Chapter 8: Ginny Comes Home
That afternoon after lunch, Harry went into the drawing room, settled himself on the sofa, and, stretching out his legs, reviewed all that he had done and learned over the past few days. He felt that he understood a lot more now about how his childhood had affected him and had shaped who he was today, although the memory of the dreams still discomfited him and disrupted his peace of mind. He was ready to explain it to Ginny, but she was still at the Burrow visiting her parents until Monday. If he asked her to come home right away, she would think that something was wrong, so he compromised and sent her an owl asking her to come home on Sunday evening.
The rest of Saturday seemed to drag, and it was hard to work on Sunday because Harry could not concentrate on his Auror business. His mind kept racing ahead to the evening hours when Ginny would return, and he rehearsed endlessly in his mind what he would say to her. Finally the work day was over and he Apparated home.
Ginny arrived via the Floo at about seven p.m. Harry was waiting impatiently by the fireplace, and as soon as she appeared, he stepped forward, took her valise from her hand, and drew her close in a hug, not minding the ash residue that still dusted her clothing and rubbed off onto his own.
"I'm so glad you're home," he said. "I missed you so much."
"I missed you too." She nestled her head against his shoulder.
"Are you sorry you went?"
"No, no, it was good to see them again. I had a good time." There was a happy tone to her voice.
"I hope you don't mind that I asked you to come home a day early."
"No, that's okay."
Harry stepped back and began to brush the ash off her clothes and his own. He was bursting with the desire to tell her what he had been doing, but he did not want this reunion to be all about him, so he deliberately asked her about her visit first. Her story was sure to be shorter than his, which was going to take a long time.
Harry sat down at the table and said, "Tell me everything you did."
"Well," Ginny said, putting the final touches to the brushing off of her clothing, "I spent a lot of time talking with Mum. I asked her all about childbirth -- she's had a total of seven children on six different occasions -- and she says it gets easier every time. In fact, she said when I was born I just about fell out. Even though this baby won't be her first grandchild, I got the feeling that having your sons' wives give birth isn't the same as having your own daughter give birth. It's like she's more connected to me than to her daughters-in-law. Well, I guess that's not a surprise." Ginny sat down at the table with Harry.
"And we spent a lot of time talking about what it's like in the first few months after the baby's born, and she told me about when Bill was a baby. And we had fun cooking some special food, and looked at baby pictures, and some friends came for dinner."
"How's your dad?" asked Harry, wanting to deal thoroughly with Ginny's story before starting his own.
"He's fine. He was happy to see me and sorry that you couldn't come too."
"I've kept very busy."
"What were you doing?"
"I've been to some strange and unusual places and talked to some unusual people," Harry said, by way of introducing something Ginny was sure to find unexpected and remarkable.
"Ooh, that sounds interesting," Ginny exclaimed, her face lighting up. "Is it anything you can tell me about?"
Harry was a little surprised by her question since he intended to tell it all to her, and then he realized that she assumed he was talking about some very interesting Auror case.
"Yes, I can tell you all of it. In fact, I have to."
Now it was Ginny's turn to look perplexed, and Harry knew she was wondering what sort of Auror case it was, that she needed to know all about.
"It's not about my work at the Ministry. It's about me," he explained.
"Oh," Ginny said. She placed her elbows on the edge of the table with her forearms crossed in front of her on the polished dark wood and leaned forward toward him, watching his face intently. "What about you?"
"It's a long story," Harry replied. "I have to start at the beginning."
The beginning was the series of disturbing dreams. Harry described them in as much detail as he could remember.
"Why didn't you tell me about this before?" Ginny asked gently. She reached forward and took one of Harry's hands in her own.
"I was worried that it would bother you. I was worried about what it meant about me. So I wanted to figure it out first."
"And did you?" Ginny asked.
"I figured out a lot. Not everything. Not yet. But I'm glad that you're not angry with me for waiting to talk until I knew what to say."
