript blue book with a clasp that appeared to be broken. She opened it up, and saw the first page.
Dot’s diary.
Mary frowned. “Dot. Dot’s diary.”
Then Mary picked up the envelope, and leafed through the envelopes inside. It was unsealed, just keeping the rest of them together, she imagined. And then she flipped the envelope over.
“Lark,” she said. Her daughter looked at her, and she held the envelope out to her. “These are for you.”
32
Sam drove me to a friend who said he’d make it go away. They gave me something that made me sleep and I woke up bleeding and in horrible pain. Today I still feel awful and I’m lying here, looking at that midnight blue dress trying to remember that night when it looked beautiful. When I felt beautiful. When this all seemed like a miraculous dream. Now home is a dream. But I do not believe it can ever be real for me again.
Ava Moore’s diary, 1924
Lark
Lark stared at the letters in her mother’s hand, and she looked down at that little yellow blanket with the unfinished embroidery, and dread climbed up into her heart and took hold there. Made it feel like she was frozen.
“I don’t want them,” she said.
“You don’t want your letters?”
“No,” Lark said. “No. I don’t want this. Let’s put it back in the box.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” Lark said. She stared at the blanket, and she didn’t know how she knew. It was only that she did. And the amount of raw grief inside her made her feel like her lungs had been torn out, left her empty and gasping.
Because it was easy, far too easy to imagine the tiny little pink body that should have been wrapped up in this blanket. She knew. She didn’t know how she knew, only that she did.
“I just want to put it away.”
Her mother took out the first letter, and Lark reached out and grabbed them, holding them to her chest, her heart beating fast.
Secrets.
The secrets were starting to unravel. All around them.
Quilt pieces, lying everywhere. Quilt pieces that could never actually be put together into one cohesive picture.
Avery had secrets.
Lark had secrets.
None of them knew who each other was. And they never had.
And they were trying to build something together that she didn’t think they actually could.
She thought back to the scrapbook, and how this had called to her.
And she didn’t want to believe in any of her metaphysical nonsense just then, because if she did, then she was going to have to acknowledge that there was a spiritual connection to this fabric. That it was what she was supposed to use. That it was something she was supposed to uncover. That the letters were something she was supposed to open, and she so desperately didn’t want that.
Instead, she pulled the first one out, the paper on the envelope odd and stiff. She opened it, and it sounded loud in the stillness of the room.
Lark,
You have never gone so far that you can’t come back home again.
There was nothing else. Nothing more. She simply stared at it. At the blanket. And she felt like she knew. She took out the next one, her hand shaking, and she could feel her mother’s eyes on her.
Lark,
I keep starting letters, and I cannot find the words to finish them. But I know we’ll talk about this one day. In the meantime, I’m sewing.
Lark sat down hard on the bed, nearly crumbling.
She put her hand over her mouth and pressed hard as tears overflowed her eyes.
“What is it?” her mother asked.
“It’s mine,” Lark said, words and violent grief all tangled together in her throat and fighting to be the first one out. “The blanket was for me.”
“Lark?”
The question, a single word, contained a thousand more.
“It’s sixteen years old.” She touched it. And for some strange reason a smile curved her lips. “She would be sixteen years old.”
The silence that stretched between them echoed in the stillness of the room. It mirrored the silence in another room, all those years ago. Not a word. Not a sound.
Not even a baby crying.
Still.
Horribly still.
Horribly quiet.
She looked up at her mother, and a rolling through her chest, leaving tiny cuts all inside her. It was worse than grief, this unbearable regret. She had grieved her loss. Over the course of years, in many towns, in many places. Left tokens and tributes and pieces of herself behind. For the child that she had only held once.
Cold and still.
The child who had never cried.
The child who had gone from pink, for only a few moments, to a deathly, ashen blue and been still. So still.
Her baby.
She had cried enough tears to flood a river for that baby. She had sent
