Fixing Delilah

by Sarah Ockler

  “Awesome. Thanks for sharing,” I call back.

  “Anytime, Delilah. Anytime.” The drill starts up and I have to shout for Mom to hear me.

  “I’ll see if Patrick wants to check it out tomorrow,” I say.

  “You should. All right, I have to get to work. Office is closed tomorrow for the holiday, but that just means twice as many e-mails on Wednesday. You all set for today?”

  “I think I’m supposed to help Rachel with estate sale stuff,” I say. “Patrick’s coming over to work on the sunroom floor with Jack. They’re going to talk about—”

  Bzzzz.

  “Sorry, Del. Gotta take this upstairs where it’s quiet. But I really appreciate your help. We’re making excellent progress here.”

  I don’t tell Rachel about the kiss exactly, but she’s going on about the Lovers tarot card she pulled when she asked the universe about me last night, and when the sound of Patrick’s voice sends me bolting for the basement, she doesn’t need a crystal ball to figure it out. She flashes me a conspiratorial smile as I pull open the cellar door and leave her to invent a good cover story.

  Patrick is in and out all day, and with Rachel’s help, I manage to avoid being seen for most of the afternoon, ducking into the basement to rearrange boxes of trinkets whenever he gets too close to the house. But just before dinner, as I’m carrying up a box of random camping supplies, there he is, all amber-gold eyes and playful dimples, guiding me back to the bottom of the stairs, moving the box from my hands to the floor so there’s nothing between us but air and dust.

  “I’ve been wondering about you all day,” he says, so close that his breath tickles my lips. “I was worried about you last night. I hope I didn’t freak you out.”

  I shake my head, looking at the floor so that my hair falls in front of my smile.

  “So we’re okay?” he asks.

  “We’re good.”

  “Glad to hear it.” He lifts my chin until our eyes meet and his lips brush over mine, soft at first, dandelion seeds blown against my mouth like a wish, and then… completely. Hungry. Suffocating and desperate and I don’t want it to stop. I’ve never been kissed like this before—not by Finn or the celebrity crushes in my head. Not even in my craziest dreams.

  A door opens and closes upstairs, and Patrick pulls away, leaving me bewildered and shell-shocked, back against the wall to keep my body from evaporating in a long, hot sigh.

  “Gotta run to the lumber yard with Dad,” he says, “but I’ll meet you tomorrow for the Sugarbush, okay?”

  I can’t even speak anymore, so I just nod. I’ll probably have to devise some elaborate alternate communication method now, like writing in symbols in the dirt or tapping out letters in Morse code on my head, because I’ve obviously lost control of whatever brain parts are responsible for forming words.

  “See you soon, Delilah.” Patrick smiles, picks up the box of camping stuff, and disappears up the stairs. I hear him talking to Rachel and Jack in the kitchen, chitchatting about the estate sale, blathering on about nails and drill bits, small-talking about the weather, and blah blah blah and ha ha ha and here I stand alone, unable to remember even how to say my own name, which at this point I can only say for sure begins with a Dee and ends with an Uhh.

  The next day, Patrick meets me outside as promised, looking exactly as before, except for those eyes. They’re the same amber-gold, but somehow, they look deeper. Clearer. And when he sweeps them over my face and stops to gaze at my lips, my skin electrifies, buzzing for our entire walk into town.

  “Where’s Em?” I ask, feeling her absence more acutely in the wake of whatever this new thing is between us.

  “She and Megan are helping Luna with her booth,” he says. “They’re giving away frozen drink samples on the fairway, so it’s gonna be mobbed.”

  “All day?”

  Patrick laughs. “All night, too. Afraid to be alone with me, Hannaford?”

  “No.” Yes. “Just wondering about Em.”

  “She can’t save you,” he says, pulling me into another kiss as we slowly make our way to Main Street.

