Fixing Delilah

by Sarah Ockler

  “What do you think,” I say. It’s not a question.

  “Delilah, we have to talk about—”

  “No, we don’t.”

  The seagull dives; Mom’s hand squeezes my arm, too tight.

  “Don’t touch me! Don’t you ever fucking touch me again!” I knock against her shoulder and push through the doorway, cutting my toe on a piece of glass. I’m on the stairs now, and hell yes, I’m leaving. No money, no food, no bags, wet hair, bloody foot, bloody shin, but I’m walking out that door and into the street and up, up, up as far north as I can go before I die.

  And bienvenue au fucking Canada, I’m not coming back.

  She follows me, each of us taking two stairs at a time to keep up with the accusations. I don’t understand what it’s like to lose a sister. She’s a monster for keeping me from my real father. I should show some maturity and compassion. She should go to hell.

  When Mom and I reach the kitchen, Rachel is standing in the doorway, purse clutched in her hand, mouth just hanging open over her Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History sweatshirt like she’s some kind of statue from the Susan B. Anthony wax museum.

  “You wanna smash things, Delilah? Okay. Let’s smash things.” Mom ignores her sister, flinging open the glass-front kitchen cupboards to expose the rows of mismatched dishes not yet tagged for the final sale, all the plates and saucers and table decorations Nana collected from gift exchanges and grocery store giveaways and other people’s kitchens. I grab a coffee mug with a picture of a sleepy-faced puppy that says “Mornings are Hard!” and slam it on the floor. Mom mirrors me with two unrelated dinner plates, scattering orange and white porcelain flowers across the tile.

  “What the hell is going on?” Rachel yells, finally finding her voice.

  I keep smashing, breaking two more ugly coffee mugs with stupid-cute animal sayings as Mom, who is clearly out of Xanax, recaps the evening’s events for her sister at warp speed.

  Mom and Aunt Rachel are arguing again, but I can’t hear their words. I’m still dropping dishes, thinking in slow motion about the GPS woman in Mom’s car. I imagine her beckoning me from outside the kitchen window, illuminated like some robot-angel, calling me forth to the Lexus where she will ferry me off to that planet of monotonous peace, that special, otherworldly place where all the residents are relaxed and confident and completely numb.

  Your life will. Get better in. Six. Point four. Million. Miles.

  Voices escalate as Rachel tries to sweep up some of the dish shards, but I’m still not listening. I grab the thing on the kitchen counter nearest my outstretched hand. The Hannaford sisters see me and read my mind and their eyes get round in their heads as I look at them with my arm held high over everything, daring them to say a single word.

  “Delilah, no! Not the blue—”

  Rachel and Mom reach for me, all four arms like tentacles springing forth and then recoiling as I slam the stupid blue cow creamer hard into the sink.

  “Delft.” Rachel’s voice shrinks away. “Goddamn it, that ugly cow was the only thing worth any real money in this entire house.”

  I hover over the sink and peer down at the pieces of her, ass end up in the drain, beheaded and de-legged. She’s broken. I’m broken. The fight in both of us is spent.

  “Four thousand dollars,” Mom says, waving her hand over the basin, the edges in her voice smoothing out. “Right down the drain.”

  That’s it.

  All the madness leaks out of the room like air from a balloon, making way for the insane laughter that follows. Rachel first, then Mom, and soon the three of us are cracking up like it’s double-dose day at the crazy house.

  “That cow was the most ridiculous…”

  “Of all the stupid trinkets…”

  “Moooo!”

  When I can no longer discern the laughing from the crying, after all of the running and screaming and dish-dodging, after all of the hating, my legs give out. I slide to the floor, leaning against the cupboard under the sink.

  Rachel and Mom slide down on either side of me.

  We sit there listening to one another’s heartbeats and jagged breaths for a long time, waiting for someone to tell us what to do, to show us how to make everything right. No one volunteers.

