All the Way Home

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  She tries another one. No coffeemaker, although there’s a china teapot with the spout broken off and a bunch of mugs her father used to collect from places he visited. They’re the souvenir kind, imprinted with cheesy slogans and mottos. Rory moves them around, looking at the names of places. There are a few from Albany. One from Niagara Falls. One from the Catskills.

  You never went far from home, did you, Daddy? Rory thinks wistfully. She considers the places she’s been since she left Lake Charlotte; thinks about how she’s skied in the Rockies and sailed in the Florida Keys; camped in the Black Hills and braved a Minnesota winter.

  Patrick Connolly would have loved it, all of it. He had taught American history and geography at the local community college. When Rory was young, she used to sit on his lap and turn the pages of his big atlas while he told her about faraway places, told her stories of what had happened there in the “olden days,” as she used to call them. He could go on for hours, and she would feign fascination long after she had lost interest, because nobody else ever listened to him, and because she felt safe, curled up there on her father’s lap, his strong arms draped around her shoulders and his deep voice rumbling in her ears.

  Oh, Daddy, Rory thinks, her eyes suddenly stinging with tears. I got my wanderlust from you, didn’t I? You never wanted to live your whole life in this little town, in this run-­down house, saddled with a teaching job and bills and a wife who was too emotionally fragile to go farther than the A&P a few blocks away.

  Only now does Rory grasp the extent of her father’s longing. Back then, he acted as though it didn’t matter that he never went anywhere, that they never did anything. He used to tell Rory that someday he was going to retire and buy one of those big old RVs and see the country.

  Who knew then that he wasn’t going to live to see forty?

  So he’d never seen any of the places he dreamed of and read about. Never went more than a few hundred miles from Lake Charlotte, except for the year they had spent in California while he was on sabbatical.

  Rory tries to push that out of her mind.

  That was different, she reminds herself. That was a terrible time. So many years of Daddy wistfully talking about how he’d love to take a sabbatical, and Mom flatly refusing to leave Lake Charlotte—­and then, boom. Trouble struck, and they saw their only chance to escape. A hollow victory for Daddy. The year in California was more like an exile than a vacation.

  Rory hurriedly closes the cupboard and turns away, anxious to forget the period in her life when everything fell apart, setting into motion a chain of events that had ultimately destroyed her family.

  Her gaze falls on Molly, still sitting at the table with her back to Rory, crunching her cereal and flipping the pages of Seventeen magazine.

  Rory contemplates telling her sister that she used to read that magazine, too, when she was Molly’s age. She and Carleen used to bring it into the upstairs bathroom they shared and try to duplicate the models’ hairstyles and makeup on each other.

  Carleen.

  Everywhere Rory turns, there are ghosts.

  I should never have come back here. Why did I come back here?

  Because you had no choice, she reminds herself. Because you couldn’t run away forever. Deal with it. Get past it. It’s time to start forgetting.

  Apparently, learning to forget means first allowing the memories back in.

  She clears her throat and blurts, “Is there a coffeemaker?”

  Molly jumps, clearly startled, then shakes her head without turning it around. “Uh-­uh.”

  “No coffeemaker?” Rory asks incredulously.

  “Mom drinks tea,” Molly says in a voice that lets Rory know that if she had been around all these years, as she should have been, she would have known that.

  As if she could forget the perpetual sight of Maura, hunched at the table in the very spot where Molly is now sitting, clutching a steaming mug of the strong Irish brew.

  “I know Mom drinks tea,” Rory replies in an I’ve-­known-­Mom-­longer-­than-­you-­have tone.

  She instantly regrets it. She’s the adult here. Not a jealous kid sister. Not anymore.

  But for a moment there, Molly had sounded eerily like Carleen. And Rory had been a child again, trying not to let her big sister’s superior attitude get to her.

  “Carleen’s acting big again, Daddy. Tell her to stop.”

  “You can act big, too, Rory . . . just climb up on a chair and act big.”

