A Ticket to Ride (20 page)

Later, when I would revisit this moment in memory, I would hear the cicadas’ chorusing differently, their meaning reaching broader to become an elegy—not just for Fawn but for everything that had been lost: the soft night-talk, the sweet bracelet of Collin’s hand circling my ankle, the way I had so needed to be told by someone, anyone, that I was good enough. They were singing for Suzette, dead at twenty-six, and for the absence I carried in my mother’s shape, a pinching skin I wore and would always wear on the inside.

More than anything, the cicadas were singing for Claudia, who wasn’t a girl anymore but a name that time was erasing, evaporating, melting away. I would never hear cicadas again without thinking their voices took the shape of loss itself, defining it in time and space, and defining me too. I would always be the one who could have drowned that night in Chicago, but didn’t. The one who wasn’t, who isn’t Claudia.

Fawn too would become fixed from that moment on. Not lost but not found, either. A forever sixteen-year-old. A mistake, a mirror, a feeling, a dream. In the years ahead, when Raymond and I would hear news of Fawn—that she was in New York for a year or so, then in Boston, then nowhere, no one knowing what she was doing for money, whether she was singing in a seedy club like the Razzle Dazzle or selling phone-book ads door to door or in love, even, floating in a pink sea of optimism—I would find myself wondering if Fawn
had
come looking for me the night before she left, if the dream image of Fawn’s face beyond the opaque plastic at the greenhouse had been real. Maybe the
sound I had thought was cicadas was really Fawn’s voice repeating my name like a question in the dark.

But for the moment it was nearly morning, a Tuesday at the end of August, warm and untransformed by my thinking or dreaming. I stood up from my bed of peat. I was achy and filthy and exhausted in a way that filled me like my own spine. It held me up, how tired I was. It walked me home. When I got there, I found Raymond sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee.

“I’ve been worried,” he said. He crossed over to the pot, poured me a cup, and handed it to me. Perhaps I imagined it, but he seemed to know where I’d been and what I’d decided. His eyes were kind and his silence even kinder.

“Thanks,” I said to Raymond and held the cup. I didn’t drink it, just held it. Felt how warm it was in my hands, took the warmth into my lungs and breathed it out again.

Was there anything sadder than starting your life? I didn’t think there was. Did Fawn know that, wherever she was then, in a fast car on the highway somewhere, or in her own too-fast dream? Would she let herself know that? I looked at Raymond and then at the window holding as much light as it could bear, and then at my two hands, the way my fingertips just knitted. This was my body, a sink of memory and doubt, a messy but salvageable bridge. A place to begin.

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my agent, Julie Barer, whose enthusiasm and editorial savvy got me through crucial drafts; and to my editor, Emily Takoudes, for continued faith and for championing this book long before it was a book. Thanks to Daniel Halpern, Rachel Elinsky, Greg Mortimer, and all the fine folks at Ecco/HarperCollins, and to Olga Gardner Galvin. Many thanks to early readers who offered invaluable advice: Glori Simmons, Lori Keene, Robin Messing, and Leigh Feldman. I’m grateful for the ongoing support of my family and dear friends, especially Teresa Reller, Penny Pennington, Rita Hinken, Alice D’Alessio, Julie Hayward, Becky Gaylord, Katherine Carlstrom and Steven Hayward, Pam and Doug O’Hara, Kirsten Docter and Paul Cox, Amy Weinfurtner, Patricia Kao, Heather Greene, Michael Schwartz, and my extraordinary colleagues and students at New England College and John Carroll University. Finally, thanks to my husband, Greg D’Alessio, for talking me through all the false starts, snarled drafts, and general self-loathing, and for so much more.