by Megan Hart
“It’s possible. I hope not. But it could happen. I won’t lie. This trip is sort of a test, I think. For both of us.” Alicia pulled out a Raggedy Ann doll she vaguely remembered getting for Christmas one year. It had always creeped her out, and she put it into a box marked for donations.
Theresa’s box seemed to be full of baby clothes, and she shook out a little onesie and held it up. “What do you want to do with all of these?”
“Donate. I don’t think I’m ever going to need them.” Alicia dug out another couple of stuffed animals. “Why did my mom keep all of these things? The toys we really loved, we kept out and played with. But all this stuff . . .”
“Sentimental value?” Theresa closed the lid on the baby-clothes box and pushed it to the side. She opened another one to pull out some more papers that looked like schoolwork.
Alicia sat back with a small groan. “Ugh. I want to get rid of all of it. Everything. All of this stuff. It feels like it’s weighing me down. I mean, seriously, I don’t care about my second-grade report cards. I want to travel the world, Theresa! I want to get out there and be . . . unburdened!”
“Then you should be.” Theresa slapped her hands together from the dust at the top of the box. “C’mon. Get this stuff. Let’s take it out in the backyard and burn it.”
“No.” Half-horrified, Alicia put her hand over her mouth, then took it away. Put it back. “No, I couldn’t. Could I? Oh my God. I could. I really could, right?”
“You totally could. You have the fire pit. We can haul this stuff down there. Light it up.” Theresa grinned. “You have any marshmallows?”
“In the cupboard. Graham crackers and chocolate, too. Let’s do it.” Alicia felt like she’d slammed a couple of beers on an empty stomach. Giddy, dizzy, buzzed. Euphoric.
It took them only twenty minutes to haul all the boxes of papers to the backyard and pile them next to the fire pit. The items for donation had been settled into the trunk of Alicia’s car and would be delivered to the thrift store tomorrow. The stuff she needed to send to her parents had been sealed up and addressed, and she’d take that to the post office tomorrow, too.
Now they would burn.
“Do you want to call the boys over?” Theresa asked as Alicia handed her one of the metal stakes they used to roast marshmallows.
She thought about it for a moment, then shook her head. “Nah. I’ll hang out with Nikolai later, and to be honest, I don’t really want Ilya to see all this stuff that was Jenni’s. It might upset him.”
“Are you sure it won’t upset you?” Theresa asked.
Alicia shook her head. “Trust me, when I think about Jenni, the last thing I think about is her essay on how beavers build dams.”
“And your parents?”
“My mom put all that stuff away because she couldn’t stand to look at it.” Alicia shrugged. “The things we really needed to hold on to, I think we did. I did, anyway.”
Theresa looked solemn, then smiled. “Right. Let’s light this up. What do you say?”
Alicia hadn’t been able to find the bottle of lighter fluid, so they settled for twisting old papers and lighting them one at a time, then setting them on top of a small pile of papers in the fire pit. Slowly, the blaze grew, lighting the night and warming them against the balmy evening air. Pretty soon they were each gathering handfuls of papers and feeding them to the fire, gleeful at the way the flames rose.
She felt lighter with each handful. Letting go. Alicia tipped her head back to watch the ashes lifting on the breeze, like black lace edged with red and gold.
“This was a great idea,” she murmured. “Thanks, Theresa.”
“Anytime.” Theresa stuck a marshmallow on the end of the metal spike and held it over the flames, turning it to get it evenly, goldenly toasted.
They made a few s’mores, then sat down on the telephone poles Alicia’s father had sunk as seating around the fire pit. Theresa warmed her toes by pointing them toward the fire. Alicia pulled a box closer to her so she could add some more papers to the blaze. Her fingers brushed something hard. It rattled when she picked it up.
“Huh.” Alicia held it to the light, turning it from side to side to try to read what it said. “It’s a mint tin. Weird.”
She shook it, listening to whatever was inside clatter against the metal. The contents confused her even more. “Aspirin?”
