It came on a Sunday, and by muggle mail, so Harry knew at once who it was from.
With a frown, he laid the envelope down unopened on the kitchen table and wracked his brain for what the occasion might have been…it was none of the children’s birthdays, nor his, nor Dudley’s. Vernon had already died, years ago before Lily was born, and Dudley tactfully chose not to let Harry know until several months after the funeral. All the same. He would not have gone.
There was Dudley’s older son, Chauncey, just a year or two older than James…he would be about eleven now. Could he have gotten a letter? Godric wouldn’t that just be rich? It was enough- almost -to make Harry’s lips quirk up into a smile.
He glanced around to make sure no one else was up; he could hear James and Albus’s footsteps thumping around upstairs but they had yet to come down. He had meant to cook up breakfast in the muggle way, an old habit Ginny often teased him for, but when he had the time he felt it calmed him. He liked the slowness. In the end though, the curiosity of the letter overtook him and he just flicked his wand at the stove to get the eggs started as he tore open the envelope
Harry,
Sorry that it’s been a while. Mum’s taken a bad turn and is quite poorly. Doctors have put her on hospice.
Yesterday, she asked about you. She hasn’t in a long while. She’s asked if she can
meet the children, and I understand if you won’t have it, but I thought you’d like
to know.
If you’d like to see her though, it should be this week or next. They say it won’t be
long. She’s at Hampton Down on the 8th floor. Visiting hours are 12-4.
Best,
D.D
Feeling numb, Harry folded the letter back up, put it inside the envelope, and stuck it under the vase in the center of the table.
He wasn’t sure why he did that; he supposed he just didn’t want to look at it longer than he needed to.
It wasn’t her dying that upset him…he had lost too many people in his life far dearer to him than Petunia for it to be that. For years, he had imagined confronting the Dursleys, pictured himself boasting to them about his accolades, his promotions, his heroism. He had dreamt himself screaming at her for all the suffering she had put him through when he was only a child, only a little boy, and telling her that now that he had children of his own, he could never imagine treating them like she did him. He had been saving all sorts of cruel and nasty things for her without making any plans to ever see her again, and now, suddenly, he was going to see her again.
And he really had no desire to say anything at all.
He turned back over his shoulder to glance at the eggs and swished his wand to flip them over, then added pepper. James always liked his eggs with a ridiculous amount of pepper.
These were times he liked to think about what the people he’d known, the people he’d gone to for help as a boy, would have told him.
Dumbledore would say something cryptic and broad and left Harry to come to the conclusion on his own. This had always served him well at Hogwarts, but he doubted Petunia had enough time for all that.
Mrs. Weasley would be aghast that Petunia had even asked. ‘The nerve of that woman!’ He could hear her saying, as surely as if he stuck his head in the floo network right now to speak to her at the Burrow. She would be right to feel that way; it had been here that swept him up into her wings, after all, when the Dursleys had only ever kicked him out of the nest.
But Lupin- Lupin in his measured calm and mournful regret, he would tell Harry that it would be better to go and to begrudge her, to be angry and sad in the moment, than to live the rest of his life wishing he’d gone to see her. ‘You may only have this one opportunity, Harry,’ his voice rang in his mind. ‘Don’t waste it.’
‘Oh, bugger the daft old bat!’ Sirius scoffed. ‘What’s she ever done for you? What right does she have to see your children? To even know their names?!’
In the end it was a voice he didn’t know that coaxed him into pulling the letter back out from under the vase. A voice he had created from pictures and imagination and other people’s memories.
‘Go,’ his mother urged him. ‘Forgive her.’
He wasn’t sure he could do that. But he did know that somewhere, swirled up in all of that bitterness in Petunia, there was the same blood that once flowed through Lily. When Albus was born and James gawked down into his cradle and ran his finger in awe over his tiny face, he had found himself thinking of his aunt and his mother, wondering if Petunia had looked at her like that. Wondering when the look went away.
“Dad? Dad! Are you alright? The eggs are burning!”
“Oh…abrupto!” Harry jumped and tossed a spill quickly at the smoking mess in the pan, then went over with a sigh to scrape away the attempt at breakfast. “Sorry lads,” he called back to James and Albus, hovering in the door. “Just a little sleepy still. I’ll put it on again…Albus, you want scrambled or over easy?”
“Poached,” Albus said, and came over to sit at the kitchen table with a serious frown. He always looked very serious, Albus, even then as a little boy of seven, and was in constant companionship but also constant contradiction to his brother, who was never without a smirk.
