by Sarah Ockler
Will I ever get any closer to the story of my family than I am right now?
I slip the box into my pocket, stuffing the requested three dollars into the cash box as Rachel flips the OPEN sign to the BE BACK SOON side and heads in for lunch.
Chapter twenty-four
Thanks to the post–July Fourth vacationer’s exodus, Luna’s isn’t as crowded for Patrick’s Wednesday gig, but his fan club is assembled at the front of the stage—Jezebel and the Tube Top Committee and a few other people from last time.
“Does Em have off tonight?” I ask Patrick.
“Montreal, remember? She’ll be back this weekend.”
“Oh, right.”
“You gonna be okay?” he asks, his hand cupping the side of my face. The skin tingles where he touches me, and I hear the echo of Emily’s words…
Are you in love with him?
“I’m great,” I say. Satisfied, Patrick heads to the stage, and I smile to reassure us both.
When the house lights finally dim, the stage lights bathe Patrick in a rainbow glow, all heads turning toward him as he strums his first notes. I recognize the song—the one he played for me the night we were alone on that very stage, chords and lyrics finally perfected.
Watching Patrick perform is like watching marathoners or cyclists hit their stride, just when the adrenaline kicks in and keeps pushing them and they know everything is going to be okay, ever more excited, ever more out of their own bodies. Patrick becomes the music, fingers melting into guitar melting into him melting into songs, and for a time I envy him, freely throwing himself into the deep end of his passion.
The Luna’s crowd is small but powerful tonight, people cheering and dancing as Patrick plays their favorite songs. I love being part of it all, seeing how much he’s changed, and how much he hasn’t—everyone falling instantly and hopelessly in love with him as always, stage lights or not, right through his voice and down to his soul—and when he looks out over the crowd and winks at me, I know that of all the girls shouting and blowing kisses and dreaming about him tonight, I’m the one he’ll seek when the music fades; my hand is the one he’ll reach for when the lights go dark.
* * *
“You were stellar tonight,” I say as we walk home side by side, a stack of song sheets folded under my arm. “Seriously. How do you do it? Don’t you get nervous in front of all those people?”
“Doesn’t matter how many people are in the crowd anymore, Delilah. Ten or ten thousand, I’m still only singing for one.” He squeezes my hand as the crickets hum their own music around us, and I stop and pull him into a kiss.
“I wish your dad could hear you sing, Patrick. I know he’d understand. If he came to Luna’s and—”
“He can’t, Del. He just can’t.” Patrick smoothes the spot between my eyebrows with his thumb, erasing the lines. “Hey, I’ve got you. I’ve got this guitar. It’s summer. We’re here. What else, right?” He smiles, but the sadness in his eyes gives it all away, and on we go.
When we reach the lake house, the lights are out and the car’s gone from the driveway. Jack’s not home, either. Patrick looks from the dark windows at his house to the ones here and back to me, smiling mischievously as we walk together to the blue-and-white Victorian.
The hairs on the back of my neck are electrified. Upstairs, Patrick closes the door to his bedroom and I instantly feel it—that edge of forbiddenness. I’ve been in the house a few times since our Red Falls arrival, but never upstairs. Never here. Not since the days when we had the same size Converse high-tops—mine turquoise, his red—and we swapped the left ones so we’d each have different color shoes. It takes a moment for my heart to relax, its quick hop finally slowing to a normal beat like eyes adjusting to the sudden dark.
Patrick’s bedroom smells like soap and guitar polish and New England summer air, sweet and clean. I look over the pale blue of the walls, the books on the shelves, the concert posters wallpapering the perimeter. I don’t remember his room from the last time I saw it; being here before was about games and toys and bug collections. There wasn’t the overanalyzing. The aching, needful search for photos or flowery trinket clues about others who may have entered during the long stretch between my last summer in Red Falls and tonight.
But I don’t see any. No photo-booth strips of kissing, funny-faced girls stuck in his mirror. No stuffed animals or dried flowers or phone numbers scrawled on little pieces of paper. Just the posters and clothes and an orange-yellow coffee can from Café du Monde in New Orleans, full of loose change. He empties the contents of his pockets into it as I pretend not to notice.
Patrick turns the stereo on low and pulls his shirt off over his head, tossing it onto the end of his bed and digging through a folded pile on his dresser for a new one.
“Hey, how did you get that scar?” I nod toward his arm and the long, light ridge cutting down from shoulder to elbow like a seam. “I’ve been meaning to ask.”
He turns his head to look at it. “Oh, it’s a really gross story involving a rusty nail and a clumsy step on the ladder last year. The important thing is that I was up-to-date on my shots.”
“I stepped on a piece of glass in the kitchen last summer.” I sit on the edge of the bed and slide my foot out of my flip-flop to show him a thin, white scar on the bottom of my heel. He tosses the clean shirt over his shoulder, takes my foot in his hand, and traces the line with his finger.
“That’s nothing,” he says. “Check this out.” He lifts the cuff of his shorts to reveal a wide, jagged ditch of a scar crosswise on his upper thigh. “A souvenir from Colorado two summers ago. We were white-water rafting and got dumped. I slammed into a hunk of limestone. It cut down to the bone.”