He said that to forestall any angry outburst from Ginny about his keeping secrets from her, but in truth he had to admit to himself that her old proclivity to the rapid angry retort when she was displeased with something was fading away. Perhaps it had something to do with becoming a mother and no longer seeing herself as a member of the youngest generation, but rather as a part of an older generation that had to assume more responsibility.
"I'm not angry. I trust that you know what you're doing. But go on with your story. What else is there?"
Harry continued until finally it was all told -- the poster in the plaza, the trip to the office of the child protection organization, the evening at the volunteer training session, the day of traveling from the British Library to Foyle's Bookstore to the Institute of Psychiatry and the amazing book that he found there, the self-help group at the church and the wise women he met there.
"I need a cup of tea," Harry said finally, standing up. "Do you want some too?"
"Yes, that would be nice," Ginny answered. As Harry made the tea, she asked "What are you going to do now?"
Harry set the cups on the table, a pink-and-white cup for Ginny and the dark blue NRLI mug for himself. Leaning back in his chair and staring at his mug, he said, "I want to talk to people who knew me when I was little, to ask them about things, fill in some of the blanks."
"Would you want to talk with your aunt and uncle?" Ginny asked.
"Merlin's beard! No!" Harry exploded, and then he added, only slightly less vehemently, "There's nothing those two people can tell me that I don't already know!"
"Sorry I mentioned it," Ginny apologized, leaning a little back in her chair.
"No, no, that's okay," said Harry more calmly. "I shouldn't get so worked up. But I'm not ready to confront them. I'm not even going there." He stared at the table for a few moments and continued, "When I was at that self-help group that I told you about, the one at the church, one of the women, the older one, I think her name was Ida, said something that really made sense to me. I was telling them about my childhood and the relationship between my aunt and my mum when they were girls -- it's all stuff that I've told you in bits and pieces over the years, but it's different when you lay it out all organized, all together; you see things you didn't see before -- anyway, I was telling them about it, and Ida said something to the effect that when my mum and my aunt were girls, my mum was the winner and my aunt was the loser in that family, so when my parents died and I went to live with the Dursleys, my aunt had the chance for a do-over. Her son would be the winner and her sister's son would be the loser. That would even the score."
"Oh, my," said Ginny simply. "Could that be true?"
"For a long time I thought my aunt was radically opposed to anything magical. She called wizards and witches freaks, including my parents. But now I wonder if it was just that my mum had something she didn't. Did you know that Aunt Petunia once wrote to Professor Dumbledore asking to be admitted to Hogwarts too? She didn't think they were freaks then."
"So even if your mother was never a witch, if she had just been admitted to a special school for arts or drama, your aunt would have been jealous and would have said that artists or actresses were freaks and kooks?"
"Yeah, maybe so. And she still would have taken it out on me."
Harry suddenly leaned forward and grasped both of Ginny's hands in his own.
"When we have more children," he said intensely, "when we have more than one, we've got to promise each other that we will treat them both equally. No favorites. We've got to be sure that we make it plain that we value each child for whatever he or she is. So if this baby is as serious and strait-laced as your brother Percy and the next one is as goofy as Fred and George, we've got to be sure that we act as if we value them equally."
"Of course we'll do that," said Ginny, staring at him with round eyes.
"It's that important," Harry said, releasing her hands. "My grandparents, my Evans grandparents, didn't do that, and you see what happened to Lily and Petunia, and then you see what happened to Dudley and me. Well, this is where it ends!"
"Okay, I agree with you," Ginny said. "No favorites, not ever. But getting back to my earlier question, who do you want to talk to about your childhood?"
Harry twisted in his chair and rubbed the back of his neck. "I've been trying to think who that could be." He reached his right arm far down the table, hooked his fingers over the rim of a bowl of grapes, and dragged the bowl back to sit on the smooth dark wood between him and Ginny. Picking a few grapes off the bunch, he said, "Everyone who knew me when I was little is dead now. My parents, their friends, Sirius... I've seen photographs, a few letters, but I already know what's in them. I wish I could talk to Professor Dumbledore, ask him what he knew about the Dursleys before he left me with them, but he's dead now too. He never shared as much as he could have with me. I guess he always thought there would be tomorrow, and then there weren't any more tomorrows."
