Fixing Delilah (4 page)
“Did you ever read it?” I ask.
“No.”
“Not even after she died?”
Aunt Rachel shakes her head, removing an eggplant from the middle row and pressing her fingers against its flesh. “To this day, I don’t know if I would’ve, either. We never found it, Delilah. It’s like she just… took it with her.”
An involuntary shiver crawls across my skin as Rachel bags the eggplant and sets it in the cart, moving us on to the lettuce. I want to ask more about Stephanie, about the diary and her boyfriend, about what her life was like and what made her heart stop working. But Rachel’s shoulders seem heavy under the burden of remembering this much, so I close my mouth, focusing instead on helping her find fresh watercress and the romaine with the crispest, greenest leaves.
We keep the conversation deceptively light when we discuss the imported cheese selection, when we pick out cereals, and when we stock up on cleaning supplies. At the end of our shopping mission, we cruise through the bakery to say good-bye again to Megan, and I help Rachel unload the groceries from our cart onto the checkout conveyor belt. As we watch the cashier scan and drop our items one at a time into brown paper sacks, we don’t say anything else about Stephanie or the family fight or the past. We just smile and pay and wheel everything out to the parking lot, the cloudless blue sky making everything seem better than it is.
“What’s that smell?” I set the last bag of groceries on the kitchen counter, waving a hand in front of my face to clear the smoke.
“Sage.” Rachel points to a stick of incense burning on the windowsill. “You burn it for an ‘out with the bad, in with the good’ kinda thing. Negative energy attaches to the smoke and flows out—see?” A long wisp of smoke rises like a ghost and wraps around her finger, trailing through the open window over the sink. It reminds me of Finn, blowing out the smoke of his cigarette in the truck last night.
So much has happened in twenty-four hours that it hardly seems real, the smoke just another part of a long, uninterpretable dream. As soon as I open my eyes, I’ll wake up in my own bed, half-asleep with the television on, sunlight sneaking in through the windows to remind me that it’s time for school.
“Great. FedEx them tomorrow for priority delivery,” Mom says from her newly established office—a folding table in the back corner of the kitchen, flanked by a dry erase board and a giant wall calendar. I’m surprised the sage isn’t interfering with her corporate chi.
“Also,” she continues, “I got a call about the invoices.” Her back is to us as she chatters away at an efficient clip, confirming details and setting goals and exceeding expectations, one hand smoothing her hair, the other pressing her ear to her assistant’s voice across the satellites a million miles from anywhere that matters.
“She makes her people work on Sundays?” Rachel whispers, pulling some of my grandmother’s old food from the fridge and sniffing it.
“Nah—weekends are optional. They only have to work them if they want to keep their jobs.”
I watch a drop of water speed down the side of an orange juice carton on the kitchen table and wonder how long ago my grandmother’s hands were on it. When did she pour her last glass? Or did she drink it straight from the carton, fridge door open as she took a swig? A Cherry Coke feeling fizzes in my stomach, bubbles rising alongside thoughts of my grandmother and the inevitable future: me wading through my own mother’s final foodstuffs and wondering how things could have/would have/should have been different. The sadness of everything slides up my spine and grabs me, two cold hands around my neck.
“That’s the last bag of groceries,” I tell Rachel, pointing to the stuff I just brought in. “I need some air.” My eyes are steady on the side door as I move toward it, tugging on the cool metal handle and flinging myself into the fading sunlight. I head around back, down the big hill, all the way over to the bleachers, turning back only once to look at the house and the tall rows of maples that guard it. Their branches and leaves scratch lightly against the chipped pillars of the wraparound porch and I know that they have the whole story, those trees.
But like the women in my family, they’re not saying anything, either.
The evening sun is hot on my black tank top, but the underbelly of the bleachers traps the cool, gentle breeze off the water. Hidden beneath mostly deserted wooden rows, I look out at the lake that was such a part of my childhood summers and cry big, silent tears. I still remember the smells, like coconut oil and charcoal and hot dogs and fish. The moist air feels the same as it always has, and when I listen to the rippling water and the music and the kids laughing and splooshing and squealing, I become them. Five years old again, arms stuffed like sausages into inflatable swim fins, going in as far as my knees, then my hips, sneaking in inch by inch until Mom waves me back to the shore, ever-present and protective in those flippety, float-on-by days. Back then, I didn’t yet miss the dad I never met. I didn’t know that when I’d finally beg my mother to share everything she remembered about him, she’d look at me with exasperated eyes and give me the newspaper article and the whole, one-night story of them, saying only that she was sorry. That she wished there were more to tell.
