Chapter 4: Do Not Open
Priya arrived at nine the next morning with bagels, two newspapers she had bought purely to check them for the story β there was nothing, which meant, she said darkly, that Vivian Ashford had made phone calls β and found Clara still at the kitchen table, in yesterday's slip, with the locket's contents laid out on a sheet of acid-free paper like a body on a slab.
"You didn't sleep," Priya said. "Tell me everything, in order, and then tell me what we're doing, because I called in sick and I don't do that for just anyone."
Clara told her. The photograph. Savannah, August '93. The fragment. Thomas Wren. The tiny key with its number 14. And as she told it she found herself telling the other story too, the one underneath, the one she had never assembled before: her mother at the breakfast table with a book turned face-down when Clara entered; her mother going quiet, every December for a week, in a way the family called the holidays being hard on her; her mother standing once β Clara was perhaps nine β in front of the formal portrait in Henry's study, touching the painted chain at her own painted throat, whispering something Clara had filed for twenty-three years under things adults do. All of it rearranged itself now, overnight, around a paint-stained hand on a pregnant belly.
"A key to what, though," Priya said, and because she was Priya she began, instantly, to enumerate. "Not a house key, too small, too pretty. A locker, maybe β a station locker, a gym, a safety deposit box needs a bigger key and a banker's twin. A suitcase? A music box? One of those little diary locks girls had? No β nobody stamps a diary key with a number. Numbers mean systems, Clara. Numbers mean a clerk somewhere kept a ledger." She took the key between finger and thumb and held it to the light the way Clara had taught her to hold anything old: by the edges, without breathing on it. "Fourteen. Your mother carried a numbered key next to her heart for three decades and never used it where anyone could see. That's not sentiment. That's evidence storage. I say this as your best friend and as a woman who took the bar: do not hand that thing, or the paper, to anyone named Bennett, Ashford, or Crane until we know exactly what they open." Clara felt, beneath the sleeplessness, a first, thin thread of steadiness: whatever else the morning had taken, it had given her a we. "Promise me," Priya said. "Whatever it opens, we open it together." "Together," Clara said.
"I keep thinking about the will," Clara said.
"What about the will?"
"There was a letter. With Mom's will, there was a sealed letter, for me. Silas Crane gave it to me at the reading, in his office, and Dad was there, and Silas said Mom's instructions were that it was mine and private." She was already up, already pulling the fireproof box from the hall closet, because of course she had kept it, she kept everything, she was an archivist: her mother's sealed letter had sat in that box for five years, behind her passport and her birth certificate β her birth certificate, she thought, and felt the room tilt slightly β and she had read it exactly once, at twenty-seven, anesthetized by grief, and remembered only that it had been strange and sad and that she had decided she was too raw to understand it.
She understood it now. Rose's handwriting, the real one, not the looping girl's pencil of 1993 but the slanted, urgent hand of a dying woman, filled two pages. Most of it was love, and apology, and instruction of the ordinary maternal kind. And at the center of the second page, underlined once:
My darling β the locket is yours now, and so I must say the thing I never could say aloud. Do not open the locket until you are ready to lose everything you think you know. It is not a warning against curiosity. It is a promise that what is inside it is true, and that the truth will cost you the story of your life as you have been told it. When you open it β and you will, you are my daughter, you open everything β forgive me. Forgive me for the silence most of all. I bought your safety with it, and I have never been sure, even now, that I did not overpay.
Clara read it aloud to Priya in a voice that failed twice. Through the window the church bells of St. Michael's marked ten, the way they had marked every hour of every crisis of her life.
"She knew," Priya said quietly. "She knew you'd open it. She planned for you to open it, Clara β after she was gone, when he couldn't β" She stopped.
"When Dad couldn't stop her telling me. She waited until she was dead to tell me, and even then she told me by keyhole." Clara wiped her face with the heel of her hand. "The key, Pri. A birth record naming another man as my father, and a key numbered fourteen, hidden behind her wedding β behind her whole life. She didn't just keep a secret. She left me a trail."
Clara looked at the key again, turning it in the light, wondering what kind of woman hides a door inside a heart and then trusts her daughter to find it.
She read the letter a second time, slowly, while Priya made tea neither of them drank, and found the passages grief had hidden from her at twenty-seven. Rose had written about the garden behind Tradd Street in the first spring of the marriage, planting gardenias she had not expected to love, and understanding that a life could be both a sentence and, on certain mornings, almost a mercy. She had written, I have been a good wife in every way the world counts, and I have been faithful to your father in deed for every day of your life, and if either of those sentences surprises you then I have done my work better than I deserved. She had not written the man's name anywhere. Clara noticed that with a pang sharper than the rest: even posthumously, even in a sealed and private letter, Rose protected Thomas Wren from Henry's house, the way you do not speak the true name of anything in a place where names can be used as weapons. What she had written instead, near the end, was this: If you go looking β and you will, you are my daughter β do not go looking to punish the living. Go looking for the girl I was. She is the one who has been waiting for you, longer than anyone, and she has never once blamed you for taking so long.
The doorbell rang at ten-forty, in the particular manner of a man who had been ringing doorbells with authority since before Clara was born. Henry stood on her step in a pressed shirt, hat in hand, looking like a mourner at his own funeral. He had driven across town, Clara understood, because a telephone call could be hung up on.
"The locket," he said, when she opened the door. "I have thought about it all night. Give it to me, Clara. Not forever β until the wedding, until this β this fever of curiosity β has passed. It will do you no good, and it can do β" he glanced past her into the hall, and she understood with a small, cold clarity that he was not afraid of the locket. He was afraid of where it had already been. "It can do the Ashfords harm. It can do you harm. Silas and I agree β"
"You discussed my mother's locket with Silas Crane this morning. Before you came to your daughter."
"Clara β"
"No." She said it simply, standing in her doorway in her bare feet, and was astonished at how much of her mother she could hear in it. "It was hers. She left it to me, with a letter that says it is mine and that what is inside it is true. You had thirty years to ask her to take it off, Dad. You never could. You're not taking it off me in one morning."
"Then you are choosing a dead man's photograph over your own family," Henry said, and put his hat on, and his hand was not steady, and Clara watched him go down Church Street with her heart breaking for him even as she closed the door β because she believed, standing there, that he was lying to her. She was no longer sure that lying was all he was doing, or that he was doing it for himself.
Chapter 5: A Name: Thomas Wren