  The annual Fourth of July parade and Sugarbush Festival is everything the banner in town foretold… and more. Log rollers in ceremonial flannels falling into the lake. Kids winding sticky fingers into the manes of brown-and-white ponies trotting in a circle. Baton-twirlers and trumpets and American flags waltzing together down Main Street. And all foods maple, including the world-famous drizzlers: vanilla ice cream cones drizzled with real maple syrup and topped with a piece of maple sugar candy in the shape of a leaf. Patrick makes the mistake of asking me to hold his while he throws baseballs at milk bottles stacked in weighted pyramids.

  “Aaaand we have a winnerrrrr!” a man shouts into the mic in a singsong carnival voice as I lick the last of Patrick’s ice cream from my fingers. “Pick out a prize for the beautiful girl.”

  “For you,” Patrick says, kneeling in front of me with a moose in his outstretched hands.

  I pull the stuffed animal to my chest. “Thank you. I shall love him always. I shall call him Holden Caulfield.”

  “From the book?”

  “Yes, from the book. You were reading it when I saw you my first day here.”

  “You remember that?”

  “It’s one of my favorite books,” I say.

  “You were totally checking me out.”

  “Patrick! Not in front of Holden Caulfield!” I cover the moose’s floppy ears with my hands, hoping neither he nor Patrick sees the red flooding my cheeks.

  “Come on.” Patrick puts his arm around me and leads us toward the giant Ferris wheel. “It’s got the best view,” he says. “You can see the whole lake—remember?”

  The last time I rode a Ferris wheel was here, eight summers ago. Spinning around in a circle, hundreds of feet in the air, suspended over the pavement in a rickety metal box with no walls or seat belts or parachutes… it was just like Mom and Jack remembered.

  “Delilah, are you all right?” Patrick tries to uncurl my fingers from the so-called safety bar pressing loosely on the tops of our legs.

  “Fine. I’m fine.” What was it Rachel said about deep cleansing breaths? In… two… three. Out… two… three.

  Patrick gives up on my china-white fingers and puts his arm around me. “The thing about seeing the best view in Red Falls is that you kind of have to open your eyes to do it.”

  I laugh, forgetting my fear for a second but not long enough to open my eyes.

  “Look. If we fall from here, at this speed and distance, we’ll be dead for sure. We won’t even feel it.”

  “Well, when you put it like that…”

  “Trust me, okay? We’re fine. Look, Holden Caulfield isn’t worried.”

  I open my eyes and let out a deep breath, concentrating on Patrick’s arm protectively over my shoulders. With his free hand, he holds up the moose so I can inspect its sewed-on smile.

  “Check it out.” Patrick points in front of us as the wheel crests the summit, stopping to let other riders board. Below, a throng of people winds and stretches its way up and down the fairway like a giant snake. I hear them squealing on the rides that spin and twirl and defy gravity. There’s music everywhere, and the smell of barbecue as men swing strongman hammers and kids lick pink-and-blue cotton candy from their fingertips.

  Farther out, past the main crush of the carnival, Red Falls Lake shimmers beneath the late-day sun. We can see the town volunteers checking the fireworks setup on a huge, flat boat in the middle of the lake. Up here, we’re giants, locked into our steel cage while the ants work below and the seagulls hover and dive all around them.

  “I think I can get a cool shot of us,” Patrick says, reaching for his cell phone. “But you have to lean this way a little. And keep your eyes open. And smile.”

  I do as he says, keeping my hands on the safety bar but leaning back into him. He flips open the phone and snaps just before the wheel starts moving again, whirring us around and around and aro
und until I can’t tell the difference between the afternoon sky and Red Falls Lake, both equally blue and beautiful and bright, almost close enough to touch.

  Suspended at the top of the world with Patrick’s hand on my knee and Holden Caulfield tucked under my arm, I look out across the fairway and pretend that I can see Mom and Rachel from here. That they’re walking with Nana, pushing Papa in his wheelchair and looking up at me to take my picture. Rachel’s eating baby blue cotton candy. Papa is dropping curly fries into his mouth like long spaghetti noodles and Mom snaps the picture, waving with her free hand while she laughs and laughs and laughs.

  The wheel whirls; the imaginary Hannafords disappear. But Patrick’s still here, watching me, both hands moving to my face as he closes his eyes and kisses me, our lips warm and maple-sweet and tangled up entirely for the rest of our descent.

