More Than Words by Jill Santopolo

Author:Jill Santopolo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-02-04T16:00:00+00:00

41

It was 3:22 A.M. and Nina was still awake. Tim’s arm was wrapped around her as if she were his security blanket. She knew she needed sleep, but her mind was awhirl. She stared at the lace canopy on the bed, trying to find shapes in the fabric the way she and her mother used to do with clouds on a summer day. When she closed her eyes, her thoughts kept spiraling through her mother’s death and her father’s death and marrying Tim, and not being able to tell her father, and all the new memories she’d unearthed by coming to this house. Memories she wasn’t sure if she could trust but wanted to just the same.

Nina pulled her phone into bed with her and went to her photos to look at one of her father. He had been gone barely a week, and she was already afraid she’d forget what he looked like, the exact shape of his eyebrows, the depth of the widow’s peak in his hairline. She brought him up on her screen, and immediately her eyes began to fill.

Nina wiped her tears and scrolled through more pictures. And then she got to the photo she’d taken that afternoon of the drawing she’d made for her mom. The one that made her wonder if Rafael had ever made something similar. Rafael, who might be awake now. She thought about the conversation they’d had the night her father died, how he’d offered to listen if she ever needed someone in the middle of the night. Even though Tim was here, she felt like she needed someone. Someone else who could help her untangle all her thoughts. Rafael would be good at that. But then she remembered what he’d said to her at her father’s wake: We can be whatever we want to be. She wouldn’t call him.

The photo was blurry. Even though she wouldn’t call Rafael, she might want to send him the picture, say hello. So Nina lifted Tim’s arm off her stomach and slid quietly out of bed. She padded into her parents’ bedroom and opened her mother’s drawer. When she lifted the drawing to photograph it better, she discovered a sealed envelope underneath. Nina picked it up and flipped it over. It was addressed to her father in her mother’s loopy handwriting.

Nina felt her heart race. Without giving it a second thought, she slid her finger underneath the envelope’s flap and opened up the sheaf of handwritten pages inside.

December 25, 1992

The day her mother died.

Dear Joseph,

I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how it got this bad.

Nina stopped reading. She folded the letter back up and slipped it back into the envelope. She didn’t want to know. This was private. Between her parents. For her father’s eyes only.

But maybe it had the answers she’d been wondering about. Maybe it talked about the mysterious Christmas present. Besides, her father was gone. Her mother was, too. Whose confidence was she really breaking?

Nina opened it again.

After the summer, after all we went through, all we talked about, you said you’d stop seeing her.

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