Fixing Delilah (5 page)

Chapter seven

It’s silent back at the lake house.

The groceries have been put away and Mom’s card table desk is tidy—pen-filled coffee mugs threatening to evict the rooster-themed tissue box behind them. Everything is still. Lifeless.

No one is here.

Upstairs, all of the doors are open but one—the room at the end of the hall that my grandparents shared. Mom’s luggage is stacked in her old room; Aunt Rachel’s in hers—the Purple Room. I fell asleep in there once, the Purple Room. There was a monster under the bed, something scaly with huge yellow eyes and an appetite for small children. Mom was working in New York City that week, and I remember screaming for Nana, who was less skilled at scaring away monsters than my one-legged grandfather but could definitely get to my room faster. Nana was at my side flipping on the light after the first scream, but in her haste, she’d forgotten to put on her hair. Unbeknownst to me, she didn’t have her own—just a collection of wisps that hovered around her head in a cotton candy cloud. It took an hour for her and Papa to convince me that the banshee standing at the end of my bed was actually Nana, even after she got back into her wig. I’m not sure I ever really trusted my grandmother after that, even though I never again saw her without her hair (or slept in the Purple Room).

My bags are stacked in the bedroom I always had here in the summers. We never talked about it before, but as I drag my stuff across the floor toward the closet, I realize with a chill that this must’ve been Stephanie’s old room. I sit on the corner of the daybed—the same one from before, minus the white lace canopy—and wonder whether this was
her
actual bed.
Her
actual canopy that I slept beneath.
Her
actual toys and dolls that I played with. Then, thought converted to action without my awareness, I’m on my knees, crawling partway under the bed as if I might find a clue. A sign. A treasure map. The missing diary, somehow overlooked for all these years in this most obvious hiding place.

It’s bare, of course, the floor beneath the bed. Nothing more than dark brown slats of hardwood, blanketed with a fine dust, marred only in the corners by the occasional movement of the bed and a single, deep carving near the left front post:

SH
+
CC

SH.
Stephanie Hannaford.
CC
must be the boyfriend Rachel mentioned. I run my fingers over the grooves in the wood and wonder what she was feeling that night. How long ago she carved it. Whether she wanted it to be seen. When I finally pull myself out from under the bed, the air is cold and I rub my arms.
What else have you left for the living to find?

Whether they once belonged to Stephanie or not, the dolls that lined the shelves in this room when I was a child are gone, replaced now with jars of buttons and boxes overflowing with ribbons and zippers and swatches of loose fabric. I don’t remember my grandmother sewing, but there’s a Singer nestled under a landslide of tissue-paper patterns, turquoise fabric caught mid-stitch, spilling over the table like a waterfall. This is the room I always had, but everything is different now. Everything changes in the space of eight years—faces, places, even memories—realities as different from our recollections as we are from our old selves.

The closet is jammed with winter coats and boots and dry cleaning bags of laundered dress clothes, but most of my stuff fits into an empty dresser. On the top there’s an old mason jar of colored, unmatched buttons that rattles when I open and close the drawers: shiny, glass-hard bits of rainbow like the sweet-and-sour candy we used to buy at Crasner’s. The bed looks just-made, and across from it there’s a small table and chair beneath a window where I can sit and lean on my elbows and stare out at the seagulls gliding down to the lake.

Or, from the window over the bed, at Patrick’s house. Lifting the shade, I see his old bedroom window from here, just like before. I wonder if he’s up there now, reading the rest of
Catcher in the Rye
—maybe the part where Holden talks about the books Phoebe writes but never finishes, or when he calls a prostitute to his hotel room, or…

“Delilah?” Mom knocks softly on the doorway, entering without permission and taking a seat on the daybed. I open my mouth to order her out, but the part of me that wants to fight is outvoted by the part that remembers her in the yard a few hours ago, yanking out the grass.

“Hey,” I say. “Where were you guys?”

“We took a walk into town to meet Bob Shane, the funeral director, to discuss the plans. Apparently Mom made the arrangements years ago, just in case no one was around to carry them out.”

