Boston Pops Pre-school.
“I’m so sorry,” I called as I let myself in the front door. There, waiting with her teacher, was my daughter Lilah. She was sitting with her Moana backpack in her lap, tapping the tips of her fingers against each other and humming under her breath.
Her teacher, Ms. Raine, smiled with obvious relief when she saw me.
“I’m so glad you’re here, Annie,” she said. “I was just about to call your office.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said again, shaking my head and flushing. “There’s a big event coming up next week and I’ve been doing all the promo material.”
Ms. Raine nodded. “Lilah had a very good day,” she reported. Leaning in closer, she raised an eyebrow at me. “You might want to take her to a bookstore over the weekend,” she said. “She’s becoming quite the little reader. We got halfway through The Alphabet Book earlier, she did very well.”
“Wow,” I said. Squatting down with some effort, I reached for my little girl. As soon as she saw me, Lilah cried out with happiness. She leapt to her feet and wrapped her chubby little arms around my neck, squeezing me tightly to her body.
“Mommy!” Lilah yelled into my ear. “You’re here!”
“I am,” I said, nodding as I hugged my daughter back. Squatting down, even in my sneakers, was a strain on my knees and I had to suppress the urge to groan as I got to my feet.
“Age comes for us all,” Ms. Raine said.
I rolled my eyes. “Tell me about it,” I said. “No one ever told me that being twenty-six would actually feel like being forty,” I replied.
“Twenty-six?” Lilah echoed. “That’s old!”
I had to put a hand over my mouth to stifle my laughter. “It is,” I said, looking down at Lilah and putting my hand in her unruly blonde curls – the same unruly blonde curls that I’d had at her age. “But it’s not nice to say things like that, not about people’s ages.”
“I’m sorry, Mommy,” Lilah said, looking down.
“We’ve got to go, sweetness,” I said. “Do you have everything?”
Lilah nodded, looking far more serious than her four years.
“Thanks again,” I said to Ms. Raine. “And sorry I was late – won’t happen again.”
The teacher waved her hand in the air. “Don’t even think about it,” she said, winking at me.
I took Lilah’s hand – it was slightly sticky – and held it tightly as we exited the pre-school onto the crowded street. From there, it was just three blocks to the T, which we rode away from the center of Boston and to the apartment where Lilah and I lived, which was a basement studio underneath a single-family home.
The apartment, although no great shakes, was home. It had been for almost five years, ever since I’d moved out of my parents’ house for good. That month had been a month of cold panic and hot anger and heartache, but I’d gotten through it. The apartment had been all I had been able to afford on the little money I had saved up, and although I probably could have moved Lilah and I to a bigger place now, I was almost loathe to leave it. My landlord, Kathy, was nice enough and besides, it was the only home that Lilah had ever known.
Soon, though, I knew we’d have to think seriously about moving. Lilah was getting big enough to want her own bedroom – it was something she mentioned all the time.
Besides, in the unlikely event that I ever had someone spend the night, it would be nice to show them into an apartment that wasn’t just a retired woman’s converted basement.
When Lilah and I exited the T, I checked my phone and frowned. There were three missed calls from my mother, and my heart lurched to the side. Mom never called more than once – she usually didn’t even call in the first place without texting to ask if it was a good time for me to talk. Seeing that she had been trying to hard to reach me filled me with anxiety and I bit my lip.
“What’s wrong, Mommy?” Lilah asked.
“Nothing, sweetie,” I lied. “Mommy just had a long day, that’s all.”
We walked the four blocks from the T station to our apartment and I let Lilah inside.
“Mommy’s going to sit outside for a minute,” I explained. “Why not go lie down and when I come in, I’ll make us a snack. Sound good?”
Lilah nodded. She scampered down the four steps that led to our apartment and opened the second door, letting herself in and shutting the door behind her. With one eye on her through the glass panes of the door, I sat down on the concrete steps and dialed my mother.
“Mom, what’s wrong?” I asked as soon as my mother picked up the call.
