Fixing Delilah (7 page)

Chapter ten

“All right, girls, where do we start?” Emily stands in the middle of the kitchen in her overalls, a red bandanna tied loose around her head. After a week of figuring out the house stuff and managing the constant stream of droppers-in, it’s finally time to plan the estate sales. Mom had to run errands in town, so Em and Megan, self-proclaimed garage-sale queens, offered to help us with the first wave.

Rachel and Megan head for the basement, leaving me and Emily to sort the contents of the kitchen cupboards and drawers into piles: use while we’re here, sell, donate, or trash. So far, trash is winning. Tupperware with no lids. Mugs with missing handles. Torn old picnic tablecloths that haven’t seen the outdoors in years.

“Check this out.” Emily holds up a pair of beige ceramic mugs printed with tic-tac-toe boards. “They’re from Chances, the café before it became Luna’s. Your grandma must’ve swiped ’em. Saucy old gal, huh?”

I shrug. “I don’t really remember that much about her.”

“Oh. I’m sorry, Delilah.”

I take the mugs from her and set them in the sell pile. “This is actually the first time I’ve been back here since I was a kid.”

“Yeah, Patrick told me. Hey, I hope this doesn’t sound weird, but he really missed you. Don’t tell him I said that.”

That butterfly keeps banging around inside at the mention of his name.
Stupid insect.
“He did?”

“You should’ve seen his face when he first told me about you last week. Man, you guys must’ve been really close.”

“We were,” I say. “But it’s been a long time. It feels so strange to be back here. I’m still trying to sort out some of the memories.” I don’t know why I’m so comfortable talking to Em. Maybe it’s her smile, or the way she says everything so straight. No buildup or fanfare. No awkward pauses. Maybe it’s her eyes, full and honest. Or maybe it’s the three-act puppet show she performs with the oven mitts and pantry boxes.

“Oreo, Oreo, wherefore art thou Oreo?”

We spend hours sorting through the kitchen, chatting about life and books and movies, about all the things that matter and all the things that don’t. My sides hurt from laughing, and when Rachel and Megan finally emerge from the basement with their bags of trash, ready to call it a day, I look at the clock on the oven and wish we had a few more hours.

“You’re going to Patrick’s show tomorrow night, right?” Em asks.

“Yes.” If I can’t convince Mom to let me go out, there’s always the window.

“Awesome. I finish work at six. See you there.” She hugs me good-bye, and it’s been so long since a girlfriend hugged me that it takes me a second to figure out what’s happening and to remember how to do it back.

“You two seemed to hit it off,” Rachel says when they’re gone. “I’m glad. She’s a sweet kid.”

After dinner, I bring down the coats and boots from my bedroom closet for the use/sell/donate/trash evaluation. Cleared of everything but the cobwebs, the closet is roomy enough for me to hang up my summer jacket, my long dress, and a few of my sleep shirts that got crunched in the dresser. Even after I line up my shoes along the closet floor, there’s still a spot for my empty suitcases. I try to shove the biggest one in the back, but it slips from my hands and lands hard on the floor, kicking up one of the floorboards.

Perfect.
Hopefully Jack can fix it before Mom finds out I broke something. After the car damage last month, there’s not much room left on my tab.

I yank the chain for the light and pull my suitcase back out. As I crouch down to replace the board, I see it—a patch of white illuminating the otherwise black hole in the floor. It’s covered in dust, but I stick my hand in to retrieve it anyway, breath shallow in my lungs.

Here beneath the floorboards and cobwebs and spiders lies the formerly missing diary of Stephanie Delilah Hannaford.

I pull it gently from the hole, feeling the weight of it against my fingers. It’s bound in cracked white leather, yellowed with age and etched with a single gold rose. The flimsy brass latch once locking the pages no longer holds them shut, and as I take it into my lap, the front cover falls open, loosing a cascade of crushed flowers and faded red maple leaves pressed between pieces of waxed paper. My heart pounds, unable to outrun the feeling that I was
meant
to find this diary, that Stephanie herself meant for me to find it, here, tonight, tucked safely under the floorboards of the bedroom closet since before her death, hidden through all of my childhood summers as I slept just five feet from its secret place.

