by Darlene Ryan
And then I hear voices. My heart begins to pound in double time. I listen. It’s my mother. And Claire.
I press myself against the wall and move through the dining room to the living room doorway. I don’t know why I’m hiding. The French doors are partly open. I lean around the doorframe and take a quick look through the closest pane of glass.
Mom is curled in the corner of the sofa, in a circle of light from a nearby lamp. She’s wearing the plaid housecoat I gave her last Christmas. Claire is sitting in the wing chair, in a silky pink-flowered robe, perfect posture as usual.
“...just makes more sense to do it now,” Claire is saying.
Mom seems to be looking beyond Claire. I lean a bit closer to the open doors to catch her voice.
“We just had your father’s funeral today,” she says. “I haven’t been able to think beyond that. I’m not even sure about all the details of his will.” She sounds very tired.
“The tea set belonged to my great-grandmother. I know my father would want me to have it. And as for the pearl necklace, you know that it’s always stayed in the family.”
“You’re not the only person in the family.”
“I don’t think a teenager would have much use for a string of pearls.”
“D’Arcy isn’t going to be a teenager forever.”
“In other words, you want everything for your child.”
My dad’s only been gone for a few days, and already they’re fighting over his things.
“She’s your sister, Claire,” Mom says. “I’m not trying to cheat you out of anything, but I will not allow you to take things from this house until I know what your father wanted. I’ll see that anything that’s been left to you is sent. I wouldn’t want you to have to make another trip.”
“You’re being unreasonable, Leah. My father—”
My mother’s head snaps up. She’s looking directly at Claire now. “My husband is dead. I’m entitled to be somewhat unreasonable.” There is silence.
Claire’s voice is low, and I almost miss that she’s started talking. “And what kind of a wife were you, Leah? Didn’t you notice what was going on with him or did you just not care? My father killed himself. Did you even try to help him?”
One of my mother’s hands snaps up, and for a second I expect her to get up and slap Claire. Then the hand drops into her lap, the fingers pulled into a fist. I press the heel of my own hand over my mouth.
“You don’t have a clue what was going on here. You didn’t even know your father.” My mother’s voice is tight with anger. “Where the hell were you, Claire? Acting like a spoiled child because Mommy and Daddy got divorced. You wouldn’t come to see him or spend any time with us. Do you know how much you hurt him? And he never stopped trying with you. You weren’t much of a daughter, Claire.”
Mom lets out a breath. “My husband’s things stay in my husband’s home until I know what he wants me to do with them. Good night, Claire.” She puts her head back against the sofa and closes her eyes.
Claire gets up, and in a minute I hear the flap of her slippers going upstairs.
I rub my eyes with the back of my hand and swallow the tears before they can get away. It wouldn’t be this way if my dad were here. The last time he came home, it was from Alaska. We had grilled cheese sandwiches in the middle of the night, and my dad told us all about the bears he’d gone to photograph. My mom said, “There’s school tomorrow.”
Dad swirled her around the room. “And there’s life right now.” He kissed the side of her neck under her ear. “I missed you both so much!”
She had to smile. He made everyone smile. Even Claire. It wouldn’t be like this if he were here.
Mom turns off the lamp and sits there in the dark. I know I should go to her, but I don’t. I can’t. I creep carefully back up the stairs.
Standing in the dark in the upstairs hallway, I hear it. Someone crying. Claire crying?
I don’t know what to do. I stand there in the dark in the middle of the hallway for what seems like a long time. Then I go back to my own room and close the door.
eight
The morning is cloudy and dull. I drink two glasses of orange juice and manage to get half a blueberry muffin down. I wonder who made the muffins. They’re good. Or they would be if I cared how things taste.
I’m just finishing when Mom comes into the kitchen. The dark circles under her eyes look like bruises.
“Morning,” she says. She opens the freezer door and roots around, pulling out a brick of coffee. I watch her start the coffeemaker, but I don’t say anything. She sits across from me, puts a muffin on her plate and then ignores it.
“I’m going out to rake leaves,” I tell her. I know I’m a coward, leaving her to deal with Claire alone after last night.
“You don’t have to do that, D’Arcy. I thought I’d hire someone.”
“I can do it. I want to. Really.” I’m chicken.
She opens her mouth and then closes it with a sigh. “All right. Whatever you want.”
“Anything you need before I go out?”
She shakes her head.
I get my jacket and look in the closet for a pair of gloves. As I pass the table again, something makes me put my hand on Mom’s shoulder for a moment. I hear a catch in her throat as she takes a breath.
“Sure you don’t need anything?” I ask as I push by.
Her eyes are shiny. “I’m just fine,” she says. “Go on.”
Two big bags of leaves later, I see Claire coming across the grass toward me, hands jammed into the pockets of her trench coat. This is my sister. This is the only other person who is connected to my dad in the same way that I am. But I don’t feel connected to her.
“Hi,” Claire says as she reaches me.
“Hi.” I keep on raking. The teeth of the rake make a metallic swish as they scrape the ground.
“I just came to tell you that I’m ready to leave.”
