I’m the first one awake. Through the kitchen, the sun is shining white-hot against the windowpanes and the lake beyond is as blue and promising as ever, all evidence of last night’s storm forgotten.
My head aches. My throat is raw and tight.
The new light of day sharpens the pain by degrees: the harsh contrast of sunshine and hope against the angry things that came out since I last saw the morning sky.
It wasn’t that many hours ago.
Most of the dish shards have been swept into a pile in the corner, but the Delft cow is still in pieces, ass end up in the sink. I dig through the kitchen drawers for some Super Glue to make her whole again, setting her to heal on the windowsill behind the red-and-gold roosters marching across the curtains.
When Mom and Rachel join me downstairs, we pass one another in the kitchen, everything around us slow and heavy as though we’re walking underwater.
Did you eat?
Mom wants to know.
Are there any clean mugs?
Rachel. She opens the window behind Moo and lights a sage stick. Mom comments on the sunshine and the lake, and I nod and shrug and none of us means any of it so I decide to hide out in the basement with a box of granola bars and some bottled waters, still dressed in the pajamas I put on last night before all the smashing. Jack is coming over to work on the sunroom and Patrick won’t be with him and nothing else matters.
I don’t know how long I sort through the final musty shelves of holiday decorations and bicycle parts and half-melted candles downstairs, but no one disturbs me, and when I finally tire of the damp cement walls, the sun has been snuffed out and the house is quiet. From the kitchen, the remnants of last night’s breakdown are gone, all of the broken things swept out the door.
When the clock on the oven says nine thirty, I know that I’m officially breaking my promise to Patrick—I’m not going to his show tonight. As last call at Luna’s approaches, I’m drawn to the front window to watch for him with nothing but hope and sadness and longing stuck on me from every direction.
I finally see the shape of him on the sidewalk, getting closer. I kneel on the living room floor with my elbows on the windowsill and my chin in my hands and watch him nearing the house, the guitar case slung over his shoulder as black and heavy as I feel.
Look up. Look up. Look up. Look up and see me and stop and lay your guitar in the grass and run up the path to my house and throw open the door and find me here, just find me, find me here crying over you, needing and wanting you more than anything in my life. Look up, Patrick Reese. Look up look up look up…
But he doesn’t look. He shifts his case to the other side and I can’t see his face as he comes and goes like I’m not even here—just another invisible ghost in the old Hannaford lake house.
Up in the sewing room, the wood floor shines, cleared of glass and buttons, and the air is lemony and crisp. The day bed is made with fresh sheets, and on the end, folded in a neat rectangle, is the beige sweater I borrowed from Nana’s bedroom the night I found her pills. It must have slipped behind the bed. I forgot I had it, and I know before I see the name on the inside label—scrawled between two hearts—what it’s going to say.
Handmade by Alice
.
I think of the woman with the dyed red hair at the estate sale, CEO of Creature Creations.
Sorry, Alice. Ollie stays with me
.
I pull the dog sweater over my head and scroll through my phone for Emily’s cell number. She picks up on the first ring.
“All right, Del. Patrick was a mess tonight. What the hell is going on with you guys?”
It’s been four days since the fight. Em’s been over here every night since my tragic phone call, listening to the whole saga, holding me when I cry, bringing me chocolate hazelnut lattes from Luna’s. She doesn’t say whether she’s talked to Patrick about me, and I don’t ask.
I haven’t seen him since that horrible night, Jack telling me only that he asked for some time off. I try to block it out of my mind, helping Rachel lug the boxes of remaining collectibles out front for the final sale, setting up tables with the last porcelain animal statues. Glassware featuring each of the fifty states. Ski boots. Needlepoint kits. The day passes slowly as my gaze drifts always to the blue-and-white Victorian, waiting for him to march out the front door and over here, right past the encyclopedias the old people didn’t buy and the bowling pin salt-and-pepper shakers priced at one dollar, right to
me
.
“Hon, why don’t you just talk to him?” Rachel says, probably seeing the whole thing unravel in the cards over her black-and-silver cloth.