  Eventually, we move to the living room, away from all the broken things. There isn’t a lot of talking. I fade in and out like an old radio, vaguely aware of Rachel cleaning my toe and shin with anti-bacterial stuff that smells like peppermint but doesn’t sting. Mom unfolds the blanket from the back of the couch and covers me with it.

  It feels like another dream.

  “Do you remember that time Dad went shopping for a used car after that old Chevy died?” Aunt Rachel whispers to Mom.

  “He came home with an ice cream truck,” she says, on the edge of laughter.

  “The music trickled in the front door…” Rachel says.

  “And we ran out to see…” Mom.

  “It was Dad…” Rachel.

  “Free ice cream for everyone!” Mom.

  “The look on her face…”

  “… slept on the couch for a week!”

  “And when they finally had to take his leg…”

  “ ‘That settles that!’ Mom said.”

  “Ah, that music!”

  “Deedle la dee da dee da dee da dee…”

  “Are we going to be okay, Rach?” Mom asks at the end of it. If Rachel responds, I don’t hear. Sleep finally invades my body, carrying me up off the couch, out of the living room, out of Red Falls, and out of the world. Mom and Rachel blur and disappear. Outside, a light breeze jostles the rainwater from the maples and my entire mind goes as endless and black as the midnight sky.

  Chapter twenty-eight

  I’m the first one awake. Through the kitchen, the sun is shining white-hot against the windowpanes and the lake beyond is as blue and promising as ever, all evidence of last night’s storm forgotten.

  My head aches. My throat is raw and tight.

  The new light of day sharpens the pain by degrees: the harsh contrast of sunshine and hope against the angry things that came out since I last saw the morning sky.

  It wasn’t that many hours ago.

  Most of the dish shards have been swept into a pile in the corner, but the Delft cow is still in pieces, ass end up in the sink. I dig through the kitchen drawers for some Super Glue to make her whole again, setting her to heal on the windowsill behind the red-and-gold roosters marching across the curtains.

  When Mom and Rachel join me downstairs, we pass one another in the kitchen, everything around us slow and heavy as though we’re walking underwater. Did you eat? Mom wants to know. Are there any clean mugs? Rachel. She opens the window behind Moo and lights a sage stick. Mom comments on the sunshine and the lake, and I nod and shrug and none of us means any of it so I decide to hide out in the basement with a box of granola bars and some bottled waters, still dressed in the pajamas I put on last night before all the smashing. Jack is coming over to work on the sunroom and Patrick won’t be with him and nothing else matters.

  I don’t know how long I sort through the final musty shelves of holiday decorations and bicycle parts and half-melted candles downstairs, but no one disturbs me, and when I finally tire of the damp cement walls, the sun has been snuffed out and the house is quiet. From the kitchen, the remnants of last night’s breakdown are gone, all of the broken things swept out the door.

  When the clock on the oven says nine thirty, I know that I’m officially breaking my promise to Patrick—I’m not going to his show tonight. As last call at Luna’s approaches, I’m drawn to the front window to watch for him with nothing but hope and sadness and longing stuck on me from every direction.

  I finally see the shape of him on the sidewalk, getting closer. I kneel on the living room floor with my elbows on the windowsill and my chin in my hands and watch him nearing the house, the guitar case slung over his shoulder as black and heavy as I feel.

  Look up. Look up. L
ook up. Look up and see me and stop and lay your guitar in the grass and run up the path to my house and throw open the door and find me here, just find me, find me here crying over you, needing and wanting you more than anything in my life. Look up, Patrick Reese. Look up look up look up…

  But he doesn’t look. He shifts his case to the other side and I can’t see his face as he comes and goes like I’m not even here—just another invisible ghost in the old Hannaford lake house.

  Up in the sewing room, the wood floor shines, cleared of glass and buttons, and the air is lemony and crisp. The day bed is made with fresh sheets, and on the end, folded in a neat rectangle, is the beige sweater I borrowed from Nana’s bedroom the night I found her pills. It must have slipped behind the bed. I forgot I had it, and I know before I see the name on the inside label—scrawled between two hearts—what it’s going to say.

  Handmade by Alice.