“Have a good trip.” I’m watching her sideways, studying her face. Are her eyes puffy?
Do it, the voice in my head insists. The words fall out of my mouth before I have any more time to think about them. “I think it was an accident.”
Claire closes her eyes for a moment. “It wasn’t.”
“You don’t know that,” I say.
“I know you don’t want to believe it, but he killed himself, D’Arcy. He didn’t want to be”—her jaw moves like she’s testing the feel of some word before she says it—”here anymore.”
“No,” I say, staring down at the ground. I’ve raked the same piece of grass so much there aren’t any leaves left. The rake is flinging up bits of dirt.
“Pretending isn’t going to change it.”
I stop, lean on the rake and look at her full on. “I’m not pretending. You don’t know that he...” I can’t get the words to come out of my mouth. I try again. “You don’t know that he didn’t have an accident. Nobody knows. The police aren’t done. Why don’t you just believe in him, Claire?”
She looks out across the yard, at the trees, the rock wall, the empty flowerbeds. Finally she looks back at me. “I’m sorry,” she says, so quietly I’m not quite sure she spoke.
We stand there for two breaths.
“I better get going then.” We both hesitate, eyeing the couple of feet between us as though it were a trench filled with crocodiles. For a moment it feels as though we’re moving toward each other too slowly even for it to be seen. Then the moment passes. I wrap both hands around the rake handle.
“Good-bye, Claire,” I say.
“Good-bye.”
She turns and heads back across the lawn. I remember the sound of her crying. Go after her, the voice in my head says. At least give her a hug. She’s your sister. I take one step. And then I remember all the things she said to my mother last night. If there’s any part of my father in her, I can’t find it. I can’t do it. I can’t hug Claire. I don’t know which bothers me more, hugging Claire or finding out whether she’d
hug me back.
The house is quiet. Now and then I hear a car pass on the street. Not very often though. It’s Saturday, almost Sunday.
I’m lying in bed on my stomach, the pillows wedged under my shoulders so I can see my clock. I watch the little red bars change: 55...56...57...58...I’m waiting for the week to be over.
I want my life to be normal again. I want the dead empty place inside me to disappear.
I want my dad.
nine
“You should go back to school,” Mom says. She’s wearing the plaid robe and a pair of my dad’s wool socks instead of slippers.
“You aren’t going back to work,” I counter. We’re at the kitchen table, Mom hanging over a cup of coffee, me with a bowl of half-eaten, soggy cereal in front of me. I’m not sure how it suddenly got to be Monday morning, but it is.
“I have some things to take care of.”
“I’ll help.”
She shakes her head. “I don’t want you to miss any more time. Exams aren’t that far away.”
The phone rings. For a second I freeze. It’s not even seven o’clock. My heart is pounding in my ears. Then I remember. How bad could it be? The worst has already happened.
I reach for the phone. Am I ever going to stop jumping when it rings this early in the morning? “Hello?.”
“Hey. It’s just me.”
Brendan. I breathe again. “Hi.” I mouth his name at Mom.
“I just called to see if you’re okay and if you’re going to school.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I mean about the school part.”
“I could skip practice and drive you.” Brendan is on the basketball team.
“No. I’m not sure yet. Go.”
“If you need me to—”
“I’m fine. Go.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” I sound mad, I realize. I don’t mean to.
“Okay. Am I going to see you tonight?”
I toss a quick glance at my mom. There are some things I need to do. “Maybe. I’ll call you.”
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
Why is he being like this? “Yes. My cereal’s getting soggy though.”
“Sorry. I’ll talk to you later.”
I hang up.
Mom looks at me. “D’Arcy. Go to school. There’s nothing you can do here.”
Suddenly I want to get out. “All right,” I say.
I get dressed, brush my teeth, throw my books into my backpack. It doesn’t take very long.
“I don’t know if I’ll be here when you get home,” Mom says. “But I shouldn’t be too late.”
“Okay.”
“Then I’ll see you whenever.”
“Okay.” I feel like I’m six years old and it’s the first day of school. My breakfast sloshes around in my stomach. I make myself pull on my jacket and go out the door.
I walk quickly, my breath hanging for a moment in front of my face and then thinning into nothing in the cold morning air. I like walking. It’s good for thinking. Or for not thinking.
The morning smells like car exhaust. Dad wanted to move out of the city, where it was cleaner. He always said that breathing this air was going to be the death of us all.
Not now. Not all of us.
I take the bottom part of the hill in long strides and turn down Duke Street toward the school. The sun’s high and bright but it has no warmth. The school’s just in front of me, past the next corner, when my feet suddenly stop.
I look across at the old stone building with the heavy wooden doors and old drafty windows. It feels like a million years since I was last inside.
I put out my hand and touch the trunk of a tree. They’re all along the street. They’re older than the school. I rub my hand back and forth on the scratchy bark, scraping my skin.
How can I do it? How can I go in there and see people and talk to them? What if, somehow, people know? They’re going to say stupid things, wrong things. I don’t know what to say back.
