Fixing Delilah

by Sarah Ockler

  “Mom, do you miss it here?”

  “Do I… what?”

  “Do you miss it—you know, coming here? Now that we’re back, I mean. Do you regret that we stopped visiting?”

  “Delilah, I don’t really want—”

  “Why?” I push harder, a trail of cold chocolate running onto my hand as I think about the diary hiding upstairs and Aunt Stephanie and how I would trade anything to know my father for even one day, while my mother cut her own family away like the scraps from a paper doll, sweeping her entire childhood into the trash as though it was the least important part of anything.

  I grab a paper towel from the roll. “Why, Mom? How could you act like she was basically dead all this time? How could you do that?”

  Mom is frozen. I can almost see the memories trying to fight their way up her spine and out of her mouth like some dormant alien pod, but she swallows them back again, her eyes opening and closing, lids as wrinkled as pecan shells. Beneath them she regards me, equally repulsed and fascinated, as though I’m some unidentified fungus or gruesome crime scene or challenging crossword puzzle that she could probably figure out if only she had more time.

  But she doesn’t, because: “Del, I’m sorry. I don’t want to get into this now. It’s late, and…”

  And blah blah blah, e-mails to answer, clients to service, marketing plans to market, and, of course, there’s the pinnacle of my summer vacation, cleaning out the gutters with Patrick.

  “Get some sleep,” Mom says, folding the newspaper into a neat rectangle. “We’ve got a long day tomorrow.”

  I want to crawl into bed and cuddle up against my anger at her, my frustration, my helplessness. The three are familiar companions, but when I lay my head on the pillow and wait for the blackness of sleep to seep in, curiosity stands at the foot of the bed, staring, waiting for me to flip on the light and pull the diary out from the drawer.

  Dear Diary,

  I decided to tell my sisters about C. At first, they freaked out, but then Rachel got over it and started asking me all kinds of questions and made me promise her that I wouldn’t rush into anything, and that if I did, I’d at least be safe. Claire, of course, is still trying to convince me what a bad idea he is, but she doesn’t know him. I think she’ll come around. I’m glad they both know now. I hate keeping secrets, especially from my sisters.

  Well, not that I tell anyone about the things C whispers to me late at night, under the stars at the lake. We go there when the entire town is asleep—I climb out the window and down the maple tree and he waits for me near the hill, and together we lie on the dock and he traces the veins in my arms and tells me how life is going to be when we can finally leave this town, this place, this tiny speck on the map of our lives. I want to see the whole world with him, and when he smiles and his eyes light up like the stars, I know that he means every word he says, and I know that I will love him until the day I die.

  Even after.

  My sisters may have a lot of the world figured out, but when C chases me in front of the black water while the entire state of Vermont is deep in their dreams, I close my eyes and spin around and wonder if they will ever get a chance to feel this way.

  But… but… yes, there’s always a but. Sometimes, when I’m not thinking about C and I’m alone in my room and the night outside is still, I feel this… hole… pressing against my heart. I can’t name it; can’t trace it. I don’t know why it’s there or where it came from, just that it is. Sometimes it hurts, like something’s missing and I just haven’t discovered what it is yet. Other times it’s just this low undercurrent of wrongness. I don’t know. I haven’t been sleeping all that well—maybe my brain is shutting down! Guess I’ll try to think about it more and write again. I don’t know. It’s just plain… weird.

  Anyway… Claire is coming home this weekend! Rachel and I are making this huge surprise dinner. Mom and Dad don’t even know about it yet. Can’t wait to see her.

  XOXO,

  Steph

  I read a few more entries about Mom’s visit, about Stephanie introducing her sisters to Casey, about her sisters actually liking him. And I try to imagine them not as they are now, aged and lost and dead and unknown, but as kids. Still mostly happy. Still looking forward to an entire life together.

