All the Way Home (5 page)

Then she catches a glimpse of movement out of the corner of her eye. Turning her head, she sees the dark silhouette of a person moving along the sidewalk beyond the black iron fence.

It appears to be a man, and he’s walking slowly, his head turned in Rory’s direction, almost as if he sees her standing up here in the window.

He might, she realizes, remembering that the light is on behind her.

She steps back automatically, instinctively wanting to conceal herself, and then wonders why.

It’s probably just one of the neighbors,
she tells herself. Everyone on the block must know that this was Carleen’s old room. That’s the kind of detail that’s become legendary in Lake Charlotte—at least it was in the year Rory lived at home, after her sister vanished.

She remembers the way cars would slow in front of their house as curious onlookers stared, and how kids would gather on their bikes outside the iron fence, peering at the house as though they expected to see Carleen’s ghost.

Rory sighs and moves to the light switch, turning it off and plunging the room into darkness once more. She pulls the door closed behind her and goes slowly down the stairs to the second floor, passing her mother’s closed door.

She hesitates for a moment, considering knocking and asking if her mother is all right.

But that seems too invasive somehow. Kevin told her that their mother spends a lot of time in bed, sometimes watching her portable television and sometimes just staring at the ceiling or out the window. The only time she leaves the house on her own is to walk to morning mass at Holy Father Church two blocks away.

Rory vowed, when she came here this summer, to make an effort to turn her mother around—to get her out of bed and back out into the world.

But tonight, she’s too exhausted to make the effort.

She passes the closed door to the master bedroom and continues to the guest room down the hall. This is where she’s staying for the summer, instead of in her old room upstairs, across the hall from Carleen’s.

She’s been telling herself that she’s chosen to stay down here because it’s cooler, and because she wants to be near her mother and Molly.

But the truth is that her childhood bedroom, like her sister’s, simply holds too many haunting memories. And though she now realizes that it’s going to be impossible to spend the summer here avoiding any thought or discussion of the past, the last thing she wants is to immerse herself in it.

She goes into the guest room, leaves the door open behind her so that light spills in from the hall, and turns on the big, ancient box fan propped in the window. As the motor hums to life, she sits on the edge of the twin bed and looks out the window, facing the same view as she had from Carleen’s room directly overhead.

There’s no sign of the man she had seen on the sidewalk.

Yet for some reason she finds herself shivering again, hugging herself as she stares out into the still, steamy summer night.

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

“C
ap’n Crunch? I used to love that stuff.” Rory peers over Molly’s shoulder into the bowl of cereal in front of her on the table.

Her sister glances up and narrows her eyes. “Do you mind? I’m trying to eat.”

“Just checking to see if it’s the kind with crunchberries,” Rory says.

Silence.

“So, is it?”

“No,” Molly tells her. “It isn’t.”

“The peanut butter kind?”

“No. Okay?”

Rory shrugs, refusing to take her sister’s hint. Maybe, she tells herself, Molly just isn’t a morning person. Carleen never was. She would growl at anyone who tried to talk to her before noon.

Or maybe Molly just can’t stand me,
Rory thought ruefully, going over to the counter and looking around for a coffeemaker.
I guess I can’t blame her for that. She thinks I took off and left everyone behind without a second thought while I gallivanted around the country these past ten years
.

Which is basically what I did
.

Rory sighs, opens a cupboard in search of the Mr. Coffee machine she vaguely remembers from years ago. Yesterday morning, there hadn’t been time to make coffee. She’d forgotten all about it in the flurry to get acclimated and see Kevin off. Now she has a pounding headache from not feeding her three-cup-a-day caffeine habit, and if she doesn’t find that Mr. Coffee machine . . .

But the cupboard is filled with stacked glass mixing bowls, all of them faded pastel colors and most of them chipped, and an unfamiliar Corning Ware casserole set that looks as though it’s never been used.

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 spoon clinks against her bowl.

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