Get on with it, I told myself. I had a task to do. I simply needed to shut off my mind and get it done.
I rose from the bed. I’d do the closet first. God only knew what was in there. I opened the closet door and peered inside. It was too dark to see, and my muscle memory clicked in as my fingers found the string that hung from the ceiling light. I tugged on what was essentially kitchen twine, so thin between my fingers I feared it would break off. To my surprise, it didn’t. How had the string not disintegrated after all these years? The bulb shed a ghostly light.
The closet was shaped in a triangle, one of the many quirks of a house built in the late seventies. Wooden rods where Beth’s clothes had hung were empty. Thank God for small favors. I’d already taken care of the clothes. That had been a hard day. Several years after her death, I’d taken all of Beth’s clothes to the Salvation Army. My father had asked me to do it one afternoon when Mom had gone to the hair salon. The first year, Mom had decided not to return to work as a first-grade teacher. She rarely left the house during those months. When I’d come home from school, I’d find her still in her pajamas curled up in bed. I’d learned to cook a few simple meals, and she’d come down for dinner and then return to her room. However, after the first anniversary, it was like something had clicked inside her. The will to live, perhaps? Maybe she needed that year to grieve fully, to let herself fall into the abyss.
Dad and I had a different method, which in hindsight might not have been as effective. We simply soldiered on. As I did after learning of my husband’s infidelities. I never gave myself the time to wallow. Brooke needed me. My students needed me.
And now here I was with another project. Help Mom sell the house.
I started with a shelf lined with books. Most were trade paperbacks with a few hardbacks of Beth’s favorites: Black Beauty, Anne of Green Gables, The Swiss Family Robinson. Dozens of romance novels were hidden behind the hardbacks. We’d devoured those stories as if they were succulent bites of chocolate.
I held my breath as I opened Black Beauty. The inscription read: To Beth. We couldn’t get you a horse, so this book will have to do. Love, Mom and Dad. December, 1980.
A lump formed in the back of my throat the size of a baseball. I sat back against the wall and spread my legs out so that my feet were pressed against the opposite wall. What it lacked in shape, the closet made up for in size. Beth and I had spent many rainy afternoons in here as kids and even teenagers, reading together, one on each wall with our legs spread out long as I had them now. How naive I’d been to think we would always be that way, connected by limbs and hearts.
I sniffed the romance with a cover of a scantily dressed hero in the arms of a redheaded heroine, hoping for a hint of Beth. The pages smelled of old paperback. How could they smell of anything else having been in the closet without their owner for decades? Still, the heart hopes without understanding the truth about loss. Grief lasts forever.
I set the book aside and sat on the floor, pulling my knees to my chest. “Beth, I miss you so much,” I whispered. What was heaven like? Could she feel me or see me? Did she miss me up there or was all pain removed the moment you entered the pearly gates?
I shook off my sadness and began to pull the rest of the stuff from the shelves and into either a box or a trash bag. A bin of paper dolls went into the trash, but I put some of the books in the box of things I’d keep for myself. The only odd item I found was a butter knife from Mom’s silver placed in one of the romances like a bookmark. Curious of what she’d bookmarked, I opened the paperback. I laughed to see that it marked a steamy kissing scene. We were innocent enough that they’d made us blush, but we couldn’t get enough. The hero in this one was a hockey player who fell in love with the coach’s daughter. A favorite of ours. I hadn’t thought about this book or any of them for that matter since I’d read them with Beth over thirty years ago. We’d imagined ourselves as the heroine, swept away by the hero’s grand gesture. We’d both been such romantics, debating for hours which of the heroes we would choose if we could. How scandalous the stories had seemed to us. If I’d only known then of what was to come—Beth’s murder and then the ultimate betrayal by my husband. Murder. Blackmailed by a prostitute. Those were real scandals. True trials.
I put aside the knife. Mom would chuckle when I told her I’d found it up here. Beth had loved chunky peanut butter from the jar. After school, she’d use a knife to take a small amount. She never used spoons because she didn’t want too much. “Too easy to take a lot more with a spoon,” she’d said to me when I asked. “I have to fit into my cheerleader uniform.”
I closed my eyes for a moment as a wave of heartache enveloped me. Beth and her peanut butter
