Home Before Dark

The armoire is nailed shut when Maggie sees it as an adult. She pries the boards off with a crowbar and sees that it’s filled with her small dresses. Her father wrote that Jessica put them there, hoping Maggie would wear them one day. Then she opens the closet and finds clothes that she had worn. She remembers her parents telling the interviewer on 60 Minutes that they had fled with only the clothes they were wearing. Ewan also said they’d never been back. Maggie never believed that they could have actually left all their possessions behind. She finds her old toys in her old bedroom and wonders if they left them there to make their story seem truer. Maybe they planned on making the loss of her things up to her with the success of the book, like when Ewan gave her a car on her 16th and 17th birthdays. She attributed these gifts then to her parents’ guilt over their divorce, but she now wonders if they had more to do with guilt over the Book.

Her parents’ room looks like it has been untouched for 25 years. She finds a dress of her mother’s that Jessica is wearing in a photo Maggie saw in Ewan’s apartment.