by Sarah Ockler
My hands are shaking as Mom grabs them across the table, resting them on the photographed candles of Stephanie’s tenth birthday cake. Her fingers crush hard into mine but there’s no anger in her eyes, only sadness and a new uncertainty. She doesn’t speak.
“There are only three Hannafords left, Mom. No one else knows what happened and no one else will remember us.”
Mom nods, her eyes fixed on pictures spread across on the table. “Would you like to see her?”
“Can I come with you?” I ask.
She pushes her chair from the table, stands, and holds out her hand. Rachel takes the flowers from the counter, still clutching a photo against her chest as if Stephanie, waving from an inflatable orange raft on Red Falls Lake, might feel her sister’s heartbeat as her own and come back.
I go with them in Mom’s Lexus, still black sapphire pearl with cashmere interior, still beeping with the freakishly calm GPS woman as if nothing has changed between Key and here over the last four weeks. I go because I want to give them another chance, an opportunity to tell me who Stephanie was and why they kept her buried. I go because I want to know.
None of us speaks. Rachel holds a tissue against her nose while her sister stays focused on a spot beyond the windshield—eyes on the road, mind on the goal, and everything will be okay. We glide down Main Street, past the Foo nasty and Luna’s, past the hardware store and all the places I’ve seen on our journey back in time to Red Falls. We cross over the edge of town that bleeds into the woods, and then through a black iron gate, letters looping across the top of it: FOREST LAWN CEMETERY.
All around us along the wide, dirt path, white stones stick out from the grass like loose teeth in a bright green mouth, chomping at the earth. We drive through the younger section where the stones still shine, some whose names have not yet been carved. The cemetery seems endless, rows and rows of markers signifying the end of hundreds of lives, thousands of years combined into a vast, underground soup. I read the names as we pass—Martin and Kowalski and O’Connor and Dannon—and wonder. Who were these people? Who have they left behind? How many layers of stories and riddles are buried here like icebergs moored in the dirt?
When we reach the part with more trees and fewer graves, Mom pulls over and gets out of the car, motioning for us to follow down a long row of smooth, blue-white stones.
“Here she is,” Mom says, kneeling down and running her hand along the arch of a pale stone that stands about two feet high. Her fingers trace the wings of a small bird etched into the rock.
“It’s a cardinal,” she says. “Stephanie loved them. They seemed to be drawn to her. She had a collection of red feathers.”
“A cardinal?” I think again of the bird trapped in the sunroom so many years ago—how upset Nana was to hear the story again and again.
“They still remind me of her,” Mom says. “I don’t see them much anymore.”
Rachel kneels beside her, setting the pink roses next to a potted arrangement of white tulips already there. The stone on the left belongs to Benjamin Hannaford, and an empty patch of grass on his other side waits for my grandmother. My heart hurts to see Papa’s name carved here, a man whose laugh could fill an entire hall, silent and asleep for eternity next to his young daughter.
“Stephanie Delilah Hannaford,” Mom whispers, tracing the carved lettering with her fingers. “Our baby sister. She was only nineteen. So, so young…”
Mom and Rachel exchange a glance, and when Rachel nods and reaches for her sister’s hand, Mom takes a deep breath. “Delilah,” she says. “When Stephanie was in her late teens, she was diagnosed with depression. Rachel and I didn’t know about it right away—we weren’t living at home at the time. We found out months later on one of our visits. She told us she was on medication and that she was seeing a doctor.”
“Of course we were worried,” Rachel says, “but she seemed okay. Dad said he was monitoring her medications and that Stephanie seemed to be making progress. Mom wanted us to take the semester off, but Dad talked us out of it. He didn’t think it was necessary. Lots of people have depression. Lots of people manage it. But after a while, she just… her light went out.”