  After we ride all of the regular rides and half of the kiddie ones, after I eat my way up and down the fairway six times, after we visit Luna’s booth and help Emily hand out free drinks, after I lose most of my money on the water gun game and Patrick commissions a caricature drawing of us with Holden Caulfield, the sky begins to darken and we find a good fireworks-watching place overlooking the lake. When the show starts, the children of Red Falls run between the blankets, twirling glow-in-the-dark necklaces and squealing as the sky cracks and whistles and explodes, white lights popping into weeping willow starbursts.

  “Those are my favorite,” I say. “They remind me of the trees. Remember when we used to hide under them?”

  “The weeping willows? Yeah,” Patrick says. “I still do that sometimes. Just lie there and stare up into the branches. It’s another world up there.”

  “I have an idea.” I stand and tug at him to follow me. We duck behind the crowds, behind the carts selling light-up silk roses and hot dogs and fried dough and more maple drizzlers. We curve around to the side of the lake and climb up a low hill until I find the huge weeping willow grove I spotted during last week’s kayaking misadventure.

  “Here,” I say, pointing at the biggest tree in the grove. Its branches touch the ground like a big, soft parachute, round and puffed out around the trunk. “For old times.”

  Patrick smiles and parts the branches for me, holding them aside until I pass through. I have to duck to fit beneath the outer layers, but inside, the branches open into a wide velvet canopy, lush and full and welcoming. The tumble of leaves muffles the crowd beyond, but there’s enough light from the festivities and fireworks to cast both of us in a pale, green-blue haze. Beneath the branches, I sit back against the trunk.

  “That’s not how you do it,” Patrick says. “Remember? You lie back, like this.” He lies in the grass, stretching out with his hands behind his head. I copy him, giggling when our elbows bump and his foot falls into mine at the other end of us.

  We lie side by side for a long time, the willow’s branches cascading down around us like long, wavy hair in a gentle breeze. It’s not cold, but I give myself over to a shiver, a gentle rolling that starts in my head and rumbles down through my heart, out my hands and feet. Patrick feels it and moves closer, his leg warm against mine. I keep my face toward the willow branches, trying to see all the way to the very top where the squirrels climb and the birds fly and the bright green leaves stretch to touch the sky. I feel him shift onto his elbow to face me, his hand drifting lazily to my hair. His fingers brush through it, lightly tracing my jaw and neck as I try to keep breathing, knowing and wanting more than my own life what will come next.

  Patrick’s hand continues to follow the lines of my face as I close my eyes, his fingers running through my hair and onto my shoulders and back again, brushing the soft edges of my ears, my eyebrows, my cheeks. Soon, his touch is warm on my neck and collarbone, and when his fingers float across my lips, I open my eyes. He has to kiss me. He has to kiss me right now or I will die a thousand deaths in a thousand little firecracker explosions under the biggest weeping willow in all of Vermont.

  I tug on his arm until he folds and crashes into me, kissing me soft and hard at the same time, both hands in my hair. Outside, the grand finale blazes on, booming and popping and whiz-banging in the sky: a temporary, explosive celebration of whatever temporary, explosive thing we have. Both beautiful and breathtaking and full of the white-hot, double-dare summer intensity that’s meant not for a lifetime, but for a short and shimmering burst.

  As the final fireworks pop and whistle and sizzle down to the lake, we slowly unglue and lie back under the tree, me nuzzled against his chest while his hand rests under the blanket of my hair and everyone outside cheers, as if for us.

  Chapter nineteen

  Patrick walks me home to a dark house. After confirming that Rachel is out and Mom is tucked away in her room, I sneak him upstairs, locking my bedroom door and tiptoeing in the dark to the bed. We try to pick up where we left off beneath the willow tree, but it doesn’t feel right, Holden Caulfield looking on, Nana’s sewing stuff watching from the table, the weight of Stephanie’s frantic diary entries like an invisible force in the room. So instead of kissing Patrick, I lead him to the closet, leaning in to whisper about the diary and show him the hole where it used to live.