  “Daddy! That’s not what I mean. It’s not fair that she always acts like she knows more than me and it’s not fair that she can do more stuff than I can.”

  “That’s because she’s the oldest, Rory.”

  “But that’s not fair. I wish I could be the oldest . . . Someday, will I get a turn to be the oldest?”

  “Don’t be silly, Rory. That’s impossible. Carleen is the oldest. That’s just how it works.”

  You were wrong, Daddy. My wish came true, Rory thinks grimly now. I’m the oldest. I have a responsibility to this family. Mostly to Molly. She needs me whether she knows it or not.

  “So there’s no coffeemaker anymore,” Rory says thoughtfully, looking around the kitchen.

  “There’s never been a coffeemaker. I told you, Mom doesn’t drink it.”

  But Daddy did, Rory tells her silently. You don’t remember that.

  Aloud, she says, “I guess I’ll have to buy one, then. I can do that in town. Do they still sell stuff like that at McShane’s?”

  Molly looks at her blankly.

  “The hardware store,” Rory says. “McShane’s.”

  “There’s a Home Depot on High Ridge Road.”

  “McShane’s is gone?”

  Then Rory realizes. Of course it must be gone. The owner, Hank McShane, had been an old man when she was a kid, and his only son, Doug, hadn’t wanted to take over the family business. He had become a cop instead. He was the detective who had worked on Carleen’s case.

  There it was again.

  “Where’s that Home Depot?” Rory asks, even though she heard Molly the first time.

  Her sister rolls her eyes as she repeats herself, and Rory says, “I don’t know if they sell small appliances, but they’ll have paint, and I needed to get some today anyway.”

  “Why?” Now Molly turns to look at her.

  “Because I’m going to paint the kitchen cupboards and trim.”

  “Why?”

  “Because . . . I mean, look around. It needs it.”

  “You can’t just show up here and take over. You can’t just go around painting stuff,” Molly tells her.

  “Somebody has to. This place is a wreck.”

  Molly says nothing, just turns back to her cereal and her magazine.

  “Want to come with me?” Rory asks, though she already knows the answer. “We can stop at that new little cafe on the way—­the one where the Rainbow Palace used to be—­”

  “Rainbow Palace?”

  “That’s probably before your time. It was a Chinese restaurant on Front Street, but it closed before I left for college.”

  “Well, the cafe’s not new. It’s been there, like, forever.”

  Not forever, Rory wants to say, but thinks better of quibbling. She recognizes Molly’s need to remind her that she hasn’t spent much time in Lake Charlotte these past few years.

  She goes on. “Anyway, 1 can get an espresso, and—­”

  “Nope.”

  Just when Rory thinks her sister is going to leave her answer at that curt, single word, Molly adds grudgingly, “I have to meet someone.”

  “Oh.”

  Anyone I know? Rory almost asks. But she stops herself just in time. She doesn’t know Molly’s friends. She doesn’t know anything about her life.

  Silence falls between them.

  Molly’s sp
oon clinks against her bowl.

  She turns a page of her magazine so forcefully that it rips.

  Rory sighs. “Okay,” she says. “I’ll be back in a few hours. Tell Mom.”

  “Tell her yourself.” Molly pushes her chair back. “I’m outta here.”

  “When will you be back?”

  “Later” is Molly’s sullen reply as the screen door bangs shut behind her.

  Rory stands in the middle of the kitchen for a moment. Then she gets her sister’s bowl from the table and puts it into the sink, absently running water into it long after the milk has swirled down the drain.

  Hearing a screen door slam next door, Michelle Randall glances out the open window next to the bathroom sink.

  A pretty redhead with long, untamed curls is striding quickly toward the detached garage, and Michelle can hear the impatient jingling of the car keys in her hand even from up here.

  That has to be Molly’s older sister, Rory. Michelle decides that now isn’t the time to catch her and introduce herself in a neighborly fashion.

