Fixing Delilah (10 page)
“Do you guys know anything about Casey Conroy?” I ask as we walk to the dock where they rent out kayaks and paddleboats.
“Never heard of him,” Em says. “Then again, I’m new here.”
“I don’t think there are any Conroys in Red Falls now,” Patrick says. “I don’t recognize the name, but I could ask my dad. He’d know.”
I tighten a blue-and-yellow life vest over my T-shirt. “No, don’t say anything to him. It’s just a name I’ve heard a few times lately. I think he knew my mom and Rachel.” I don’t tell them about the diary, the bits of conversation I picked up in the house today, or the initials carved under the bed. “You know me. Obsessive as always.”
Patrick smiles. “Good. While you’re obsessing, we’re getting the boats.”
As Patrick and Em untie the kayaks and drag them toward the shore, my mind drifts from Mom and Rachel to the other morning news: Nana’s trust fund. For eight years, she didn’t have a granddaughter. Yet she socked away enough cash to pay for my entire education? That’s tens of thousands of dollars. Why not leave it to the town or the forest or the National Saint Bernard Foundation instead? Was it her fault that we left Red Falls, and paying me off is her way to absolve the guilt? And what if I don’t get accepted into college? What if I decide not to go? Do I have to return the money? Will she come back from the dead and haunt me?
And what does Casey Conroy have to do with any of this?
This is the song that never ends… it just goes on and on my friends…
“Delilah?” Em asks. “You coming?” She and Patrick bob on the water in their red and blue boats, waiting for me to push off and join them.
“Sorry, guys.” I shake away all the what-ifs and grab the sides of my yellow boat, leading it off the sand and climbing in, one foot at a time. After several shaky attempts, I manage to get inside and stay upright long enough to position the paddle across my legs.
It’s the last time I’m vertical for our entire kayaking adventure.
“Not bad for my first time out, right?” I ask Patrick, leaning on him as I limp into Alphie’s Pie in the Sky, the pizza place around the corner from Luna’s.
Patrick cocks an eyebrow. “You didn’t
drown
, if that’s what you mean.”
“Don’t worry, Del,” Emily says, pulling out a chair for me. “It gets easier. Next time will be better.”
Patrick laughs. “Who says there’s a next time?”
“Hey! I’m certainly not the first person to get hurt trying this, am I?”
“No,” Patrick says. “People get hurt kayaking all the time. They aren’t ready for the roll and get water up their noses. They drop the boat on their toes carrying it up to shore. They overextend their shoulders paddling too hard. But in all my years of living on this lake, every single summer for my entire life, I have never seen someone come away with a knee injury caused by the water, twenty feet away from any kayaks, docks, or people.”
“The waves knocked me down!” I say. “I didn’t see it coming. I totally could’ve drowned. Emily? Back me up here.”
Em smiles. “Del, you were only in up to your shins. I honestly don’t know how you wiped out.”
“And you managed to dump yourself out of the boat about, well, eleven times,” Patrick says, setting a Coke in front of me. “Not that I’m counting.”
“I was testing my balance.”
“You failed!” Em and Patrick say together, laughing as I prop my leg up on a chair.
The three of us share a cheese pizza and a large Greek salad, and even though my knee is throbbing, I keep laughing, keep encouraging the jokes as we recap our day, because being the star of the punch line is the only thing that keeps me from being swallowed up by the sinking realization that, without question, my mother is willfully hiding something from me. Something
about
me. Something major.
And Rachel knows about it, too.
“What happened to your knee?” Mom asks as I limp through the side door with Patrick and Emily.
“Just a scrape.” I grab some peanut butter granola bars for dessert, inspecting the army of porcelain figurines lined up on the kitchen table, flanked by the dolls from Nana’s dresser.
“What’s all this?” I ask.
“We had an appraiser come in,” Rachel says. “He agreed that we should try to sell the house furnished so we don’t have to sell the furniture individually. Most of this other stuff will go at the estate sale, but there was one surprise in the lot. We can take it to auction if we don’t find a private buyer.” She holds up a blue-and-white china creamer in the shape of a cow.
Patrick moos.
“This hideous thing is early seventeen hundreds blue Delft china from Holland,” Rachel says.
Em picks up the cow for a closer look. “She’s not that hideous,” she says. “I think she’s kind of cute.”
“Yeah, so does the appraiser,” Rachel says. “Four thousand dollars kind of cute, hiding in the basement in a box of Christmas ornaments.”
“Four
grand
?” Em sets the cow back on the table, far away from the edge.
I open the trash can to toss out my granola bar wrapper and spot the bottles from Nana’s dresser, see-through orange, tipped into the trash with the organic eggshells and coffee grounds.
“You went through Nana’s entire bedroom today?” I ask.
