Die for You

by Amy Fellner Dominy

  As if he understands all of that and not just “treat,” Charlie turns back toward the kitchen, his nails clacking on the tile.

  “He misses you,” she says.

  “I miss him, too.” I sigh. I miss this. I glance around the familiar entry and down to the sunken living room. “New couch?” I ask, and even that feels familiar.

  “You know Mom. Can’t pass an estate sale without finding something.”

  Mrs. Mann peeks around the kitchen. “Emma, I thought I heard your voice. So nice to see you. Everything good?”

  “Great.”

  “Any plans for spring break?”

  “No. Just going to hang out with my dad.”

  “I’ll bet he’ll love every minute of that. Give him my best, won’t you? And before you go, I’ll make up a plate of cookies for you to take home.” Mrs. Mann has been friends with my mom for years, but she always asks after Dad and I love that about her.

  “He’d like that,” I say. I sniff and catch the faint scent of chocolate. “Smells good.”

  “Just put the first batch in.”

  She disappears back into the kitchen as Marissa heads for the staircase.

  “Come on up,” she says. “Sarah’s here.”

  I pause with one foot on the first stair. “Sarah?”

  “She’s helping me pick a suit.”

  A shadow moves from above and I see Sarah’s long blond hair flop over the railing. “Hey, Emma.”

  “Hey.” I like Sarah. I always have. But that doesn’t change the fact that today was supposed to be just us and Marissa knew that.

  She gives me a look that says, Sorry. There’s a crease between her brows, a sign that she feels bad. I tell myself to shrug it off. I’m sure it was Sarah, inviting herself over, and Marissa would never hurt anyone’s feelings, even under threat of torture. But I’m not in the mood to shrug off anything.

  “We need your opinion,” Sarah says. “I like this one Marissa’s wearing, but she thinks it’s too pink.”

  I follow Marissa up the carpeted steps. “You didn’t think it was too pink when you bought it?”

  “I bought four to try on,” she says over her shoulder. “And I didn’t think it was quite this pink.”

  “You bought four and you’re trying them on now? Don’t you leave tomorrow?”

  “You know me,” she says.

  Sarah laughs as if she knows, too, and of course she does. Everyone in our group of friends knows how much Marissa dreads buying a new bathing suit. She always says her legs are too short for her body so she looks stumpy. But Sarah’s laugh still grates on my nerves. Since I moved away, Sarah has been on Marissa like a flea. She’s always fluttering around and impossible to get rid of. Marissa and I have talked about it—how it’s stupid that I’m jealous and how she feels the same about my new friends. About Dillon. But Dillon is different—he’s a boyfriend. Sarah is trying to be me.

  Marissa rolls her eyes as she tugs her shirt down over her legs. “If only the fashion was to have overendowed thighs, I’d be a supermodel.”

  “Stop it,” Sarah says. “I think you look great. You have to try on the green one for Emma, too.”

  Marissa’s room is dotted with stacks of shorts, T-shirts, and a pile of swimwear, some of it still on hangers on top of her desk. Sitting on the carpet, half packed, are duffels.

  Two of them.

  I look from the duffels to Marissa.

  “Sarah’s coming with,” she says.

  “To Mexico? With your family?”

  Sarah moves a stack of T-shirts and sits on the bed. “My mom would never let me go to Rocky Point, but she says it’s okay if I go with responsible adults.” She smiles wryly. “She wanted to give Marissa’s parents a polygraph, but I got her to back down.”

  I’m still watching Marissa, wondering why she didn’t tell me. We just talked…well, we exchanged texts a few days ago. Definitely less than a week. “You didn’t say.”

  “It was one of those last-minute things.”

  Like Sarah being here today? The words are on the tip of my tongue. I’m suddenly close to tears. This day has been too much already. “You know what? I thought this was a good time, but you guys are busy.”

  “Emma.”

  “No, it’s okay. I’m really beat anyway. But have a great trip.”

  “Wait, don’t,” Marissa says. She reaches the door before me and grabs the knob. “Don’t leave mad.”