"Was there anyone besides Professor Dumbledore who knew about when you were a baby? Hagrid maybe?"
Harry shook his head. "I don't think Hagrid knew much. He brought me from Godric's Hollow to Little Whinging, and he picked me up from the shack on the rock when the Dursleys were trying to run away, but he didn't know about my life with them. He was surprised that I didn't know that I was a wizard. Professor Dumbledore once told me that when I arrived at Hogwarts I was scrawnier and more malnourished than he expected, which makes me think that he didn't have a clear view of my life before then, if he was surprised by my condition when I arrived."
"You would think he would have confided in someone else at Hogwarts, maybe someone who is still alive. After all, you were the Boy Who Lived, and everyone was expecting you to enroll in 1991, when you were eleven years old. You must have been the topic of discussion at least occasionally."
"Yeah, maybe so," Harry shrugged, "though it seems funny to put the words 'Dumbledore' and 'confide' together in the same sentence. But if he confided in anyone, I'm betting it would have been Professor McGonagall."
"Would you like to talk with her?" Ginny asked. "Maybe she can fill in some blanks. It wouldn't hurt to try."
"I suppose so," Harry agreed. "Nothing ventured, nothing gained. But I don't have high hopes." He pulled a few more grapes off the bunch and sat eating them, one by one.
"What about the people you knew in Little Whinging?" Ginny persisted. "Your friends at school, their parents, your teachers?"
"I didn't really have any friends. I was pretty much of a loner. And I didn't know my classmates' parents at all."
"It seems weird to think of you as a loner with no friends," Ginny remarked, plucking and eating some of the grapes also. "You always seemed to be in the thick of things at Hogwarts."
"Believe me, I was. I looked a proper freak, dressed in Dudley's old clothes. They were all baggy and worn, and the trousers were very thin in the seat and knees. And my glasses were always held together with sellotape. You know, that's crazy. My aunt was worried that the neighbors would think I was a freak, and yet she did her best to make sure I looked like one."
Ginny shook her head slowly. "I'll never understand it. So I guess you didn't really know any of the neighbors personally."
"The only one that Aunt Petunia allowed me to associate with was Mrs. Figg. She was an old lady who lived a couple of blocks away, and I used to see her walking in the streets from time to time. She was my babysitter when I was little. For the most part, if Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon and Dudley went somewhere special, they didn't take me along and they left me with Mrs. Figg. As I got older, that happened less often, of course. But I think it would be interesting to pay her a visit. She's a Squib, you know, and she knew Professor Dumbledore. I was so surprised when I found that out."
"Do you think you could learn anything by talking to her now?"
"I sure don't know. I feel like I'm just fishing, but I've got to go there."
"Then let's do it. That is, if you want me to come with you."
Harry got up from his chair and walked around the end of the table to Ginny's side where he took her in his arms and held her close.
"Ginny, there's no question I want you to come with me. I don't know how I would get to the end of this without you."
"Don't you be getting all soppy on me, Harry Potter," Ginny said cheerfully. "This is our adventure, our challenge to meet, our mystery to solve. We'll get everything figured out."
"I knew I could count on you."
"We could go next Saturday. Professor McGonagall is probably at Hogwarts because the school year is beginning soon. Do you suppose Mrs. Figg is still living in Little Whinging?"
"I hope she hasn't died. I'll send some owls right away."
As it turned out, Mrs. Figg was still alive in Little Whinging and Professor McGonagall was at Hogwarts preparing for the new school year. They both expressed their delight at the prospect of a visit from Harry and Ginny and their willingness to help him however they could.
On Saturday morning, after an early rising and a hearty breakfast cooked by Kreacher, Harry and Ginny reached into the glass jar over the fireplace in the stone-walled kitchen and then threw their pinches of Floo powder into the flames, which immediately flared up green and sparkling.