  I don’t keep a diary, but if I did, I wonder if I’d write about Finn. The way he calls me Lilah. All those times in the woods. Other than that, I don’t have much to say about him—we haven’t even spoken since the night Mom caught me sneaking back into the house just before we left for Red Falls. The story of me and Finn certainly doesn’t warrant an entire diary, but as I flip through the rest of Stephanie’s, I see Casey’s name on nearly every page, spelled out in full on some, just C on others. I wonder how long they stayed together. Was he there at the end? At the funeral? What happened to him after?

  I slide the diary back into the drawer and crawl into bed, my late aunt’s words a new weight, a new thing to chew and worry and slip in between the layers of my dreams. My mother lost her baby sister. Then her father. Then her mother. She’s not close with Rachel, and I’m not making things better for her either.

  Most of the time, I want to hate her. But tonight, I can’t. All I can do is close my eyes and promise the stars twinkling through the windows that I’ll try. That I’ll work with Mom, Rachel, Jack, and Patrick to finish up the house, sell the rest of my grandmother’s things, and get us all back to our regular life.

  But as I drift off to sleep with Stephanie’s words rolling like ticker tape through my mind, I wonder if any of us even knows what a regular life is.

  Chapter eleven

  “I think I’m gonna be sick.” I hold my nose as Patrick kneels in the grass and digs into a moldy pile of leaves and old garden clippings near the front corner of the house. “I’m serious, Patrick. This is foul.”

  “I brought you a pair of rubber gloves,” he says, smiling. “Might want to put them on before we get to the really nasty stuff.”

  “It gets worse?”

  “Gloves, Delilah.”

  I do as he says, trying hard not to breathe through my nose as I hold open a black outdoor trash bag.

  “So, Emily seems really cool,” I say, turning my face away from the mess. “I love that she’s not shy.”

  Patrick laughs. “Yeah, she’s definitely not shy.”

  “Um, what do you mean, gutter boy?”

  He laughs. “Not that. She’s just really outgoing, that’s all. I met her last year while her family was staying with Luna for a few weeks. This year, her parents sent her alone to work with Luna for the whole summer. She wants to own her own café one day.”

  “I know. That’s awesome. I would love to have just one single thing in my life figured out like that. I break into hives whenever someone even mentions SATs.”

  Patrick stands and ties off the first bag, tossing it alongside the house. “I know what you mean. I don’t even want to think about the future.”

  “Aren’t you going to work with your dad? Reese and Son?”

  He shakes his head. “Dad and I… he’s really into the whole ‘and son’ thing. Don’t get me wrong—I enjoy the work and the money’s great and Dad and I are pretty close, so I always have a good time working on projects with him. But this stuff isn’t where my heart is.”

  I follow him to the back of the house where he’s already set up two ladders and a garden hose. “Where is it?”

  “Music,” he says as we climb our respective ladders. “It’s all there is for me. I think about notes and scales and lyrics, even in my sleep. I see something like the lake in the winter or the Brooklyn Bridge lit up when no one’s around or seeing you again after all these years, and I want to write a song about it. To find the melody that tells that story, you know? And then I wake up in the middle of the night, just because I can’t stop thinking about it, like whatever is inside wants to come out, and I know I just have to do it, no matter what anyone says or how it shakes out with my dad.” />
  “Wow.”

  “I want to perform,” he says, running a gloved hand through the gutter above the back windows. “And I want to teach.”

  “Patrick, I can totally picture it. You’ll be incredible.”

  He drops a pile of leaves to the ground and reaches in for another handful as I do the same. “You think so?” he asks.

  “Without a doubt. So why don’t you just explain it to your father? If he knew you were so into music, I’m sure he’d support you. No?”

  “Well… no. Not only is he stuck on this partnership thing, but he has major issues with artists and musicians. Mom basically left him for her acting. Seriously. It’s like this unspoken rule in our house—I never ask him to come to the Luna’s gigs, and I never talk about Mom’s shows. He’s still not over her, Delilah. I don’t think he’ll ever move on. I know my dad always looks like he’s smiling, but on the inside, it’s like his life was frozen on the day she left. He doesn’t know how to unfreeze it.”