My mom let out a sharp sound and I could immediately tell that she had been crying.
“Mom?” I asked nervously. “What is it? Did something happen?”
“Annie – Annie, your father was in a car accident,” she said hoarsely. “He died this afternoon, on the way to the hospital.”
My heart convulsed violently and I let out a loud wail, then covered my mouth with my hand so that Lilah wouldn’t hear from the other side of the door.
“Annie, please, you’ve got to come home,” my mother said. She burst into a wave of fresh tears and I felt tears of my own come to my eyes. Bowing my head, a single drop of hot salt water ran down my cheek and dripped onto my lap.
“I’ll be right there,” I said. “Just stay there, okay? I’m going to pack a bag and Lilah and I will be there soon.”
We hung up and I sat there, breathing hard as tears ran down my face. I felt a wash of hot guilt – in the years since I’d moved out, I hadn’t seen nearly as much of my parents as I’d wanted to. I’d spent so much time working and raising Lilah that we had barely even seen each other for holidays. Most of the time, my parents had come into the city and the four of us had gone out to a nice dinner – I hadn’t ever had the time to drive out to their suburb for a proper meal or opening gifts under the tree.
Lilah had never gotten a chance to know her grandfather as well as I’d known him, and with a sharp sob I realized now that she never would.
I’m such a bad daughter, I thought, swallowing hard. On the other side of the door, I could see Lilah capering and singing, pretending to sweep the kitchen floor. The sight was heart-wrenching – how on earth was I going to tell her what had happened to her Pop-pop?
I got to my feet and slid my phone into my pocket. Opening the door to our apartment, I stepped inside.
“Hon, I want you to get some of your favorite stuff together,” I said. “We’re going to see Nana for a few days.”
“Really?” Lilah asked, her eyes wide. “I love Nana!”
“I know you do,” I said. “I do, too. She needs us right now.” I swallowed hard and squatted down to my daughter’s height. In the evening light filtering in through our windows, her green eyes looked more like Elliot’s than ever.
Elliot, I thought, pressing my lips together. As always, thinking about his name filled me with a blend of arousal, hurt, and disappointment.
If it wasn’t for Elliot, I wouldn’t be here.
But if it wasn’t for Elliot, I wouldn’t have ever had Lilah. And my daughter was the light of my life, someone whom I never wanted to be without. She was truly magical, and having her had transformed my entire existence.
Elliot was the reason why I hadn’t been back to my parents’ house in so long, but that hardly mattered now.
“Why does Nana need us?” Lilah asked. She pouted at me. “Is she going to give us presents?”
I shifted my weight, sitting on the carpeted floor and pulling Lilah onto my lap. “Pop-pop isn’t ... well, he’s not here anymore,” I said softly. “And Nana is going to be very lonely, so I thought we’d go see her for a few days.”
Lilah looked into my eyes. For a moment, I thought she was going to sass me or at the very least, question what I’d told her. But she seemed to accept my explanation, nodding her head slowly. A very intuitive child, Lilah had always picked up on my emotions. That was both a blessing and a curse – it made hiding how I felt at tim
es impossible from her, and I worried that she was going to grow up believing herself responsible for keeping everyone’s emotions in check.
But right now, I was just relieved that my little girl was so smart.
“Okay, Mommy,” Lilah said. She gave me a sticky kiss on the cheek, then scrambled up from my lap and went over to “her” corner of the apartment, where her pink daybed was piled high with stuffed animals.
While my daughter was busying herself with her toys, I packed a suitcase with clothes for both Lilah and myself, toiletries, and my work laptop. My mother was clearly going to need a lot of support, and I wasn’t sure how long we’d wind up staying.
I just hoped that Elliot and his stunningly hypnotic emerald eyes were long, long gone.
16
Annie
“Mommy, are we almost there?” Lilah whined from the backseat. She was buckled into her booster seat and she kicked her little legs as she talked, nearly whacking me in the shoulder with one of her Elsa sneakers.