“We’re not speaking,” I say.
She frowns but doesn’t push for details. “Maybe you should go over there. I’m sure when he sees you again, he’ll realize—”
“I’m
fine
, Rach.”
“You haven’t touched the flourless chocolate torte I made. And your shirt is on backward. And inside out. And what’s going on with that
hair
?” Rachel makes a swirling motion above her head as I tug at the shirt tag beneath my chin.
“I’m just tired, okay?”
“Listen, Delilah. Your mother and I are burying your grandmother in less than two weeks. We let things go unsaid for eight years, and now it’s too late. Life is short. You don’t always get another chance to make it right. So enough of this
tired
crap, okay? Shake out your hair. Fix your shirt. March your ass over there and tell him how you feel.”
“Did you draw the Lovers card again today?” I ask. “I told you, I’m just—”
“Enough!” She points next door to Patrick’s house. “This has nothing to do with tarot cards. Now
go
.”
The thought of facing Patrick after all these empty days sends a sharp jolt through my insides, but Rachel is right. I don’t even know if Patrick
wants
to talk. But that night on the beach, when we got out of the car in the middle of everything, rising above the shouts in the storm, there was something else. Something in his eyes. Something he said.
“Don’t you get it? I’m in love with you!”
Patrick’s front door is open, the summer breeze carrying honeysuckle-scented air through the screen door. I hear the sweet warmth of his voice as I wrap my hand around the door handle, pull, and step inside.
“Em,” Patrick says from the living room. He doesn’t see me. Doesn’t know I’m watching. “You’re amazing. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“Same here,” Emily says, standing on her toes. She reaches around his neck, pressing herself to him and choking all of the air from my lungs. He rubs her back and smiles and then she says it, those awful little words that were supposed to come only from me. “I love you, Patrick.”
I take a clunky step backward, startling them both. Patrick lets go of Emily and finally notices me, his pained, frantic eyes holding mine. It’s as if we’re both being electrocuted by the same current and neither of us can let go or knock the other out of harm’s way.
“Delilah, wait!” His hand reaches out.
“I can’t…” I stumble backward. “I thought… I…”
“Whoa, Delilah. It’s not what you think,” Emily says, waving her hands to erase the image of their embrace from my mind. “It’s
soooo
not what you think.”
I look at Patrick. “At least you’re ditching the work next door for something good.”
“I
told
you,” Emily says, but Patrick stops her, grabbing her hand in an affectionate squeeze.
“Don’t,” he says to Emily. “You don’t have to explain
anything
to her.”
“But this is insane,” she says. “I don’t even—”
“It doesn’t matter.” Patrick stops her again.
The three of us stand near the door, me staring at Patrick, trying to keep myself from collapsing, Patrick and Emily staring at each other and then back at me.
Finally, Emily shakes her hand free and Patrick breaks the silence.
“Did you need something, Delilah?” he asks. “Or are you just trying to make everyone in Red Falls as miserable as you are?”
My stomach tightens, but I ignore the sting. “I wish I never found you again. I liked you better when we were kids!”
“Finally!” he shouts. “We agree on something!”
“Oh, you know
what
?”
“Why are you still here, Delilah?”
“Stop it!” Emily yells. “Both of you! Just stop!”
“FINE!” Patrick and I scream at her, and at each other, and at the seagulls all the way down on the lake, floating blissfully ignorant over the blue abyss.
Emily pushes past me through the doorway, outside, down the steps, sneakers throwing tiny stones at the house as she bolts toward Maple Terrace. I stumble onto the porch and Patrick slams the screen door and I run back to Nana’s, faster and faster as I try to outpace my own heart. There aren’t that many steps between the two houses, but I take them in double time, triple, quadruple, speeding toward Rachel and her army of ten-cent trinkets, bashing my hip into the table and taking out a whole section of fake plastic fruit and ice-skating frog figurines, Megan’s words from so long ago boiling up like hot tar to fill the black holes inside.
We all long for what could have been
.