I open the diary to the first page. It’s covered with black letters, small and perfect. I trace the opening words until my fingers memorize their old grooves, the tiny loops of her handwriting bringing Stephanie closer to me than any passed-down story or photograph ever could.

“Thank you,” I whisper into the dark space of the closet.

Dear Diary,

I’m sixteen today. Claire sent you to me and I know that I’m supposed to fill the pages with all of my collected wisdom, but I’m not sure how. I should feel more wise, right? More confident? Instead, eight hours into this new age, I feel neither. Am I alone in this? My sisters seem immune, as if together they are in on some secret that they just don’t want to share. Were they ever as lost or alone? As unsure? Claire is already finishing up her second year of college, and Rachel, well… we’re as close as ever, but I know that nothing lasts. She’ll be gone soon enough, too. And though I know they love me, I can’t help but feel as though they’re leaving me here unprepared, alone to deal with Mom and her moods and Dad in his all-consuming quiet, shadowed by my mother’s raging outbursts. I just don’t have the armor for it.

But hope is not as lost as this dismal letter would have you believe! When I stretch my hands and reach into the faraway place of tomorrow, there’s Casey Conroy.

Please don’t tell my sisters. He’s a bit insane, in the best kind of way. I don’t think they’d understand what I see in him—they’re much too practical!

Ah, well. Happy birthday, happy birthday, happy birthday to me.

XOXO,

Steph

Casey Conroy—CC.
There it is, in perfect black print, the name belonging to the initials carved under the bed. Now that I see it, now that my lips can form it, his full name hangs in my throat, stuck to the lump rising in the wake of reading Stephanie’s words. The letter is so
usual
, so unsurprising, so much like something any girl my age would write, that for a moment I forget that she’s dead. That this diary was hidden here before I was even born. That between the entry on her sixteenth birthday and the final page, so many of the stories for which I’ve been searching may be written.

And my mother and Rachel have no idea that it’s here. That it wasn’t lost or taken with Stephanie to the great beyond. That I have it, and that through her words, I’ve stepped into a piece of my family’s elusive history.

I slip the diary beneath my clothes in the bottom dresser drawer and head downstairs for a late-night snack, heart racing, mind racing, the air around me crackling with the electric fear and hope that comes with the discovery of something new.

*         *         *

“You’re up late,” Mom says. She’s in the kitchen reading the
Red Falls’ Bee
. She doesn’t look at me at first, and as she turns the pages of the town’s weekly, the edges of my heart ache for her, wanting so much to tell her about the diary. To let her know that upstairs, tucked into the folds of my summer shirts, a part of her sister lives on—a part that she and Rachel can still know, even though she’s not here. But as I watch my mother flip through the
Bee,
late at night in the kitchen of her childhood home, I lose all the words for it.

“Can’t sleep?” she asks as I dig through the freezer.

“Not really. Are there any fudgesicles left?”

“Check behind the ice trays. Rachel’s trying to hide them so she’s not tempted.”

I dig out the box. “Where is she?” I ask. “Sleeping?”

“She went out for a drink with Megan. She should be back soon.”

“Oh. How was your day?” I ask.

“Fine. Met with Bob Shane again at the funeral home. Picked up the cremains.”

“Cremains?”
It’s weird to think that someone can live a whole life—falling in love, getting married, having babies and grandkids and family feuds—just to end up “cremained” in a little box at the end of it all.

“That’s what they’re called,” Mom says as if she’s reading an article from
Funeral Directors Monthly
. “The cremated remains.”

“I don’t like that word.
Cremains.
Sounds like
Craisins
or something.”

“Delilah, please.”

“Sorry. Where is the… I mean, the… where is she?”