  “Hey. There’s something else up there,” he says when I yank on the chain for the closet light and bathe us in a soft, white glow.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Shoved in the back. Looks like an envelope or something.” He stretches to reach it, pulling out a thick manila envelope, yellowed sides tearing at the seams. “Pictures.”

  Together, we sit on the floor and spread them out between us—photographs of my family that my grandmother must’ve tucked away after each member died. Or in our case, left.

  With Patrick strong and warm beside me, I flip through all of them, my mother and Rachel as girls with another who looks like a younger version of me—Stephanie. I hold her up to the light and look into her eyes and wish she was here with us now, looking at the photos, telling me where they were taken and sharing the thousand words each of them is supposed to be worth, cashed in so I could finally know. There are school pictures and drawings and a photo booth strip of a teenaged Stephanie and Megan. There are shots of my mother asleep on the couch with books and papers and Rachel pulling Steph in a little red wagon and my grandfather, standing for his wedding photo, before they took his leg and confined him to the wheelchair. There is more Hannaford family history on the floor between us than I’ve ever seen in my life, yet there are still missing years. No photos of Stephanie in her late teens, near the end. None of Mom and Rachel during college or even from the holiday breaks when they must’ve come home. None that could be Casey—just a few of Stephanie with someone ripped or scratched away. Removed. Erased. More questions.

  I know I told Mom that I’d stay focused, that I’d stop asking questions that don’t have answers, that I’d stop delving into the past. But now, with snapshots of all that’s left of our family swirling in front of me on the hardwood floor of Stephanie’s old bedroom, I know that I can’t keep that promise forever. And my mother shouldn’t ask me to.

  I pull the diary from the drawer, and though I don’t let it out from between my hands, I tell Patrick about Casey Conroy and some of the things I’ve read. Some of my suspicions that my late aunt, like my grandmother, may have suffered from some form of depression. Even in a whisper, voicing it feels almost like a betrayal, my throat tightening over the words as I realize how protective I’ve become of the two people in the diary—people I’ve never met. People who, like my father, would have been part of my family if only they’d been around long enough.

  “Hey, Del, don’t look like that,” he says, brushing his fingers on my cheek.

  “Like what?”

  “Like you feel guilty for reading it.”

  I run my hand over the worn leather, the rose etched on the cover not unlike the gold flowers on my grandmother’s urn. “But I do.”

  “She’s not here anymore. And the diary has bee
n hidden under there for, like, seventeen years. There has to be a reason no one else found it before. Maybe you were meant to.”

  “That’s what I thought at the beginning.”

  “I would’ve read it, too. You’re just looking for a connection with your family.”

  I hear Aunt Rachel on the porch, coming in through the kitchen door. As she makes her way up the stairs, Patrick and I remain absolutely still. Her footsteps pause outside my door and I breathe deeply as if I’m asleep, the glow from the light in the closet as soft as a nightlight, no brighter than the moon through the window. Soon, Rachel’s footsteps move away, carrying her to the Purple Room where she closes the door tight behind her.

  I lower my voice from a whisper to a faint breath, inching closer to Patrick as I continue.

  “I just wish I knew more about her life,” I say. “About Casey. What happened after she died. Where he ended up.”

  “Your family doesn’t talk about it, huh?”

  “Nah. I guess it was just too hard for them. So far, there’s nothing specific in the diary about depression or medication or anything like that. But some of her entries are all over the place. And others are really flat, like she didn’t even want to get out of bed that day. Plus, she was a total insomniac. And she was so into this Casey guy. My mother and Rachel would question her about him, about whether she was sure, that kind of stuff, and she’d get really pissed. I read an entry the other night where she didn’t speak to Rachel for two weeks just because Rachel asked her if she’d ever thought about dating around.”

  “Are you going to tell your mom about any of this stuff?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes I think my mother wouldn’t even care. She doesn’t have time for it all, you know? She hates being back here. For her, the sooner we get everything packed up and sold, the better.”

  “Maybe she hates being here because she doesn’t know about any of this,” Patrick says, flipping through another set of pictures. Black-and-whites, this time.