“Let me see.” Theresa took the tin from her hands before Alicia could get a good look at it.
In the firelight, Theresa looked like she’d seen a ghost. She peered inside the small tin, then closed it. She clutched her fingers tight around it.
“What’s wrong?” Alicia asked. “What is it?”
“They’re not aspirin.”
“No?” Alicia held out her hand to take the tin back, but Theresa didn’t release it right away. “What is it?”
“Looks like pain pills.” Theresa lifted one, held it up.
She tossed it into the fire before Alicia could stop her. “Hey! Are you sure?”
“Yes.” Theresa made as though to toss the entire tin into the pit, but Alicia snagged it from her before she could.
“Don’t. I want to see.” She opened the tin to shake out a few of the dozen or so pills into her palm. She tried to see what was written on them, but the shifting firelight didn’t give her good-enough light. “I’m going inside.”
“Alicia . . .” Theresa followed her into the house. “Wait. What are you doing?”
Alicia had spilled the pills out onto the kitchen table and was carefully using her phone to figure out what they were. Not all of them were identifiable, but the ones she could figure out were definitely prescription pain meds. Something told her they weren’t for her mom’s infrequent but debilitating migraines. She pushed the pills back into the tin and closed it.
“They don’t even make these kind of mints anymore,” she said.
Theresa sat at the table across from her. “They probably don’t make some of those pills, either.”
“So they’re vintage illegal pain pills.” Alicia forced a laugh that twisted and faded into nothing. “They were Jenni’s. She must’ve put them in the crawl space to hide them.”
“I’m sorry, Alicia.”
Alicia shrugged. “What do you have to be sorry for? You’re not the one who got my sister hooked on pills.”
Theresa blanched, a reaction that seemed extreme. “No, I didn’t. I’m sorry you found them, though.”
“I knew she was on something. More than booze or pot. I asked her, but she denied it. I knew, though.” Alicia swallowed around the lump in her throat. “I wish I’d known then. It might’ve made a difference.”
“It wouldn’t have,” Theresa said with conviction.
Alicia frowned. “You can’t know that.”
“You can’t beat yourself up over it. I do know that. Whatever your sister was into back then, it wasn’t anything to do with you. And if she didn’t want your help, or she didn’t want to get sober, then she wouldn’t have, no matter what you said or did, or how many times you tried to help her. If you threw the pills away, she’d have found a way to get more.” Theresa cut herself off abruptly, looking away. She shook her head. “It’s what they do.”
Alicia traced the letters on the lid of the tin. “I’m going to toss this in the fire.”
“Good idea.”
Out back, a shadowy figure standing by the fire pit startled them both. Alicia had gripped the tin in one fist but put both hands up in automatic reaction when Galina stepped out in front of her. Alicia yelped even as she recognized Nikolai’s mother.
“I smelled smoke when I got home. I thought something might be going on over here. I had no idea you were having a weenie roast.” Galina looked at the tin in Alicia’s hand, and her expression tightened. “What are you doing? Burning papers? What’s that?”
“I’m clearing out the crawl space so I can get the house ready to sell it. This is just some old junk I found in one of the boxes.” Alicia
tossed it into the fire pit, sending up a shower of sparks and ash into the night sky.
When she turned around, Galina and Theresa were staring at each other, neither of them moving. Theresa was the one who broke the gaze. She bent to grab one of the marshmallow sticks that she held out to Galina.
“Want a s’more?” Theresa asked.
“Yes, thank you. I wanted to be sure everything was all right over here. It’s good to be neighborly, yes?” Galina smiled. “My girls. Sisters.”
Alicia gave Theresa a surprised look. “Galina . . .”
The older woman clapped her hands together, with another look at the fire. “You might as well be, yes?”
It was an odd thing for her to say, but Galina had always been a little strange. Alicia looked at Theresa, who was making a weird face that she quickly smoothed when Galina turned to look at her. Galina tilted her head, her long dark hair falling over her face until she pushed it back.
“How’s your father?”