"Hogwarts School, Professor McGonagall's office," they said, one by one stepping into the flames. Ginny was carrying a cloth shoulder bag containing "hostess gifts" for the two ladies whom they would be visiting that day. She had decided that gifts were in order because she and Harry had essentially invited themselves to call on Professor McGonagall and Mrs. Figg, and she had pondered long on what gifts would be welcomed by older women who probably already had everything they wanted and didn't fancy more clutter. She had finally decided on some special cakes because they were consumable, could be shared with others, and were the work of her own hands, much to the displeasure of Kreacher, who considered it his duty to do all the cooking in the household.
Stepping out of the swirling flames, Harry and Ginny found themselves in the dark-paneled office of Professor McGonagall. The sunlight streamed through the tall, multi-paned windows and reflected off the glass-fronted cabinets. Professor McGonagall was sitting behind her desk, but she arose as they appeared in her office and stretched out a hand, a warm smile on her face.
"It's such a pleasure to see you again, Harry, Ginny," she said, shaking each of their hands in turn. She was dressed in green, which had always been a becoming color on her, but Harry noticed that she was older-looking than he remembered, her hair shot through with white and her face more lined. Nothing stays the same, he thought, not even the good things.
Professor McGonagall invited them to sit down and they chatted about light topics for a few minutes and Ginny presented her wrapped package of cakes. Then Harry broached the subject of why they had come.
"I'm here today because I'm trying to glean whatever information I can find about the circumstances of my early life. What happened, the reasons why things happened. You're probably wondering why I care, all of a sudden."
"Yes, I do," Professor McGonagall remarked.
"It became more important to me as I was looking forward to beginning my own family, and finally it became an overwhelming need to find answers, to put things to rest. I had doubts about my ability to create a completely healthy family life so long as old ghosts were hanging about. I think these old ghosts can twist and warp your thinking, maybe even in ways you don't recognize, so that you're not in control of your own life, and that's bad."
"I see what you mean, Harry," Professor McGonagall said. She was holding her hands together in front of her on the desk and she looked at him over the tops of her glasses. "I'll answer your questions as best I can, although I doubt that I know very much."
Harry nodded. "Maybe not. It would have been good to talk with Professor Dumbledore, but unfortunately it's too late for that."
"We were hoping that maybe he had confided in you, or that maybe you and he had discussed how Harry was doing, from time to time, before he came to Hogwarts," Ginny interposed.
"I'm sorry to disappoint you," Professor McGonagall answered. "Professor Dumbledore decided these matters without asking for suggestions from anyone. I didn't know, until Albus dropped you off, that he planned to leave you with your aunt and uncle for fostering. He left a letter for them, which he said would explain everything, but I never saw the letter and I can't say exactly what was in it. All I knew about the Dursleys was what I saw that day. They appeared to be very common Muggles, and Dudley looked like a real handful, but Albus seem confident that everything would be all right. Or maybe he was just trying to be optimistic because he didn't see any other options. I really don't know."
"Were there truly no other options?" Harry persisted. "Could I have been given to relatives of my father? I remember the first time I encountered the Mirror of Erised. I saw a whole group of people who seemed to be my relatives because there seemed to be some family resemblance. I didn't know if they were all dead -- I saw my parents in the mirror and they were dead -- but it made me wonder if some of them were still alive somewhere, maybe some cousins of my father."
Professor McGonagall gave a deep sigh. "My understanding was that it had to be your mother's relatives because your mother was the one who made the final sacrifice to save your life, the one who specifically chose death when she had a choice, in order to protect you. Only in the house of her relatives could you be safe from Voldemort."
"Obviously that protection wasn't absolute," Harry observed drily, "since the dementors attacked me and my cousin and would have done us in if I hadn't known how to drive them off with my Patronus."
"Do you think Harry could have been fostered at Hogwarts?" Ginny asked. "Would he have been safe here?"