“There’s an urn,” Mom says, making the shape of a cube with her hands. “It’s on the dresser in her bedroom. I guess we’ll just keep it there until we get the permits cleared for the lake ceremony.”

“You mean, she’s
here
? In the
house? Upstairs
?” A layer of goose bumps rises on my skin.

“It’s
fine
. It’s put away in the bedroom. You don’t need to go in there. Anyway, since you’re here, let’s talk briefly about tomorrow. I have a DKI call first thing, so I’ll need you to be ready when Patrick gets here to clean the gutters at eight. Jack said there are tools in the shed and other supplies in the garage. You’ll also need to—”

“Mom, do you miss it here?”

“Do I…
what?
”

“Do you miss it—you know, coming here? Now that we’re back, I mean. Do you regret that we stopped visiting?”

“Delilah, I don’t really want—”

“Why?” I push harder, a trail of cold chocolate running onto my hand as I think about the diary hiding upstairs and Aunt Stephanie and how I would trade anything to know my father for even one day, while my mother cut her own family away like the scraps from a paper doll, sweeping her entire childhood into the trash as though it was the least important part of anything.

I grab a paper towel from the roll. “Why, Mom? How could you act like she was basically dead all this time? How could you do that?”

Mom is frozen. I can almost see the memories trying to fight their way up her spine and out of her mouth like some dormant alien pod, but she swallows them back again, her eyes opening and closing, lids as wrinkled as pecan shells. Beneath them she regards me, equally repulsed and fascinated, as though I’m some unidentified fungus or gruesome crime scene or challenging crossword puzzle that she could probably figure out if only she had more time.

But she doesn’t, because: “Del, I’m sorry. I don’t want to get into this now. It’s late, and…”

And blah blah blah, e-mails to answer, clients to service, marketing plans to market, and, of course, there’s the pinnacle of
my
summer vacation, cleaning out the gutters with Patrick.

“Get some sleep,” Mom says, folding the newspaper into a neat rectangle. “We’ve got a long day tomorrow.”

I want to crawl into bed and cuddle up against my anger at her, my frustration, my helplessness. The three are familiar companions, but when I lay my head on the pillow and wait for the blackness of sleep to seep in, curiosity stands at the foot of the bed, staring, waiting for me to flip on the light and pull the diary out from the drawer.

Dear Diary,

I decided to tell my sisters about C. At first, they freaked out, but then Rachel got over it and started asking me all kinds of questions and made me promise her that I wouldn’t rush into anything, and that if I did, I’d at least be safe. Claire, of course, is still trying to convince me what a bad idea he is, but she doesn’t know him. I think she’ll come around. I’m glad they both know now. I hate keeping secrets, especially from my sisters.

Well, not that I tell anyone about the things C whispers to me late at night, under the stars at the lake. We go there when the entire town is asleep—I climb out the window and down the maple tree and he waits for me near the hill, and together we lie on the dock and he traces the veins in my arms and tells me how life is going to be when we can finally leave this town, this place, this tiny speck on the map of our lives. I want to see the whole world with him, and when he smiles and his eyes light up like the stars, I know that he means every word he says, and I know that I will love him until the day I die.

Even after.

My sisters may have a lot of the world figured out, but when C chases me in front of the black water while the entire state of Vermont is deep in their dreams, I close my eyes and spin around and wonder if they will ever get a chance to feel this way.

But… but… yes, there’s always a but. Sometimes, when I’m not thinking about C and I’m alone in my room and the night outside is still, I feel this… hole… pressing against my heart. I can’t name it; can’t trace it. I don’t know why it’s there or where it came from, just that it is. Sometimes it hurts, like something’s missing and I just haven’t discovered what it is yet. Other times it’s just this low undercurrent of wrongness. I don’t know. I haven’t been sleeping all that well—maybe my brain is shutting down! Guess I’ll try to think about it more and write again. I don’t know. It’s just plain… weird.

Anyway… Claire is coming home this weekend! Rachel and I are making this huge surprise dinner. Mom and Dad don’t even know about it yet. Can’t wait to see her.