  I think about Patrick’s father and it reminds me of Stephanie, the words of her life captured and frozen in the pages of the diary the way Jack’s life is frozen here, waiting for a wife who will never return—a life that will never pick up where it left off.

  “I have to tell him soon,” Patrick continues. “I promised Mom I’d do it this summer. I’m already enrolled at a school in Manhattan. I start in the fall. He has no idea. And every time I work up the nerve, I see his face and his smile and I think about when Mom left and how heartbroken he was, and then I just close my mouth and pick up the hammer and keep on banging away.”

  Beneath my bright yellow rubber glove, a spider crawls out from the gutter onto the roof, disappearing under the eaves as I climb back down to solid ground. “I know that face,” I say. “I see it on my mother whenever I want to talk about anything. She and I used to be really close. But now, it’s like she’s constantly running. She runs to work. Runs from one meeting to the next. Runs to client sites. She’s been doing it for so long that it just comes naturally now. She runs away from me and I’m her own daughter.”

  “My mom’s not around much either,” he says, bagging up the leaves on the ground. “Lots of auditions. Any one of them could be ‘the big break.’ Everyone thinks it’s so awesome that I have all this freedom, but honestly, it kind of sucks. I’d rather have my mom around once in a while to bake cookies or bitch at me to turn down the music.”

  I nod. “Exactly. But in the meantime, she’s not. And I’m supposed to be figuring out my life and I have no idea where to start. I’ll probably end up like her. Get a desk job. Hang up a few motivational posters. Become a responsible corporate citizen-slash-zombie. Gross, right?”

  “Ah, I can’t see you in a job like that,” he says. “There’s too much life in you. That kind of gig would suck it right out of you, and then I’d have to go kill someone, and then you’d spend the rest of your days trying to bust me out of jail.”

  “Um, as promising and well-thought-out as that sounds… got any other ideas?”

  Patrick laughs.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “I have one idea,” he says, shaking his head. “But your mother would definitely not approve.”

  “Well, what is it?”

  “You don’t want to know.” He laughs again. I pick up the hose, squeeze the trigger, and douse him.

  “No more laughing, gutter boy,” I warn. Soon we’re both covered in a thick, grimy paste of water and dirt and stuck-on leaf parts, mud masks cracking around our eyes and mouths. When this most horrendous project is complete, Mom grants me official permission to go to Luna’s for Patrick’s show, saving me the effort of an elaborate window escape. When she sees us up close, two swampy creatures from the depths of Red Falls Lake, her smile is broad and deep, like the time when I set off that fire extinguisher in Connecticut.

  * * *

  De-guttered and pink after a hot shower, I slather myself with Rachel’s homemade vanilla sugar body butter and wrap up in Mom’s summer robe. It smells like her—Coco Chanel. The first time she bought a bottle was after she landed a full-time marketing manager gig at DKI, complete with a 30 percent salary hike. We went to the Chocolate Bar to make dinner out of our desserts, and right after the double fudge mousse and hand-dipped white chocolate strawberries, we headed to Four Corners Mall so she could splurge on us. I got an iPod and she got the perfume, and for that whole first year, Coco was the smell of celebration. Of success. Of happiness. She was still around back then, taking me school clothes shopping, watching movies with me, baking cookies, bitching about loud music, just like Patrick said. And she smelled great doing it.

  Now, several promotions later, buying a new bottle of perfume is just another errand on her assistant’s long list, and Coco Chanel is the smell of nothing but a woman leaving; a door clicked closed after a casual “Don’t wait up—I’ll probably be late again tonight.”

  “Hey, you,” Rachel calls from the porch. “Come sit with me.”

  I join her outside, rocking the porch swing with my foot, lavender aromatherapy candles floating in a bowl of water nearby.

  “Where’s Mom?” I ask. “I thought she was done for the day.”

  “Nope,” she says. “Had another meeting. She’s in her bedroom.”