  “I’m not mad,” I say. “It’s just been a hard day.” I lower my voice. “I thought it was just going to be us.”

  “You weren’t even sure if you were going to make it over.”

  “I wasn’t sure what time.”

  “That’s what you always say,” Sarah interjects, as though she’s a part of this conversation.

  I whirl to face her. “What?”

  She’s still sitting on the bed, her hands bearing her weight, her shoulders raised in an easy shrug, but I read the challenge in her overly mascaraed eyes. “You say that you’re not sure what time or that you’ll be late or that you have to leave early, and most of the time you don’t show at all.”

  “That was one time.”

  “What about her birthday?”

  “Sarah!” Marissa says, her cheeks flushing.

  I feel flushed, too, hot with anger and resentment. “I came over. I took her to lunch.”

  “On Saturday. But you said you’d show up on Thursday.”

  “It was a school night. I had homework.” I look at Marissa. “I told you. You knew that.” I pause, waiting for her to back me up. “Marissa?”

  Her arms are hugging her chest, shoulders hunched, her eyes down like she wishes she were anywhere else. “We’re all busy. I understood.”

  “Please,” Sarah says under her breath so that I can barely hear it. But I do hear it and I know there’s more I should say but there’s also a lump in my throat and a heaviness behind my eyes. I don’t want to lose it, not in front of Sarah.

  “When do you get home from Mexico?” I ask Marissa.

  “Saturday,” she says.

  “I’ll call you. Saturday night. We’ll set up something for the week after. Okay?”

  “Perfect,” she says.

  I pull her to me and give her a hug. Over her shoulder I glare at Sarah, who’s watching me like I’m in the wrong. Does she think she’s protecting Marissa? From me?

  I step back and open the bedroom door. “Have a great time,” I say. Then I pin Marissa with a firm look. “Saturday,” I say again.

  —

  The house is quiet when I get home. I set my purse on the counter with my keys. “Dad?”

  It’s just after six and though it’s been a long day, the sun is still bright through the window that stretches above the kitchen table.

  I decorated when I moved in, hanging blue ready-made curtains over the windows and buying bright yellow cushions for the chairs along with matching place mats. I laid a fluffy blue rug by the sink and dangled striped blue-and-yellow pot holders from hooks beside the cooktop. I’m not sure what I was hoping to accomplish—as if Dad would see the pot holders and think, Gee, those make me so happy, I’ll stop missing Mom. I guess I hoped that if I could somehow make it look like a home, then it would actually be one.

  I’m tired. Maybe it’s good that the house is sold. I’ve only been back a few times, for holidays or when Lauren is home for a visit, but every time I’m there it makes me feel worse. It’s not just Mom. It’s everything, even Marissa.

  I’m still mad about the things Sarah said. She’s wrong—she is—but I have to admit that it’s been hard to connect with Marissa. There’s always so much going on, and it’s not like she lives around the corner anymore. I hate that I felt the distance when I hugged her goodbye. I’ll fix it, though. Just as soon as she gets back.

  I let my eyes drift shut. I want Dillon to be here so badly—I want to lean into him instead of this cold kitchen counter. “Hold me,” I’d say, and he’d put down whatever he’s
doing and pull me against his chest and we’d stay like that, my head on his shoulder, his hands warm at the small of my back. After a few minutes, he’d say, “Come sit,” and I’d end up on the couch with my feet in his lap and his hands doing magical things as he massaged. “My turn next,” I would promise, and he would nod, and then we’d both smile because I’m terrible at massages and it’s never his turn and he never cares. God, I miss him so much.

  The fight we had is still in the back of my mind like a bug bite you forget you have until suddenly it starts to itch. I want to imagine us making up, but it’s the one thing I can’t picture. We almost never fight.

  A drawer clangs shut in the small office off the master bedroom. My eyes flash open. “Dad?” I call again.

  “Back here, baby.”

  I straighten and gather myself in a steadying breath. I need to do this now. I’ll tell him about the move and then I’ll tell him I need him to keep it together. I need him to be a responsible dad—just for a little while longer.

