Many people commented that, upon leaving home, they would return expecting to ease right back into their old lives – sleeping in their former bedrooms, eating at the same spot at the kitchen table – only to find that their bedroom now housed a splendid array of finches and their old photos were in boxes and their dog barked at them as fiercely as he would a burglar.
Not in my case.
It had been nearly a year since I last set foot in my childhood home, but the only differences in the house were the ones I had made. The items I took to start my life in Diagon Alley were obviously missing, but nothing new had taken their place. This much was evident on the front porch, where the porch swing swayed in the autumn breeze looking absolutely uninviting without its throw pillows and handmade blanket. They were in my bedroom – George's bedroom – in the flat. Mum never replaced them.
The Dark Mark still lingered in the dawn air above my childhood home, faded but still so clearly holding its evil shape. The muggle residents of Knowle St. Giles would spend years trying to explain the odd cloud formation that occurred the day my mother was tragically killed in a home invasion, which was how they explained it. A home invasion. A burglary gone wrong. It seemed almost comical, the simplicity to their lives. They were involved in this mess, too, yet they had no idea. They busied themselves with shoveling last night's snowstorm off of the walk, shovels scraping against concrete when they finally dug through the last few inches of it.
I stood there on the walk, staring at the untouched porch, the green snake slicing through the clouds above, until Angie appeared at my side with our bags. She had insisted on coming with me to do this. Fred wanted to be there, too, but then who would run the shop? No, the whole family could not come to pack up my old home. This was something I really ought to do on my own. I just knew I could not.
In those few long moments outside, I noticed and remembered the strangest things. Angelina's parents still had their Christmas wreath hanging on the door, its bright red bow a bright contrast against the dark blue door. My mother had not picked up our mail that day, her last day. I did. The electric bill, a catalogue, and an advertisement for a new auto detailing place. As if my mother would ever drive a car. Though, if she did, I suppose she would be all about getting every nook and cranny of it cleaned.
The first difference to the house hit me when I walked in the front door. It was in the air. Death. I knew that feeling – the heaviness and the stale, stagnant taste in my mouth. I felt the same way at Hogwarts before I left my last year. I felt it in the Department of Mysteries. And now, I felt it here. I felt it at the coat rack, where my mother's beige slicker and black umbrella and wide-brimmed hat hung above a pair of dark blue wellies, one of which had tipped over to lay across the crimson entry rug. When I lived her, I would have kicked it aside, but now I felt the need to step over it, to leave everything exactly how I found it until it was time to pack up my mother's belongings.
A half-filled teacup still rested on the coffee table in the living room next to the decorative bowl of potpourri she always had out, this one smelling of vanilla and cinnamon and berries. The tellie was on, playing news now, but I could just imagine it had been tuned to EastEnders or one of her other shows at the time. The Western Gazette rested next to the teacup, opened to the crossword. She never got the Daily Prophet for fear they could trace it back to us. Fat lot of good that did her.
I could follow the trail perfectly by the path of destruction through the house. It started small and grew and grew and grew, painting a vivid image in my mind of what it could have been like for her. She sat there, on the couch, where I sat as Angie watched helplessly from the doorway, drinking her tea and watching her show and filling in the crossword during the adverts. There was a noise at the back door, a loud one probably, and she stood up suddenly, spilling a few drops of tea that had now permanently stained the wooden surface. She crossed the room quickly, knocking her copy of Moby Dick off of the armchair's seat cushion as she passed, sending the book pages-down to the ground. I picked it up, returned her bookmark snugly between the pages, unfolded the few corners that creased from being unceremoniously shoved to the ground, and returned it to the chair.
She could tell by this point that it was serious, maybe from taunting voices or a feeling in the air. She fumbled for her wand, hidden in the vase on the end table. It fell in her haste, shattering to the ground, sending the bouquet of red roses to the ground. She ran over them as she entered the dining room, tearing off petals and grinding them into the carpet. As I scooped up the petals, I could tell by their scent that they were recently purchases to replace the last dying flowers. She always had to have fresh roses.
I pushed the ajar door open more to enter the dining room and continue on her journey. Here, I imagine she came face to face with them. Spells flew, chairs toppled, pictures went up in flames, the china cabinet's glass and contents lay in pieces all across the room. But, she got away. She hit the ground here, a quarter of the way across the room where the blood started, maybe injured by a spell or tripping over a chair. She cut her hands or her knees or both or something else entirely, and bled on the hardwood floor as she crawled to the kitchen door. Leaving a slick trail behind her that I followed even as last night's dinner threatened to come back up if I continued.