James yawned, adjusted the spectacles over his nose, and ran a hand through his hair to tousle it. He didn’t even look at the letter before he swept it off that morning’s owl post and picked up the Daily Prophet to scan the Quidditch matches. Albus, however, silently scanned the return address and glanced at Harry with cool eyes, but he said nothing.
Eventually, with breakfast rescued and the scores of various Quidditch games thoroughly analyzed and reported back to Harry and an uninterested Albus, they were all sat down together munching on eggs and bacon. Harry could almost forget that he ever made breakfast any other way, in any place called Privet Drive, with any dying aunts screaming at his back for him to do it faster. His sons were here, the sun was out in full force, and the Chudley Cannons were leading the league. Things were good.
“Dad,” James said eagerly through a mouthful of scrambled eggs, “is it true you met Viktor Krum?”
Harry nodded with an indulgent smile. James had asked him this so many times he must have known what Krum smelled like at that point, but he always liked to hear about him.
“Oh yeah,” Harry said. “Met him while I was at school. He went to Durmstrang, but he was in England for the Triwizard Tournament. And I saw him play, of course, at the World Cup.”
James balanced his feet on the outside rungs between the legs of his chair and bounced on his toes. “Was he brilliant?”
“More than brilliant!” Harry said. “But you know, you should ask your Aunt Hermione about him next time you see her.”
He winked over James’s shoulder at Ginny as she came in, balancing Lily on her hip. Their daughter was five now, too old to be carried around everywhere, but there were still some nights when she crawled into bed with them from some nightmare or another, and neither Harry nor Ginny was strong enough to put her back in her own room. On such occasions, everything was permitted. Ginny carried her, she sucked her thumb, and no one said a thing.
Ginny fought back a smile as she went to scoop the leftover eggs for her and for Lily. “Ask Uncle Ron, too!” she quipped.
Albus scrunched his face into a frown. “Why?”
Harry laughed, even as Ginny picked up the envelope with a curious tilt of her head and sat down next to Lily to read the letter. He kept talking to his sons- about Quidditch, about work, about anything while Ginny’s eyes got wider and her face got paler. Only when the children had finished up and stacked their plates by the sink, and gone out to play in the yard and left their parents alone, did he finally look up to meet her glance.
“Harry,” Ginny breathed, softly.
He shook his head. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Do you…?” She bit her lip and swept the amber hair back from her face. “Do you have to do anything?” she asked. “I mean, they were so awful to you.”
“Yeah.” He watched his boys whoop in excitement outside as they clashed their toy goblins together in a makeshift battle. Lily hopped up and down and tossed gobstones at them to egg them on. Had he ever known happiness like that at their age? “But she’s my family. I don’t have much family.”
“You have us,” Ginny reminded him. He wasn’t sure if she meant her and children, or her and the Weasleys. Either be correct.
“Yeah.”
With a sigh, she reached across the table and took his hand in hers. “Whatever you decide to do, love,” she said, and lifted his hand to press her lips to his knuckles. “We’ll all go with you.”
***********
So that’s how it came to be that the Potter family stood, cramped in a hospital elevator and dressed in muggle clothes, at half past three the following Wednesday. James kept gawking at the white-coated doctors and their stethoscopes, while Albus fidgeted in his starchy camel coat and slacks, grumbling about how ‘dumb’ he looked. A few times, Harry had to reach out and stop James from trying to push all the elevator buttons at once. Lily stood shyly at her mother’s side, clinging to her coat and hiding behind her legs.
It was Dudley’s wife, Camilla, who greeted them outside room 804 after the nurse let them up. She sprang up from the chair she’d been sitting in, thumbing through an old magazine, and rushed in hurried little steps to come over and clasp Harry’s hand in hers, fleshy and too warm, slick with sweat.
Camilla was a large woman, not unkind but very loud and fast-speaking with an almost frantic edge to her voice at all times. Between that and her constantly red face and the slight trace of panic that seemed to linger in her eyes, Harry always got the sense that all her bluster was just a cover for some deep-seated insecurity.
Of course, there was also the chance that Dudley had told her they were all ‘magical freaks’ and that she was simply terrified of him.
“Oh Harry,” she gushed, “so glad you could come. Really so glad. She’s been talkin’ aboutcha, did you know? Hardly a word out of her all these years and now it’s like we can’t get her to stop! I think she’s feelin’ lonely, the poor love, you know because Dud’s got work and Chauncey has football practice and of course Maggie has theater. Did he tell you she’s been takin’ up the theater? Real artistic mind, our Maggie’s got. Gonna play Anne Boleyn in her next show, she is.”
