The Noel Letters (The Noel Collection #4) - Richard Paul Evans Page 0,5

place with sick people.

Wendy followed a little way behind me as I walked through the house. I passed through the kitchen to the small dining nook on the southwest corner of the house. There were the same oak table and chairs I had sat at with my cereal or Malt-O-Meal every day before school.

In one corner of the room was a glass menagerie case with porcelain figurines—soft-curved German Hummels and the larger, glossy Lladró pieces. Most of the sculptures were of butterflies or little statues of girls with butterflies. I remembered most of them from my childhood—especially one of a father holding his daughter’s hand. As I looked them over, there was only one I didn’t remember. It was a statue of a veiled bride holding a bouquet of roses. It seemed a little out of place in the collection. I wondered when he had purchased it.

I moved from the dining area to the front room. There were two couches in front of a tiled fireplace with a painted mantel and bronze lion-head andirons. There was a large framed picture of me above the fireplace. It was a picture I’d never seen before.

As I stood there, I remembered the flowers someone had left outside on the front porch. I went to get them and suddenly froze. Standing near the front door, I had a flashback of my father holding my mother down as she screamed for him to let her go. My heart started pounding heavily. That experience was indelibly branded on my mind and soul. It was the last time I saw my mother alive.

I fled the discomfort of the living room, down the short hallway that led to the bedrooms. I looked in the bathroom. The old tulip and windmill wallpaper had been stripped and painted over in a neutral taupe. The original black-and-white honeycomb floor tile remained. When I was seven years old I was fascinated by how much the tile looked like chicken coop wire, and one morning I began tracing between the lines with a Magic Marker, an act that earned me a rare spanking from my mother and a lengthy time-out.

The room next to the bathroom had been my parents’. The door was shut, which is how I remembered it. It was the home’s inner sanctum and I rarely went inside. I grasped the brass handle and opened the door. I was hit by a rush of cold air. The room was freezing.

“Why is it so cold in here?” I asked Wendy.

“I cracked the windows to air out the room,” she answered. “It smelled bad.”

I stepped farther inside. “This is where…” I didn’t finish.

After a moment she said, “I stripped the sheets and washed them. They’re in the dryer.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

Wendy walked past me and shut the window on the far side of the room. On top of a mahogany chest of drawers was another Lladró, one of a young girl holding a bouquet of butterflies. It was next to a postcard-sized, silver-framed photograph with the word Yellowstone. The picture was of my father and me in front of Old Faithful. I was probably four years old at the time, and I was sitting on his shoulders watching the spout. The picture, the closeness, felt foreign to me.

I took a deep breath and turned back. I’d seen enough. I walked out of the room and across the hall to my old bedroom. I opened the door and flipped on the light. The light switch was still encased in a whimsical, nursery-tale plate that had somehow survived my childhood: Mary and her little lamb.

My room was, as my father said, exactly as I’d left it. The memories were thickest here.

The bed was a wooden poster bed with a princess canopy. As a thirteen-year-old, I had crawled under the bed on that horrible night my mother had fled our house. I woke later in my bed, to tense, emotional voices. For reasons I couldn’t fathom, my father’s sister was there. She was talking in low tones with my father, who then left the house. I remember hearing the side door slam and the angry roar of the car engine as he drove away. Most of all, I remember the overwhelming fear I felt as I wondered if he or my mother would ever come back.

I woke the next morning and jumped out of bed to see if my parents were there. All I found was my aunt sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee. She looked