by Sarah Ockler
Little Ricky. I look across the yard at the neighboring blue-and-white Victorian and wonder if his family still lives there. We were so close back then—best summer friends. I remember the feeling even now; an inescapable stickiness to each other like magnets on the fridge. It’s funny how someone can be such an integral part of your life, like you laugh at the same jokes and eat your ice cream cones the same way and share your toys and dreams and everything but your heartbeats, and then one day—nothing. You share nothing. It’s like none of it ever happened.
Only it totally happened, I know it did, the memories of it forced suddenly from their hiding places by the reality of this house. My chest tightens, a lump rising up inside me with everything I want to scream at my mother. It’s her fault my grandmother died alone here, forgotten. It’s her fault our days back home melt into one another in their dreary sameness, a thick gray soup of don’t wait up. Not tonight. Not now. I look at the trees and the grass and the lake and wonder—is this my destiny, too? In twenty years, will I drive across the states with my own daughter, back to my mother’s house in Key, back to bury the things I tried for so long to forget?
When I find my mother at the top of the slope, I wipe my eyes on the back of my hand and stomp across the yard, ready to let loose all that I’d bottled up on our long drive from Pennsylvania. But as soon as I see her up close, sitting there in the grass and looking out over the town’s namesake lake beyond, all the fight in me scatters, clearing the way for something worse.
Fear.
In these quiet moments, Claire Hannaford doesn’t belong; her face is vulnerable and far away. She watches me awhile with a tilted head, strands of brown-and-gray hair blowing gently over her eyes as I approach. I wonder if she’s thinking about her departed mother, or Aunt Rachel, or the sister that died when they were younger, or the call from the Blush Cosmetics security guard, or maybe the cattails at the edge of the lake—how she used to cut them with a pocketknife and chase me with them, all the while my grandfather laughing from his wheelchair parked in the grass, pointing out circus animals in the clouds overhead.
“Mom?” I rub my arms as I get close to her, though the air doesn’t seem chilly enough to make my skin prickle.
“I couldn’t go in,” she says, yanking up fingerfuls of grass. “I got all the way up the driveway, but once I smelled that honeysuckle, I couldn’t go near the front door.”
I sit down next to her on the ground, not touching or talking, wedged into the familiar space between the rock part of me that mostly hates her and the hard-place part that dies to see her so uncertain.
“I just can’t believe my mother is dead, Honeybee.”
Like the fragile side of my mother, her old nickname for me no longer fits. Awareness of its long absence creeps between us like a serpent in the grass of her childhood home, and Mom shakes her head as if to erase the word, looking back out over the water.
We sit for a while, watching the lake breeze carry seagulls in search of castaway popcorn along the shore. The birds sing to each other in a mournful way, the echo of their calls floating up from the beach, and I try to imagine what it’s like for her—eight years dodging that one phone call, that one ringing in the middle of the night, the death knell for someone she once loved. I think about the Hannaford women and can’t help wondering if we’re all alike—me and my mother, she and hers, all of our problems starting this way. A tiny crack in the previously solid understanding of one another. A crack to a fissure. A fissure to a break. And then a gulf, big and empty and impossible to cross.
“Aunt Rachel will be here soon.” Mom stands to brush the grass from her pants and holds out a cool hand. I take it without hesitation because I don’t want to hurt her feelings. Because I don’t want to know the lost side of her, and I need to feel her hand in mine, familiar and strong and absolutely certain again. Because I need to know that eyes on the road, mind on the goal, everything really will be okay.
But I can’t know that, and neither can she. The old house on Red Falls Lake is like a cemetery now—hallowed. Haunted. Not the place for questions.
I squeeze her fingers anyway.
Mom takes a deep breath and marches us toward the driveway, shedding her frailty like a jacket too warm for summer.
“Let’s move this stuff into the house,” she says, dropping my hand. “I’d like to get my workspace set up before Rachel arrives and the arguing starts.”
“What time is she coming?”
“She said two o’clock,” Mom says. “That means four.”