On the morning of Nana’s memorial service, I’m awake at four o’clock, thirsty and restless and unable to fall back asleep. It’s been two weeks since I learned about my real father and the things that have wedged my family for generations. Almost as long since I’ve seen Emily or spoken to Patrick—when he returned to work on the house with Jack, it was with renewed efficiency, no longer needing my assistance with the shutters or the gutters or the painting of the shed. No longer seeking my conversation. No longer searching for my eyes across the kitchen table during breakfast. To him, I simply don’t exist.
At five, I pull on the dog sweater and head out the front door to watch the sun fight against the fog. Cool mist swirls around my feet, swallowing me in a giant cauldron, a pinch of insignificance in a complicated magical recipe whose ultimate purpose is yet to be revealed.
Next door in front of Patrick’s house, the mist breaks in the street, billowing out before a dark, hulking mass. I take a few steps back from the road as the figure moves closer, its breath white on the air just ten feet from my unblinking eyes.
It’s a moose, tall and chocolate-brown, standing in front of my grandmother’s house. Her head bobs gently and I smell her through the stew of the fog, her scent mingled with the earth and the tang of an earlier rain. I don’t move.
My heart bangs beneath my shirt as two calves appear through the fog behind her. Time holds us all as she sniffs at the air, judging whether I’m friend or foe, whether she should challenge me or let us all pass in peace. After a series of long sighs and grunts, she raises her head and moves aside, waiting for her charges to hobble up next to her. Eight short legs move quickly, mother nudging gently with her nose. Still, I don’t breathe. When the babies are finally in front of her, she moves on, vanishing in the haze.
My mother and aunt are awake when I go back inside, none of us able to sleep on the morning of Elizabeth Hannaford’s burial. We eat breakfast together with little conversation, forks and knives clinking against three mismatched plates. When we do talk, we keep it safe—
the bacon isn’t bad, considering it’s soy. I hope the weather holds out. Who wants more coffee?
None of us speaks of the real things filling our hearts like deep, cold water—the funeral. Who’s going to carry the urn. The weeks of tension and our explosive argument. Our impending and final departure from this house. This place. This story.
An hour before we’re scheduled to leave for the funeral, Mom finds me in my room, sitting at the edge of the bed and staring out at the lake. The door is open, but she lingers in the hall, waiting for permission to enter as if she no longer has the right to ask. I give it to her.
“I’m burying my mother today.” She sits next to me and puts it out there, just like that. I think about the black box etched in gold flowers on my grandmother’s dresser, wondering how it will look in my mother’s hands as she shakes out the ashes of my grandmother over Red Falls Lake.
“Can we talk?” Mom asks, putting her arms around me.
I shrug. Words won’t come to my lips. In the rawness of her open affection, I’ve forgotten how to make them.
“Okay,” Mom says, brushing the hair out of my eyes. “I’ll start.”
There’s a stray button on the floor. They must have missed it when they cleaned up the glass from the jar.
Did she buy the button on its own, or was it an extra from a new blouse?
“There were so many times I wanted to tell you about your father,” she says.
I wonder what happens to all those extra buttons that come with new clothes?
“But as you got older, I thought if you knew the truth, you’d look at me the way my mother did when she found out. I couldn’t bear that, Delilah. I never wanted to see that kind of hatred in your eyes.”
Maybe we should give them to Alice for her creature creations.
“Please say something, Del. Even if it’s something angry.”
I wonder how many loose buttons there are in this world, just rolling around in a jar without a mate or a blouse to go on. No destiny. No purpose. Just sitting there, unnoticed. Forgotten.
“Delilah,
please
?”
I look at my mother, deep lines in her forehead, no makeup to fill in the wrinkles around her eyes. I wasn’t prepared for it, and the immensity of my sadness wrings the anger out of me me until all of the harsh words escape like water squeezed from a sponge.
“I’m not mad that you were with Casey,” I say. “I’m mad that you lied to me. And that you kept on lying to me every time I asked you about Thomas Devlin. You never wanted to talk about my real father.”