“Most of it,” Mom says, wiping down the kitchen counter with a velocity the average household germ would never see coming. “I left the books and jewelry if you want to look through them. Nothing really valuable up there, though.” The dolls on the table look offended, but like everyone else in this family, they don’t say anything. And as I let the trash can lid slap closed over the pill bottles, neither do I.
Later, after Patrick and Emily leave and Rachel walks to Crasner’s for more fruit, I pour two glasses of iced hibiscus tea and sit next to Mom on the porch, rocking the swing with my foot.
“Did you have fun on the lake today?” she asks, taking a sip from her glass.
“It was great. Patrick is teaching me how to kayak.”
“How’s your knee?” She leans forward to take a look.
“It’s nothing. So what were you and Rachel fighting about earlier?”
I watch the lines of her face change as she leans back in the swing and looks out over the driveway. “What do you mean? When?”
“Today. Before I left.”
Mom shakes her head. “Nothing. I told you. Just legal stuff with the will.”
“Sounded like you were arguing.”
“She said something that upset me.”
“Was it about what happened eight years ago?”
Mom turns to face me, her fingers white around her iced tea glass. “Del, you are
so
hung up on this,” she says. “I understand it was hard for you when we left here, and maybe I should’ve handled it differently, but you need to hear me on this. There’s no big mystery here. Families fight. They tear each other apart. Sometimes there aren’t any happy endings or logical explanations and we just have to accept that and move on. Sometimes it really
is
that simple.”
“But I know you’re keeping something from me,” I say, pushing away my own guilt about keeping Steph’s diary hidden.
Mom covers my hand with hers, but it’s cold and firm. “Delilah, really. There’s no need to dig up the past. Just focus on getting your own stuff back on track. That’s what I need you to do right now. That’s what we all need to do.”
She pushes off from the swing and heads for the kitchen, back to her desk and her laptop, before I can press further. I follow her in and sit at the kitchen table, looking over the odd lot of my grandmother’s things.
Let it go, Delilah. We just can’t go back there again.
That’s what Mom said to me every time I asked about Nana after that fight. Every time I packed my suitcases for another summer in Red Falls and cried as she silently unpacked them. Eventually, I stopped packing. I stopped missing Nana and Little Ricky and the cardinal and the fireflies around the lake. I stopped asking. I stopped wondering. And I let Nana and Papa and the whole sleepy town of Red Falls fade into the long Hannaford history of Things We Just Don’t Talk About.
As I stare at the back of Mom’s head, hands smoothing her hair as she replaces the cell phone earpiece, I begin to think I had it all wrong. Mom is right. Families fight. Maybe it really
is
that simple. And maybe I should stop digging for a truth that’s been shattered and shoved so deep into the earth by so many different hands that no one even remembers where the pieces are buried.
Mom lets out a long, slow breath over her desk and all the air in the room changes, electrified like the air before a storm. She clears her throat and I wait for the lights to flicker; for the power to surge and pop and fizzle and throw us into days of darkness.
But nothing happens.
“Hey,” she says into the earpiece. “It’s me. Thanks for sending that e-mail. The project files are on a disc in my office. Should be four still images and the video. Right.”
I turn back to the trinkets on the table.
“Moo,” I whisper to the cow. She doesn’t answer back.
“One large house blend and one iced chocolate hazelnut latte, extra whip,” Luna announces. “These are on the house.”
“Thanks, Luna.” I take my drink from the coffee bar, grateful Mom and Aunt Rachel have another estate meeting tonight. In the apocalypse of last week’s overheard and then promptly dismissed Casey conversation, we’ve managed to avoid any more direct hits. Out of guilt or distraction or genuine second chances, Mom has loosened the restrictions on my free time, the two of us reverting easily to our ships passing in the night routine. Tonight, I’m grateful to be out, away from the awkward silence that permeates the walls of the house. Away from the pages of the diary, still calling from my dresser drawer. Away from the urn and the ashes of my grandmother and her departed dog. Away from the past, if only for an hour.
Across the café, I look at Patrick, clipping the ends of the new strings on his guitar, and Luna, asking me to take home the leftover scones. I think about Emily, open and free and completely without expectation. And Megan, showing up almost every day to help Aunt Rachel. The people I’ve met in Red Falls, thrown into my life by the weird and tragic circumstances of this summer… they
know
how crazy the Hannafords are, and still, they don’t judge. They don’t demand. They don’t assume. They’re just…
there.
Wanting to know us. Wanting to be with us. There’s a word for these people. Sometimes I think I’m on the edge of some great understanding, looking up at all the answers I just can’t reach, like apples too high in the tree. But tonight, I stretch my fingers toward the sky, and I think I have the answer. The word.
Friends.
“Do you mind if we hang out a little longer?” Patrick asks Luna from the stage, strumming a few chords on the new strings. Luna’s already turned off the
OPEN
sign—Patrick and I are the only ones left. “I’m working on a new song and I don’t quite have it,” he says.
“Stay as long as you want,” she says. “Just lock up when you go.”