Ignoring the front door, we head for the porch that starts on the side of the house near the maples and wraps around back in a giant L. The third stair creaks loudly as we land on it, one foot after the other, marching up to the unlocked side door and through it, into the kitchen.
“Wow,” Mom whispers, setting her purse on the counter. “It’s the same. Exactly the same. Even the curtains.” I follow her gaze to the white fabric panels hanging limp over the sink, tiny red-and-gold roosters trotting across the bottom in pairs. The cupboards are the old kind—wood painted white with windowlike panes so you can see the dishes inside. On the spots where the sun hits sideways, the blocky, black-and-white-tiled floor reflects in the glass. The skin on my arms prickles again as the breeze moves through the screen door, the red-and-gold roosters marching back and forth, back and forth as the curtains sway.
I leave Mom with her memories and start unloading the car, never venturing beyond the kitchen entryway, never raising my eyes more than the transfer of our belongings from the black sapphire pearl car to the black-and-white-tiled floor necessitates. As I travel from the car to the driveway to the third creaky stair to the kitchen and back, the series of accidental screwups that earned me a summer of estate sale duty fades from my mind, clearing the way for the scattered memories of our last trip to Red Falls—the yelling. Tears. Flashes of the fight between my mother, Aunt Rachel, and my grandmother that sent us packing. It was at Papa’s funeral, after the church service but before the burial. They’d said I was too young for that part—the burial—but after all the screaming, Mom and Aunt Rachel didn’t go to the cemetery, either. As we backed out of the driveway—gravel back then, I remember it crunching under the tires—I watched the house and the willow tree in front of it get smaller and smaller until they both disappeared.
It was the last time any of us saw my grandmother alive.
I want to ask a hundred questions now—all the ones I held back in the car and in the yard, still pinned beneath my tongue by a waning sympathy for my mother’s pain. But we lose our words easily here. I don’t ask, she doesn’t offer, and through our mutual silence we set about our work efficiently, all the kitchen windows opened, me bringing in boxes and Mom sorting their contents into stacks and rows.
On my last trip to the car, Aunt Rachel’s rickety black pickup bleats and bumps its way up the driveway, late as Mom predicted. As my aunt approaches, the sadness of the house reflects in her face, just as it did in her sister’s.
“Aunt Rachel!” I wrap myself around her and my heart unsticks, just a little. She rubs my back and kisses the top of my head, squeezing me tight as a line of jingle-jangle silver bracelets slides down her arm, a small hiccup catching in the back of her throat.
We all look alike, the three remaining Hannaford women. Same hazel eyes with various brown flecks. Same small ears. Same unruly eyebrows. Same long, wavy, chocolate-brown hair. And we all have those parentheses around our mouths—the ones that betray everything we feel and say all the things we don’t. I haven’t seen her since my solo trip to D.C. last Christmas, but feeling her warm against me with her cinnamon ginger breath and homemade lavender soap–scented skin erases all the time and distance between us. Her light blue vintage T-shirt (Annapurna—a woman’s place is on top) is soon covered in our mixed-up tears.
“I have no idea how to handle this,” I say, kicking the driveway with my flip-flop as we break our hug. “Mom’s in total denial, as usual.”<
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Aunt Rachel blots her eyes with her shirtsleeve. “I think we all are, hon.” She tries to laugh, but it’s as sad and faraway as the seagull songs, and I know she doesn’t mean it. She and Mom haven’t seen each other in two years—not since my aunt’s last Thanksgiving visit. She only stayed two of the planned five days. And Mom—well, the closest she gets to Rachel’s apartment is dropping me off at Philadelphia International Airport for the Philly to D.C. nonstop.
When we reach the porch, Mom opens the side door and leans forward like she’s going to envelop her sister in a hug but stops just short, her shoulders tightening from the effort of holding back. “Rachel?” she whispers.
The maples near the porch shake their rustling green heads in the breeze, but Mom and Aunt Rachel don’t notice. They just stare at each other, standing here in the middle of things with their arms dangling and the screen door half-open, the same blood flowing through their veins and a thousand pounds of unspoken words keeping them apart.