  But when I get to the door of his office, I freeze. I want to sink to the carpet. No. That’s not true. I want to turn away and let someone else deal with this. But there is no one else.

  The room is a wreck. The desk and chair are covered with old photos and the credenza is piled with things I recognize from a tub of scrapbooking supplies I collected when I went through a phase a few years ago. The family photo albums are lying open on the rug beneath his desk. Dad is sitting in the middle of the albums, a bottle of wine lying empty on its side. A second one is barely balanced on the edge of his desk. Perfect. He’s picked today to fall apart.

  There’s a glass in his hands, the wine sloshing like purple waves as he takes a drink and looks up at me with a sweet smile. “How was your day? How were all my favorite girls?”

  I can almost hear Lauren’s voice in my head: Tell him now—how much worse can it get?

  “Dad,” I say, “let’s get you off the floor.”

  He shakes his head. “I’m making a memory book. For your mom.”

  “Oh.” I inject just enough enthusiasm in my voice so he’s relaxed and unsuspecting as I pull the glass out of his hand and set it on the desk. I glance around the room again.

  What would an archaeologist think if they uncovered this space a thousand years from now? They’d find pictures of smiling parents. Two little girls in matching pajamas growing up in a series of Christmas photos that abruptly ended when Lauren turned eleven and balked at the humiliation. There are homemade birthday cards hanging from a small corkboard and a little statuette with wide arms that says I LOVE YOU THIS MUCH. Would a historian conclude that a happy family had lived here? Or would they dig deeper and notice that as the smiling parents got older, the space between their faces got wider and wider? First the faces of children appeared between them, and then just…space. Would they look at the wreckage in this room and see a search for something missing? Or would they see what it actually was—a search for what had been lost?

  I think of Dillon and my throat tightens. We will never get to this place. Never.

  I move the wine bottle and uncover a stack of clippings Dad must have pulled out of a box from the attic. I shuffle through them as if they’re snapshots from the years of their marriage. Dad’s smiling face behind a desk as trips are announced to Egypt and Macedonia and Turkey. Always that same photo as if time touched everything except the historian.

  “Silly, wasn’t it?” He looks up at me, and my heart hurts from the pain in his swollen eyes.

  “What, Dad?”

  “I used that same awful photo for fifteen years.”

  “You didn’t have time to sit still for another one.”

  “I never had time for too many things.” He rubs a hand over his face and looks around. He’s wearing plaid pajama bottoms and a rumpled ASU T-shirt that’s so old and faded only the S is still readable. But it’s like everything else from our past life. He can’t let it go.

  He has nice eyes, clear blue when he isn’t drinking, and even with the new lines etched into his face over the past year he seems scholarly rather than old. His hair is more salt than pepper, but he still has plenty of it. He’s a handsome guy. He looks like one of those dads on TV you wish were your own.

  Which is who he used to be.

  “I was watching a movie this afternoon. Something embarrassingly sentimental.” He scratches at the back of his neck. “The man put together an album of photos and left it for the woman. It seemed like a good idea.” He smiles and shrugs. “Memories of the two of us to remind her of what we had. But then I couldn’t find any pictures of just the two of us. There were vacations and school events and Lauren’s moot court competitions. Sometimes the four of us, but usually the three of you, and when I was there, I was behind the camera. Observing. The role of the historian.” His voice is sad. “Not so good an observer after all.”

  “Dad.”

  His head hangs. “We only see once it’s too late.” He closes an album, a tiny tremor running across his rigid shoulders. Shaking free of ghosts—that’s what it reminds me of when he does that. “How is she?” he asks.

  “Fine. She’s fine.”

  “Did you two talk things out?”

  “There’s nothing for us to talk about.”

  “Emma, you can’t keep shutting her out. It doesn’t help anything. It could be part of what’s keeping us all separated.”

  I stare at him in disbelief. “It’s not what’s keeping us separated.”

  Dad’s throat works up and down. “He wasn’t there, was he?”

  “No.”