I join her on the bed, not sitting too close. “When are we having the funeral?”

“I was hoping to take care of it as soon as possible so we could focus the rest of our time on the house, but that’s not going to happen. She wanted to be cremated, which Bob can do this week, and buried in the plot next to Dad. But she also wanted some of her ashes scattered over the lake. Since Red Falls is so popular in the summers now, outdoor ceremonies require a special permit so they can rope off part of the lake for the scattering.”

“Sounds complicated,” I say.

“Between that and the actual service plans, realistically, we’re looking at the end of summer.”

“And don’t forget about this guy,” Aunt Rachel says, showing up in the doorway with an economy-size mayonnaise jar. “He was in the hall closet, just like Bob said.”

Mom shakes her head. “I really hoped he was joking.”

“Nope. Man, for a jar of ashes, this thing weighs a
ton
. Must’ve been a big dog.”

I jump up from the bed, backing away toward the closet. “A dog? A dead dog is in there?”

“Little Ollie,” Rachel says, setting him on the floor at her feet. “Her Saint Bernard. He died last year and she had him cremated by the vet. Bob told us that Mom wanted them buried together. It’s against the rules, but he promised her he’d mix their ashes anyway. I have to run these over tomorrow.”

“This family is insane,” I say, flopping back on the bed. “I can’t believe I’m stuck here for the entire summer.”

Mom looks at my hands, but she doesn’t reach for them. “Delilah, I know this isn’t how you planned to spend your summer. None of us expected to be here, and it’s going to take time to get used to these…
arrangements
. We’ve got just about two months to get this house in shape, organize an estate sale, and plan the funeral service. Plus, between Realtors anxious to secure the listing and people offering their condolences, I expect we’ll be inundated with visitors over the next few days. It’s going to be a zoo. We’ve got to stay on track and remember why we’re here.”

I look at my mother and her sister and the flowers embroidered on the bedspread and wonder whose version of
why we’re here
she’s referring to. Are we here to delve into the past? To talk about what happened at Papa’s funeral eight years ago? To remember Stephanie? To say good-bye? Or are we just here to sell the house, get back to Key, and forget about Red Falls all over again?

“I understand being back here is tough on you,” she continues. “It’s tough on all of us. But I don’t want you wandering off again like you did this afternoon. Considering your issues with following rules, you need to stick close to the house with me or Rachel unless I say otherwise.”

I’m ready to make a case for myself, but Mom launches quickly into a monologue about my recent behavior, throwing in a few of her favorite miscreant catchphrases like
acting out, attention-seeking, impacting your future
, and
not without consequences
. I hear all the words, but only peripherally, like watching the sailboats today on Red Falls Lake—in front of me but distant, their speed and imbalance warped into something slow and graceful by the curvature of the Earth.

“Did you hear me, Del?”

I shrug.

“I spoke with Mr. Marshall at Kennedy the other day, and he—”

“What?” I ask. “You talked to the
guidance
counselor about me?”

“It’s no secret that you barely passed this year. You’ve cut classes. Missed assignments. Shown up late. We’re concerned you might not have a successful senior year.”

I wrap and unwrap a loose thread from my shorts around my finger, watching the tip turn purple and white, purple and white.
She just lost her mother, Delilah. Let it go.
Purple. White. Purple. White.

“He also said that you skipped all the big pep rallies this year. The dances. That you ate lunch in the library alone a lot. What about your blogger friends? I thought you loved those girls. What happened?”