Chapter four
“Come on in,” Mom says, holding the door. “I haven’t looked at the rest of the place, but the kitchen’s dreadfully the same.” Her laugh is forced and uncomfortable—an olive sucked through a straw.
Inside, my aunt glides along the perimeter of the kitchen, one hand running over the countertops and curtains and one in her pocket. Behind her, two ants march out from under the stove to investigate a sticky-looking stain, completely unaffected by us and my grandmother’s death and everything that happened before.
“Oh, sis,” Rachel says. “How did we get—”
Bzzzz.
“That’s mine,” Mom says, digging through her purse.
“But I—”
“Hang on, Rach.”
“Claire?”
Mom nods but holds up an index finger to put her sister on pause. She wraps up quickly, but that doesn’t earn her any points with Aunt Rachel, who’s steaming against the counter with her arms folded over her chest.
“Rachel, I told you last night,” Mom says, pulling out her earpiece and sashaying back into the conversation like we’re milling around the hors d’oeuvres table at a cocktail party. “If anything important comes up at the office, I have to make myself available.”
“Burying your dead mother isn’t important?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“I can ask someone else to help if it’s too difficult to manage your schedule,” Rachel says.
“Manage my schedule? Look, I realize that you can come and go wherever the wind blows, but my work is a little more—”
“Important, right? Because catering for movie crews isn’t important? People need to eat, Claire.”
“I was going to say structured.”
“Structured? You don’t know anything about my work. You’ve never even been on a set, so how—”
“Let’s not do this right now.” Mom grabs her purse, digging into the front pocket and producing the small tin where she keeps her Xanax. “We have a lot to sort through tonight. I have to finish unpacking and do a preliminary walk-through… call the funeral director… her friends…” She grabs a glass from the cupboard, fills it with tap water, and chases down a little white pill. “I haven’t even picked up groceries.”
“I’ll go,” Rachel says. “Need anything specific? Milk? Toilet paper? Compassion, maybe? I’ll get a bunch. I probably have a coupon. You know how we unstructured people are about our coupons.”
“I’m going with her,” I say. Both of them look at me like they forgot I was in the room, and before Mom can object, Aunt Rachel takes my hand and leads us out through the kitchen door.
“I’m sorry,” Rachel says as we reverse down the long driveway and onto Maple Terrace. “I promised myself I wouldn’t let my sister upset me today, and I blew it in five minutes. The tarot cards told me to prepare for conflict. Why didn’t I see it coming?”
“That’s just Mom’s way. I think it’s the assertiveness training she gets at work. ‘Close the deal’ and all that stuff.” I make air quotes around the deal phrase with my fingers.
“That bad, huh?” Rachel asks.
I shrug. “Pretty much.”
“Here.” She fishes a miniature spray bottle from the glove box and gives it a few rigorous pumps. “Frankincense and orange oil,” she says. “To increase happiness and peace.”
“Perfect. When we get back, could you, like, spray that directly on her?”
“If you think it’ll help, Del. If you think it’ll help.”
As Rachel navigates Red Falls’ “bustling” commercial hub, a few kids on bikes slow to check us out, waving as if we’re a parade float throwing candy. A woman in a purple apron chats with coffee-drinkers as she sweeps the sidewalk in front of a funky-looking café called Luna’s. The view of the sky over Main Street, sapphire blue, is interrupted only by a single banner suspended from Sweet Thing Chocolatier on the left side of the road to Bender’s Hardware on the right, announcing with many exclamation points (!!!) and Random Capitalizations:
Red Falls’ 50th Annual Fourth of July Parade
And Sugarbush Festival!!!
July 4th!!
Featuring Log rolling, Pony rides,
Maple Sugar candy, Maple Cream, Maple fudge, and
our WORLD famous Maple Drizzlers!!!!