There’s a sour lump at the back of my throat that I can’t swallow down. Okay, five minutes. I’ll try it for five minutes but that’s it.
I head down the sidewalk toward the main doors just like everyone else. I just want it to be normal. Can’t one part of my life be normal again?
ten
Seth Thomas stops me at the stairs. He’s the peer tutor in my advanced math class. Peer tutor is what they do with kids who are smarter than the teachers. He’s my age and he’s doing college-level calculus.
“D’Arcy, I heard about your dad. I’m sorry,” Seth says. He doesn’t wait for me to say anything, doesn’t seem to expect me to. He hands me a bunch of papers. “These are all the notes of what you missed, and you don’t have to worry about the assignment.”
I nod.
Seth swings his leather pack onto one shoulder and shoves his hair out of his face. “That’s my e-mail on the top page. In case...you know, you have any problems.”
“Umm, thanks,” I say.
“No problem,” he says and disappears down the stairs.
I hold the pages tightly. This I can figure out. There’s only one answer to these problems, and the answers always make sense.
Marissa is leaning on my locker in jeans and her suede jacket with the fringe. She has all these great clothes because her mother is a buyer for Willington’s department store—not just the store here, but all the stores in this part of the country. And she gets to travel with her mom a lot. She’s been to New York twice, and last year she went to Paris for five days.
“Hi,” she says. “I wasn’t sure you’d be here today.”
“I didn’t think you would,” I say as I work the combination of my lock. Marissa has been out of school for almost two weeks with some weird flu.
“I got sick of being home. After The Young and the Restless, there’s not much to do.” She frowns. I can feel her studying my face while I stow my jacket and search for books. “What about you? You okay?”
Here it comes. “I’m all right.”
“I really wanted to come to the funeral, but I had this freaky cough. I sounded like a seal.”
“It’s okay, about the funeral,” I say. “I got your note.”
Marissa stares down at her feet. “I...uh...want you to know that I’m sorry. I really liked your dad. He was fun. Not like my dad.” She looks up at me and makes a face. “Do this. Don’t do that. Mostly don’t do that. It’s all my dad knows how to say.”
I keep my head inside my locker, moving books around so I don’t have to talk.
She snaps one purple fingernail with the other. “D’Arcy, you’d call me if you wanted to talk, right?”
“Sure,” I mumble.
“Even if it’s the middle of the night, you can call me.”
I turn to look at her. “Yeah, I know.”
“You can tell me anything,” she says.
What is the matter with her? She has this look on her face like she’s wearing a thong that’s too small. This is what I didn’t want: people acting all weird. I slam my locker door and snap the lock.
We head down the hall to homeroom. Marissa’s walking backward. “Hey,” she says, “do you remember the time your dad came back from Mexico, and he got us out of study hall and we went out and had burritos? He had that big sombrero on and it was sticking out of the sunroof.” She laughs. “Your dad was so cool.”
I nod. I remember. I just don’t want to.
Before we go into class, Marissa grabs my arm. “Listen. If you just can’t stand sitting in there, pull on your hair or something. I can still do the cough, and it’s like I’m gonna pass out.” She snaps her fingers. “And just like that we’re off to the nurse’s office.”
“That’s so sneaky,” I say.
“But effective.” She grins, and I almost manage a grin back.
It’s getting dark when I get home. That’s the thing I hate most about this time of year, more than the cold. I feel as though all my life outside of sch
ool is happening in the dark.
There aren’t any lights on in the house. “Mom?” I call.
No answer. The car’s in the driveway. Where is she? I feel that stomach-falling, top-of-the-roller-coaster sensation inside.
“Mom?”
Nothing.
Some sense, some kind of radar maybe, makes me turn toward the living room. She’s there, standing by the window in the almost darkness, as if she and the room were in another place. I touch her arm. “Mom?”
“Beautiful, isn’t it, D’Arcy,” she says, staring out the window.
“What?”
“The sunset. It was your father’s favorite time of day. You know that.”
I don’t know that. I hear it again, just like this morning when the phone rang so early: my own heartbeat pounding in my ears. I wait until I realize she isn’t going to say any more. She just stands there looking out into the night. The first stars are winking on.
“C’mon, Mom,” I say at last. “Let’s get some supper.”
She looks at me. For a moment, less than that really, it seems as though there’s no one behind her eyes, just blankness. Then it passes. “Supper? I didn’t even think about supper. How about spaghetti?”
“Sounds great,” I say.
Brendan puts his arm around me, tucks my body close against his. “I’m glad we came,” he says, leaning close to my face.
“Yeah,” I say, nodding in case he didn’t hear me over the music and the people.
We’re at the South End Street Fair, which isn’t actually on the street at all. It’s in an old warehouse close to the water-front. There are dozens of things to do and see and hear. Lots of sound and color and light and people. It’s almost impossible to talk or even think, which is good because I don’t want to do either one. It’s taken so much energy all week just to act normal. I haven’t told Brendan or Marissa or anyone that my dad might have...because we don’t know yet. We don’t.
“What do you want to do first?” Brendan’s breath is warm on my ear.