Theresa’s expression went completely flat. “I’m sure he’s fine.”
Galina looked over the graham crackers and chocolate bars Alicia had set on one of the wooden benches. She looked over her shoulder at Theresa. “Is he?”
“Let me make you a marshmallow,” Theresa said.
Galina had never been mean to Alicia, not like in the horror stories she’d heard from some of her friends who’d had to put up with jealous, manipulative, or vindictive mothers-in-law. She’d been sometimes difficult to deal with in her erraticism. Kind and generous in one breath, spiteful and histrionic in the other. Still, Alicia had never had to actually live with her, and Theresa had. It seemed to have left a mark.
“So,” Galina said when she’d piled together a gooey, melty s’more but had not yet bitten into it. “You girls. My boys.”
Alicia smiled, a little self-conscious, noting Theresa’s startled look. “What about us? And them?”
“I want to see them settled and happy. If you’d had children, you would understand.”
It might not have been meant as a jab, but it probably had been. Alicia’s smile became harder. “It would’ve been difficult to have children when I was married to one.”
Theresa pressed her fingertips to her lips, holding back a tiny chuckle. It drew Galina’s attention. The other woman licked some chocolate off the side of her s’more.
“You think what she said is funny? What about you? What do you think about my son?”
Theresa pulled a marshmallow from the bag and jabbed it onto the end of the metal spike. “I think we all need to acknowledge our flaws and grow from them.”
“So many secrets,” Galina said sharply.
Alicia looked from Nikolai’s mother to Theresa and back again. “What’s going on?”
Galina ignored her. “My mother was a good cook. Not terribly inspired, but consistent. She never taught me, you know. How to cook. It was a joke with my boys what an awful cook I am. But she taught you, and I don’t even remember seeing the two of you in the kitchen.”
“That doesn’t make it a secret,” Theresa snapped.
“She liked you, Theresa.” Galina looked at Alicia. “She liked you, too.”
“I loved Babulya,” Alicia said.
Theresa nodded. “So did I.”
“Well, of course I loved my mother, too,” Galina said sharply. “We didn’t always get along, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t love her.”
“I never thought you didn’t,” Alicia said, wondering if this was the start of a Galina tantrum.
The older woman stared into the fire. “You’re burning your past, Alicia. Too bad it’s not so easy to do that with everything.”
Neither Theresa nor Alicia responded to that with words; they shared a look between them of commiseration and bemusement. Galina tossed her s’more into the fire and got up. She gave them both a smile.
“Next time, invite Dina Guttridge so she doesn’t have to peek out the windows and wonder what’s going on,” Galina said. “Good night, girls.”
With that, she left by way of the side of the house, leaving Alicia and Theresa to sit and watch the burning-down fire. Alicia wanted to laugh but didn’t. It wasn’t terribly funny.
“What do you think she wanted, really?” Theresa asked finally.
Alicia shrugged and tossed another handful of papers into the fire. They were almost all gone. “I’m not sure. I’m not sure it matters.”
“Right.” Theresa coughed into her hand, shifting on the lawn chair. “Alicia. Look. Those pills . . .”
“It doesn’t matter anymore. Jenni got herself into a bad place, and it ended up being bad for the rest of us, too.” Alicia poked at the fire with a stick. “I don’t really want to talk about it, okay? Knowing she was taking drugs doesn’t change anything that happened. It can’t bring her back. Nothing can do that. The best I can do, the best we all can do, is move on from it.”
Together, they watched the fire for a few more minutes, until Theresa excused herself to go inside. “Will you be okay out here?”
“Yeah. I’m going to make sure the fire goes out. I’ll be fine.” Alicia smiled. “Thanks, Theresa. ’Night.”
Alone, Alicia sat and studied the fire as it turned from tall orange flames to golden-and-red coals, then steadily became black. Clouds had covered the moon, so there was no light. She sat in the silence and the darkness until her eyes grew heavy; then she went inside to fill a pitcher with water, which she brought out to splash over the remains of the fire.
