Remnants

This story is by Paul Venderley and was part of our 2025 Fall Writing Contest. You can find all the writing contest stories here.

I don’t know when this story begins.

Does it begin when my father, lying in a ramshackle hospice bed, spent the last half hour of his life summoning the energy, spirit, and will to mutter: “She made me swear not to tell.”?

Or does it begin as Julia and I made our way through the detritus of our father’s life, when I found a picture of a woman neither of us knew stuck in a battered copy of “Seeking Refuge” by his bed?

When I had called my sister and told her about Dad’s final words, she’d said: “Jesus! He can’t even finish a deathbed confession!”

When I showed her the picture of the mystery woman, she said: “You actually look like Mom in that photo.”

“That’s not Mom.”

“Sure it is.” Julia took the photo from my hands. Held it close to her face, squinted.  “That’s Mom, just younger.  And she’s holding you.” She pointed at the grey-blue lump in the woman’s arms.  “That’s your baby blanket.”

I could believe that was me in the bundle the woman was clasping to her chest.  But I could not believe that was our mother. Mom’s face had been rounder, like Julia’s. And this stranger looked tall, like me, a willowy six feet, where Mom had…

“What are you thinking?” Julia asked.

“What if this is what Dad meant?”

She burst out laughing.

“This picture meant something to Dad!” I protested. “It was here in his bedroom!”

Julia pointed at the book I’d pulled it from. “He was using it as a bookmark!”

She held up her hand to stop my protestation: “Look at the back of the photo. 11/8/91. Almost a week after we were born. That’s probably outside the hospital. That’s you. That’s Mom.”

“Why isn’t she holding you, too?”

Julia shrugged. “Dad’s probably holding me while he’s taking the photo. God, Lydia! Dad messed you up with that deathbed confession, didn’t he? You’re overthinking things.”

I had been overthinking things. Which is why I had talked Julia into sifting through and organizing the collections of Dad’s myriad interests rather than hiring a flotilla of Dumpsters to throw everything away.

“For an estate sale,” I had suggested, appealing to Julia’s business sense.

There was an order to the chaos of the stuff Dad had collected. Research in the living room. Practical items: garage. Music: Julia’s old room. Writing-his or anyone’s: my old room. Memories: Mom and Dad’s bedroom.

“Couldn’t he have collected Disneyana?” Julia complained as she pulled open what once had been Mom’s closet. A collection of shoeboxes filled with anything but shoes spilled out.

I seized each shoebox as though it were a treasure chest of memories-either ours, or Mom and Dad’s-and spread their contents out on Dad’s bed to look for anything of value. Julia breezed in and out like she was airing out the past with each haul of clothes that she grabbed, muttering: “Throw them away, Lids,” each time she saw me sifting through the fragmented spoils.

After she pulled out the last bundle, I noticed a Globe-Trotter suitcase shoved in the back corner. The handle fell off as I pulled it out, and even as I grabbed it carefully by the sides I felt the seams coming apart. I hefted it onto Dad’s bed and fumbled with the stiff, brittle buckles.

“What’d we find?” Julia joined my side.

My baby blanket. It was faded but still recognizable: greyish-blue with a poorly sewn Winnie-the-Pooh in the corner, who barely hung onto three faded primary-colored balloons. I grasped the blanket in both my hands and bunched it up against my face. It was scratchier than I remembered and smelled of must and old paper. Julia looked beyond the blankie, into the rest of the suitcase. Ratty clothes with the dust of miles ground into their cuffs and sleeves. A hairbrush, bristles falling out but for the hair tangled around them. Prayer cards: “Guía a todos los refugiados hacia pastos de seguridad y descanso.” A stack of photographs, portraits of stern looking men and women in faded color and sepia.

“The woman in that photo and these people,” I said. “They’re related.”

Julia snorted. “Oh, that’s just great! And how do you know this?”

I pulled the mystery woman’s photo from the book.  “This is her suitcase.”

