Maybe One Day

Helena and Anna haven't spoken in five years, but when their mother dies unexpectedly they are forced to clean out her house together.

The tiny apartment was filled with the delicious aroma of pancakes, toast, eggs, and homemade raspberry jam. It was the first day of June, meaning it was the first day of summer vacation for Helena and Erik Wilson. The schoolteachers should have taken the day to sleep in, but their inner clocks were still stuck on 5am. Erik was the first to wake, so he immediately began cooking. Around 6:15 Helena walked groggily into the cramped kitchen.

            “Breakfast soon. Wanna make the orange juice for me?” Erik asked her as she walked into the room.

            “One day out of school and you’re already speaking in incomplete sentences,” she said playfully as she grabbed the juicer from the cabinet.

            “Well, we aren’t all English teachers. The math department makes up its own rules.”

 

            The morning went along rather uneventfully. The couple cleaned the apartment while talking about their students, the ones they would miss and the ones they didn’t ever want to see again. They continued their morning as they would any weekend morning: with a run. When the couple came back to the apartment, Erik went to check the machine for missed calls.

            “Your sister called. Four times, actually. No messages.” As he said this, Helena absentmindedly glanced at the framed picture in the dining room. It was one of the only pictures that she had with her sister Anna. They were sitting in their mother’s prize garden on the day they planted a pear tree with their father.   

            “She’ll call again if it’s that important,” Helena replied to him.

            “If she’s calling for the first time in five years it’s obviously important.”

            Irrational anger flooded Helena. Erik doesn’t understand. He’s always defending the sister he’s not married to, the one he barely knows. He’s a good guy, so Helena assumes he tries to see the best in people.

            As if on cue, the phone rang. The caller ID showed ‘Anna Montgomery’ for the fifth time in just under an hour. Even before Helena could say hello, Anna’s frantic voice filled the phone.

            “Where the hell have you been?! I’ve been calling all morning.”

            “Erik and I went running. Why? What’s wrong?”

            “Mom,” Anna said in a quiet tone with her voice cracking. “I went over to visit her and she was passed out in the kitchen. They said she’d been dead for a few hours. You just, you need to come here as soon as you can.”

            The rest of the conversation was a blur. Helena immediately started packing, stopping only briefly to tell Erik what was going on. She wasn’t sure if what she was packing actually made any outfits. It didn’t matter at the time. All that mattered was the ten-hour drive ahead of her and her mother.

           

            Though Erik wanted to go with her, Helena insisted on him staying behind. She claimed it was because he had already made a commitment to teach summer school and couldn’t quit, but really it was because she handled loss better on her own. As soon as she heard the news of her mother, Helena thought of eight years ago when her father died in an alcohol related car accident. Like then, Anna cried, Helena did not. It wasn’t that Helena didn’t care for either of her parents, she just mourned differently than her sister. She mourned quietly and alone with her thoughts, seemingly numb to any outside emotion.

             Helena’s mind never worked in a linear fashion, so her thoughts were scattered and unorganized throughout the entire drive. Mom always said she didn’t want a funeral. Anna said Mom wrote it into her will, so I guess she’s really not. Seems strange but that’s her, I guess. Ashes scattered in the woods or by the ocean. She’ll like that. I wonder how long the house is going to take to go through. Bet Anna isn’t going to be much help…

 

            Helena sat in front of her family’s sea foam green cottage, unable to go in. Not in a “there are so many memories that I don’t want to revisit in this place” sort of unable to go. No, she was physically unable to get into the house because it was locked and Anna was a half hour late with the key to get in. In the meantime, Helena sat alone on the chipped, white bench in the once lavish garden overlooking the beach. She thought back to the last time she sat in the garden. It was right after Erik proposed and, at the time, it was filled with pear trees, roses, tulips and daffodils. She and Erik spent three hours that day talking about their future together. Erik, she thought, now I kinda wish I had told him to come. Along with wanting to be alone, Helena initially thought it was a good idea for him to not be there because he would try to push the sisters together. Now, the thought of being in the house alone with Anna was almost as depressing as sitting in the dying, colorless garden.

            As she continued to think about the garden, she heard the sound of an old car clinking up the road. It’s about damn time. Helena knew it was Anna in their dad’s old car that he gave her when she turned sixteen. The car has sounded the same since then, almost ten years ago, and she was extremely surprised to see it still running. The brakes squealed as Anna parked the car in the gravel driveway. Five years did not change Anna very much. She still had the same cropped, dyed red hair and wore brightly colored shirts with flecks of paint splattered on them. If it weren’t for her hairstyle and clothing choices, Anna and Helena could have passed for twins, despite being four years apart in age. They had the same bright blue eyes, fair skin, and petite stature.

