Part 4
Valerie could have lied. She was good at omissions, and a photograph with a missing edge offered plenty of room for them. She could have said Jack was an old boyfriend, an embarrassment, nobody important. She could have said the scissors were Diane’s, or their mother’s, or the result of some forgotten craft project from another decade.
Instead, she opened her purse, took the photograph out again, and placed it on the table between them.
“My sister’s husband,” she said.
Megan looked down at the image, then back at Valerie. “You cut your sister’s husband out of pictures?”
“Not all pictures.”
The answer was so absurd that both of them heard it. Valerie pressed her fingers against her temple.
“His name was Jack Bennett. He worked at the rail yard in Joliet when we were young. Diesel mechanic. Tall. Brown hair. Hands always scraped up. He had this ridiculous old Chevy that only started when he threatened it.”
Megan smiled faintly, but she did not interrupt.
“I was studying architecture. Diane was still at community college. Our father taught history at Northwestern, and our mother believed manners could prevent almost any disaster. I thought I was…” Valerie stopped. The word that came was better than she deserved. “Refined.”
“You were a snob?”
“Yes,” Valerie said. “A very lonely one.”
She had loved Jack with the ferocity of someone who had never been asked to risk anything. He was warm in a way that embarrassed her, friendly with strangers, easy with laughter. He came to their house once to fix their father’s old station wagon and left with grease on his jaw and Diane teasing him from the porch. Valerie had watched from the kitchen window, pretending to rinse dishes.
When Jack asked her to go to a Fourth of July picnic, Valerie said she was busy.
She was not busy.
She said it because he asked too openly, because Diane was watching, because their mother had once referred to him as “that nice working boy” and Valerie heard the class line in the compliment. She said it because she wanted him badly enough to be ashamed of it.
“He asked again?” Megan said.
“Once. I told him we moved in different circles.”
Megan winced.
“Yes,” Valerie said. “That is exactly the face Diane made.”
Diane had followed her upstairs afterward, furious. You’re not better than him, Val. You’re just scared. Valerie had denied it, of course. She denied everything well then. She said Jack was not her type, not her future, not worth discussing.
That summer, Valerie went to stay with their grandmother in Ohio for six weeks. When she came back, Diane and Jack were together.
“I told myself she stole him,” Valerie said. “But that wasn’t true. I threw him away in front of her and then hated her for picking him up gently.”
Megan sat still.
“I told Diane she was ruining her life. I said he would keep her small. I said she was embarrassing the family. She cried, and I felt powerful for about ten minutes. Then I left.”
“Left where?”
“Chicago. Alan had been asking me to marry him. He was appropriate. An accountant. Good family. Clean fingernails.” Valerie’s mouth twisted. “I said yes two weeks later.”
Outside, rainwater hissed under passing tires. Valerie had not spoken this much about Diane in decades. The words felt stiff from disuse.
“Did your sister know you loved Jack?” Megan asked.
Valerie stared at the cut photograph. “I thought so.”
“But you never told her.”
“No.”
“And you never told him.”
“No.”
Megan leaned back slowly. “Valerie.”
“I know.”
“No, I don’t think you do.”
That should have angered her. Instead, it made her tired.
Diane had married Jack in a small church outside Rockford. Valerie did not attend. Later, they moved north to a river town in Wisconsin where Jack found work with a freight company and Diane, improbably, began helping an elderly widow run a small inn. Years passed. Their parents died. Valerie saw Diane three times: at their father’s funeral, at their mother’s funeral, and once in a lawyer’s office while settling the estate.
Each time, Diane tried. She touched Valerie’s sleeve. She asked about Mia. She said, “You look good, Val,” in the same hopeful voice she had used as a child when offering half a cookie after a fight.
Each time, Valerie made herself cool.
But Diane wrote.
Christmas cards. Birthday notes. Letters on cream paper with blue envelopes. Photographs of children Valerie never met: Sarah missing two front teeth, Noah in a baseball uniform, both of them sticky with popsicles on a porch. Jack appeared in many of the pictures, older, broader, still smiling that unbearable smile. Valerie cut him out of some and tucked the pieces into a separate folder because throwing them away felt impossible.
“You kept the pieces?” Megan asked.
Valerie nodded once.
Megan’s face softened with something like grief. “That’s a lot of years to keep being hurt by something nobody knew they did to you.”
Valerie looked toward the window because she could not bear the kindness in that sentence.
“Diane died two years ago,” she said. “Cancer. Jack called me himself. I heard his voice and could not speak. He said the funeral was Friday. He said Diane would have wanted me there.”
“Did you go?”
“No.”
Megan closed her eyes briefly.
“I told Alan I had a migraine. I stayed in bed while my sister was buried.”
The apartment was quiet except for the rain and the low rattle of a train passing nearby. Valerie expected Megan to comfort her or condemn her. Instead, Megan reached for the photograph and turned it over again, looking at the handwriting.
“She kept writing because she wanted you back,” Megan said.
“You don’t know that.”
“No. But I know what it’s like to keep calling someone who hurts you because you can’t stop hoping this time they’ll answer differently.”
Valerie folded her hands in her lap. They looked old to her suddenly, veined and dry, with one pale groove where her wedding ring used to be.
“What would I do now?” she asked. “She’s dead.”
Megan’s answer came quietly. “Go to her grave.”
Valerie shook her head. “That is sentimental nonsense.”
“Maybe. I did it with my dad.”
“You were a child when he died.”
“Six. For years I was mad at him like he had chosen to leave us broke and alone. My therapist told me to say it somewhere he couldn’t interrupt.” Megan gave a small shrug. “So I went. I told a headstone I was furious. Then I told it I missed him. It didn’t fix me, but I stopped carrying the same sentence around every day.”
Valerie wanted to dismiss it. She wanted to stand, retrieve her purse, and announce that their session had become unprofessional. But the photograph lay on the table like a witness.
That night, at 3:17 a.m., Valerie gave up trying to sleep and pulled a shoebox from the back of her closet.
Inside were Diane’s letters, still bundled by year with rubber bands that had gone brittle. Valerie sat on the bedroom floor in her robe and opened the most recent one, dated nine months before Diane died. She had read it before. She had read all of them. But she had skimmed the pain and punished the hope.
This time, she read slowly.
Jack says I should stop pestering you, but he doesn’t mean it. He just hates seeing me wait by the mailbox like an idiot. Sarah says I’m stubborn. Noah says I’m worse than stubborn. Maybe I am. But I keep thinking one day you’ll come up here, and we’ll make coffee too strong, and I’ll show you the inn, and Rosie will bark at you for ten minutes before deciding you belong.
Valerie pressed the page to her mouth.
At the bottom of the box was a photograph she had never cut. Diane sat on a porch step with a shaggy brown-and-white dog leaning against her knees. Jack stood behind them, one hand on Diane’s shoulder, his face lined by age and sunlight.
On the back, Diane had written: Rosie only likes people I love.
Valerie held the photograph until the room blurred. Then she opened her laptop and bought a train ticket to Wisconsin before she could become reasonable again…
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