  His shoulders dip with relief. The shadow of a smile lifts the corners of his mouth. “Mom and I have exchanged some emails about Lauren. About arranging an apartment for her this summer and the tone has been so friendly. She’s all alone in that big house and I think she’s starting to feel it, baby.”

  “Dad.” I swallow.

  “I’m going to finish this memory book for her birthday in three weeks. She’ll like it, don’t you think?”

  “Dad,” I say again. Gently. Firmly. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  He brings a hand to his chest and his face lights up. I have to look away. His hope is such a painful, painful thing. A thin, fragile, impossible thing and yet he holds on to it with a death grip. How do I take that away from him?

  “Well?” he asks.

  “It’s about next year.” I smile. “How would you feel about me going to Rome?”

  I’m being pulled up from under dark blue water…tugged to the surface by the sound of a heart beating in rhythm with the waves.

  Hmmmm Hmmmm Hmmmm Hmmmm.

  I wake suddenly, blinking my eyes open to pitch black and the sound of my phone vibrating. Heart in my throat, I reach for my cell, knocking over a bottle of hand lotion before my fingers find the phone. I slide my finger across the call button. “Hello?”

  “Emma!”

  “Dillon?” I push myself up, my breath coming hard and fast. “It’s the middle of the night. Are you okay?”

  “I couldn’t sleep.” He sounds far away and there’s a hum in the background as if a fly is caught on the line. But it’s him. It’s Dillon.

  “Are you still on the cruise?”

  “Two more nights.”

  “But how are you—I didn’t think there was a phone.”

  “I’m not supposed to be calling. It costs almost as much as the cruise.”

  “Dillon—”

  “I don’t care,” he interrupts. His voice is strained, as if someone has a fist around his lungs. “I had to hear your voice. I hate that we fought.”

  I sink back and it feels like the only thing holding me up this past week has been worry. Suddenly it’s gone and I’m as heavy and limp as a wet towel. I cradle the phone wishing I were touching him instead. “I hate it, too.”

  “We’ll work it out, Em. Our lives are connected—the Red String, remember?”

  “Of course I remember.” I smile and my
eyes feel a tiny bit wet at the corners. “The day you saved my life.”

  “I’ll always save you,” he says. “I’ll always keep you safe.” His breath is ragged over the phone. “I have to go,” he says. “My mother will go ballistic when she sees the charges.”

  I press my cheek harder into the phone. “I’m glad you called. I was worried. I—”

  “We’ll be together soon.” His voice catches, breaks. “For always.”

  “Dillon?”

  There’s a sharp click.

  “Dillon?”

  The phone screen goes dark. I stare at it a second, then press the phone to my chest. My pulse is racing. His voice sounded so strange at the end. It must have been the connection.

  AUGUST 24, AD 79

  SEVENTH HOUR, 1:00 P.M.

  Anna is stirring the fish stew when Marcus arrives at her lunch counter. She meets his piercing gray eyes, hopeful. He drops his head, his curls not quite hiding the flush. She fights her disappointment as she reaches for a bowl and a ladle to serve him.

  It won’t be today.

  “My father…It must be done carefully,” he murmurs.

  It is what he says every day. She forces a nod and reminds herself that Marcus Ceillus is from one of the finest families in all of Pompeii. She is lucky to have his love at all.

  As if he reads her thoughts, he leans in. “It will not be forever.” Then he presses coins for the stew into her palm, along with something else. Something round yet pointed. Her pulse beats furiously as she shifts, turning away from the danger of snooping eyes. When Anna uncurls her fingers, it is all she can do not to cry out.

  Lying in her palm is the most beautiful ring she has ever seen. It is a coiled serpent, glimmering in pure gold with a raised head and eyes formed by two dark jewels.

  “To remind you,” Marcus murmurs, “that just as the snake does, we may shed our skin and become reborn.”

  Anna shakes her head. “I cannot wear this!”

  “Keep it for now. As a promise of our future together.”

  Anna slides the ring deep into the pouch that hangs from the belt of her simple tunic. She is both scared and thrilled. It is the most valuable thing she has ever owned.