AFGHAN BOY KILLS AWARD-WINNING BRITISH JOURNALIST; BOY’S FAMILY CALLS IT ‘TRAGIC ACCIDENT’
KABUL—A twelve-year-old boy shot and killed National Post journalist Thomas Devlin on Thursday in Tuksar, Afghanistan. Devlin, thirty-six, was shot at close range in the head and chest after the boy returned from school and mistook him for an intruder. Devlin was at the house to interview the boy’s mother [name withheld] for a story on paramilitary recruitment of children in the rebel-controlled village in northern Afghanistan.
Devlin, a London native and graduate of Oxford University, is best known for his extensive fieldwork in politically unstable countries with displaced civilians and endangered species. Last year, his National Post series, “The Elephant’s Journey,” earned him the esteemed National Journalism Award in Britain and international recognition for exposing major underground poaching networks in Kenya and Namibia. Both countries have since enacted stronger antipoaching and endangered species protection laws, crediting Devlin with raising national awareness of the impacts of poaching and worldwide compassion for the plights of orphaned elephants.
Devlin’s recent work in Afghanistan was to be part of a larger National Post series on civilian life in rural areas of the war-torn Middle East. The family of the boy who shot him declined to be interviewed, saying only that the incident was a tragic accident.
Devlin, mourned by friends and colleagues at home and throughout the international community, left no surviving relatives.
Well, there
was
the woman from the bar he met on his last night in Philadelphia. No one knew about her, with the long dark hair and the little triangle of brown at the top of one of her otherwise hazel eyes.
He loved her laugh. He said so.
She loved his accent. She said so.
Shall we?
Yes, let’s.
When Thomas (not Tom) Devlin boarded the plane back to London the next morning to transfer to the one that would take him on his very last assignment, he probably thought about the woman and her eyes and her laugh. She probably thought about him, too—the way he said her name. The way he smiled at her across the bar. That’s how I like to imagine it. But back then, neither knew about the tiny little thing already setting up camp inside her uterus. If Thomas
had
known, maybe he would’ve thought about that tiny little thing before he saw the boy and the gun and opened his mouth to say, “God!” or “No!” or “PLEASE!” or
“Please?”
or—well, only the now twenty-nine-year-old Afghan boy and his mother know for sure.
The embryo of me aside, there was no one else, just as the article said. And now, other than me and Aunt Rachel, my mother has no surviving family, either. No one to tell the stories. No one to inherit the china in the dining room or the wavy chocolate-brown hair or the laugh that ends an octave higher than it starts. No one to tell us where we’ve been or who we are or whether any of it was even worth it.
Like so many of the hard things between us, Mom still won’t talk about my father. Does she miss him? Does she resent him or the boy in Tuksar for making her a single mom? Does she ever think about him? I have his picture tacked up on my bulletin board—the headshot I printed from his online
National Post
bio—and sometimes I look at it for hours, searching the lines and shadows of his face for anything like my own. But the mirror tells me that I’m mostly my mother’s daughter. Hair. Eyes. Skin tone. Teeth. All of them, a younger version of hers. So what is it, then, that makes me Thomas Devlin’s daughter? Did I inherit his sense of adventure and twist it into my own form of recklessness? His need to uncover and expose the truth? His constant search for something more?
I never met my father, so it’s not like I feel this big hole in my heart where all the stuff of him used to be: the scent of his cologne. The sound of his voice. The bend of his favorite hat. But there are times like now when I wish that he was here, that I could ask him what I should do, what I should say, how I should be. That he’d answer me. That he’d look at me and say the right words and kiss me on the cheek, and I’d believe him.
A seagull lands on the bleachers and my mind comes back to the present, fingers scratching and peeling a loose patch of paint from the row in front of me. As I drop papery gray flecks into the dirt below, I notice someone, two sections over, one down, stretched out on his back with a book pressed flat across his chest and a baseball hat pulled low over his eyes. I creep one section closer, hidden by the shadows, my hands on the bars beneath the bleachers as I watch the gentle way his lungs expand and contract, expand and contract in the setting sun.
“You’re not going to sneak up and scare me, are you?” he asks.
“I… no. I was just… I’m… sorry?” I step backward and, in all my startled and graceless glory, whack my head on a support beam.
“Oww!”
“I felt that.” He sits up and puts his hat on the right way before sliding in under the bleachers to meet me, his face hidden by the shade. “You okay?”