  Even if the woman wasn’t clearly in such a hurry, it would take Michelle forever to lug her enormous body—­not to mention Ozzie—­down the steep flight of stairs in this heat. Besides, her stomach is still roiling from being sick in the toilet a few moments ago.

  “Are you done frowing up, Mommy?” Ozzie asks from the floor at her feet.

  She glances down and sees that he’s playing with the long-­handled brush she uses to clean the toilet.

  “Ozzie, no!” she shrieks, grabbing it and prying it from his chubby fingers.

  He promptly bursts into tears.

  “That’s yucky, sweetheart,” she says, shoving the brush back into the plastic holder behind the tank and scooping her toddler into her arms. “Come on, let’s scrub your hands.”

  “No! No scrub!”

  “Ozzie, stop squirming,” Michelle says sharply, struggling to keep her grasp on the little boy despite her enormous, protruding tummy.

  She hoists him toward the sink, turns on the water, and reaches for the antibacterial soap. They go through a lot of that these days. Ozzie gets into everything.

  Oh, Lord, what am I going to do when I have a baby to take care of, too? she wonders, exhausted already though it’s barely nine A.M. She didn’t sleep more than a few hours total last night, thanks to indigestion and the baby pressing on her bladder, which meant countless trips down the hall to the bathroom.

  Maybe it’s a mistake to have another one right now, she thinks wearily. She shouldn’t have let Lou talk her into it. They have their hands full with Ozzie, who’s in the throes of the Terrible Twos, not to mention this big old house that’s under renovation and will be for what’s bound to feel like forever.

  We never should have bought this place, she tells herself. I knew it from the start.

  Lou was the one who had stumbled across the For Sale sign one day, and insisted that they look at it even though it was obviously falling apart. He was the one who had talked her into buying this place, calling it a steal. It was surprisingly inexpensive for a house this size—­due, no doubt, to the fact that it had stood vacant for years, and was rumored to be haunted. Aside from all that, she had thought they were taking on more house than they needed or could afford.

  The renovation is going to be a slow process; they don’t have the money for most of what they want to do, even with Lou’s recent promotion at the law firm to junior partner.

  Before he left for the office this morning, Lou had reminded Michelle to call John Kline, her second cousin and the architect they’re working with, and set up an appointment to discuss the family-­room addition.

  When Michelle suggested that they hold off until they have some money in the bank, Lou argued that they’ll need the extra space as soon as possible, with a baby on the way.

  “But we can use the extra money, too,” Michelle had pointed out. Until she got pregnant, she had been planning to go back to work this fall at the elementary school where she had taught art until Ozzie was born.

  But now she’s expecting the baby in late July or August, and it will be at least another year before she’ll feel like she can leave Ozzie and the new little guy in day care or with a full-­time sitter. There are too many crazies out there; it’s just too hard to find someone you can trust with your children these days.

  Michelle feels a pang of loss, thinking about her mother, who died only months before Ozzie was born. Mom had lived right here in town, and she would have loved spending her retirement years taking care of her grandchildren.

  Lou’s mother, on the other hand, isn’t the grandmotherly type. Iris is too busy with her garden club and bridge club and God knows what else, and, besides, her winters in Clearwater Beach keep getting longer and longer.

  No, Michelle can’t count on her to help out.

  Of course, there’s Molly. She’s terrific with Ozzie. But she’s just a kid herself. Michelle doesn’t like to leave her alone with Ozzie at night if she can help it. The few times she has, Molly has seemed nervous about it. And just the other night, she asked Michelle if she thought the house was really haunted.

  Michelle would rather not think about that possibility. She’s a grown woman, and when they bought the place, she and Lou laughed off the rumors that the house was haunted by the ghost of Emily Anghardt, the young girl who disappeared from here and presumably was murdered. But the past few nights, with Lou working late at the office, she’s found herself spooked about being alone here.

  Must be the pregnancy. She’s feeling vulnerable in a lot of ways lately.

  Drying Ozzie’s hands, she says, “How about if we go downstairs for a snack?”

  “Snack? Yes, snack. Yummy!” he replies eagerly, and makes a beeline for the door.