  “Of course.”

  “It’s okay, Delilah. Really. She’s done a lot with the estate already. It’s going much better than I thought.”

  “But you’re upset.”

  “Just… pensive,” she says, tucking her legs beneath her. “I pulled the nostalgia card again today. Then I found these old pie tins in the basement. The cheap kind you’re supposed to throw out after, you know? And I had this memory of picking blueberries with Mom… I must have been ten or twelve. We spent the whole day together, just the two of us. The berries were everywhere, so sweet and warm from the sun, and we ate them straight from the bushels. Later we baked a pie and ate most of it while it was scorching hot out of the oven, hours before anyone else got home. Amazing what we think we’ve forgotten, huh? All that from a hunk of tinfoil.”

  “I know what you mean,” I say, my thoughts floating back to the red cardinal and the four-leaf clovers.

  “There’s a lot of research on scent and memory, too,” Rachel says. “I read this article… some scientists think that odor is a more powerful emotional trigger than visual cues like photos. I believe it. That’s how I am with real maple syrup. One whiff, and I’m right back here again, right back to the days when Mom used to make her own maple sugar candy.”

  I close my eyes and pull my wrists to my face, breathing in the cuffs of Mom’s robe. Don’t wait up—I’ll probably be late again…

  From an open window, the electronic warble of the printer-scanner–fax machine pierces the air. Rachel and I listen as Mom comes downstairs, retrieving and reading her fax aloud for the caller on the other end of her earpiece. Muffled by the papery rustling of maple leaves in the breeze, her words blur into a series of indiscernible sounds, chopped and broken but urgent as always.

  As Aunt Rachel tells me about the junk she uncovered in the basement—used gift wrap, refolded and stored; unopened shampoos and conditioners undoubtedly bought in bulk; board games from her childhood—my own broken recollections of my grandparents mesh with hers, our voices entwined in a thick, slow-cooked stew of memories and events and scents and sayings. Pictures of Nana come more clearly now, aided by Rachel’s vivid descriptions of her mother’s cooking and clothes and habits and all the little things that make each of us who we are. If Mom can hear us, she doesn’t make it known, busying herself instead with the constant shuffling and reshuffling of paperwork.

  “I wish Mom would talk about this stuff,” I say. “I know she wants to block it all out, but I don’t. I want to know about Nana. I want to know what happened.”

  Rachel closes her eyes and inhales the air over the candles. “Del, our mother said a lot of hurtful things at Dad’s funeral. Things that can’t be unsaid. And now
that she’s gone, we’ll never resolve it. It’s like everything from that time in our lives is just… I don’t know. Frozen, right where we left it.”

  Frozen, just like Jack in the house next door. Just like Stephanie on the pages of her white diary.

  I don’t want to believe my aunt, because believing her means believing that my relationship with Mom could become irreparable. That I might never be able to work things out at school. That nothing is ever truly fixable.

  “Bad things happen,” I say. “But why does it have to erase all the good? You and Mom used to be close. Same with me and Mom. I don’t know how everything got broken.”

  She looks at me for a long while, but Mom is in the kitchen doorway now, a five-minute break between meetings, asking if anyone wants a snack.

  “No thanks,” I say, more to Aunt Rachel than to Mom. “I need to get dressed, then I’m heading to Luna’s. See you later?”

  “We have an appointment with the estate lawyer tonight,” Mom says, “but I expect you back by ten, got it?”

  “Got it.”

  The screen door bangs closed behind me, and through it I hear the familiar rasp of whispered accusations. Low voices mingle and clash, and I quickly dress, slipping out the front door before the Hannaford tide sucks me into its raging undertow.

  Chapter twelve

  Luna’s—along with Crasner’s Foo nasty and the rest of the Main Street stretch that we drove through on our first day—is just a ten-minute walk from Nana’s house. The sun is still out, it’s not too hot, and for the first time since our arrival, the anticipation of something good buoys me above the dark waters of all else.