“I didn’t mean to interrupt.” I nod toward his book and hope he’ll stop watching me rub my stupid (and now throbbing) head. Hope that the breeze has sufficiently dried my earlier tears. Hope that he doesn’t ask too many questions.
“Nah, it’s cool,” he says, flipping over
Catcher in the Rye
. “I’ve read it before. I just like coming down here. It’s peaceful…
usually
.” He smiles. “Hey, seriously. You okay?” He rubs the back of his head on the spot where the lump is undoubtedly forming on mine.
“Yeah. I’m… um…” I take another step back. “I was just leav—”
“Stay.” He reaches for my hand but changes his mind. “I mean, you don’t
have
to leave,” he says. “Unless you want to. But it’s cool if you want to stay.”
I’m about to ask Mr. Holden Caulfield just who he thinks he is, reaching for my hand under the bleachers, all up in my personal space like some kind of stalker. But then he turns his hat around backward and shifts so the light is on his face. As soon as I see those eyes up close—gold-flecked and amber and a little bit mischievous—all I can do is smile.
“Little
Ricky
?” I throw my arms around him; his laugh is the only confirmation I need.
“It’s Patrick now, but yeah. It’s me.” He pulls away to look at me again, his hand sliding down my arm and closing around my wrist. “My dad told me you guys would be back today. Hey, I’m really sorry about—”
“Your parents still live here?” I ask, staring. His braces are gone now, and he’s got six inches of height on me. The freckles of childhood have faded into smooth, tan skin, but otherwise, he’s still the same Little Ricky Reese. I mean,
Patrick
Reese.
“Dad does,” he says. “They split up a few years ago, but he kept the house. Mom’s in New York now doing her off-Broadway thing. Trying, anyway.”
“What about you?” I ask. “You’re here?”
He sticks his hand out between the benches, turning it over in the sun. “I actually live in Brooklyn with her during the school year, but I come to Vermont in the summers to help my dad with his construction stuff.”
“Your dad still has the remodeling business?” I remember the tools and workbenches and the mounds of sawdust in his garage next door. How Ricky always wanted to help, but we weren’t allowed to play in there.
“Yep. Only instead of Handyman Jack’s, now we’re Reese and Son Contracting. When I turned eighteen a few months ago, he made me a partner. Which is a fancy way of saying he mailed in some forms, got new signs for the truck, and gave me a lot more work to do.” Patrick smiles, readjusting his hat.
“I can’t believe… I can’t believe you’re here, like
right
here,” I say. “I was just thinking about when we used to come down here to look for stuff after the races.”
“Me, too.” He unearths a layer of dirt with his sneaker, still smiling beneath his cap.
“I haven’t seen you in eight years.”
Little-Ricky-now-Patrick nods and pulls his
Catcher
book against his chest. “Delilah Hannaford, you nearly broke my heart when you didn’t come back that summer.” He winks at me.
“I was eight,” I say, following him as he walks out toward the docks. “I didn’t get a vote.”
“I know. That’s why I’ve decided to forgive you. Well that, and you’re still kind of adorable.”
“
Kind
of?”
Patrick laughs and puts his arm around me, pulling me close in his old magnets-on-the-fridge way. “Hey, seriously, Delilah. I’m sorry about Nana. I was home when Dad… I mean, he called me over there and told me what happened.”
“How did he know she was… you know.
Gone?
” I keep my eyes down as we speak, one foot moving slowly in front of the other along the planks that make a wide path around this end of the lake.
“We were helping her remodel the sunroom in the back. When she didn’t answer the door yesterday, he went in, and that’s when he found her.”
I consider this as I recall the old sunroom, big bay windows looking out over the lake, all the sunlight shining through them nearly absorbed by the heavy wood panels covering each wall. I think about the matriarch of my family taking her final steps and final breaths, feeling again like I’m watching some fictional cop show with the tough-but-emotionally-wounded police escort giving details on the crime scene.
“Emergency response took her to Maple Valley so the doctor could confirm the cause of death,” Patrick says. “He said it was her heart. He asked us if we knew how to reach her next of kin, so Dad gave him the number he still had for your mom, but it was an old one. They tried Rachel next. You know the rest.”
“I’m not sad, really.” The confession falls out fast, but Patrick’s eyes don’t falter as I rush to explain. “I mean, the whole
thing
is sad, but it hasn’t really hit me. There’s so much… I haven’t been back since my grandfather’s funeral. I don’t remember them very well, you know?”
He nods. “That was the last time I saw you. You were wearing a light blue dress and you were just…” Patrick looks out over the lake, searching. “Inconsolable,” he says. “You asked me to find you four-leaf clovers for his grave.”