            Anna jumped out of her car, moving in her usual sporadic, quick pace. Helena had never understood how someone who moves so fast could be late for absolutely everything.

            “Sorry,” was all that Anna said as she unlocked the door. Not wanting to get into an argument in the first thirty seconds, Helena said nothing and followed after her sister.

            The old cottage, unlike the garden, looked as lively as ever. Barely two days had passed since their mom died, so the house sat unchanged. People joked that Helena got her obsessive compulsive cleaning from her mother, but she didn’t realize it until she walked into the house, dustless and organized. The only thing out of place was an overturned kitchen chair, surrounded by a shattered dish. That’s where they found her. They couldn’t have even picked up the chair?

            Helena stared at the spot for a few minutes until Anna cleared her throat. “Wanna go through upstairs and I’ll take down here?” As Anna spoke, Helena noticed that Anna’s eyes were bloodshot and welling with fresh tears.

            “Mmhmm.” Helena ascended the stairs as she did thousands of times before and walked directly into her old room. A year before she moved to Boston her room was changed to a study. The left wall was full of shelving with miscellaneous books and large seashells that the girls and their mother collected over the years. The bay window seat was covered in opened books with writing in the margins and half completed sketches.

            While Helena and her mother were very much alike with their love for books and need for organization, her mother and Anna were much closer. She and Anna bonded over art as a coping mechanism after their father died. Helena secluded herself with books and later with Erik, while her mother and Anna spent their days sketching out their pain and loneliness. Through this bond, their mother began to defend Anna when she would act out, saying that it was just a phase. Her inability to see that Anna was spiraling out of control disgusted Helena, so she stayed away from the only family she had more and more. She loved her mother, and as much as she refused to show it, she loved Anna too. She just didn’t think it was worth her time to worry about someone who buried herself in drugs and alcohol and was too stubborn to accept any help. It was soon after Anna ended up in the hospital as the result of a car accident while driving under the influence that Helena lost hope in her sister. Her mother called it another phase of mourning. Helena called it bullshit. Anna had already been reckless, but partaking in the same habit that got their father killed was too much for Helena, whose most reckless life choice was marrying Erik after only two years of dating. About two weeks after Anna came home, Helena announced that she and Erik were moving to Boston. Every two weeks, she talked to her mother, but after the move she didn’t make an effort to keep in contact with Anna. Anna clearly felt the same, because neither of them tried to talk until yesterday, five years later, when their mother died.

 

            After observing her old bedroom for a while, Helena decided that the room would take the most time to go through and she should start with a smaller one. While walking to the bathroom, she overheard Anna talking loudly on her cell phone.
            “Yeah, she was here when I got here…Only a half hour this time…It’s Helena, of course she’s pissed…We’re just putting stuff in boxes, they’re selling the house soon.” The conversation continued on like that, a little too loud for occasion.

            An hour passed and Helena finished boxing up all of her mother’s belongings in her bathroom. Apprehensively, she again stood in the doorway of her old bedroom, staring at the piles of books, sketches, and journals.

            The creaking of the stairs caused her to look away from the daunting task in front of her. Anna was standing five feet away from her, glancing between Helena and the room.

            “Do you need help? I really don’t want to be in that kitchen anymore.” Anna’s voice was scratchy like she had been crying for days, which was most likely the case.

            “Sure, there’s still this room and the guest room,” Helena answered her without making eye contact. 

            The two of them automatically went to opposite corners of the room, separating every document into piles and boxes. Photographs were in the center, to the left were boxes of books, and on the right were her mother’s sketches and handwritten journals.

            “Did you look through any of these?” Helena asked.

            “Not yet. I kinda don’t want to. Mom and I…we sketched some of these together. It’s gonna bring back memories I’m not ready for.” The silence fell back over the room for three hours as they packed the room, the years of art and memories into seven large boxes. The sisters wordlessly divided the boxes into what each of them would keep, what would be donated, and what would be discarded. It was dusk by the time they were done with Helena’s old room, so they decided to stop for the night and start fresh in the morning

            The following day went by without any disputes. Helena assumed that as long as they didn’t talk or weren’t in the same room for a long period of time there wouldn’t be any issues. Helena packed the living room and finished the kitchen, as Anna focused on the remaining rooms upstairs. Several times during the day, Helena could hear Anna crying. Helena still had not shed a tear.  

            Even though the sisters packed for upwards of twelve hours, they still had a solid day of organizing and finishing touches left. Helena sat in her hotel room, exhausted, talking to Erik and flipping aimlessly through her mother’s books before she went to bed.

