Another Life

The attic was even worse than I’d thought. I looked around the musty, crowded space, the air laying hot and heavy on my neck. It didn’t look like mom had been up here in years. But now that the house had been sold, there was no time to waste in getting all this crap cleared out and ready for the buyer. I was only jealous that I’d drawn the short straw against Cody, who got to clear out the bedrooms down in the AC. 

I tied my hair back and got to work. At first, it was pretty simple. Old holiday decorations, junk from when Cody and I had been babies, those didn’t need sorting through and could go straight to Goodwill. It got a bit harder when I came across a box of dad’s old clothes. I didn’t consider myself to be particularly sentimental, but holding the things that had belonged to the man I’d barely gotten to know struck a chord deep inside. I fingered the flannel shirt, the heavy coat, all soft with wear. From what mom had told me about him, he hadn’t cared much about what he wore. She had been the same, really. I shook my head and put the box aside. Old clothes wouldn’t bring him back, and didn’t offer much of a way to get to know the man who had died too young either. 

By the afternoon, I had made good progress. Probably half of the attic was fully cleaned out, and I had taken a break to sweep the floors and pry the window open, so the atmosphere wasn’t nearly as oppressive. Cody helped me bring the boxes out to the driveway and we stopped to crack a beer.

“Find anything good?” He asked. “You haven’t put anything aside to save yet.”

“Have you?” 

“Not really.” He said. “I figure we can split up the books and keep those. I put her jewelry box by your purse as well.” 

“Thanks.” I sipped my beer. “I found a box of dad’s old clothes.” 

“Really?” Cody had been even younger than me when dad had died. He always seemed to hoard any bit of information he could learn about dad, I guess as a coping mechanism for growing up without him. 

“Nothing worth keeping. He wore everything about through. Lots of it had holes.”

Cody laughed. “Mom always said she could never get him to buy new clothes.” He paused. “You think she would have wanted us to get rid of all of his old stuff? She never did, even after all these years.”

I leaned over and took his hand. “She would understand. I don’t think she would want us to wallow in the past, Code.” He nodded, but didn’t say anything, and I knew he was bothered.

We finished our beers and got back to work. The back half of the attic held things that were older, and I started to find relics of our parents’ lives before we were born. They’d spent almost ten years traveling around the world before settling back home to start a family. I pulled out a box with chopsticks from Japan, jade trinkets from Taiwan, and glass from Venice. One box held the most beautiful, intricate tea set I’d ever seen, and for a moment I wondered why these things were shoved away instead of being displayed around the house. I only had to wonder for a moment though, because the truth was that I was sure I knew the reason. 

Mom and dad had been high school sweethearts, desperately in love from what I’d heard from friends and family. They’d left college and traveled the world together, spending every minute with each other, absolutely inseparable. 

“They were always talking.” Grandma had told me once. “We used to wonder what the heck they had to talk about considering they spent every waking moment together. I swear, Katie, your momma would come home from the grocery store and be chock full of things to tell your dad. The grocery store! Like anything interesting could have happened while pushing a cart through Kroger. But your dad would be there listening to every word, absolutely engrossed.”

Old pictures and videos of my mom showed a bright, energetic girl in love with the world around her. But once dad died, the light went out of her. I remembered some of how she was. In most of my memories from before, we were always laughing. Mom took good care of us after dad died, was a good mother, but there wasn’t a lot of laughing anymore and it always felt like she was on autopilot. 

I set aside the boxes with the mementos to go through with Cody. I opened up a new box, and at the top lay a pale green fishing vest that I recognized. In a lot of their travel photos, mom had worn this vest overtop whatever else she was wearing. It was about the dorkiest thing ever, so I’d asked her once why she’d always worn it. A lot of people’s travel photos showed them dressed up nice, clean and smiling against pretty backgrounds. In my parents’ photos, they’d always looked sunburnt or farmer tanned, in old tank tops and athletic shorts, and like they could both really use a haircut. 

“We tried to always travel by scooter.” Mom had winced at the memory, like she always did when something from the past came up. “I loved that vest because I could hold everything we might need on the road in it. A little cash, some gum, a snack, our phones. That vest held every single thing we could possibly need on a drive.” 

Holding it now, I could see she was right. Opening the pockets, I found a treasure trove of relics of another world. Headphones, the old kind that still had a wire, you barely ever saw those around these days, a couple ballpoint pens, a pack of gum, and two passports. I  couldn’t believe my eyes. There were my parents at 21, their faces straight and serious and so young in their passport photos. I flipped through the pages looking at all the exit and entry stamps they’d collected. I couldn’t believe these were up here, but the more I thought about it, the more I understood. Mom hadn’t traveled after losing dad, and based on where this box was, it looked like this was where she had started hiding the painful memories of him and their lives together. This was when the attic had begun to fill, when she had changed into a different person. 

The vest still felt heavy, and opening it up I found a long book pocket on the inner lining. Inside was a slim journal, leatherbound and beat all to hell. I opened it and read on the first page my mother’s name, phone number, and email address under a “please return if lost” message. The next page said 2018-2019. And all of a sudden, I remembered that my mother used to be a journaler. I hadn’t thought about it in years, but I had even had a little journal of my own, complete with a small key I’d worn as a necklace. Had she stopped journaling? Were there more of these tucked away that Cody and I would find, and what secrets of our mother’s would they tell us?