What happened?
I’ll her
exactly
what happened—all of it. How my so-called blogger friends are more concerned about scoring booze for the next creek party than they are about reporting the issues and spending time together. How ever since Libby Dunbar inherited the junior class blog, it’s taken on its own demonic life, morphing from a cool and somewhat helpful academic resource to a gossip ’zine almost overnight. How the trendy new format launched Libby into pseudo-celebrity status where freshman girls clamor to carry her books and clean up her lunch tray. How the blog’s most popular feature, “Kiss or Diss,” invites people to publicly rate the looks of classmates. How the “Rumor Mill” message board publishes more atrocious lies than the stuff in the grocery store tabloids. And how last month on the “Free-4-All Graffiti Wall” someone anonymously uploaded cell phone pictures of me and Finn kissing behind the skate park, one of his hands up my shirt, the other on my ass. How every morning after that, I’d show up at my locker to find another printout of that awful pose taped at the top, guys calling out across the hall in front of the whole world, “When’s my turn, Hannaford? Do I have to buy tickets or is the feel-up service complimentary?”

When I asked Libby to remove the photos, she told me I was overreacting, that the pictures weren’t even that bad. She laughed and said that her blog would make me almost as famous as it made her. Then, after I e-mailed a final plea, she wrote back one last time, saying only this:

“Delilah, I’m not censoring anyone. I really thought you of all people would know how important freedom of the press is. Your father died defending it.”

When I open my mouth to confess the whole sordid tale, the only words that fall out are, “Things are just different this year, Mom.”

“Yes,” she says. “Things change sometimes, and not always in the way we’d like them to. I understand that. But the whole situation speaks to the larger issue of your behavior, and frankly—”

I hold up my hand. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Rachel shifts in the doorway and I catch her fidgeting with her pocket. The air is magically infused with essence of oranges, but I don’t think any of it gets on Mom, and she presses ahead.

“I’m your mother, Delilah Hannaford, and I
do
want to talk about it.”

“Are you kidding me? You never want to talk about
anything
!” I don’t name the things that have gone unsaid between us for so long, but they’re here, rising up like steam in the heat of this place. Tears creep back into my eyes, and it’s a monumental effort to keep my butt on the bed, to keep my feet from carrying me right back down to the lake.

Before Mom can respond, Rachel is in front of us, clapping her hands together. “Too much negative energy. Let’s all take a deep, cleansing breath”—she sucks in, waving at us to do the same—“now exhale.”

We obey, repeating it three times.

“Much better,” Rachel says. “It’s obvious we all have a lot to work through, but we just got here. We haven’t even unpacked. Someone has
died
, remember?”

Mom closes her eyes. “Rachel’s right,” she says, rubbing her temples. “I’m sorry, Del. One day at a time, okay?”

“Fine, Mom. But—”

“Let me do the cards,” Rachel says. “They’ll help clarify our thoughts.”

I used to love Rachel’s tarot readings on my D.C. visits, but that was way back when my future didn’t look so bleak. Now, I just don’t have the emotional fortitude for those tricky little death cards and devils and half-naked girls prancing around in front of Nana’s needles and bobbins and blouse patterns. “No thanks,” I say. “Mom won’t go for it, anyway.”

Rachel laughs. “Hey, I got her to turn her cell phone off for the rest of the night. Stranger things, right?”

Mom shrugs. “After the weekend I’ve had? I’ll go along with anything. Count me in.”

Rachel turns over my last card, laying it face up on a square black cloth dotted with silver stars and moons. “This,” she says, “is your final outcome.”

“There are boys in tights in my final outcome?
Perfect
.”

“It’s the Page of Cups,” she says. “He represents the birth of something.”

Mom picks up the card for a closer look, as if the answers to all of my problems are inscribed on the Page’s golden chalice. “Please don’t tell me you’re pregnant, Delilah.”

“It
can
mean a child,” Rachel says, glaring at Mom, “but in this case, it’s probably the birth of a new relationship or friendship. Kind of like an unexpected new beginning. It might mean a situation, but if it’s telling us about a person, it’s usually someone imaginative and artistic. Passionate. A dreamer. What do you think, Del?”

I avert my eyes from the house next door, splashes of blue peeking in through the window. “What do
you
think? You’re the fortune-teller.”

“It’s not fortune-telling,” Rachel says. “The cards are just a way to pick up messages from the universe. I can only tell you what they mean in the positions they’re drawn. It’s up to you to figure out what they’re trying to say. There’s a lot going on in this spread, but it’s not inherently negative.”