“At some point,” Mom says, “Stephanie got her hands on sleeping pills. Her doctor didn’t prescribe them, and we never found an actual bottle, so we think she got them from a friend, or maybe stole them out of someone’s medicine cabinet. The doctor told us she could’ve been taking them for a few days. Maybe a week. Then, one night, she took too many. Five. Six, maybe. It was enough to interact with the other medication in her system and cause a reaction. She went into cardiac arrest. It was basically an overdose.”
“Oh my God, Mom. Did she… I mean, how do you—”
“To this day we don’t know whether she took her own life,” Rachel says. “Five pills? That seems intentional. But when someone’s depressed and they just want to take something and sleep… it could’ve been a desperate accident. One pill didn’t work. Two didn’t work. She didn’t leave a note. Up until that night, she was still making plans with her boyfriend to move away.”
“We’ll never know,” Mom says. “My mother was the one who found her the next morning, lying on the floor in the sunroom. She must’ve wandered down there at night, after she took the pills. By then it was already… she was… gone.”
Mom runs her fingers over the stone again, resting her hand on top. “My mother believed that Stephanie took her own life. She blamed us for not seeing the signs. We weren’t there to see the subtle changes. The day-to-day. I guess I’ll always wonder if taking that semester off would’ve made any difference.”
I sit on the ground before the stone and I think about Stephanie’s diary, hidden for years under the floorboards of the darkest corner of the closet, all of her written thoughts deepening, intensifying, blackening in the shadow of Mom’s words.
“It’s so hard,” Rachel says, her voice shaky. “To think that she may have taken her own life… I hated her for leaving us. For not trusting us to be able to help her. And if she didn’t do it intentionally, then I blame myself for not being here. For not… I don’t know.”
I picture the rose etched on the diary and I wonder if they could have saved her—Mom and Rachel. If they had found it and read through her final sentiments in time to change things.
And so it is here, tonight, that I say good-bye, dear diary. Good-bye.
Mom looks over the green expanse beyond us, dotted with white stones. “When Stephie died, my mother took down her pictures—stopped saying her name. Dad never believed it was suicide. Until the day he died, he always said it was an accident. A mix-up. I didn’t know what to believe. And now, even with Mom gone… I still don’t know. It’s harder to dig up the old bones and sift through the dirt than it is to let them rest in peace.” Mom doesn’t cry, but her voice is thin, words trailing to my ears on a tight metal wire.
“I always thought she got rid of all the pictures,” Rachel says. “Especially after we left. I’m glad you found them, Del.”
I finger the soft velvet petals of the tulips, losing myself in a swirl of thoughts and memories and hurt and yes, anger. I never met Stephanie, but I’m mad at her, too. All those things in her diary… all the people she loved… did she really take her own life? Why didn’t she talk to her sisters? Why not Megan? Casey? Why did she stop writing? If one person had known how she was feeling, maybe she would be with us now. Instead, here we are, the only remaining Hannaford women, crouched over Stephanie’s grave with heads bent together like wilting flowers, unable to climb out from the burden of our pain as it continues to knit the broken pieces of us together in a misfit patchwork quilt.
“Here’s something you probably don’t know about your grandmother,” Rachel says. “She loved tulips, but she could never get them to grow. She tried everything, every kind, every color, every bulb she could get her hands on, but they just wouldn’t sprout. The spring after Stephanie died, Mom’s garden had full blooms for the first time ever—b
ut just the white ones. They grew back every year on the same day. Probably still do. These here must be from Megan,” she says.
“There’s still so much I don’t know,” I whisper. “Stephanie. Nana. The fight.”
And it’s out there, just like that, a branch snapping in the silence to scatter the birds from the limb.
My mother reaches for my hand and pulls me up. “It doesn’t matter anymore,” she says, her hand resting on my face. “We’re here now, the three of us, like you said. Together. Moving forward.”
Rachel offers Mom a gentle smile. “We’ll be okay.”
I look again at the letters of my grandfather’s name carved into the stone next to Stephanie’s, but nothing is revealed; everyone taking to his final resting place the secrets he kept in life.