The Globe-Trotter stood next to the woman, battered but looking a bit better than it did on Dad’s bed.

“We’re related,” I whispered.

“Oh, my God. This has got to stop!” Julia grabbed the suitcase. It fell apart in her arms. She threw it onto the floor.

I grabbed my baby blanket as she swept everything off the bed into the separated suitcase halves, pleading with her to let me keep the other items, the clues to the big mystery Dad had left behind for us. Asking her why, why was she doing this.  She didn’t listen, instead stormed out of the house, down to the street, and heaved the pieces into the Dumpster.

“I don’t know why you’re moaning about not looking like Mom when you’re so hell-bent on becoming a hoarder like Dad!” Julia’s words struck like a shovel hitting stone. “There is nothing in that suitcase that is connected to our family!”

“The pictures!” I shrieked, climbing into the Dumpster. “Why would you throw them away! They’re for someone’s ofrenda!”

“Not! Ours! We don’t have an ofrenda!”

“Maybe we should! That way you’d remember what Mom looks like!”

Julia glared at me as I pulled the photos from the suitcase’s remnants. I glared back. She turned on her heels and stormed into the house. I jumped out of the Dumpster to storm anywhere else.

“Anywhere else” was the fresh earth that represented Dad’s resting place, next to Mom in the local cemetery. I plopped down on the ground between their plots, trying to unearth the right questions to ask.

Thirty minutes and zero answers later, Julia stood over me.

“Guess we’re still doing the whole ‘twins without benefits’ thing, huh, Lids?” she asked.

I shrugged. Julia set her sweatshirt on the grass next to me.

“You know,” she said as she sat on the sweatshirt. “Never able to finish each other’s…”

She waited, eyes fixed on me.

“Sentences.”

“You were supposed to say: ‘sandwiches.’”

I grinned, in spite of myself. “Same date, different clocks,” I said.

“That’s how Mom always described us,” Julia smiled, remembering. “She really messed us up, huh? I mean, as much as Dad hoarded physical things, Mom hoarded secrets. She never believed she could trust us with the truth.”

I nodded.

“But despite all that, she was still Mom. Took care of us. Fed us. Disciplined us.  This woman?” Julia gently took the photo out of my hands. “Was never Mom.”

I imagined Julia looking for clues as she stared into the photo. She was just looking for more words. “I’ll bet she was a nice woman. Had to be, for Mom to let her hold you just after we were born.”

I said nothing and let her leave the photo on Mom’s gravestone.

 

Maybe this story begins after the estate sale, when Julia left with promises to return the following weekend.

“We’ll tackle your old room together,” she assured me, and I assured her that she had given enough of her time. I returned to work as well and spent nights digging through boxes of Dad’s letters and manuscripts, scanning his missives for any insight into our past. I had stayed close to home, so he hadn’t written to me. He’d rewarded my presence with his Socratic monologues. I’m regretting that I hadn’t listened more carefully.

So I was surprised to find, wedged between his writing desk and the far corner of the room, a pile of notebooks on which my name was written in Dad’s misshapen scrawl. They crumbled as I pulled them out. A colony of termites had devoured the lower half of the pile, pulling Dad’s words down with them, entombing them within the hollow chambers of a now-dead subterranean hive. Scattered words clung to the spiral binding: “I want to tell…” “Mother…”  Some phrases referred to magazines I had already discarded, and I mourned my haste. Some phrases referred to the missionary named on the prayer cards we’d found in the Globe-Trotter, and I rejoiced that I had pulled them out with the ofrenda pictures. But the bulk of the notebooks were the consistency of ash.

Of course I wouldn’t show any of this to Julia. It’s all guesses and circumstantial evidence. And I needn’t worry, because she didn’t return the following weekend, or the next. I had a month to collect what evidence I could from the crumbling clues from Mom’s suitcase. A month to plan my next steps to excavating the truth behind Dad’s confession.

I may not know when this story begins. But I will keep digging until I reach where it leads.