Harry blinked, unsure how they’d ended up on this topic, and smiled as he shook Camilla’s hand. “That’s great,” he said simply, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.
James frowned and tugged on Ginny’s coat. “Who’s Anne Bowlin’?” he asked in a loud whisper.
Camilla’s frightened eyes flicked at once to the children and she made an odd sort-of squealing sign in her throat. “Oh, my lovelies!” she cried, rushing over to them with only a brief pause and a “hello, dear,” to peck Ginny on the cheek. “How handsome you all look! And so pretty!” She twirled an orange lock of Lily’s hair around one finger and Lily giggled, leaning casually against Ginny.
“Hullo Aunt Camilla,” James said with a polite smile.
“Hullo Aunt Camilla,” Albus mumbled.
She pulled them both into a bear hug, and Harry watched both boys make the same face at him over her broad shoulders. He pressed his lips tightly together to keep from laughing.
“Oh well, Dud’s still at work,” Camilla said, releasing the children and scurrying over to the door as she smoothed her shirt down. “He’ll be ‘round in half an hour or so…always makes sure to stop by for his mum that one. I only wanted to make sure you got in properly but I do have to pick up Chauncey from football so if you don’t need anything…”
She trailed off and looked at Harry. For a moment, the panic intensified in her eyes.
“No, that’s alright,” Harry said, swallowing his dread as he glanced through the window in the door. All he could see was a curtain, but he knew who was behind it. “We’ll manage. Thanks, Cam.”
Her shoulders sagged with relief and she knocked briskly on the door, then strode in without waiting for an answer. Harry followed, but the rest of his family stayed cautiously in the doorway.
“Petunia, love!” Camilla shouted. “Guess who’s come to visit? Your new favorite boy! Harry’s here, eh? All the way from London! And he brought the whole family, just to see you.”
“What’s that?” a raspy voice demanded. It was weak, but it stopped Harry in his tracks. There was that same, cutting disapproval.
But Camilla was either obvious to it or used to it by now, so she only straightened some of the flowers at Petunia’s bedside and propped her pillow up. “Harry!” she stressed. “Harry Potter! Your nephew. Come now, look sharp. Dud’s comin’ by in half an hour and then I’ll be back tomorrow, alright? You enjoy now. Family time!”
She beamed at Harry as she passed, leaving them alone face to face.
Whatever he’d expected, it was not this. This was so much worse.
She had always been a thin woman, but now she was skeletal. Even the skin of her face seemed stretched back and translucent, showing the delicate silvery veins of her temples and eyelids. Her eyes were sunken. Her teeth looked too big for her mouth. Where there was once a nest of brown curls, now there was only a cloth tied over a bald head. She was hooked up to so many wires and machines that Harry was surprised she could move at all, but she did, to shift on her hospital bed and narrow her eyes at him.
“You,” she breathed.
He felt a rush of something pinching in his gut. Anger? He wasn’t sure. He swallowed and nodded, cordial, dispassionate. “It’s Harry, Aunt Petunia.”
She frowned and her thin eyebrows creased together in what, to his astonishment, Harry realized was annoyance. “I know it’s Harry,” she rasped. “I asked for Harry.”
“Well…” he turned over his shoulder to cast a helpless look at Ginny, who only shrugged, then returned to his aunt with his jaw set in tight determination. “Why?” he demanded.
She blinked at him. “What?”
“Why did you ask for me? All these years…they said you barely even mentioned me, and now suddenly you want me at your deathbed. Suddenly you want to meet the children. I thought you and Vernon and all of Privet bloody Drive were glad to be rid of me, so why now? You owe me that much.”
He had to fight, he realized, to keep his voice from rising.
Petunia’s glassy eyes squinted up at the ceiling in thought, and Harry wondered if she was all there to listen to this, this fragment of the speech he’d prepared for so long. What was in that bag dripping into her veins, after all? She may well have thought he was Prince Harry.
But she opened her chapped lips and said to the ceiling tiles, “They’re her grandchildren.”
Harry opened his mouth, then snapped it shut, and it felt like all the fight had rushed out of him at once. “Yes,” he said. “Yes they are.”
“You met a girl then?”
He sat down at the chair beside her bed and nodded. “Yes. Ginny.”
“At school?” She gave him a suspicious glance from the corner of her eyes. “One of…your sort?”
He pressed his lips tight in irritation. “Yes,” he snapped. “One of my sort. And my children are as well.”