We turn into the lot at Crasner’s, which has since my last visit expanded from a humble general store into a bona fide Food Dynasty, minus the burned-out d and Dy on the neon sign. As Rachel settles on a parking spot, I ask the question that’s weighed me down since we arrived in Vermont, made heavier now by my recollection of Sugarbush Festivals past.
“Rachel, what happened that day at Papa’s funeral?”
Rachel turns off the truck and unbuckles her seat belt, staring at the CRASNER’S FOO NASTY sign until her eyes go blank, her hands curled in her lap like dried leaves.
“Every day you wake up and think, we’ll fix things tomorrow,” she says, still staring at the sign. “Or the next day. Or maybe the next. But now… there won’t be a next day. Mom’s… she’s just… gone. Like that.” She snaps her fingers.
“I’m sorry. I thought—”
“I have this memory of shopping here for school supplies,” she says, turning the silver bangles around her wrist. “Your mom and I always swapped bags on the way out to the car to see who got more loot.”
I try to picture Mom and Rachel as kids, digging through bags of pencil cases and folders and erasers and Elmer’s glue, but there’s someone missing from the story. We don’t talk about her often, my other aunt. I’ve never even called her Aunt Stephanie. Dead at nineteen from cardiac arrest, she didn’t live long enough to come into the title. And though Mom gave me her youngest sister’s middle name as my first, by the time I was old enough to ask questions, she’d buried the entire history of it with I’m sorry, Del… I really don’t want to talk about it.
I want to ask Rachel about Stephanie now, but I don’t get much further than the S.
“Sss… hard to imagine Mom as a little girl,” I say instead.
“Claire lived for back-to-school time. She was very methodical about it. She’d spread everything out on the bed and organize it into categories. Then she had this whole special way to load up her backpack.”
“You should’ve seen her this morning,” I say. “Notice all the boxes and matching luggage?”
“Yep.”
“She brought pantsuits, Rachel.”
“Pantsuits? Are you serious?”
“I wouldn’t kid about something like pantsuits.”
Rachel shakes her head. “It’s a wonder you’ve survived this long, Del.”
“Just barely,” I say, remembering Mom’s face when she picked me up at Blush yesterday. “Things at home aren’t exactly splendid.”
Rachel shifts in her seat to face me. “Okay, I’m totally ambushing you here. What’s going on with you? Your mom told me last night you’ve been getting into some trouble.”
I
laugh, shaking my head. “You and Mom talk like once a year. Now she decides to be chatty?”
“She’s worried about you, Delilah.”
I put my sunglasses on top of my head and look out the passenger window at two men in cutoff flannel shirts having a spitting contest on the curb.
“She worries about all the wrong things,” I say, more to the guys outside than to Rachel. “I’m fine.”
“Right. I was on the phone with her last night when she discovered you’d snuck out, presumably with some dude.”
“Finn,” I say, “is not some dude.”
“Boyfriend?”
“Not exactly. We just kind of… it’s nothing, really.”
“I get it.” Rachel’s hand turns my face away from the window. “Boyfriend. Dude. Nothing really. Please tell me that you’re at least being… safe?”
I think about waiting in the black space of the street corner for Finn, who’s always late, and the way he drops me off for the walk back to my house alone. I recall the spin of the tires on the pavement last night as he swerved to stay on the road after sliding his hand up my shirt before we got to the woods. I feel the bark of the tree outside my bedroom window scraping my fingers as I pulled myself back up to the second floor. Safe?
“God, Rachel. Yes, we’re safe. I’m not stupid, despite what my mother thinks.”
“She knows you’re not stupid, Del. Which is why she says your behavior lately doesn’t make any sense.”
“Great. Now you sound like her.” I put my sunglasses back on and turn away again. The spit champs are gone. “I thought you were on my side.”
“There aren’t any sides,” she says. “I just want you to be okay. I’m worried about you, too.”
“Then be straight with me. What happened back then? I was young, but I remember you guys arguing with Nana, and then Mom packed us up and we left. I wasn’t even allowed to talk about Red Falls after that. It’s like Mom wanted everything… erased. And now we’re back here eight years later and no one is saying anything.”