by Sarah Ockler
Rachel taps her fingers on the steering wheel, but she doesn’t offer any answers. “The three of us need to sit down and talk about things, hon. And we will. I promise. I’m not trying to put you off. But for now, let’s just get the groceries so we can get back to the house and settle in. It’s our first day together in years, and it’s not going to be easy on anyone—especially your mom.”
“I guess.”
“Can you do me a favor?” she asks. “Promise me you’ll hang in there a little longer?”
I take her outstretched hand. “All right, Rach. I promise.”
“Good. Now let’s go find the bakery case and see if they still make those delicious maple walnut muffins.”
Rachel hits a bell on the counter and smiles as a woman in a white paper hat emerges from behind a row of giant ovens.
“Good afternoon, ladies. What can I get for you today?” she asks as she carries out a tray of golden buns. “Just took out a fresh batch of… of… Rachel Hannaford? And… oh my God!”
She drops the fresh batch of Rachel-Hannaford-and-oh-my-God.
Her hands cover her mouth.
And she shakes her head, staring at me with wide, watery eyes as if I’m a ghost.
“For a second it’s like I was looking right at her,” she tells my aunt.
“Claire?” Rachel asks.
“No. Stephie.”
“I can’t believe you’re almost seventeen,” Megan the Baker says, taking her break with us in the bakery department’s small eating area. “I used to change your diapers.”
“Really?” I manage a weak smile, wondering what’s in those fresh-baked buns to make a total stranger think such an announcement is okay.
“Del,” Rachel says, “why don’t you go find some snacks for the house? I want to catch up with Megan a little.” She pushes the cart toward me. I wheel over to the junk food aisle without her, trying not to look offended.
As I check out the cookies and potato chips and snack cakes, I can’t shake the feeling that everyone in this town is watching me. Like if there was a record playing, it would’ve scratched and skipped the second I walked through the door, and everyone would just wait for me to make some big dramatic announcement, hands on their guns just in case.
This town ain’t big enough for the both of us.
When Stephanie died, she was just a few years older than I am now. I probably do look a lot like her, but I’ve never seen any pictures—not even at my grandparents’ house. Just the one Mom keeps tucked away in her nightstand drawer—the three sisters holding hands and jumping off a dock into the lake. You can’t even see their faces.
As I reach the end of the aisle, I peek at the bakery department to check on Megan and Rachel. Their hands move quickly as they talk, landing on each other’s shoulders like small, pink birds. Their faces are sad and serious and when Megan puts her arms around my aunt, I see her face again and I finally remember it.
When we reunite a few minutes later, Megan ambushes me with a bear hug, smothering me against her bread-and-flour bosom.
I hug her back.
“Mom and I will stop by the house tomorrow,” she says, handing Rachel a box of pastries. “Most of us heard the news yesterday, and now that you’re in town, I’m sure you’ll get visitors. Actually, here—better take a few more pastries. On the house.” She loads up another bakery box with an assortment from beneath the glass case and hands it over, kissing us each on the cheek one more time.
“I remember her,” I tell my aunt as she takes over the cart and leads us to the produce. “She was always at the lake with us.”
“She loved hanging out with you.”
“How do we know her?”
Rachel looks back toward the bakery. Behind the pastry case, Megan blots her eyes with the edge of her apron, the white paper hat drooping on one side over her forehead. “Megan was Stephanie’s best friend.”
“Whoa.”
Rachel nods, pushing the cart toward the fresh vegetables and steering us into the section with the eggplants.
“Aunt Rachel? I don’t mean to be… I mean, I know it’s really hard to talk about because she died so young, but… how come we don’t… there aren’t any…” I don’t know how to ask, so I just leave it there, half-said.