“Mmm.” There was that disapproval again. That wrinkled nose. “Not Dudley’s.”
He said nothing.
“The girl,” she said. “It’s not that smart one with the normal parents? The one who used to write you over summers?”
“Hermione?” Harry asked. “No she…” he paused, stricken. “How’d you know about her? You never met my friends.”
Petunia laughed, but it quickly morphed into a cough she spent a good minute hacking, her body shaking until she at last drew a deep, rattling breath and sank back into her pillows. From the doorway, Albus leaned in to try and see her, but Ginny pulled him back.
“I used to read your letters,” she muttered, “if I could get ahold of them. Wanted to make sure you weren’t up to any trouble.”
She said it the same way she’d always talked about him- back when she’d sneer that he was no good, the same type of wastrel as his father, an ingrate -but he was oddly touched. How many letters had she combed through and then put back and slipped under the door for him to find and believe were right from Hedwig? How many details of his life had she learned and not spoken to him about?
And she’d remembered. She remembered Hermione.
“I married my friend Ron’s sister,” he said. “You remember Ron…him and his brothers came to get me in a flying car once after I blew up Aunt Marge.”
Petunia let out such an abrupt bark that Harry almost flew out of his seat, thought maybe he should ring a nurse, but it turned out to be another laugh. “Oh what an awful woman,” Petunia wheezed, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye.
Harry smirked, trying to hide his shock. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah she was.”
‘So were you’ was the unspoken line between them.
For a moment, they sat in silence. Ginny, bless her, didn’t move an inch from the doorway and kept shushing James when he asked what they were doing here, who was this lady again? And who was Anne Boleyn?!
Harry didn’t know how to do the next part, or even if he should, but then his eyes caught on the wilted orange flowers in the white vase with the price sticker still on it at Petunia’s bedside. The petals had half fallen off, settling in a soft circle on the plastic tray along with saltine wrappers and bitten straws. They were lilies.
His face softened and he leaned forward a bit, so his chin was closed to the gate drawn up at the side of her hospital bed so she wouldn’t fall. “Would you like to meet them?” he asked softly.
Petunia turned to look at him with wary eyes, so pale now that they were almost pink like a lab mouse’s from the vessels. She nodded.
“Ginny,” Harry called, “children, come over, will you?”
Quietly, with no more than a rustle of their uncomfortable, scratchy muggle clothes, Harry’s family emerged from the doorway and came to stand before the foot of his aunt’s bed. James was still stunned by the strangeness of the hospital. He couldn’t close his mouth from gaping at all the equipment, the postcards and drawings on Petunia’s wall, the television. Had his kids ever seen a telly? Surely, when they visited Dudley. But James couldn’t take his eyes off it.
Albus was more interested in Petunia, and stood boldly staring at her, cocking his head at her thin frame and her blue hospital gown. He looked like he was picking her apart with his eyes, and Harry wondered if he got any of the traces of his lineage from the sharp bones of her face.
Lily wouldn’t come out from behind her mother except to peak. She had her fingers in her mouth, and she eyed Petunia with such fear that it was all Harry could do not to sweep her up into his arms. He should have warned them, that she would look like this. Muggles did not die well.
He cleared his throat. “Kids,” he said, waving to Petunia, “this is your Great Aunt Petunia. She and my mother were sisters, and when I was a little boy, I used to live with her.”
James, of course, was the first to speak. “Is she Uncle Dudley’s mum?”
“Yes.”
“Is she a muggle?”
“That’s not polite to ask, James.”
“Oh. Why not?”
Harry sighed and tipped his chin to Petunia. “Aunt Petunia, meet my wife, Ginny.”
Ginny smiled. “Pleased to meet you, miss.”
“And that’s my oldest, James,” he said. “James Sirius.”
She nodded, but her eyes flicked up and down James with all the caution of someone assessing whether or not a dog would bit her. “Looks like him,” she grunted. She did not even so much as look at Ginny.
“Right.” Harry coughed into his sleeve and began to wonder if this was perhaps a horrible idea after all. “And this is Albus,” he drew Albus over with a hand on his shoulder and ruffled his black hair. “Albus Sev…well, Albus. He’s seven now, is what I was going to say.”
“Hmm.” Petunia seemed the slightest bit more interested, and rustled a bit against her pillows as if to get more comfortable. That was all she had to say.
“And hiding over there,” Harry stooped down with a playful smirk and pulled his daughter up into his arms, “is Lily. Lily, can you say ‘hi’ to your Great Aunt? Say ‘hi?’”