Clovers.
I don’t remember the light blue dress, but the clovers—of course. It’s as if I was here last week, combing through the grass while Papa watched me from his wheelchair.
Look, Papa! A six-leaf clover!
I’d made it by tearing three leaves down the middle because I’d already found so many four-leafers that I was afraid I’d use up all the good luck in Red Falls. My grandfather kissed the top of my head and called me his lucky little rabbit’s foot. It was like that every summer at the lake house—me. Papa. Little Ricky. The four-leaf clovers. I thought they’d last forever.
I lean on the rail over the water, watching the sun spark off the surface. A family walks behind us, the youngest of three kids riding his dad’s shoulders and pointing at the sailboats in the distance. “Boap! Boap! Boap!”
“More tourists than I remember,” I say.
“Yeah. They’ve really jacked this place up. Dad and I worked on some of that new construction over there.” Patrick points across the lake to a row of gray and white cottage-style homes on a spot that used to be no more than a thicket of trees with a small dirt path leading into the woods. “They stopped the boat races because the motors were disturbing the out-of-towner fishermen and the sailboats. They said it was preventing an ‘authentic New England experience.’ ”
I laugh. “Whose idea of authentic?”
“Exactly. It’s not completely overrun, though. Besides, once the boat races stopped, the turtles showed up.” He points toward the edge of the lake where two turtles bask on a large, smooth rock, their heads craning toward the sun. Behind them, a smaller turtle scrabbles up the side, slipping back into the water with a
sploosh
. Just as quickly as she fell, her head and feet poke through the surface of the lake for another try.
“I saw some new places on Main Street,” I tell Patrick as the turtle finally summits the rock. “Trendy camping store. Nail salon. Coffee place.”
“Luna’s,” he says. “The coffee place. I do shows there all summer.”
“Shows? Like, ‘To be, or not to be’ stuff?”
“Um,
no
.” He shoves me on the shoulder as we continue our walk, his deep smile showing off his dimples.
Oh no
. I remember
those
.
“I sing and play guitar,” he says. “Acoustic.”
“Seriously? You sing?”
He nods, taking off his hat to run a hand through his sticking-out-everywhere summer hair. “You should check it out next week. We usually get a pretty good crowd. I do a mix of originals and covers—people like to sing along, you know?”
“Patrick, that’s so awesome.”
“Oh, man, wait till I tell Emily about you!”
“Emily?” My chest tightens. “Is that your girlfriend?”
“No, nothing like that. Just a good friend. She works at the café. Luna is her aunt, actually. She’s always at the gigs, either working or just hanging out. You’ll see. You’ll like her.”
“Sounds cool.”
“Next show is next week, Tuesday,” he says. “Think you can make it?”
“Definitely.” I skip the whole irrelevant part about my current state of semi–house arrest. Not to mention the part about my non-boyfriend, also irrelevant.
Our walk stretches on for nearly two hours, all the missing years smushed back together. As we near the bleachers again, Patrick buys popcorn from a vendor along the path and we take turns throwing it in the water, watching the seagulls bob on the waves and dive after the little white kernels.
“I still can’t believe you’re here,” he says when the popcorn’s gone. His eyes hold mine longer this time, and I let myself get a little bit lost in the honey color they take on in the low sun. When he smiles again and squeezes my shoulder, something swirls in my chest. I can’t temper it, and it unhinges me a little. So I pull away from his touch and tie my humidity-prone hair into a loose ponytail, mortified to imagine how frizzy it must be but grateful for the distraction. “I should get back, Ri—I mean, Patrick.”
“Sure,” he says. “I’ll see you soon, anyway. My dad stopped over there earlier. I guess your mom wants to talk about the sunroom and other house projects over dinner tomorrow.”
“Dinner? You sure you want to come around?” I ask. “One house. Three women. Dead people. I can almost
guarantee
random, unprovoked cat fights and spontaneous bouts of crying.”
“Well, since you put it like
that
…” Patrick’s fingertips brush my bare arm so lightly the hairs on my skin have to stand up and stretch to reach him.
“See you then,” he says. He flashes his dimpled smile once more and heads back to his spot on the bleachers,
Catcher
in hand. As I walk up the hill to my grandmother’s house, my hand moves to my arm where the feel of his touch still lingers, warm and soft and familiar like my memories of Little Ricky racing around the lake, devising contests to dig up the biggest fish bones or jump off the highest dock.
You’re still kind of adorable.
That thing in my chest lurches sideways and I take a deep breath, count to ten, and bury it, way down deep.