            “My mom had a lot of books that I wanted, so I’m bringing them and some jewelry home. I have her diaries too, but I feel like I should burn them or something. She was pretty big on privacy.”

            “I think you should read them first,” Erik said immediately.

            “You want me to read my mom’s diary? You have sisters, you should know that you don’t do that.”

            “I remember when we went on that trip to New York with her. She called it her journal, so it’s different. Just read a few entries.” Not likely, she thought immediately.

            After hanging up, Helena glanced to the box of journals by the bed. Her initial thought of preserving her mother’s privacy began to be overridden by curiosity. She wondered if it was really a bad thing to peek into her mother’s written life. She decided that one or two entries wouldn’t hurt, so she flipped open to the page dated March 17, 2005.

            Anna and Helena are growing more and more distant with each passing day. I guess Helena and I are too. I know she thinks I’m too lenient with Anna, but it’s the only way I know I can keep her around. I’m not worried about Helena; I know she’ll be okay if she leaves. Anna won’t be. I can’t yell at her or force her into rehab, because if she leaves she’ll get into more trouble. She needs her sister more than anything though and I don’t think Helena can see that that. Kevin was the glue this family. He held the girls together when they started to grow up. I’m not as good at that, I can hold on to each of them with the opposite hand, but I can’t ever bring them together. I just hope over time they realize they’re all the family they will ever have.

 

            Helena stopped reading the entry and flipped toward the end of the journal. There were pages filled with descriptions and lifelike sketches of her engagement ring, wedding, and other happy moments in her life. As her mother’s descriptions of Helena grew happier, Anna’s grew darker. She wrote about Anna’s drug addiction, alcoholism, and car accident. Helena stopped at the last entry of the book, dated May 17, 2007.

            Helena and Erik left for Boston today. We had a going away party for them and they seemed to really appreciate it. They spent hours saying their goodbyes to everyone. Not everyone, actually. Anna didn’t come to the party until after they left. She said that she knew Helena wanted to move to get away from everything going on here, going on with her. I couldn’t deny it. Anna cried, and that’s not like her. She said that she understood and didn’t blame her. She also promised that she wouldn’t try to talk to her until either Helena was ready to forgive her, or Anna could prove to her and to herself that she was okay again. She just wants her big sister to be proud of her. I don’t think I’m going to write in here until my girls are talking again. It doesn’t seem right.

            At the end of the entry, her mother taped the photograph that Helena had in her dining room of her and Anna sitting together in the beautiful garden. She wrote the caption, “Maybe one day,” under the picture. Helena reread the entry a few times, glanced at the picture, shut the journal, and went to bed.

 

            For the first time, Anna arrived somewhere before her sister. She sat in the garden with her back towards Helena, crying and unaware of her presence.           

            “What happened to the garden? Mom loved this place,” Helena asked Anna as she came up behind her to sit on the white bench.

            “I think she was tired of constantly trying to take care of it. It’s too bad, this place used to beautiful,” Anna dabbed her eyes as she answered softly.

            “It still is in a different sort of way. All of us have so many memories here.” Helena took the photograph from the journal and placed it onto Anna’s lap.

            “Have you ever seen this?” Anna looked confused for a second before smiling slightly, nodding at the tree and saying, “Dad took this after we planted that pear tree. We were so proud of ourselves, but I think mom and dad thought it wouldn’t survive the winter. It was so small.”

            “Look at how wrong they were. It’s the only thing in the garden that’s still alive.”

            It was quiet for a second until Helena spoke again. “I read part of mom’s journal. She said you weren’t going to talk to me until you were better?”

            “Mmhmm.”

            “Are you close to being there?”

            Anna sighed and stared at the sunrise. “I am. I have been for two or three years, maybe. I was going to call you or write or something, but then I thought, ‘you know, what’s the point?’ I didn’t think you’d believe me. I get why you were fed up with me and how Mom handled everything, but you didn’t need to leave how you did, or when you did. Even if I didn’t act like it, I still needed my sister.”
            Anna walked into the house without saying another word, leaving Helena alone again. Somewhere in her heart Helena knew was wrong, but was not willing admit it to Anna. Maybe one day, Mom, she thought as she finally began to cry after years of holding it in.

Author's Note

Constructive criticism is appreciated. Thanks for reading.

Reviews

[Forest Green]

Very good work...your dialogue is convincing, uncontrived. The storyline with memories her mom give the lead character a true connection with the reader.

Excellent sentences and the descriptions are well done...especially like the old car...:)

Good work...!

[hmm]

Well I'm not that good at Constructive criticism,
But i did enjoy your story. Love the plot.
Everything seemed to flow well.
I thought it was very well written.