“Whoa.” I stand up to get a closer look.
“Medevac, forty-nine stitches, and a blood transfusion,” he says. “Top that.”
“Well, I bit through my bottom lip in sixth grade falling off the parallel bars in gym class. Two stitches, but you can’t really see the scar.” I make a pout to show him.
“Are you serious? Come here.” He grabs me by the shoulders, pulling me an inch from his face, looking very intently at my mouth. “I don’t see anything. Oh, wait…” He squints to get a better look, taking my face in his hands and tilting it toward his. “I think I see it now.”
I try to swallow, but it’s impossible with my head upturned, the soft pale of my throat stretched out before him, the silver heart of Nana’s necklace hot on my skin.
“Yes, right there,” he whispers, his finger sweeping delicately across my lips, and then…
I lean into his kiss, pulling him toward me, wanting to feel him around me like a hot bath. The longer we kiss, the deeper I fall, headfirst into this roiling sea. His hands move slowly beneath my shirt, light against my stomach, smooth and warm, buttons coming undone, sun-touched skin heating up and pressing together as we lie back on his bed. With his bare chest against me, he unhooks my bra with one hand and breathes into my ear and I feel my toes stretch and curl, my back arching to meet him.
There is no more denying my feelings for him, no more lying to myself about control, no more weighing out the pros and cons, no more comparisons and warnings and walls. I’m tumbling and turning somersaults in the water, no way to know which end is up, which means certain death, which promises all the air I need to breathe. It reminds me of that last day in Connecticut with Mom, when the sun finally came out and we got to swim in the ocean. No lifeguard. No way to see or feel or sense the bottom. Just us and the water and the exhilarating knowledge that it could crush the bones of our hearts, swiftly and completely, should the tide turn.
“What was that?” I ask, pushing against his chest.
“What?”
“Sounded like the front door.”
“Are you—”
“Patrick? You home?” Jack’s voice echoes up the stairs as he drops his keys on the table in the front hall.
“Shit!” Patrick leaps off the bed in search of his shirt. I pull
mine on so fast that when Jack opens the door, I’ve got a pink-and-white striped demi bra shoved under my legs and my arms are crossed over my thrown-on, inside-out top as if I’m cold.
“Oh, hey, Delilah. I didn’t know you guys were up here.” Jack looks from me sitting on the edge of the bed to Patrick wiping his guitar case with a rag on the other side of the room. I feel the cooler air rush in from the hall and wonder if this is the part where the oxygen sucks in against the fire, just before the whole room goes up in flames.
“You kids hungry?” Jack asks, giving Patrick a “we’ll talk about this later” glare.
“No, thanks,” I say. I’m still afraid to move my arms. “I should go. Mom and Rachel will probably be back soon.” I return his smile and wait for him to leave so I can fix my shirt and wriggle back into my bra.
“I don’t know what’s more difficult,” Patrick says when Jack’s finally gone, slipping his arms around me again. “Not seeing you for eight years while you’re hundreds of miles away, or finding you again, seeing you every day, thinking about you constantly, knowing that you’re sleeping fifty feet from my window when all I want to do is this.”
His mouth covers mine and I fall for another minute into the hot press of his lips. I hear Jack calling again and push my hand against Patrick’s chest, both of us nearly out of breath.
“For the record,” I say, “I won’t be sleeping tonight.”
“Perfect.” Patrick grins and pulls me into another kiss, his next words muffled and undecipherable as they crash like unguarded ocean waves against my lips.
Chapter twenty-five
As July stretches and slides into August, I slip into a state of near-constant daydream, my physical body complying with the endless estate sales and manual labor at the lake house while my mind wanders from the shadows of Stephanie’s death to the diary, from my grandparents to Mom and Rachel, from summer memories of honeysuckle and fireflies and maple sugar candy to that night in Patrick’s bedroom.
When no one is watching and our work is done and my mind is still, we draw each other close again—his lips brushing mine on the far side of the house; my hands in his hair under cover of the big weeping willow out front; tiny bits and pieces mixed into the hours of work or the free time we share with Em. It’s almost enough to make me forget the weight of all that lies ahead: burying my grandmother. Selling the last of her belongings. Selling the house. Saying good-bye.
It’s late one rainy night when I drift downstairs for a cup of hot tea with Patrick’s copy of Catcher in the Rye. He left notes for me in the margins of all the best parts, and we vowed to do the same after Red Falls, marking up and exchanging our favorite books so that through them we can still know each other, even if I can’t visit him as often as I’d like. After all my time muddling in the past, the future seems like a foreign land in which I understand neither the language nor the culture, wanting nothing more than a one-way ticket back to the present. There’s still a month left. I don’t want to think about the fall and the distance between Key and New York City just yet.
Rachel is out with Megan tonight, late as always, but when I reach the living room, I realize that I’m not alone in my nocturnal wandering.
“Mom? You’re still up?” I sit next to her on the couch. “I thought you had an early call tomorrow.”
She nods, pulling her robe close around her neck. Her eyes are shot with red, and I follow their gaze to the photograph on her lap. It’s the three Hannaford sisters, Mom and Rachel on either side of Stephanie, arms tangled around one another, Stephanie whispering in Mom’s ear as she giggles beneath her long brown pigtails.