I try to think about Megan and all the layers of our lives, but it’s too much. It’s too much to ask, too much to drag out of the mud into the bright light of day. I don’t want to know about Stephanie anymore, about why she stopped writing in her diary or why she took the pills or why we stopped coming here or why my mother and Rachel are still running away. I just want to go home.
I leave the sisters at the graves of their departed family and wait inside Mom’s Lexus, curled into the cashmere seats for twenty minutes before they finally return to the car, Rachel walking several paces behind her older sister, eyes turned down as if they’re closed.
Chapter twenty-two
Patrick and Jack say you just don’t find original, hundred-and-fifty-year-old plantation shutters like this on New England houses anymore—not functional ones that close over the entire window, not in such good working condition, and most certainly not thirty of them.
Thirty. And we have to remove them all because the painters are coming to do the house tomorrow. After the cemetery and the flowers and the silence in the car on the way home, removing thirty original, hundred-and-fifty-year-old plantation shutters seems like the most pointless thing in the world.
“Why don’t they just do the shutters the same color as the house?” I ask. “Then the painters can do everything in one shot.” It’s eighty-five degrees, sweat is running down my back, and I still can’t erase the image of my nightmare, the rot of it made more real by our cemetery visit.
“Shutters are complicated, Del,” Patrick says. “You can’t just paint over the hardware or it’ll stick and they won’t work anymore. Did you get the baggies?”
“Yes, sir.” I hold up the box of Ziplocs.
“Don’t you ever see the bright side of things?” Patrick asks as I mope against the bottom of the ladder.
“Easy to see the bright side when you’re getting paid by the hour.”
“Delilah, I will gladly give you my full wage plus a month’s supply of your iced choco-nut whatever lattes if you trade places and clothes with me right now.”
“You’re not wearing a shirt.”
“That’s the deal, Hannaford,” he says. “Take it or leave it.” He jimmies a shutter free from its weathered, paint-stuck prison, scraping his shoulder against the outer wall of the house.
“No deal, Reese.” I laugh, but my smile fades fast. Everywhere I look, I see the eyes of the girl who looks like me, her words loud in my head, haunting and pleading and begging me to save her from the fire in my dream, from her illness, from her grave beneath the stones of Forest Lawn Cemetery.
It takes us the rest of the morning to remove the shutters, laying them in order on tarps across the lawn. I remove, label, and bag the hardware, and when we’re finished, the yard looks like a piano keyboard stretched across the grass, almost as far as Patrick’s house.
“It’s not so bad,” Patrick says. “At the end of the month, when we’re done with all the work, the house will be like our magnum opus.”
“Right. Except they’re selling it, so I’ll never see it again.”
“Um, bright side?”
“The bright side is… I need to get out of here. Can we go out on the water? Just us?”
Mom’s on her laptop when I go inside to change, phone attached to her ear, right back in step with whatever spreadsheet she left off to wish her departed sister a happy birthday this morning. I don’t bother telling her where I’m going—just a note, scratched on a Post-it and stuck to her wall calendar.
“Going out with Patrick. Be back later.”
Patrick rows in front of me, the muscles in his back tensing and relaxing as the paddles break the surface of the lake and propel him forward. I copy his motions—tense, relax. Tense, relax—pausing only to notice the stillness of everything, muffled and miniaturized by our distance from the shore, far away from the parents on the beach and their babies pointing up at the seagulls. Far away from the cemetery. Far away from my mother and Rachel and the Hannaford ghosts.
Kayaking has gotten easier since the first time he and Emily took me. As I slice through the lake, water laps softly against the boat like a puppy learning to drink and the sun heats up my banana-yellow kayak, reflecting like a million stars on the water. My shoulders burn on the outside from the sun and on the inside from paddling, but I don’t want to stop. Here, away from everything, I could almost keep on going.
When we reach the shore, Patrick climbs out gracefully, one foot at a time dipping into the water over the side of his red boat. He drags it out of the lake, watching as I tug my kayak by its nose onto the sandy shore.