"Oh, my, that's an odd idea," Professor McGonagall responded. "We're really not set up to care for a baby. It's hard to imagine who would do it, or how. I'm sure that a baby would be better off in an ordinary family setting."
"Better off?" Harry echoed, looking down and shaking his head. "Did anyone here have any premonition of what my life would be like on Privet Drive? Did anyone try to find out later?"
Professor McGonagall did not answer directly. Then after a few seconds she said, "Tell me everything that happened."
Harry shook his head again. "It would take a long time, too long, to tell everything that happened. Suffice it to say that from the earliest times I can remember, my aunt and uncle treated my cousin Dudley with love and indulgence. They gave him whatever he wanted. And they treated me with anger and indifference and gave me nothing but Dudley's castoffs. When I was little, I couldn't figure that out. Dudley regularly beat on me, and it was as if my aunt and uncle didn't see it, but if I struck back they did see that and punished me. So I just tried to stay out of his way." He took a deep breath and kept going.
"When I was a little boy I was playing in the back garden next to the fence. I was making little roads in the dirt and using twigs to make little structures. I would stick the twigs in the ground. I didn't have any toy cars, but I used some rocks and little chunks of wood and pretended they were cars, and I pushed them along the roads with my hand. Then Dudley saw me and he kicked my rocks and twigs with his boot and ruined my roads. Then he told his mum I was wrecking her garden, and she came out of the house all angry and shouting at me. She threw me in the cupboard under the stairs and I had to stay there in the dark for the rest of the day. I was just a little kid then and I took everything literally. I couldn't understand how I was wrecking her garden because nothing was planted back there by the fence. Now I realize it had nothing to do with the garden and everything to do with animosity towards me. Multiply that incident by a thousand, no, ten thousand, because it went on for ten years."
Harry looked around the room and finally met Professor McGonagall's gaze again. "I felt sad because they hated, not just me, but my whole family. I sensed that because they never talked about them. I think that I was about five or six when I finally realized that Aunt Petunia and my mother were sisters, but I didn't know anything about my father's relatives, and I used to fantasize that someday they would come, just appear at the house, and take me away with them."
Professor McGonagall had been sitting motionless, never taking her eyes off Harry. "Were you thrown in the cupboard very often?" she asked.
Harry was startled. "I slept in the cupboard every night. I didn't have a proper bedroom. I mean, there were plenty of bedrooms in the house, but I didn't get one. As far back as I can remember, I just had that cupboard. It had one high end, near the top of the stairs, and it tapered down to nothing at the other end. I had a narrow bed, shoved down toward the low end of the stairs, and there were some nails in the wall near the high end. When I was little I could walk in without bending my head. I hung my clothes on the nails. When they made me stay in there for punishment, they made me keep the door closed, and it was dark in there.
"But you knew that already, didn't you?" Harry leaned forward in his chair and spoke more animatedly. "You knew they made me sleep in the cupboard. That first letter that arrived from Hogwarts, about a week before my eleventh birthday, it was addressed to me in the cupboard under the stairs. If you saw that, you must have seen the other stuff. How did you know I was in the cupboard?"
Professor McGonagall sighed. "That's part of the function of the Trace. It monitors the magical activities of the children of wizarding families, making note of underage magical activities. This includes the minor magical acts of young, untrained, wandless children, such as making flower petals change color or levitating pebbles. It also monitors their whereabouts. But this monitoring occurs automatically; there is not a witch or wizard watching the mundane information continuously. The acceptance letters are addressed by automatic quills which do not make judgments about the appropriateness of what they write."
"Then you really didn't know what 'The Cupboard Under the Stairs' meant," Harry said. It was not a question. "And nobody was checking up on me."