  I think of the woman with the dyed red hair at the estate sale, CEO of Creature Creations. Sorry, Alice. Ollie stays with me.

  I pull the dog sweater over my head and scroll through my phone for Emily’s cell number. She picks up on the first ring.

  “All right, Del. Patrick was a mess tonight. What the hell is going on with you guys?”

  Chapter twenty-nine

  It’s been four days since the fight. Em’s been over here every night since my tragic phone call, listening to the whole saga, holding me when I cry, bringing me chocolate hazelnut lattes from Luna’s. She doesn’t say whether she’s talked to Patrick about me, and I don’t ask.

  I haven’t seen him since that horrible night, Jack telling me only that he asked for some time off. I try to block it out of my mind, helping Rachel lug the boxes of remaining collectibles out front for the final sale, setting up tables with the last porcelain animal statues. Glassware featuring each of the fifty states. Ski boots. Needlepoint kits. The day passes slowly as my gaze drifts always to the blue-and-white Victorian, waiting for him to march out the front door and over here, right past the encyclopedias the old people didn’t buy and the bowling pin salt-and-pepper shakers priced at one dollar, right to me.

  “Hon, why don’t you just talk to him?” Rachel says, probably seeing the whole thing unravel in the cards over her black-and-silver cloth.

  “We’re not speaking,” I say.

  She frowns but doesn’t push for details. “Maybe you should go over there. I’m sure when he sees you again, he’ll realize—”

  “I’m fine, Rach.”

  “You haven’t touched the flourless chocolate torte I made. And your shirt is on backward. And inside out. And what’s going on with that hair?” Rachel makes a swirling motion above her head as I tug at the shirt tag beneath my chin.

  “I’m just tired, okay?”

  “Listen, Delilah. Your mother and I are burying your grandmother in less than two weeks. We let things go unsaid for eight years, and now it’s too late. Life is short. You don’t always get another chance to make it right. So enough of this tired crap, okay? Shake out your hair. Fix your shirt. March your ass over there and tell him how you feel.”

  “Did you draw the Lovers card again today?” I ask. “I told you, I’m just—”

  “Enough!” She points next door to Patrick’s house. “This has nothing to do with tarot cards. Now go.”

  The thought of facing Patrick after all these empty days sends a sharp jolt through my insides, but Rachel is right. I don’t even know if Patrick wants to talk. But that night on the beach, when we got out of the car in the middle of everything, rising above the shouts in the storm, there was something else. Something in his eyes. Something he said.

  “Don’t you get it? I’m in love with you!”

  Patrick’s front door is open, the summer breeze carrying honeysuckle-scented air through the screen door. I hear the sweet warmth of his voice as I wrap my hand around the door handle, pull, and step inside.

  “Em,” Patrick says from the living room. He doesn’t see me. Doesn’t know I’m watching. “You’re amazing. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  “Same here,” Emily says, standing on her toes. She reaches around his neck, pressing herself to him and choking all of the air from my lungs. He rubs her back and smiles and then she says it, those awful little words that were supposed to come only from me. “I love you, Patrick.”

  I take a clunky step backward, startling them both. Patrick lets go of Emily and finally notices me, his pained, frantic eyes holding mine. It’s as if we’re both being electrocuted by the same current and neither of us can let go or knock the other out of harm’s way.

  “Delilah, wait!” His hand reaches out.

  “I can’t…” I stumble backward. “I thought… I…”

  “Whoa, Delilah. It’s not what you think,” Emily says, waving her hands to erase the image of their embrace from my mind. “It’s soooo not what you think.”

  I look at Patrick. “At least you’re ditching the work next door for something good.”

  “I told you,” Emily says, but Patrick stops her, grabbing her hand in an affectionate squeeze.

  “Don’t,” he says to Emily. “You don’t have to explain anything to her.”

  “But this is insane,” she says. “I don’t even—”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Patrick stops her again.

  The three of us stand near the door, me staring at Patrick, trying to keep myself from collapsing, Patrick and Emily staring at each other and then back at me.