I flipped through the pages, worn soft over the years. The book was part calendar and part diary. The weeks were outlined with a careful hand and marked with appointments and scheduling, but on seemingly random pages throughout were short, dated diary entries. 

4/12/19

Landed in Taipei. Rented scooter from Jeremy’s shop again. He had our Christmas card hanging on the shop wall! We went out for bubble tea with him and his wife and talked about soccer til I thought I’d fall asleep on the table. Alex made him show him the bike he’d been working on and they tinkered with that for awhile. 

6/18/19

Bought a sandwich at a cafe in Verona today. It was tuna with thick slices of pickle on the bread, never had that before! Must recreate once we're back home. Alex’s tuna sandwich had olives. Not so good. 

The calendar pages were marked with notes like “flight to Milan, 8:55”, “meeting with potential housesit in Okinawa, Skype, 4:00”, “train to Kaohsiung, 6:15”. She had been a careful chronicler of where they had spent their time together. Hotel and B&B names, addresses, and email addresses were noted, ticket stubs saved and stapled to the page, even restaurant names and what they had ordered listed. 

I was fascinated by this glimpse of a mother I’d never known. Even her handwriting looked different, round and bubbly and a mixture of messy cursive attaching to print. Her observations, the things she had taken the time to write down, showed a sense of humor I couldn’t remember. 

9/12/19

Slaphappy today from a night of too much wine. We found a TLC stream online and stayed up all night drinking and watching 90 Day Fiance. Had to find a McDonald’s to cure our hangovers, which was over an hour’s drive from the village. We’re the worst travelers ever.

Most of her notes were scribbles of food combinations or recipes she’d learned abroad. She’d always been so thin, especially towards the end, and had never found much pleasure in food or cooking. We’d always had three square, healthy, well-balanced meals a day, but that was treated just as a necessity, nothing more. One of the pages held a polaroid snapshot of the two of them at the trailhead for Mount Fuji. Her face was rounder and fuller and the ends of her smile about touched her ears. 

I must have lost track of time flipping through the journal, because all of a sudden it was dark outside and Cody was climbing up the ladder. 

“Katie? You doing okay?” 

“Cody, you’ve got to see this.” I waved him over to where I sat and handed him the book. “This is mom’s journal from one of the years she and dad were traveling. It’s amazing.” 

I watched his eyes go round as he paged through it, his hands gentle as if it were made of the thinnest glass, and my heart melted. Cody had always longed to understand our parents. Dad had died when he was just two, and mom had turned into someone else. He’d grown up in a house shadowed by lost love and riddled with the landmines of painful memories. Our mother had loved us and provided a safe and nurturing home, but she had always seemed a little distant, a little bit hard to reach. As a result, Cody grasped desperately for any snippet of information he could learn about both mom and dad. As a kid he’d watched their videos religiously, the little shaky GoPro clips of the two of them together. Mom couldn’t stand to be anywhere near those videos and had threatened to wipe the drives if she ever walked in on them, so he’d stayed up late, watching on his laptop beneath the covers with headphones in. At 13, he started spending the summers with dad’s parents in Maine, sleeping in dad’s childhood bedroom, playing catch with dad’s old glove. It was an obsession that definitely bordered on unhealthy, but mom couldn’t stand to talk about it, so no one ever really did anything.

“Katie, it’s like reading an itinerary.” Cody looked up from the book at me with shining eyes. “We could literally follow in their footsteps!” He went back to the pages, tracing the lines with his finger as he read.

It felt like someone had poked me, hard. I jolted upright. “Code…” I said. “What if we did?”

“Did what?” He asked, not looking up.

I put a hand over the pages to get his attention. “What if we did follow in their footsteps?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Think about it. We have every step of their travels from that year right here. We have people they met, meals they ordered, places they stayed. Sure, it was awhile go but I bet at least a few of these places still exist. Hell, maybe a few of these people still remember them. This is a whole part of their lives we could experience. Mom left us a little money, we can use that. I can’t imagine any better way to spend it, can you?”

“Katie.” Cody just looked at me, I couldn’t read his expression. “You’re brilliant!” He launched at me and pulled me into a hug. “Think about everything we could learn about mom and dad. Outside of these pages are a whole life that they lived. We can use the photos and even those old GoPro videos to go where they went and see what they saw.” 

We stayed up late into the night bookmarking the pages of the journal and making notes. We found flights and traced out the route that they had taken. Taiwan to Japan, Japan to Bali, Bali to Italy, Italy to Russia. We’d finish getting the house ready to sell and take off. We’d follow in the footsteps of our doomed parents and see them in a way we’d never been able to before. Maybe we’d leave and I would be able to let go of some of the resentment I held towards my mom for mentally abandoning us to her grief. Maybe Cody would finally feel like he got to know our dad, or our mom the way she used to be. Or maybe it wouldn’t bring any kind of closure or peace at all, and we’d come home feeling just as alienated from our parents as we always have. 

We’d just have to find out once we landed in Taipei.