The wall of our dining room jutted out to form a corner that hid the door to the kitchen from sight. When I rounded that corner expecting to find the old white door, I found nothing more than shattered wood and a doorknob holding on by the latch. As if someone blasted their way through. As if she crawled through, closed the door, locked it, and did not think to use her magic to seal it. And they broke their way in. The kitchen lay in ruins, the only sign that it had ever been used for cooking being the charred remnants of a refrigerator and stove. The back door was still open from their entrance. I carefully walked over to it, stepping around splinters of the former door to close it. The door to the fridge hung bent on its hinges, swinging back and forth, back and forth in a breeze I did not feel. Our table was nothing more than a pile of wood, and, as I crossed to inspect the small stream of water spewing from where the faucet snapped off, I felt it. I felt the spot. The spot where they killed her. It hit me like a brick, cold and heavy and suffocating. Until that point, it had all been speculation. The blood in the dining room was probably hers. The door probably splintered from the Death Eaters forcing entry. The vase probably broke as she hastily grabbed her wand. Probably. Probably. Probably. But this was real. Real. Real. Real. This was really where she died. I Felt it. I Knew.
That was where Angie found me, curled in a ball in that spot, clinging to yesterday's mail as my only lifeline, rocking back and forth, refusing to cry. Unable to cry. I had never been so overwhelmed that I did not know what to do, but, at that moment, my body was torn between vomiting out everything I had eaten in the past week and crying out all the liquids I could spare to lose and then some.
I will spare us both the wretched details of the next few hours, how we sat in silence in that room, staring at the destruction; how Angie led me to the living room where I flipped off the tellie and mopped up the tea and swept away the broken vase and ruined roses; how I got overwhelmed in the dining room and collapsed in the doorway, causing Angie to silently promise she would take care of that room for me; how she got me upstairs, which was perfectly untouched, as if nothing evil or even mildly impure ever happened here.
Suffice to say, I eventually found myself, still unable to cry, in the attic. This was the easiest place to start, since everything up here already came in a box. All I had to do was open it up, see if I wanted the contents, and close it back up. I already knew I would want very little. I did not want memories of this place. Neither my mother nor I had been up there in quite a while, so the boxes and loose items had a fine layer of dust covering them. The air smelled musty, causing Angie to sneeze a few times until she adjusted to it. I pulled the heavy drapes aside to let the evening light in through the big bay window we covered long ago, seeing no sense in advertising the storage, and rays of sunlight illuminated the dust particles swimming through the air.
I dropped to my knees in front of a pile of boxes, the only boxes I figured I would want. The photographs. The old photographs my mother never acknowledged having but would never get rid of. Photographs of her glory days, at Hogwarts and with my father and barely pregnant with me and her wedding and her childhood. Photographs of my father growing up and of vacations in Australia. Albums upon albums.
As I flipped quickly through the pages, most engrained in my memory from spending rainy childhood Saturdays going through them, I finally spoke. "The Carrows did this, you know."
"Mel, we can't be sure," Angie said gently as she peered at a box of moth-eaten baby clothes. "We're getting rid of these."
I pulled out the thick green album I spent most of my childhood looking through. It had always been my favorite, and my body seemed to automatically want to flip through the pages and pages of photographs memorializing my parents last year at Hogwarts. I had a particularly fondness for seeing them so young, carefree, and in love. So untroubled. I flipped through the pages without seeing, the pictures already well-known to me, until one that I must have seen dozens of times caught my eye and stopped my progress.
"Get rid of all of it," I told her. "And we can be sure. They killed my father. And they found her. They must have."
"How? Mel, she's been in hiding for years."
That was when I realized how different being a Ravenclaw made me. I could put the pieces together so much quicker than the rest could. They may chalk it up to paranoia or fear or whatever term may make them feel better, but I knew what was going on here, and no one could tell me otherwise. The Order may never believe me, but as I stared at the familiar picture of my father at Hogwarts, laughing at one of the long tables of Hogwarts's Great Hall, flanked by comrades I had only seen in a vastly different context before now, I knew the answer. How many times had I flipped past this photo without realizing its implications? How many times had I looked without seeing?
"Me."
Angie huffed. "Mel, that's ridi-"
"Don't tell me I'm being ridiculous, Angie, because I'm right. Bellatrix Lestrange knew who I was in the Department of Mysteries. Sort of. She and Lucius Malfoy knew my mother in school. Look, see?" I held up the picture in my hand. "And they knew my father."
Angie crossed the attic swiftly and snatched it from me to look at how a very young Lucius Malfoy seemed practically chummy with my father, and the young man and woman on the other side laughed and leaned in dramatically to be sure they were in the shot. My dad tried to shove them away, which Lucius seemed to find hilarious.
