THE NIGHTINGALE NOVEL BY KRISTIN HANNAH FULL
The top tray is full of baby memorabilia. I kneel beside it, but the pain in my knees is piercing, so I slide onto my backside.įor the first time in thirty years, I lift the trunk’s lid. With effort, I drag the heavy trunk to the center of the attic, directly beneath the hanging light. Tucked in the corner is what I am looking for: an ancient steamer trunk covered in travel stickers. For me, admitting that I won’t decorate a tree for Christmas is giving up, and I’ve never been good at letting go. Boxes are tucked along the wall, marked “Xmas,” “Thanksgiving,” “Easter,” “Halloween,” “Serveware,” “Sports.” In those boxes are the things I don’t use much anymore but can’t bear to part with. I see the rocking chair I used when my grandchildren were young, then an old crib and a ratty-looking rocking horse set on rusty springs, and the chair my daughter was refinishing when she got sick.
The ceiling is so steeply pitched that I can stand upright only in the center of the room. Wide wooden planks panel the walls cobwebs turn the creases silver and hang in skeins from the indentations between the planks. It is like being in the hold of an old steamship. A single, hanging lightbulb swings overhead. The flimsy stairs wobble beneath my feet as I climb into the attic, which smells of must and mold. The stairs unfold from the ceiling like a gentleman extending his hand. I reach for the hanging handle that controls the attic steps. There is not much I want to take with me. I am boxing up the Oregon beachside life I settled into nearly fifty years ago. What do I care where I die? That is the point, really. He is trying to take care of me, to show how much he loves me in this most difficult of times, and so I put up with his controlling ways. My house, named The Peaks by the lumber baron who built it more than a hundred years ago, is for sale, and I am preparing to move because my son thinks I should. I want to imagine there will be peace when I am gone, that I will see all of the people I have loved and lost. The past has a clarity I can no longer see in the present. Perhaps that’s why I find myself looking backward. It is unnerving, this new unreliability in my vision. My eyes fail me often-in the darkness, when headlights flash, when rain falls.
THE NIGHTINGALE NOVEL BY KRISTIN HANNAH SKIN
My skin has the crinkled appearance of wax paper that someone has tried to flatten and reuse.
I have aged in the months since my husband’s death and my diagnosis. As I approach the end of my years, I know that grief, like regret, settles into our DNA and remains forever a part of us. It makes it sound as if I misplaced my loved ones perhaps I left them where they don’t belong and then turned away, too confused to retrace my steps. Lately, though, I find myself thinking about the war and my past, about the people I lost. We understand the value of forgetting, the lure of reinvention. They think talking about a problem will solve it.
Today’s young people want to know everything about everyone. If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: In love we find out who we want to be in war we find out who we are.