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He almost expected the house to feel like a funeral parlor, but it didn't.
Instead, school-branded PADDs were strewn across the kitchen table. Small shoes were piled haphazardly in the hallway. Small coats hung on pegs, too. Generations of pictures adorned the walls, a tapestry of life and color. It was, whatever else, a home even now.
Which meant Len felt like he was an intruder, rather than a mourner. Or a penitent. But then, whenever it came to Scotty's life, it had been like that for a damn long time; Scotty was so zealous about keeping his home and his career separate that the few times that Len had found a way across that line between the two, he'd felt immediately like some kind of malignancy, or as if he was trampling in sacred territory.
The woman moving around the table gestured for him to sit, once she cleared her grandbabies PADDs away; her hair was streaked between iron and snow, braided over a shoulder, and she was a kind of-- weathered beauty. Like the cedar-shake houses Len had passed driving here, down a peninsula in Midcoast Maine, following ghosts.
"Corrigan family tradition is that the folks move out and the next generation gets the house, whichever branch wants to stay local," Abigail Corrigan said, putting a kettle on the stovetop. "Aaron's a nautical engineer out of Bath, so Allie kept the house and asked me to stay." She turned and leaned against the counter, not explaining her words, crossing her arms over the plaid flannel that brought out the storm gray of her eyes. "What are you doing here, McCoy?"
"Can't imagine that answer's not obvious, ma'am," Len said, cordially, even though that sense of intruding increased. "Sorry," he added, sincerely.
She tilted her head in a way that immediately reminded Len of Scotty, regarding him. "Yeah, but it's really not. What do you think you're going to find?"
That was actually a good question; when Len had come here, digging the address out of old records, it had been two hours after the Jenolan had been declared lost and all aboard her dead, including Scotty. But it wasn't like Len hadn't had time to get used to the idea; the transport had gone missing a year earlier.
It was just-- official now.
Len took a breath and rubbed the bridge of his nose, then said, "Words, maybe. Closure."
Abigail nodded, then said, "I don't think you'll find it here. I never have."
Oddly, Len wasn't surprised by that, even as her words settled in his chest like stone. "Yeah," he finally said, after a moment. "I know everyone's gonna be expecting me to give the eulogy, but--" he gestured, helplessly. "I tried, but I never really knew him."
"I did." Abigail closed her eyes, mouth pressing into a tight smile. "He wouldn't want a eulogy. Or a service. Or even a party."
Len was tempted to argue with her on that last point, but it'd be-- hell, he didn't know. Dishonest. He had a hell of a lot of recent memories of Scotty being gregarious and cheerful, seeming content as could be in Main Engineering of one of two Enterprises, but he also knew exactly what kind of heavy antidepressants the man had been on, too. "They'll throw one anyway," he concluded.
"Anything I'd be able to give you won't give you closure," Abigail said, frankly. "Insight, yeah. Answers even, maybe. But never closure, not about Scotty."
"Think I'd settle for answers. A few, if you have 'em." Even as Len said it, though, his throat ached and his eyes started stinging.
The first time he really felt the loss of the complicated, flawed and enigmatic man he'd nonetheless considered a friend.
And-- maybe that was why she finally agreed.
And she was right. Len found no closure, looking at photo albums (a tapestry of life and color), or looking at a penlight with a name etched in silver, or a compass to guide lost sailors home, no matter how funny and heartbreaking and beautiful all those things were. Because they really were. But answers? Yeah.
Enough of 'em to get his own closure seventy-four years later.