She nods, pulling at the collar of her robe. “It killed me to pretend like that, but there was always some reason not to tell you.”
“Mom, I hate…”
I hate you for being weak and needy and stupid. I hate you for making a mistake. I hate you for not being perfect.
It’s what I want to say, but the thoughts evaporate almost as quickly as they appear. How can I fault her for trying to bury a truth that when exposed to air and sunlight could only hurt the ones she loves? For doing with the story of my father exactly what I’ve done with my own stories for so long? All the stories we’ve told each other were broken or incomplete, truths stretched thin and riddled with holes where the light shone through.
“I didn’t plan that night with Casey. You know that much, right?”
“I know,” I say. “I made a lot of mistakes, too. Especially with guys. I get that part of it.” I stare at the button on the floor again, bright white against the dark of the wood, wishing I could press it and open a hidden passageway into Red Falls Lake where I could breathe underwater and watch the sun blaze beneath the surface.
“Mistakes? Delilah Elizabeth Hannaford, the mistake I made was not telling you the truth. Casey was not a mistake. From the moment I learned I was pregnant, I’ve never regretted that night—not once—because at the end of it all, I got you.”
Mom kisses the top of my head and squeezes me closer, the rise and fall of her chest uneven as her arms tighten around me.
“But why did you take me away from here?” I ask. “Why did we stop coming? Why did we stop talking about them? Okay, Nana was upset. But did she really cut us off because of that one time between you and Stephanie’s boyfriend?”
My mother takes a deep breath and looks out the window, pulling a tissue from her bathrobe pocket.
“Your grandmother was a difficult woman. None of us was ever very close with her, but that was especially true with Steph. They never saw eye to eye on anything, and when Rachel and I got older and moved away, Steph was left here to deal with Mom on her own.
“After Stephanie died, Mom felt a lot of guilt about their relationship, and she resented me and Rachel for not being able to save her. ‘You were her sisters,’ she always said. ‘You would’ve noticed something was wrong, but you were too busy to bother with Red Falls.’
“Eventually we got past that part of it, but, Delilah, you have to realize what suicide—or any death with questionable circumstances—does to the people left behind. Not only do we grieve the one we lost, but there’s this whole new layer of guilt and accusation and fear. None of us could talk about her, because we all felt responsible for what happened. Why didn’t we know she wasn’t taking her medication properly? Where did she get sleeping pills? Why didn’t anyone notice? Did she take her own life, or was it truly an accident—the mistake of a depressed girl who just wanted to fall asleep that night? Even trying to talk to people outside the family, like Megan or any of her other friends, was impossible. Everyone wanted it to be someone else’s fault. We all needed someone to blame. Someone to scream at. Especially Casey. He didn’t leave town because of what happened between us. He left because he couldn’t face life here without her, the constant questions, never knowing if he or any of us could have made a difference before it was too late. He told us he would go, even before that night on the docks, and he did it.”
I shift on the bed, wrapping my arms around myself as an edge creeps back into Mom’s voice. She shakes her head and continues, the creases between her eyes deep and long.
“You know, when a person is murdered, you can miss that person and put all of your anger into hating the killer, even if you don’t know who the killer is. You also have the choice of forgiveness. But when someone takes her own life, she
is
the killer. So we missed our sister, and at the same time, when we thought about the possibility that her death was her own doing, we
hated
her for leaving us. God, it’s been almost twenty years, and some days I still pick up the phone, hoping she’ll be on the other end, wishing I could forgive her. I just can’t believe she really… it never goes away, Delilah. That feeling. It’s always with me.”
Mom presses the tissue to her eyes and I don’t say anything for a long time.
“I don’t know how much of this you remember,” Mom continues, “but sometimes on our summer visits, your grandmother would refuse to leave her room, sometimes for days on end. Or she’d go stay with a girlfriend across town until she felt like dealing with us again. She was not well, Delilah. Clinically. Like Stephanie.”
“I know,” I say. “I found the medications in her dresser drawer that night I was in her room.”
“Well, she’d been on them for decades—even before we lost Steph.”
