The Restoration of Celia Fairchild - Marie Bostwick Page 0,70
new urgency. While sorting through some drawers in the sideboard, I found still another treasure, a framed photograph of me and my parents taken on my eighth birthday.
Though I was still in the fries-and-chicken-fingers stage, Sterling said it was high time I learned to eat oysters and drove us out to a seafood shack near Folly Beach. Having the waitress put a platter piled high with bumpy, crustaceous, unshucked oysters down in front of me was fairly alarming. But I wanted to please my father, so I dug in. Turns out that anything tastes good with lots of mignonette sauce on it.
Sterling praised my “sophisticated palate” and put his arm around me. The waitress snapped the picture. I was sitting behind a pile of empty oyster shells with a lobster bib around my neck and a grin on my face. It was a good day. It was nice to remember that some days with my father truly had been good.
I’d unearthed many similarly evocative artifacts—Calpurnia’s typewriter and pearls, Beebee’s sewing basket and collection of cameos, handwritten copies of a couple of Sterling’s poems, which were really very good, several abandoned drafts of his never-completed second play, which was not. I found my mother’s old college yearbook too, with a snapshot of her and some girlfriends dressed up as the cast of The Wizard of Oz. But I still hadn’t found any photos of me and Calpurnia together. That bothered me.
She’d saved practically everything on the planet but not one picture of us together, not one artifact of our adventures. Why? Was thinking about all we’d lost too painful to bear? Or maybe she blamed it all on me? Some questions can never be answered, but that didn’t stop me from asking them.
I hauled off mountains of junk, including a couple hundred nearly empty egg cartons. I say nearly empty because after I’d accidentally cracked two undetected eggs, the stink made my eyes water. But when the smell faded, the dining room was clean at last, empty of everything but Beebee’s table and chairs and a walnut sideboard in remarkably good condition that had been passed down from my great-great-grandmother.
I limped up the stairs to my bedroom feeling tired but pleased with my progress, then popped two ibuprofen and climbed into bed, telling myself that physical exhaustion had its upside and at least I’d sleep soundly that night.
That was the theory.
The dream came back, same as always—Calpurnia, the baby, the bearded man in the shadows—but this time it played on a continuous loop. I’d dream the dream, wake up blinking and restless in the dark, shake it off and go back to sleep, only to find myself dreaming and disturbed again fifteen minutes later.
Shampoo, rinse, repeat.
All. Night. Long.
Finally, a little before four, I bolted upright in my bed, angry as well as groggy, and shouted to the empty room.
“Calpurnia! Knock it off! If there’s something you’ve got to say to me, then say it already. If not, shut up and let me get some sleep!”
Just at that moment, the moon emerged from a bank of clouds. It beamed a shaft of blue-tinged light through the narrow opening of the curtains and onto the scarred heart-pine floorboards, illuminating a crack I’d never noticed before, perhaps half an inch wide and partially hidden by the fringe of the rug.
I crawled out of bed, knelt down on the floor, and folded back the corner of the rug. The floorboard beneath was shorter than those surrounding it, only about two feet in length. The crack wasn’t quite wide enough for my fingers to get into, so I grabbed one of the box cutters I’d been using earlier that day and pried up the board with the end of the blade.
A metal box was hidden between the floor joists, the kind merchants use to store cash and sort bills, flat green in color and coated with dust. There was a cheap lock on the side with a key already inserted and a thin chrome handle on the flip-top lid. It was the handle that got caught in the moonlight, glinting like a beacon to demand my notice. If the moon had been a little less bright, in a slightly different phase, if the slit in the curtains had been wider or if I had closed them completely, like I normally did, or if I hadn’t been awake at just the right moment, I might never have noticed it.