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She rereads the letters on one of the few holidays she spends with Mark and his family.
She’d spent the night before getting comfortably drunk with her brother, her feet in his lap, and his feet on the table, enjoying the feeling of steadily becoming warm and fuzzy at the edges. She has happy memories of when she’d come home from college, crash at Marks and then spend the night getting progressively more incoherent the more they drank, over-analysing their father and how they both demonstrated their overwhelming need for his approval.
She’s more understanding of her father these days.
They stay away from the more touchy subjects. Like how her collection of scars has increased exponentially every year [Mark stopped asking the year that Sam, already hopped up on painkillers and distraught over losing Daniel again, burst into tears at the dinner table; Mark was stunned, he hadn’t seen his Sammy cry like that, not since she’d dumped that bastard Hanson’s sorry ass – he couldn’t stomach being the one to make her cry, not when he saw her so little already].
Or why Mark’s best friend from college doesn’t visit anymore [Mark had left rambling long messages on Sam’s voicemail which she’d come home to after an unforeseen delay on PX3-421. Jason had gotten drunk, declared his longstanding love for Laura before threatening her for refusing his advances, trashing their house and assaulting Mark].
They talk instead about the little things, how Mark will cope with the kids as teenagers, why Sam hasn’t ever yet beaten Mark at backgammon, whether crazy cousin Tim will move out from home eventually, if Sam can still pick locks faster than Mark can, how much Mark misses going surfing and if Sam’s fixed those loose roof tiles yet or does she need a strapping young man to help her [Mark delivers this with a waggling of the eyebrows]. She missed this.
Three quarters of the way through a bottle of very expensive whiskey, they’ve migrated to sprawling on the floor with cushions around them. Mark tells her he found a box of her stuff when clearing out the attic. Grinning wickedly, he tells her that he always knew she’d had a crush on Will Tobins, the school quarterback [she’d tutored him in maths and he’d helped her with her throwing and catching – she’d been trying to impress her much too distant Dad by playing football]. She manages a few seconds of fake outrage that he had the gall to read her diary before the snort of laughter escapes her.
It’s when he tells her that he found the shoebox in there too that she quiets. She’d hoarded as many things of her mothers’ as she could for months after the accident. It took two years and then some before Jacob finally realised that Sam’s wardrobe was overflowing with her mother’s clothes. They’d argued before Sam had consented to keeping a jumper and some smaller keepsakes along with as many photos she could find that Mark hadn’t kept himself. She’d found some letters that Grace had written to her parents in the bottom of an old drawer and kept them too.
She sits up in the attic the next morning, grinning when she hears Marks awaken to a hangover. She spreads the photos out around her and thumbs through the diary before discarding it in favour of the letters. The paper is more faded and brittle but she smooths her hand over the pages, savouring the slant and loops of the writing. The smell is musty, with a far away hint of something flowery wafting from the jumper lining the box. She finds an old ring, slightly tarnished, that she slips onto her finger. She can’t wear it on missions but she’ll keep it in her locker.
She is suddenly overwhelmingly thankful for Mark finding this and telling her. No matter how little she can tell him about what she does, he’s still her brother, she still has someone, someone to get drunk and reminisce with, someone who’ll invite her to Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Years, someone who’ll roll his eyes and grin at her bad jokes, worry about her and give her a spare room. She has this. And this is more than she sometimes remembers she has.