  Finally, Emily shakes her hand free and Patrick breaks the silence.

  “Did you need something, Delilah?” he asks. “Or are you just trying to make everyone in Red Falls as miserable as you are?”

  My stomach tightens, but I ignore the sting. “I wish I never found you again. I liked you better when we were kids!”

  “Finally!” he shouts. “We agree on something!”

  “Oh, you know what?”

  “Why are you still here, Delilah?”

  “Stop it!” Emily yells. “Both of you! Just stop!”

  “FINE!” Patrick and I scream at her, and at each other, and at the seagulls all the way down on the lake, floating blissfully ignorant over the blue abyss.

  Emily pushes past me through the doorway, outside, down the steps, sneakers throwing tiny stones at the house as she bolts toward Maple Terrace. I stumble onto the porch and Patrick slams the screen door and I run back to Nana’s, faster and faster as I try to outpace my own heart. There aren’t that many steps between the two houses, but I take them in double time, triple, quadruple, speeding toward Rachel and her army of ten-cent trinkets, bashing my hip into the table and taking out a whole section of fake plastic fruit and ice-skating frog figurines, Megan’s words from so long ago boiling up like hot tar to fill the black holes inside.

  We all long for what could have been.

  Chapter thirty

  On the morning of Nana’s memorial service, I’m awake at four o’clock, thirsty and restless and unable to fall back asleep. It’s been two weeks since I learned about my real father and the things that have wedged my family for generations. Almost as long since I’ve seen Emily or spoken to Patrick—when he returned to work on the house with Jack, it was with renewed efficiency, no longer needing my assistance with the shutters or the gutters or the painting of the shed. No longer seeking my conversation. No longer searching for my eyes across the kitchen table during breakfast. To him, I simply don’t exist.

  At five, I pull on the dog sweater and head out the front door to watch the sun fight against the fog. Cool mist swirls around my feet, swallowing me in a giant cauldron, a pinch of insignificance in a complicated magical recipe whose ultimate purpose is yet to be revealed.

  Next door in front of Patrick’s house, the mist breaks in the street, billowing out before a dark, hulking mass. I take a few steps back from the road as the figure moves closer, its breath white on the air just ten feet from my unblinking eyes.

  It’s a moose, tall and ch
ocolate-brown, standing in front of my grandmother’s house. Her head bobs gently and I smell her through the stew of the fog, her scent mingled with the earth and the tang of an earlier rain. I don’t move.

  My heart bangs beneath my shirt as two calves appear through the fog behind her. Time holds us all as she sniffs at the air, judging whether I’m friend or foe, whether she should challenge me or let us all pass in peace. After a series of long sighs and grunts, she raises her head and moves aside, waiting for her charges to hobble up next to her. Eight short legs move quickly, mother nudging gently with her nose. Still, I don’t breathe. When the babies are finally in front of her, she moves on, vanishing in the haze.

  My mother and aunt are awake when I go back inside, none of us able to sleep on the morning of Elizabeth Hannaford’s burial. We eat breakfast together with little conversation, forks and knives clinking against three mismatched plates. When we do talk, we keep it safe—the bacon isn’t bad, considering it’s soy. I hope the weather holds out. Who wants more coffee? None of us speaks of the real things filling our hearts like deep, cold water—the funeral. Who’s going to carry the urn. The weeks of tension and our explosive argument. Our impending and final departure from this house. This place. This story.

  An hour before we’re scheduled to leave for the funeral, Mom finds me in my room, sitting at the edge of the bed and staring out at the lake. The door is open, but she lingers in the hall, waiting for permission to enter as if she no longer has the right to ask. I give it to her.

  “I’m burying my mother today.” She sits next to me and puts it out there, just like that. I think about the black box etched in gold flowers on my grandmother’s dresser, wondering how it will look in my mother’s hands as she shakes out the ashes of my grandmother over Red Falls Lake.

  “Can we talk?” Mom asks, putting her arms around me.

  I shrug. Words won’t come to my lips. In the rawness of her open affection, I’ve forgotten how to make them.