The tin had not burned. She heard the spatter of water on it, different from the soft sounds of it in the ashes. Using her phone, she shined a light into the fire pit. She used one of the sticks to shove ashes over it. It had not been destroyed, but that didn’t matter. She didn’t need to look at it anymore.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
I believe you can do this.
Theresa’s voice, quietly confident, echoed in Ilya’s head every time he used his keys to open the diner doors. He had monthly payments to the bank, utilities set up in his name, new equipment ordered to replace the few things that had been bad, and a small construction crew taking care of the interior renovations.
He was doing this.
Alicia had been the one to handle the day-to-day crap at Go Deep. Ilya should’ve appreciated that way more than he had at the time. Now, faced with a shadowed and quiet diner left empty but smelling of sawdust and varnish, his head was bursting with plans and ideas he was discovering needed more than enthusiasm to implement.
He needed Theresa.
He hadn’t seen her for the past few days. The last time, they’d argued lightly, over takeout food eaten at the prep counter, about whether they should even bother to try for a liquor license. Since the diner’s original owners hadn’t had one, Ilya had said they didn’t need one. Theresa, surprisingly, had been in favor of getting one, because she thought it would give their new place an edge beyond the fresh menu and the nostalgia they were hoping to capitalize on. She agreed to research the possibilities and let him know what she discovered. He’d tossed a straw paper at her. She’d rolled her eyes. They’d shared a thick wedge of chocolate cake, with her feeding him bites off her fork, and when he kissed her good-bye, she’d let him.
He’d thought about trying to make more of it than that. Another round on the prep counter, maybe. Or he could’ve taken her into the dining room and made love to her there. Something in the way she’d responded to the kiss had told him Theresa would not have turned him down. So why hadn’t he, then?
I need to know you believe you can do this. I need to be able to trust you, Ilya.
I want to. Is that good enough?
I don’t know.
I don’t know.
The trouble was, he didn’t know, either. He wasn’t convinced he could. So he’d left her hanging with a question in her eyes and the taste of chocolate cake and kisses in his mouth. He couldn’t be sure which one of them had decided not to reach out, but it felt like they were bot
h avoiding each other. He’d picked up his phone a dozen times to text her, to ask her out to dinner, or even just to get together at home to talk about the diner as though that was all they had in common, but he’d erased all the messages before hitting “Send.” They did need to talk about the diner, but that had nothing to do with why he wanted to see her.
He’d spent a lot of time looking at the pictures she’d given him. He’d known then what love felt like. How it burned. He and Jenni had both been so young, but the difference was that now he’d grown older, and she would always be that laughing seventeen-year-old girl who’d insisted on breaking his heart.
He’d thought about throwing the pictures away but hadn’t been able to. He’d satisfied himself with putting them in a cardboard shoe box on the top shelf of his closet, along with some old school medals and a few other mementos of his childhood. That’s what Jennilynn Harrison had become to him, Ilya thought. A memory to be put away in a box.
Yet it had still taken him four days of not hearing from Theresa before he could bring himself to go after her, and he was only doing it now because he could no longer stop himself. If she didn’t want anything to do with him romantically, that was fine, but he did need her help with a bunch of stuff, and they would have to get through it, whether either of them liked it or not.
Steeling himself, he thumbed in her number and listened to the ring. She answered right before he expected to be sent to voice mail, her voice thick and rasping. She sounded groggy.
“What’s the matter?” Ilya asked at once.
“I have the flu.”
He frowned. “You okay?”
“No. Fever. Headache. Can’t get out of bed.” She coughed. “I e-mailed you with a list of things that needed to be taken care of and told you I wasn’t going to be in for a few days.”
“Oh.”
She coughed again. “Let me guess, you didn’t read the e-mail.”
She’d set up a special e-mail account specifically for the diner, but he hadn’t yet added it to his phone. “Is Alicia there? Is she helping you?”
Theresa gave a rough, rattling sigh. “She and Niko left for Scotland, remember?”