But Lily only covered her eyes and buried her face in Harry’s shoulder, refusing to look at her.
Petunia’s eyes went wide, and she stared at the back of Lily’s head with such shock that, for a moment, Harry wondered if she had perhaps slipped away into some delusion of the dying. “Oh,” she breathed. “Is she frightened of me?”
“Oh, I, er…” Harry bounced Lily gently and patted her back. “She’s just not really used to hospitals, I think.”
“She has nightmares!” James blurted out. “She’s scared of everything.”
Petunia eyed him with a small crooked smile. “Maybe not,” she said. “Your father had nightmares when he was a little boy. And he’s not scared of everything.”
James and Albus perked up their eyes and inched closer to the bed.
“Really?” James asked.
“Oh yes.” Petunia nodded. “Since he was a baby. And so did your grandmother, my sister. She had bad dreams all the time.”
“Did she wake you up?” Albus pressed. “Lily wakes us up with her crying almost every night.”
Petunia chuckled. “That’s the job of little sisters,” she said. “They make us angry.”
“How come my grandmother was magic and you’re not?” James asked.
“James!” Ginny hissed, leaning over to smack him lightly on the head.
“Ow! What?”
Petunia waved her off. “Sometimes that’s just the way it happens,” she said. “Now you, the little one,” she pointed at Albus, “be a good lad and hand me that bag, hm? The blue one under the telly, yes.”
Albus walked over to pick up the bright blue duffle with floral print as Ginny and Harry watched on warily. He set it down on Petunia’s lap and craned his neck, along with James, as the old woman rifled her brittle hands through the contents and emerged with a small square wrapped in brown paper.
“Ah,” she croaked. “This. Yes this is for you.” She thrust the package somewhat roughly towards James without really looking at him, then returned to digging. “It was your great grandfather’s,” she muttered. “My father. His medal from the war. That’s the Korean War, you understand. He was a soldier.”
“Thank you,” James said with a quizzical frown at the medal. He stood up on his tiptoes and tented his hand to whisper at Harry, “What’s that mean?”
“Shh,” Harry said. “I’ll tell you later. Just say thank you.”
“I did!”
“And for you,” Petunia pulled a book from the bag and handed it to Albus, somewhat breathlessly. There was a crazed and determined look in her watery eyes. “This was a book my mother loved. Poems by Yeats…my mother was Irish, yes? And you are part Evans, so you are part Irish too.” She looked at him until he nodded in understanding. “You are part Irish,” she said, and slowly took her fingers off the book so he could have it.
Finally, she returned to the bag and pulled out a raggedy stuffed bear, running her hand gently over its head. The teddy had once been white, but was not worn down to a dull grey with mats in its fur and white, chipped-glass cataracts on its eyes. “This is Flops,” she murmured, to no one in particular. “He was my sister’s.”
Harry did not need to ask. He simply set Lily down at his feet and turned her, gently but firmly, towards Petunia so that she couldn’t run away and hide.
Petunia smiled down at the girl and offered her the bear, which Lily took hesitantly, but hugged close to her chest. “That was your grandmother’s,” she whispered. “Her name was Lily, too.”
****
Petunia died four days after that, and this time Dudley let him know and told him when and where the funeral would be, but the Potters did not attend. This, Harry told himself, was mostly out of respect for the dead. She would have had an aneurysm if she’d known a family of wizards was at her funeral, consorting among her friends and neighbors, sullying her reputation. He politely declined Dudley’s invitation and agreed yes, they should see each other for dinner soon, when neither of them really intended to do so.
He tried his best to explain the concepts of Korea and communism to James, but in the end, he just said that Mr. Evans, James’s great-grandfather, had been very brave and heroic in a muggle war, just like his father and Uncle Ron and Aunt Hermione had been very brave in a wizard war. Muggles, he said, gave each other shiny medals as rewards for their bravery, and it was very special indeed. James took great pride in it and set it on his dresser beside Harry’s first snitch.
Ginny read from the Yeats poems to Albus every night until he fell asleep. She sometimes asked if he wanted to hear Babbity Rabbity, or the Three Brothers, but he always wanted Yeats. His favorite was “The Stolen Child.” Sometimes Harry would stop to listen outside his son’s bedroom, and he would hear Ginny’s lilting voice whisper:
“For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of
weeping than he can understand.”
Lily was never apart from Flops the bear. She sat it beside her for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and she slept with it always, tucked up under chin with one arm across it so that if anyone were to try and take it away, she would know and wake up. She never had another nightmare again.