Chapter 2: Gardenia
I called him from the car before I’d even pulled away from the curb.
“Why does Denise have my spare key?”
“Hm? Oh, honey, it’s on the hook by the garage door. She grabs whatever’s there.” Dad sounded tired and a little full. “It’s not a conspiracy.”
“Take it off her ring, please.”
“I’ll get it back to you.”
He didn’t. I knew he wouldn’t. I let it go anyway, because I was seven weeks from my wedding and I was tired too.
You have to understand what share with your sister meant in our family.
When I was ten, the American Girl doll Mom saved for all year went to Dad’s house one weekend and never came back, because Brooke, who was one, “loved it so much.” When I was sixteen, Mom’s old Corolla was supposed to be mine; Dad sold it and put the money toward Brooke’s daycare. Every time I said that’s mine, someone said keep the peace, and the thing I’d said it about was gone by the next visit.
Mom never fought him on any of it. She just started keeping her important things at her own house.
After the funeral, I found the dress in its box under her bed, wrapped in blue tissue, with a note pinned to the sleeve in her slanted handwriting: For Claire. Something old.
I took it to Mrs. Ochoa the week Marcus proposed. She cried a little when she opened the box. Then she put on her glasses and said, “Well. Let’s make it yours.”
Ten days after Dad’s birthday, I went into the spare room to check the garment bag, the way I did most nights, like touching a sleeping baby’s back.
The zipper was on the left.
I always closed it on the right, tucked under the hanger hook, so the pull wouldn’t scratch the lace. Always. Mrs. Ochoa had made me practice.
And the room smelled faintly of gardenia.
Denise has worn the same gardenia perfume since 1999. It gets into car seats. It gets into the couch cushions at Dad’s. I stood in the doorway and breathed in and felt the back of my neck go cold.
“Maybe you closed it the other way,” Marcus said, when he got home at seven the next morning. He was still in his scrubs, eating cereal standing up. “You’ve been stressed.”
“I don’t close it the other way.”
He looked at me over the bowl for a long moment. Marcus is a careful man. He doesn’t argue with a feeling until he’s checked it.
“Okay,” he said. “Then let’s find out.”
That afternoon he came home with a little white camera, the kind people buy to watch their dogs. It sent motion alerts straight to my phone. He set it on the top shelf of the bookcase, between my yearbooks and a jar of sea glass, angled at the closet door.
I texted Dad that night: Has anyone been in my house?
He answered in four minutes. Of course not! 😊 Get some sleep, bride.
Twelve days went by. Nothing. The camera caught me in my bathrobe, Marcus looking for his charger, the mail carrier’s shadow across the window. I started to feel ridiculous. I started to feel like the kind of person who installs cameras in her own house over a zipper.
Then it was Thursday.
I’m a librarian at a middle school, and at 1:14 in the afternoon I was in the back storage room, counting returned copies of Hatchet. My phone buzzed against the shelf.
Motion detected: Dressing Room.
Marcus was on shift. There was nobody at home. We don’t have a cat.
I opened the live feed with my thumb shaking.
The spare room door swung open. Denise stood in the doorway in her red blouse, my brass key with the blue cap still in her hand. She looked over her shoulder and waved someone in.
Brooke came in behind her, already pulling her hoodie off over her head.
Denise crossed to the closet, unzipped the garment bag from the left side, lifted out my mother’s wedding dress, and held it up against Brooke’s shoulders.