  “Wait for Mommy,” she calls, hurrying to catch up. She presses one hand into her aching lower back and uses the other to wipe a trickle of sweat from her forehead. The temperature is already steamy, and the sun has only been up a few hours. Weather like this is unusual in the foothills of the Adirondacks, even in late June.

  “What should we have, Ozzie?” Michelle asks her son in the kitchen, surveying the contents of the cupboard. She really needs to get to the supermarket later. Things are looking pretty bare, and she just got groceries a few days ago.

  “Ice cream,” Ozzie says firmly, his eyes lighting up at the prospect of his favorite treat.

  “It’s too early for ice cream,” Michelle tells him. “How about a ­couple of crackers and peanut butter?”

  She takes out a box of saltines, thinking they’ll settle her stomach. Nothing like having morning sickness the whole nine months, she thinks grimly. She reaches into the nearly empty inner waxed paper bag and pulls out a ­couple of crackers.

  “No. Ice cream,” Ozzie insists.

  The saltines taste unpleasantly dry in this heat and Michelle eats only one, putting the rest back into the bag.

  “Okay,” she says, returning the box to the cupboard. “It’s got to be ninety degrees out. Ice cream it is, Ozzie.”

  Molly nudges Rebecca’s arm and tilts her head in the direction of two boys coming out of the bait and tackle shop across from the park bench where they’re sitting.

  “Look. There’s Ryan Baker,” she says.

  “Oh, gee, Molly, is he why we’re sitting here instead of at the library?” Rebecca’s serious gray eyes look dismayed behind her owlish glasses, and she flips her long, slightly frizzy dark hair over her shoulders impatiently.

  “Relax. The library doesn’t open until ten.”

  “It’s ten-­fifteen.”

  “Oh. Well, don’t be ridiculous. How would I know he was going to be here?” Molly asks, watching as Ryan and his friend Andy Chase get on their bikes, balancing fishing poles over their shoulders.

  “Maybe you overheard Jessica telling Am
anda yesterday that Ryan couldn’t go with her to the mall today because he and Andy were going fishing at the park after they finish their paper routes,” Rebecca says pointedly. “I know I heard her. Everyone at Carvel heard her. She wants the world to know that she and Ryan are going out.”

  “Oh, really? 1 didn’t hear her say that,” Molly lies, intent on Ryan, who’s skillfully peddling across the street in their direction.

  She admires the way he wears his Yankees cap backward. That must be why his face is ruddy from the sun. The other day, when she bumped into him at the gas station where they were both getting air in their bike tires, she noticed that he has a sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of his nose, and that the tip of it is peeling from a recent sunburn.

  Lately, she notices everything about Ryan Baker.

  Too bad he doesn’t notice her.

  Except . . .

  Did he just glance in her direction as he rode his bike up over the curb onto the sidewalk a few yards away?

  “Hi, Ryan!” she calls impulsively, then just as impulsively wants to crawl under the bench and hide.

  Maybe he’ll think Rebecca said it, she thinks hopefully, and glances at her friend, whose nose is buried in some dumb library book she’s about to return. It’s about cats. Rebecca loves cats. She’s wearing a pink T-­shirt with a kitten’s face appliquéd below her shoulder. Molly gave it to her for her birthday last month, but now she wishes she hadn’t. It looks so juvenile.

  “Hey, Molly. Hi, Rebecca,” Ryan says, slowing his bike in front of them.

  Molly realizes he’s only waiting for Andy, who’s stuck on the other side of the street, waiting for traffic. Still, Ryan didn’t have to stop in front of her. He didn’t have to say hi.

  No, hey. He’d said hey, in that casual way of his, around a piece of gum he’s chewing.

  “Hey, Ryan,” Molly says.

  “Yeah?” He backpedals, balancing his bike somehow without falling over.

  She feels herself blush under his glance. “Oh . . . I just meant, hey. You know, as in ‘hi.’ ” Which you already said, you idiot.