“You know, hon, after Stephie died, we never really talked about her,” she says, her hands tight around the cart handle. “There’s a lot of pain there. Still. I guess we feel like we failed her. Like maybe if we were home instead of away at college, we could’ve done something to fix her. Something my parents and the doctors and her boyfriend missed. Sometimes I think I don’t have the right to talk about her. Like at the end, I didn’t know her well enough to say anything. So much of her life became secret. She spent all of her time with her boyfriend, and when she was home, her nose was buried in her diary. I swear that diary was her best friend, even more than Megan.”
“Did you ever read it?” I ask.
“No.”
“Not even after she died?”
Aunt Rachel shakes her head, removing an eggplant from the middle row and pressing her fingers against its flesh. “To this day, I don’t know if I would’ve, either. We never found it, Delilah. It’s like she just… took it with her.”
An involuntary shiver crawls across my skin as Rachel bags the eggplant and sets it in the cart, moving us on to the lettuce. I want to ask more about Stephanie, about the diary and her boyfriend, about what her life was like and what made her heart stop working. But Rachel’s shoulders seem heavy under the burden of remembering this much, so I close my mouth, focusing instead on helping her find fresh watercress and the romaine with the crispest, greenest leaves.
We keep the conversation deceptively light when we discuss the imported cheese selection, when we pick out cereals, and when we stock up on cleaning supplies. At the end of our shopping mission, we cruise through the bakery to say good-bye again to Megan, and I help Rachel unload the groceries from our cart onto the checkout conveyor belt. As we watch the cashier scan and drop our items one at a time into brown paper sacks, we don’t say anything else about Stephanie or the family fight or the past. We just smile and pay and wheel everything out to the parking lot, the cloudless blue sky making everything seem better than it is.
Chapter five
“What’s that smell?” I set the last bag of groceries on the kitchen counter, waving a hand in front of my face to clear the smoke.
“Sage.” Rachel points to a stick of incense burning on the windowsill. “You burn it for an ‘out with the bad, in with the good’ kinda thing. Negative energy attaches to the smoke and flows out—see?” A long wisp of smoke rises like a ghost and wraps around her finger, trailing through the open window over the sink. It reminds me of Finn, blowing out the smoke of his cigarette in the truck last night.
So much has happened in twenty-four hours that it hardly seems real, the smoke just another part of a long, uninterpretable dream. As soon as I open my eyes, I’ll wake up in my own bed, half-asleep with the television on, sunlight sneaking in through the windows to remind me that it’s time for school.
“Great. FedEx them tomorrow for priority delivery,” Mom says from her newly established office—a folding table in the back corner of the kitchen, flanked by a dry erase board and a giant wall calendar. I’m surprised the sage isn’t interfering with her corporate chi.
“Also,” she continues, “I got a call about the invoices.” Her back is to us as she chatters away at an efficient clip, confirming details and setting goals and exceeding expectations, one hand smoothing her hair, the other pressing her ear to her assistant’s voice across the satellites a million miles from anywhere that matters.
“She makes her people work on Sundays?” Rachel whispers, pulling some of my grandmother’s old food from the fridge and sniffing it.
“Nah—weekends are optional. They only have to work them if they want to keep their jobs.”
I watch a drop of water speed down the side of an
orange juice carton on the kitchen table and wonder how long ago my grandmother’s hands were on it. When did she pour her last glass? Or did she drink it straight from the carton, fridge door open as she took a swig? A Cherry Coke feeling fizzes in my stomach, bubbles rising alongside thoughts of my grandmother and the inevitable future: me wading through my own mother’s final foodstuffs and wondering how things could have/would have/should have been different. The sadness of everything slides up my spine and grabs me, two cold hands around my neck.
“That’s the last bag of groceries,” I tell Rachel, pointing to the stuff I just brought in. “I need some air.” My eyes are steady on the side door as I move toward it, tugging on the cool metal handle and flinging myself into the fading sunlight. I head around back, down the big hill, all the way over to the bleachers, turning back only once to look at the house and the tall rows of maples that guard it. Their branches and leaves scratch lightly against the chipped pillars of the wraparound porch and I know that they have the whole story, those trees.