For the first time Professor McGonagall took her eyes away from Harry's face. She looked down briefly and then turned her head to gaze out the window. "Professor Dumbledore determined that you had to stay with your mother's sister in order to preserve your life. But you have known that for a long time. He left a letter when he left you on your aunt and uncle's doorstep, but he didn't speak with them directly. I had serious reservations about leaving you with Muggles, especially those Muggles, and I feared that a single letter would not be enough to explain everything that needed to be explained, or ensure their co-operation. But Professor Dumbledore seemed confident that everything would turn out all right, and Hagrid and I trusted his judgment. I should have trusted my instincts more. You are completely right, Harry. We should have checked. We should have known more."
She hesitated for a moment and then continued, "We don't have control over how families treat their children, but your case was special because you were not born to the Dursleys. You were not their son. It was our decision to place you there, so we did have some responsibility. Even though you had to stay there for your own preservation, maybe we could have done something to make it better. And maybe not."
Harry spoke gently. "I didn't come back here to blame anyone. I realize your hands were tied. Believe me, I have tried to think what else could have been done."
Ginny reached over and placed her hand on her husband's hand, giving it a squeeze. She gave him a wan smile.
"Is there anything else you can tell me about that time?" Harry asked.
Professor McGonagall shook her head sadly. "I doubt that Professor Dumbledore really thought it would be necessary to insist that your aunt and uncle treat you kindly. He probably hoped that you and your cousin would be like brothers."
Harry laughed. "You want to hear something funny? At least it's funny now. When that first letter arrived from Hogwarts, addressed to the Cupboard Under the Stairs, Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia were very alarmed. They thought that it meant that the wizarding community was spying on them and knew what they were doing. And that very same day they moved me from the cupboard to the small bedroom upstairs. They were ashamed or embarrassed or more likely just frightened to think that someone knew how they had been treating me. But really the only person who knew was the automatic quill. They were frightened by a quill."
It seemed to Harry that no more answers were to be found at Hogwarts. He stood up and extended his hand to Professor McGonagall, saying, "Thank you so much for giving me your time and talking about these old matters. It has been helpful to me in trying to make sense of my early life."
Professor McGonagall grasped his hand firmly. "I am glad to have been of some slight help. But Harry, you are a successful man with a formidable record of accomplishment and a loving wife. Can you not simply put all these early experiences behind you?"
"They are behind me," Harry replied, "but they are also beside me and in front of me. You could say that they are part of me, for better or worse, and I am determined to make it be for the better."
Professor McGonagall smiled. "I certainly hope it will be, Harry, and I have every faith that you can do it. It has been a pleasure to see you again, and I wish you every happiness with your growing family."
Harry and Ginny walked through the familiar corridors to the main doors. Gazing around him, Harry could scarcely detect where the repairs had been made following the extensive damage in May of 1998. All the stonework had been skillfully restored to its original condition, and nothing seemed to have been changed or modernized during the reconstruction. He reflected that most of the students now in attendance had never known anything different.
They stepped out into the sunlight and paused for a few minutes on the stone steps, looking at the grass, the trees, the intensely blue sky with a few little white clouds.
"Did you find out what you wanted to know?" asked Ginny.
"I guess so," said Harry. "I learned that the quality of my early years was just a matter of luck, bad luck."
"It's hard to believe. You were the Boy Who Lived, a person that everyone was talking about, but no one paid any attention to the real you."
They started walking aimlessly down the path, and after a minute Harry said, "We don't have to be at Mrs. Figg's house until one o'clock. What do you say we walk down by the lake for a little while, and then go into Hogsmeade for lunch, if you feel like walking that far."
"Sure," answered Ginny. "It's either that, or we have to eat the cake I brought for Mrs. Figg."
"No, we mustn't do that," Harry smiled. Ginny could always lighten his mood.
They turned their steps toward the lake and walked down the lawn until they could see the marble tomb which was Professor Dumbledore's last resting place, still bright in the summer sun, unbesmirched by any trace of green moss or gray lichen. As they approached the marble structure, Ginny broke the silence by saying, "Now you can ask Dumbledore anything you want, but he won't be able to answer."
Harry stopped walking and fixed his gaze on the tomb. "I don't have to ask," he said. "It wasn't his fault. In the end, it was always Voldemort."