“How old are you guys there?” I ask.
“Ten, eight, and six,” she says. “Give or take.”
“You look like triplets.”
“Everyone used to say that,” she says. “God, look at her. Look at those eyes. All those freckles. She seems so happy, doesn’t she?”
She sighs, her Claire-Hannaford-Speaking smile locked in the desk drawer for the night. It’s the same frail woman from our first day in Vermont. The same one from the cemetery on her sister’s birthday.
For so long, Mom and I worked around our mutual distance as if it was just another part of the family. As much as I wanted everything out in the open, now I feel the hollow between us: a deep, fresh wound where the ghosts of the past used to live. I did that. I opened it and let them out, digging and scraping and clawing, insisting that there was more to the story of my family than Mom was willing to share.
Stephanie was depressed, like her mother. And though she loved Casey and her sisters and her friends, love wasn’t enough to save her. Whatever was going on in her head in the time that followed her last diary entry, the things and the people in her life were not enough to save her. She ended it, and whether it was accidental or intentional, the result was the same. She’s gone. Like Papa. Like Nana. Like the eight missing summers we didn’t spend in Red Falls. Maybe Mom and Megan were both right. Maybe some things really are that simple, and other things have a lot more layers, and the only thing that’s ours to accept is the fact that we don’t always get to know the answers.
I look at Mom, slumped on the other end of the couch, longing for what could have been… It doesn’t matter what caused the fight eight years ago. It really doesn’t. We stopped coming here, and now there’s no one left in our family to visit. Soon the house will be gone and Red Falls really will be a memory. All we can do now is move on.
“I’m sorry, Mom.”
She turns her head slowly to face me, her eyes widening.
“I’m sorry about your sister, and about everything that happened this year, and that I pushed so hard about all the stuff with Nana and the fight. I didn’t mean to bring up the past again. It was selfish.” I think about that trip to Connecticut Mom and I took, and celebrating her promotion, and the picture with the bubbles, and how even after everything that changed, I still love her; I’d still be willing to trade it all in for a new start if she’d take the offer.
“Like you said,” I continue, “it’s all in the past. It doesn’t matter anymore. I don’t want things to be like this with us… all this fighting and tension and weirdness.”
Mom takes a sharp breath, pulling me into a hug.
“I miss you, Mom.” My throat clenches around the words like a child’s fist around a dandelion bouquet, tears rolling hot on my cheeks, and I finally understand that it has never been about the secrets or the truth or the ghosts. I just miss my mother. I miss knowing how to make her smile. I miss being important in her life.
Mom doesn’t say anything, but she’s crying, hugging me tighter and tighter like we’ll break into pieces if she lets go. Then, she’s shaking. Really shaking.
“Are you okay?” I ask. “What’s wrong?”
“I didn’t want it to be like this,” she says. Her voice is barely audible.
“Me neither, Mom. Things were just so weird… I couldn’t remember what happened here, and my mind invented stories and I just kept getting more scared that someday we’d end up the same way that you and Nana did. I didn’t want—”
“Oh, Delilah!” She pulls away from me, hands digging into my shoulders now, eyes narrowed at mine. Something urgent rises in her face, the presence of it suddenly large and forceful, chilling my skin. I’ve never seen her so shaken, so sorry, so used-up. It scares me. It scares me more than all the times I had to sit in the living room as she told me about the school principal calling her at work. More than when she picked me up from the security office at Blush Cosmetics and more than when she caught me sneaking back in the window the night she found out Nana died.
I wonder if Thomas can see all of this—all of us. I wonder if he still thinks about my mother and whether he likes the woman she became after he died. I wonder if he really knows about me. If he does, he doesn’t say; no message or sign to fill up the cold spaces in the room.
I meet her intense gaze. “It doesn’t matter, Mom. You don’t have t
o say anything.”
She nods quickly, sliding the tin of pills from her bathrobe pocket and pressing one on her tongue. She reaches for her water glass and takes several big gulps. Then she sets it back on the table, looks at the ceiling, and sucks in a deep breath as if convincing herself to jump from the highest dock on the edge of the lake. And then she does it. She jumps.
“Delilah, Thomas Devlin is not your father.”
Splash.
I see her mouth moving as the room swirls around her, filling with water so that everything goes in slow motion, blurred and muffled. I can hear my heart beat in my ears and the waves on the lake and the crickets, all the way out in the wheat grass, humming in their same low buzz, the big old world spinning by as it ought to.
Then it’s as though two giant hands wrench me from the water, throwing me to the shore. I take a sharp breath as Mom opens her mouth to speak again.
“There’s more. Listen to me. You have to know the whole truth.”
I don’t want to listen. My body is numb. I can’t feel my skin. I keep telling my feet to move, my legs to unglue and lift me off the couch and carry me away, but they don’t. They just sit here, waiting for my heart to explode.
Mom looks at me with big, sad, please-forgive-me eyes, and I almost want to. To let it go. To crawl into her lap and sob and tell her it doesn’t matter, don’t say anything else, let’s just let it all go.