But like the women in my family, they’re not saying anything, either.
The evening sun is hot on my black tank top, but the underbelly of the bleachers traps the cool, gentle breeze off the water. Hidden beneath mostly deserted wooden rows, I look out at the lake that was such a part of my childhood summers and cry big, silent tears. I still remember the smells, like coconut oil and charcoal and hot dogs and fish. The moist air feels the same as it always has, and when I listen to the rippling water and the music and the kids laughing and splooshing and squealing, I become them. Five years old again, arms stuffed like sausages into inflatable swim fins, going in as far as my knees, then my hips, sneaking in inch by inch until Mom waves me back to the shore, ever-present and protective in those flippety, float-on-by days. Back then, I didn’t yet miss the dad I never met. I didn’t know that when I’d finally beg my mother to share everything she remembered about him, she’d look at me with exasperated eyes and give me the newspaper article and the whole, one-night story of them, saying only that she was sorry. That she wished there were more to tell.
AFGHAN BOY KILLS AWARD-WINNING BRITISH JOURNALIST; BOY’S FAMILY CALLS IT ‘TRAGIC ACCIDENT’
KABUL—A twelve-year-old boy shot and killed National Post journalist Thomas Devlin on Thursday in Tuksar, Afghanistan. Devlin, thirty-six, was shot at close range in the head and chest after the boy returned from school and mistook him for an intruder. Devlin was at the house to interview the boy’s mother [name withheld] for a story on paramilitary recruitment of children in the rebel-controlled village in northern Afghanistan.
Devlin, a London native and graduate of Oxford University, is best known for his extensive fieldwork in politically unstable countries with displaced civilians and endangered species. Last year, his National Post series, “The Elephant’s Journey,” earned him the esteemed National Journalism Award in Britain and international recognition for exposing major underground poaching networks in Kenya and Namibia. Both countries have since enacted stronger antipoaching and endangered species protection laws, crediting Devlin with raising national awareness of the impacts of poaching and worldwide compassion for the plights of orphaned elephants.
Devlin’s recent work in Afghanistan was to be part of a larger National Post series on civilian life in rural areas of the war-torn Middle East. The family of the boy who shot him declined to be interviewed, saying only that the incident was a tragic accident.
Devlin, mourned by friends and colleagues at home and throughout the international community, left no surviving relatives.
Well, there was the woman from the bar he met on his last night in Philadelphia. No one knew about her, with the long dark hair and the little triangle of brown at the top of one of her otherwise hazel eyes.
He loved her laugh. He said so.
She loved his accent. She said so.
Shall we?
Yes, let’s.
When Thomas (not Tom) Devlin boarded the plane back to London the next morning to transfer to the one that would take him on his very last assignment, he probably thought about the woman and her eyes and her laugh. She probably thought about him, too—the way he said her name. The way he smiled at her across the bar. That’s how I like to imagine it. But back then, neither knew about the tiny little thing already setting up camp inside her uterus. If Thomas had known, maybe he would’ve thought about that tiny little thing before he saw the boy and the gun and opened his mouth to say, “God!” or “No!” or “PLEASE!” or “Please?” or—well, only the now twenty-nine-year-old Afghan boy and his mother know for sure.
The embryo of me aside, there was no one else, just as the article said. And now, other than me and Aunt Rachel, my mother has no surviving family, either. No one to tell the stories. No one to inherit the china in the dining room or the wavy chocolate-brown hair or the laugh that ends an octave higher than it starts. No one to tell us where we’ve been or who we are or whether any of it was even worth it.