“How do you feel?” he asks, his eyes golden and content. “Shoulders holding up okay?”
I look at him and shake out my arms. “I’m fine. A little tired, but okay.”
“What about the rest of you?” Patrick looks harder into my eyes, his dimples vanishing.
I shrug. “Still processing, I guess. I showed them the pictures this morning, and they took me to the cemetery to see her. It would’ve been her birthday.” I tell him the story. The roses and the tulips. The pills. The uncertainty. “And after talking to Megan and reading the diary and seeing my mom and Rachel at the cemetery… now I just keep thinking… what if… what if it runs in my family?”
“Hey,” he says, reaching for my hands. “Your mom and Rachel are okay, and you are, too. Don’t do that to yourself.”
“But how can you say that? How can any of us even know that? I’m sure Steph thought she was fine for a long time, too. My mom needs pills to get through her day. What if she wakes up one morning and decides she doesn’t want to go to work anymore? Or that she doesn’t want to be a single mom? And she just…”
“Delilah, that’s not going to happen.”
“What about me? What if I just—”
“Not possible. You are way too stubborn to go out like that. Did you see how you handled that kayak today after what happened last time? That boat got dealt with.”
I smile. “I did kind of own it today, didn’t I?”
“You got here without falling, right? I think we need an award for this momentous occasion.” Patrick laughs as he pulls our bags from the boats and leads us to a clearing surrounded by a grove of maple trees.
“I can’t believe it’s so quiet out here,” I say through a mouthful of grapes.
“You can drive here, but you can’t really see this spot from the road,” Patrick says. “Most of the tourists don’t know about it. Locals like it, though. I’m surprised we have it all to ourselves. Must be the clouds.”
I look up and squint at the sky. The afternoon sun still burns bright down to the sand, but fat, gray clouds linger on the opposite shore.
“What’s this place called?” I ask.
“Brighton Beach.”
“Thought so. Rachel told me about it. She said my grandfather used to bring them when they were kids, back when he could still drive.”
“Yep. My parents grew up coming here, too. They brought me a couple times, but now I usually come by myself on the kayak. It’s a good spot to get away and think.”
I look out over the water, my thoughts helplessly drifting back to my family. “One thing about Step
hanie that does make sense… it kind of explains how someone as control-freakish as my mother could get caught up in a one-night stand with a random guy she met at a bar. In my entire life, I don’t remember her ever having a boyfriend outside of her laptop. She doesn’t even have time for speed dating. Seriously. She must’ve been a train wreck back then.”
“I’m sure she was. But really, the only thing that made it a one-night stand between her and your father was the fact that he got killed right after. You can’t know what might have happened if he’d missed that flight or gone to the wrong house in Afghanistan or taken a different assignment. Maybe they would have met up again. Fallen in love. Maybe your mom would’ve moved to London. You could have been born British, you know?”
“Then I never would’ve met you,” I say. “On the other hand, I’d have that cool accent, so maybe it would’ve been a good trade-off.”
Patrick throws a grape at me, and before I can retaliate, he takes off with the whole bunch, throwing them at me one at a time until I chase him straight into the water. He grabs me and pulls me in with him, soaking us both and losing the rest of the grapes to the seagulls.
After the dip, we stretch out on our backs on sun-warmed towels, side by side, arms touching from shoulder to pinky, talking about birds and clouds and the gigantic enormity of things.
I turn to face him, resting my cheek against the towel. “You know the worst part? The whole thing is just one more mystery between me and my mother. One more thing she never told me about. As much as they explained their reasons for not talking about Stephanie, I feel like there’s more to the story. I don’t want to be selfish and keep asking them to talk about something that’s obviously so painful—I mean, I can’t even imagine losing someone like that. But as soon as we got back to the house, Rachel was down in the basement working on the sale stuff, I started on the shutters, and Mom was on her computer like everything was just fine. But it’s really not, Patrick. Their little sister may have killed herself. How can anything ever be fine again?”