Page 68 of Haunted

My sketchbooks.

I sit down on the floor of his closet with the first one open on my knees and I don’t say anything for a while, because there is a version of my own handwriting in here that I haven’t seen since I was seventeen. And then pictures. My grandmother asleep in the recliner with her mouth open. Elliott from behind, at the window. Rochelle in profile in art class, badly, because I could never get her nose exactly right.

I had forgotten I could do this. Not the drawing. The looking.

“How do you have these?” I say. “I thought all of it burned.”

The third book is of nothing but him. Page after page after page of Lance Broussard, aged fifteen and sixteen and seventeen, from the side, from behind, asleep on a lunch table, laughing at something out of frame. I go through it slowly with my ears burning because he’s staring at me so intensely.

“I might have had a thing for you in high school.”

“Really?” His smile is infectious.

“Okay, I was really into you in high school.”

“147 sketches worth?”

He stops. “You counted them.”

“I said I was working up the courage.” He isn’t looking at me. “I didn’t say I managed it. I got about four pages in and then I sat on that closet floor for two hours.”

“Ouch. That sounds…accurate.” I’m pretty sure my face is on fire.

“Well, we’re even. I am into you now. And then.” He leans over and kisses me.

“How long have you had these?”

“They’ve been in the basement for ten years, and my dad just found them last Christmas. He gave them to me a week ago to give to your aunt. But I’m giving them to you. They were in a little box I put behind the driver’s seat and forgot about. I think they were last-minute grabs.”

I put my hand over his and we sit there on the closet floor like that for a minute.

Then I put the sketchbook down and reach back into the box, because there’s still a folded bag of papers at the bottom with my mother’s name on it, and I pull it out.

Lance crouches beside me.

It’s a bank statement from Fairhaven Community Bank, and my eye catches on the one number that doesn’t fit: a deposit for twenty thousand dollars from a company called Albatross Press.

Lance peers at it. “Albatross Press. Isn’t that the name Alice gave you?”

“That’s what Alice said. She asked if my mother ever mentioned a company called the Albatross Press. She said my father owned it.”

We stare at the number. Twenty thousand dollars from a publishing house owned by the man Alice thought was my father. It could be a book deal. It could be a coincidence. But the amount is wrong for a book deal from a small press, and my mother was not a writer.

Lance doesn’t say what we’re both thinking. He just puts his hand on my shoulder and squeezes.

There’s an address book in the bag too. Spiral-bound, rubber band around it, so swollen with loose paper it won’t shut flat. I take the band off and things come out of it into my lap. A recipe for pound cake in handwriting I don’t recognize. A funeral card for somebody called Wilbur. Phone numbers for cousins in Roanoke I have never met and she never once mentioned.

And folded together in the back, two pieces of paper.

One is a photocopied class schedule from Fairhaven University almost thirty years ago. Somebody has gone over one line of it in ballpoint, hard enough to score through the paper.

The other is a newspaper clipping, brown at the folds. A young woman in a nurse’s uniform accepting a plaque, smiling straight into the camera. SUZANNAH CLEMMONS. I skim over the article. It’s about a young nursing student being given an award for excellence.

“That’s my neighbor,” I say. “That’s Suzannah. Why would my mother keep this?” He scans it.

Lance takes it and holds it under the closet light for a long moment, and hands it back without saying anything at all. “I don’t know. I mean, her award was a scholarship. I know this grant. The nursing department gives it out every year to their top students, though they gave out less money in those days. Did your mother have some sort of beef with Suzannah?”

“She had beef with everybody. I don’t think she liked Suzannah. I think if she were here, she’d say something really bitchy like, she’s no better than she ought to be. I don’t think she actually said that but it seems like the sort of thing she would say. Just a kind of obliquely bitchy remark.” I sigh and put both pieces back where they were, because they are the only things in this box I don’t understand, and right now there’s a number on a bank statement that I understand even less.