Like so many of the hard things between us, Mom still won’t talk about my father. Does she miss him? Does she resent him or the boy in Tuksar for making her a single mom? Does she ever think about him? I have his picture tacked up on my bulletin board—the headshot I printed from his online National Post bio—and sometimes I look at it for hours, searching the lines and shadows of his face for anything like my own. But the mirror tells me that I’m mostly my mother’s daughter. Hair. Eyes. Skin tone. Teeth. All of them, a younger version of hers. So what is it, then, that makes me Thomas Devlin’s daughter? Did I inherit his sense of adventure and twist it into my own form of recklessness? His need to uncover and expose the truth? His constant search for something more?
I never met my father, so it’s not like I feel this big hole in my heart where all the stuff of him used to be: the scent of his cologne. The sound of his voice. The bend of his favorite hat. But there are times like now when I wish that he was here, that I could ask him what I should do, what I should say, how I should be. That he’d answer me. That he’d look at me and say the right words and kiss me on the cheek, and I’d believe him.
A seagull lands on the bleachers and my mind comes back to the present, fingers scratching and peeling a loose patch of paint from the row in front of me. As I drop papery gray flecks into the dirt below, I notice someone, two sections over, one down, stretched out on his back with a book pressed flat across his chest and a baseball hat pulled low over his eyes. I creep one section closer, hidden by the shadows, my hands on the bars beneath the bleachers as I watch the gentle way his lungs expand and contract, expand and contract in the setting sun.
“You’re not going to sneak up and scare me, are you?” he asks.
“I… no. I was just… I’m… sorry?” I step backward and, in all my startled and graceless glory, whack my head on a support beam. “Oww!”
“I felt that.” He sits up and puts his hat on the right way before sliding in under the bleachers to meet me, his face hidden by the shade. “You okay?”
“I didn’t mean to interrupt.” I nod toward his book and hope he’ll stop watching me rub my stupid (and now throbbing) head. Hope that the breeze has sufficiently dried my earlier tears. Hope that he doesn’t ask too many questions.
“Nah, it’s cool,” he says, flipping over Catcher in the Rye. “I’ve read it before. I just like coming down here. It’s peaceful… usually.” He smiles. “Hey, seriously. You okay?” He rubs the back of his head on the spot where the lump is undoubtedly forming on mine.
“Yeah. I’m… um…” I take another step back. “I was just leav—”
“Stay.” He reaches for my hand but changes his mind. “I mean, you don’t have to leave,” he says. “Unless you want to. But it’s cool if you want to stay.”
I’m about to ask Mr. Holden Caulfield just who he thinks he is, reaching for my hand under the bleachers, all up in my personal space like some kind of stalker. But then he turns his hat around backward and shifts so the light is on his f
ace. As soon as I see those eyes up close—gold-flecked and amber and a little bit mischievous—all I can do is smile.
Chapter six
“Little Ricky?” I throw my arms around him; his laugh is the only confirmation I need.
“It’s Patrick now, but yeah. It’s me.” He pulls away to look at me again, his hand sliding down my arm and closing around my wrist. “My dad told me you guys would be back today. Hey, I’m really sorry about—”
“Your parents still live here?” I ask, staring. His braces are gone now, and he’s got six inches of height on me. The freckles of childhood have faded into smooth, tan skin, but otherwise, he’s still the same Little Ricky Reese. I mean, Patrick Reese.
“Dad does,” he says. “They split up a few years ago, but he kept the house. Mom’s in New York now doing her off-Broadway thing. Trying, anyway.”
“What about you?” I ask. “You’re here?”
He sticks his hand out between the benches, turning it over in the sun. “I actually live in Brooklyn with her during the school year, but I come to Vermont in the summers to help my dad with his construction stuff.”
“Your dad still has the remodeling business?” I remember the tools and workbenches and the mounds of sawdust in his garage next door. How Ricky always wanted to help, but we weren’t allowed to play in there.
“Yep. Only instead of Handyman Jack’s, now we’re Reese and Son Contracting. When I turned eighteen a few months ago, he made me a partner. Which is a fancy way of saying he mailed in some forms, got new signs for the truck, and gave me a lot more work to do.” Patrick smiles, readjusting his hat.