“Soon, baby,” I said as I glanced in the rearview mirror at my daughter. She was pouting, with her arms crossed over her chest, and I sighed. We had been sitting in traffic for over two hours and we were still miles from my parents’ house.
My mother’s house, now, I realized with a pang of sadness. There was a sharp ache in my chest that hadn’t even begun to fade since getting off the phone with my mother several hours before. I felt terrible, knowing that she was home alone, waiting for me and Lilah to arrive.
I couldn’t even begin to believe that my father was gone. He had been so young, only sixty-seven, and he and my mother had planned such a fabulous retirement. Knowing that they wouldn’t get to enjoy it together was so painful – it was like someone had reached into my chest and ripped my heart out. I had to blink back tears every time I thought of the chances I’d had to call him, the chances I’d had to text or send an email.
All of the chances that I’d had and hadn’t taken.
I didn’t want to cry in front of Lilah, at least not while we were in the process of driving to my mom’s house, but as the tears welled up in my eyes I knew that this was one time I wasn’t going to be able to blink them away.
“Mommy?” Lilah asked timidly from the backseat. “What’s wrong?”
I took one hand from the steering wheel and wiped my eyes.
“I miss Pop-pop,” I said. “And we’re not going to get to see him again. He’s ... well, sweetie, he’s gone.”
“I’m sorry, Mommy,” Lilah said.
Her little voice gave me the strength I needed to clear my throat and dry my eyes. Before I’d had my daughter, I had thought that I’d known what love was: passion and excitement, hearts pounding and pulses racing. But giving birth to Lilah had changed all of that, forever. I’d had to be strong for my little girl since day one, and it had changed me.
For the better, I thought. Having Lilah had grounded me in a way that nothing ever had before, and I would have done anything to make her smile and giggle and laugh. She had been an easy baby, at least compared to the stories I’d read about in parenting forums online, and even though she wasn’t yet five years old, she was already far more mature than I had been at her age.
Still, she wasn’t even five, and she was going to have to cope with the loss of her grandfather and the strain of her grieving mother.
Thinking about that kept my mind occupied for the rest of the drive. By the time I pulled into my mom’s neighborhood, it was dark outside and the crickets were chirping and singing. I pulled into her driveway and slowed my car before putting it in park and turning off the ignition.
Turning to Lilah, I was about to announce that we had arrived but I saw that she’d fallen asleep with her thumb in her mouth. The sight was enough to put a smile on my face and I unbuckled her from her booster seat as quietly as I could. With Lilah in my arms, I made my way to the front door.
The trees between the houses weren’t yet thick enough with summer green to conceal Elliot’s driveway and even though I knew I shouldn’t be looking, I glanced over. Sure enough, his green Jaguar was still there, glittering under the light of the moon.
Clearly, the universe hadn’t chosen today as a day to be kind to me. I told myself that none of it mattered now, that I had much more important things to worry about than my ex-lover.
But knowing that he was near was making my heart thud in my chest and my stomach twist anxiously. All of these years, I had been so busy caring for our daughter that I had rarely let myself think of Elliot, much less dwell on him and wonder if he still lived next door to my parents. And now that I knew for sure, well, I had the unfortunate sense that all of my lust and passion and anger towards him were going to come rushing back, full force.
With a sinking feeling in my chest, I climbed the stairs to my mom’s house and let myself inside.
Great, I thought. Now, what?
Early next morning, I sat at the kitchen table with Lilah as my mother pulled a sheet of bacon from the oven.
“I’m sorry that I was asleep when you got in last night,” my mother said quietly. She set a plate of bacon down in front of Lilah, who immediately dug in.
“That’s okay,” I said. I reached across the table for her hand and squeezed it. “There was so much traffic – I thought we’d be here much earlier. Even Lilah passed out in the car – I had to carry her up the stairs and everything.”
My mom nodded. She looked terrible – her mouth was drawn and puckered and the skin on her face looked as thin and insubstantial as paper. There were dark circles under her eyes and the pain was practically radiating from her in strong waves.