"You know who those two are, right?" Angie nodded at my question. Of course she did. The faces of all Death Eaters were permanently etched in our minds. I said it anyway, though, in case she was only humoring me. "The Carrows. He knew them. Angie, look, they were his friends. It makes sense; they were in the same house at about the same time, though I think they might've been slightly older than him. And when I showed up at the Department of Mysteries and they heard the name Harper, it wouldn't take long to figure out my mother, their old classmate and his girlfriend, was still in England. And they probably assumed I would be here, too, and they could finished what they started all those years ago." I licked my lips. "He knew them and was friends with them. Think of what that means." That they betrayed him. That he either betrayed them or, in a backwards way, us. That my father may have been a Death Eater.
Angie considered this, staring at the picture. Then, slowly, very slowly, she looked at the album I pulled it from. She reached out and slid out the picture next to it, one of my parents together on the wooden bridge at Hogwarts as a light snow fell in the distance. Their arms wrapped around each other's waists, my mother bundled in a Hufflepuff scarf and a beautiful black sweater with the school crest on it and a radiating smile and my father in a simple heather grey coat and his hair all messy and love in his eyes. Angie handed that to me, folded the picture of the Carrows, and pocketed it.
"Remember your father that way. This," she pointed to her pocket, "is something we need to figure out. Later"
I nodded. I liked that thinking. At the moment, I liked any thinking that was not my own. My mind felt thick and heavy and muddled, like I was wading through a dense fog or my late grandmother's pea soup.
"I don't want anything," I announced, hugging the photo album to my chest. "Just these."
"Are you certain?" Angie frowned. "Mel, there's a lot to go through, I know, but we have time."
"I don't want it," I repeated seriously. "I want the photographs. That's all. The rest was…hers. Not mine. I don't want it now."
Angie studied me carefully, biting her bottom lip and furrowing her brow as her eyes scanned over me. I can only imagine what she saw. A trembling girl too old to be in school but too young to face the horrors of the real world. A girl clutching to an old album in a dusty attic standing in front of a window that could stand a good cleaning. A girl with wide eyes and quivering lips pressed together in an attempt to stabilize them and shallow breaths desperate for cool, fresh air that could not be achieved with the weight of the world now thrust on her shoulders.
"Why don't we wait, yeah?" Angie suggested. "It's getting late. I'll make us some dinner…" she frowned. "I think my mum said something about going there to eat, actually." Yeah, because there was no chance I would eat Angie's attempt at a meal. "And we can sleep this off. Tomorrow'll be a fresh day. Sound good?"
I nodded. It all sounded good. It sounded wonderful. Except that a fresh day would not be enough to rid this house of its demons. It may help, but I still would not want anything. I still would not be ready to box up my mother's possessions, to clean the kitchen, to pick up the remnants of a disrupted life. How could I put that into words for someone who had never seen death, though?
The closest I could manage was, "I'm not hungry."
I told her to go eat. I wanted to be alone for a while, and, after much cajoling, finally got her to go to her parents' house for dinner without me. I ventured into my mother's room, heavily shadowed as the sun began to set, and stared at her favorite bedspread – the one with the ivy pattern. My fingers trailed along the polished wood of her dresser, and I pulled open a drawer to stare at the sweaters and blouses and socks and underwear inside. For no reason. Just to see them. Her locket lay on her nightstand, a tarnished gold oval engraved with a triquetra that looked like it was formed from branches or twigs. I could remember playing with that locket as a child as it hung around her neck, but she stopped wearing it after my father died. Gently, as if it might break, I picked it up and clicked it open.
My mother smiled back at me. Not as I knew her, because I never knew an Adelaide Harper that smiled broadly. No, this was a girl, barely older than me. A girl with raven curls, just like mine, and blushing cheeks and bags under her eyes. Slinging his arm over her shoulder was a man about her age. A yawning man with a day's worth of stubble on his unshaven chin and a light in his green eyes and an infant in his arms. Me.
I clicked the locket shut and latched it around my neck. I would keep that, too. With my decision made, I drifted to my old bedroom, left untouched as if no atrocities had occurred in this house. Angie must have dropped my suitcase there earlier, though I had never noticed, as it sat on the rocking chair next to the bed. I opened it, stared at the sleep clothes I brought, and realized I did not have the energy to change. I felt exhausted. I had done absolutely nothing that day, just walked around a house, but I could no longer stay standing.
George's red sweater, emblazoned with a golden G boldly across the front, called to me from the top of the suitcase. I grabbed it and crawled onto my old bed, not bothering with the covers. I did not mind the chill of night settling through the house mostly because I was too numb to feel it. I closed my eyes, hugged his sweater to my chest, took a deep breath to fill my nose with his scent, and pretended that he was there with me.
Sorry for dumping you on a cliffhanger last time! I know this still isn't the greatest spot, but at least it's a little better, yeah? I'm back at school now, so life is a little crazy, and I don't know when the next post will be. Hopefully pretty soon, because I know the timing of this part of the story and slow posts is terrible. I'll do my best!
Next Chapter: I Miss You Like Hell