“I guess that’s why I don’t have that many memories of her,” I say. “Seems like she didn’t want to be around much.”
“She loved you, Delilah. But she didn’t show it like Papa did. She couldn’t.”
Mom’s right; my grandfather adored me. Every time he’d sit me on his lap and race me around in his wheelchair, or read the comics to me, or laugh at my silly endless knock-knock jokes, I knew that I was the light of his life. I haven’t thought about him this summer as much as I’ve thought about Nana and Stephanie and all of the secrets, but when I do, I miss him all over again, like I just got the news this morning. It’s as if he’d been part of our lives all along, and now the doctors called to tell us there wasn’t anything they could do.
“After my father died,” Mom says, “I was overcome with grief and shame. I had to talk to someone. I had to confess the secret I’d been carrying since that night with Casey. So I told Rachel. I knew she’d be upset about what happened, and hurt that I’d never told her. I knew it would change things between us. But I also knew she wouldn’t turn her back on me… or on
you
.
“My mother overheard the entire conversation. She snapped. She said horrible, hateful things to me and even to Rachel, whose only crime was to hear my confession.”
“What things?” I ask.
Mom closes her mouth to hold back the words like a dam. “Remember that she wasn’t herself, Delilah.”
“But I—”
“It’s not important anymore. She’s dead.”
“It’s important to me, Mom. I need to know. Please stop trying to protect me from my own history.”
Mom takes my hand and closes her eyes, nodding slowly. “After my mother found out that Casey was your father, she accused me of robbing you from Stephanie. She said that Casey and Steph would’ve been married one day, and that you should have been theirs. She screamed at Rachel and me on the day we were supposed to bury my father. Shouted it through the whole house. That when God took Stephanie, he took the wrong child. That he should have taken one of us. That we weren’t good enough to save Steph, and for that we didn’t deserve to live.”
Mom’s face takes on an intensity that I don’t recognize; a pain I’ve never before seen in her eyes despite the long and troubled story of us. It makes me want to take her away from all of it, to become the mother just this once, to rock her until it’s okay again. All the times I hated Claire Hannaford Speaking, smile-as-you-dial, the constant buzzing of mobile communications devices, I’d give anything now for a call from her assistant. To see my mother clear her throat and shake it off and answer that phone, large and in charge.
“God, Mom, I’m so sorry.” I rest my head on her shoulder and squeeze her hand, all of the comforting, right words lost.
“There’s more,” Mom says, steadying herself with a deep breath. “Delilah, Rachel and I stood in the living room of this house, in this home where we’d spent our entire young lives together, and we heard my mother make a promise to God that if after all of her praying and sacrificing he still didn’t take us, she would spend the rest of her life begging him to take you instead, just… just so I could know the pain of burying a daughter. After all the fights in our past, the days she’d go without speaking, the cruel words for which her illness was always a ready excuse—that promise was
it
. That’s why we left. It didn’t matter if it was the depression talking or the shock of hearing about Casey and me or the loss of her husband or anger and guilt about Stephanie or the medications… her words were enough. Rachel and I couldn’t bear to be near her after that. By the time some of our anger had subsided, months turned into years, life went on, and we just never came back. And now, she’s gone.”
I replay my grandmother’s words in my mind only once, trying instead to think about the orange pill bottles. Trying to remind myself that through the burden of her depression, Nana had also suffered the deaths of her young daughter and husband and had just learned that I was the child of her dead daughter’s boyfriend who’d since vanished from their lives. Deep down, she probably blamed herself for Stephanie’s illness and her eventual death. And I believe she loved me once. Maybe she always did. It doesn’t lessen the scorch of her jagged, vengeful vow, but it helps me understand things just a little more.
When I’m all out of questions, Mom picks up the pink jewel box sitting in the windowsill—the one I bought from the first estate sale.
“What’s this?” she asks. “Was it hers?”
“I think so. Something told me to keep it when I saw it with the other sale stuff. I don’t know where—”
But I
do
know where. It’s here now, the memory materializing before me like the moose in the morning fog.