“Eat, eat,” Mom said, gently pushing the plate of bacon in my direction.
I shook my head. “I’m not hungry,” I told her.
I thought she’d push me – my mom hated taking ‘no’ for an answer – but it appeared that she didn’t have the strength. Mom sighed and leaned back in her chair, closing her eyes and exhaling softly.
“Nana, I’m learning how to read,” Lilah said, blinking her big green eyes in my mother’s direction.
“She is,” I added. “Her teacher is really proud of her – says that she could be doing small chapter books by the time she starts kindergarten.”
“That’s nice, sweetie,” Mom said. She took a deep breath and turned to Lilah. “How would you like to play with all of your mom’s old toys? From when she was a little girl?”
Lilah squealed with excitement.
“We’ll be right back,” Mom said. She took Lilah’s hand and led her to the sink where she helped my daughter wash her hands, then took her out of the room. I heard the sounds of them going up to the third floor.
When my mom returned, she was alone.
“Lilah’s playing with your old dolls,” she said, smiling faintly. “They still look just like they did when you got them. You remember when your father and I got you Felicity as a Christmas present? You were eight.”
The memory was both sharp and painful and sweet all at once – sitting on the floor of the living room, tearing at wrapping paper, as my parents sat on the loveseat with mugs of bourbon-spiked coffee, smiling down at me. The longing I felt for my father in that moment was so intense that my chest ached, and I put my hand to my heart and closed my eyes for a moment.
“Yeah,” I said softly. “That was my favorite Christmas.”
My mom came over to the table and sat down, toying with the edge of Lilah’s discarded napkin.
“Have you made any arrangements?” I asked quietly.
Mom shook her head. “No,” she said. “You know, your father didn’t want a funeral. He didn’t even want an obituary,” she added, pursing her lips and sighing. “I wish we could do something, you know. Just for all of his old colleagues. But I don’t want to go to against his wishes.”
“You could always send them something, just to let them know,” I said. “They’d probably appreciate that.”
My mom nodded slowly. “Yeah,” she sa
id. “There’s just ... there’s just so much to do, you know?”
I nodded. “You’ll have to make sure all of his credit cards are canceled,” I told her. “And you’ll want to call the family attorney.”
“It’s so overwhelming,” Mom admitted. She looked at me. “Annie ... do you think you could stay for a while? Just while I’m getting through this.”
In that moment, my mom looked so small and frail at the kitchen table that it was hard to believe she’d keep living in this giant house all by herself. Thinking about her alone here made me ache with sorrow and sadness and before I could think too much about what she meant, I nodded.
“We’ll stay as long as you like,” I said. “I can find Lilah a new pre-school – she could even go to the same one I went when I was her age.”
“What about permanently?” Mom ventured.
I blinked at her.
“Only if you want to and you can, of course,” Mom said. “It would just ... it would just be such a help, Annie. And having you and Lilah around would be such a joy. I don’t feel that I’ve gotten to spend nearly as much time with my granddaughter as I’ve wanted to.”
The look on her face was plaintive and worn and, in that moment, I knew there was no way I could even think about leaving my mother alone, not at a time like this.
“Of course,” I told her. “We’d be happy to stay.”
One day passed, then another, then another, and before I knew it, I’d spent an entire week back at my mother’s house. It was strange, settling back into that routine – the same routine that I’d become accustomed to after graduating college, years ago.
Except now it was different. Now, I had Lilah. My mom was a grandmother, and she was throwing herself into the role. Per my dad’s wishes, we didn’t have a funeral but my mom sent out obituary bulletins to the newspaper, her church, and to the firm where my father had worked. Being in the house without him felt strange, especially when I still found little touches of him all over the place. A pair of L.L. Bean leather moccasins hidden under his favorite armchair. His reading glasses, coated with a thin layer of dust, partially tucked behind a row of books. A baseball cap that he always wore to mow the lawn, with the name of my alma mater emblazoned on the front and the brim stained with sweat.
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