The coffee shop falls silent when she leaves, save for the low hum of the refrigerator and the buzz of the overhead lights. In the absence of the usual crowds, everything takes on a new life, a new intensity. The burnt-chocolate smell of coffee infusing the air. The silver moon and stars hanging overhead, spinning softly, reflecting flashes of light. And Patrick’s eyes, clear and intense as he works on his music. Here. Now. Just the two of us. Alone.
“What are you thinking about?” he asks.
“Friends.”
“Do you miss them?”
“Back home? No, I really don’t. It’s funny. I have these people there. You might call them friends. I always did. We hung out together, went to the same parties, that kind of thing. Always something to do on the weekends. But things changed this year, and now that I’ve been away for a few weeks, calling them friends… it doesn’t feel right anymore. Like they were just there to pass the time. They haven’t earned the right to be called
friends.
Does that make any sense?”
“Perfect.” Patrick nods. “I went through that stuff last year with an old friend from school in New York. We didn’t have a fight or anything, but junior year, it just felt off between us. We started hanging out in different crowds, and the few times we got together, it didn’t fit anymore. It sucked, too, because he used to be a really a cool guy.”
“So what happened?”
“Eh, we grew apart. Went our separate ways. I’d run into him sometimes, and we were friendly. But we didn’t jam on the weekends anymore or meet up after school for a bike ride.”
“Were you sad?”
“I was, but then I realized that I was holding on to something that didn’t exist anymore. That the person I missed didn’t exist anymore. People change. The things we like and dislike change. And we can wish they wouldn’t all day long, but that never works.”
“Nope. I’ve tried it.”
“And friends,” he says, “I mean real, true friends… I used to think certain people in my life were the real deal. That we’d stay tight forever. Now, the older I get, I keep coming back to something my dad said: In your entire life, you can probably count your true friends on one hand. Maybe even on one finger. Those are the friends you need to cherish, and I wouldn’t trade one of them for a hundred of the other kind. I’d rather be completely alone than with a bunch of people who aren’t real. People who are just passing time.”
“I’m starting to see that,” I say, thinking of all the acquaintances that have passed through my life, and all those who might still come and go. But when Patrick smiles at me, the sadness of it leaves my shoulders and for now, everything is fine.
“So check this out,” he says, ducking behind the stage. He dims the café lights and flips on a set of round, colored stage lights that shine up from the front and sides of the platform to illuminate the main event.
“Luna had these installed last weekend. What a difference, huh? It’s a small place, so the sound fills out pretty well without cranking the amps. The tough part is when the crowd is distracted. It doesn’t happen often, but it sucks trying to sing over that—not just because it’s hard to hear, but because you know no one’s listening. The lights should help focus their attention. Then I just have to work harder to make people care.”
“Patrick, I’ve heard you sing. How could they
not
care?”
“Not everyone who comes to Luna’s on gig nights is here to see me. Some people are actually more interested in the coffee. Or the scones. Or in hitting on Emily.”
“Oh, I didn’t say I
wasn’t
here to hit on Em,” I say. “Just that hitting on Em and enjoying your music aren’t mutually exclusive.”
“Is that so?”
“It is.”
“Then I’m glad we had this little chat. I’ll have to let Em know I’m stepping up my game. She’s tough competition, especially in the looks department—
way
cuter than me.”
I laugh with my head down to hide the fact that my face is probably
completely
pink. I mean, Em
is
cute. And awesome and hilarious and sweet. So why isn’t he into her like that? Is he?
“Don’t you have to practice something?” I ask. “Let’s hear it.”
“All right, Hannaford. You win. Come here.” He motions for me to sit in front of him and passes me his guitar pick, using his fingers bare against the strings. Our knees touch; his Martin guitar and the rising tide of music all that’s between us.
When Patrick sings, his eyes close and his face goes simultaneously intent and content, like he’s taking a long, beautiful journey but has to concentrate very hard on the path. It’s just the two of us, alone on the stage, and even through his unpolished practice lyrics, his voice rolls over my skin and gives me goose bumps. The currents of the melody carry me away from all of life’s disappointments and hidden things, and I’m left with only wonderment and possibility, endless and pure. I don’t even realize my eyes are closed until the music stops, and in the soft echo of the last note, a kiss lands and melts against my lips like a snowflake, cool and amazing and completely unlike anything I’ve ever felt. Patrick pulls me closer, and the silver heart on my necklace clinks soft like a raindrop against his guitar strings.
Our kiss deepens, Patrick finding his way past my lips. My racing mind slows, fear and worries fade as I fall headlong into it, feeling and tasting and inhaling every bit of it, just me and him and the world outside holding its breath, waiting for us to finish, waiting to see what happens, waiting to see if I remember how to walk after this.
But when Patrick shifts to slide his guitar out from between us, the spell breaks. I realize how close we are now, too close, no-air-left-in-the-room close, nothing to keep him from getting any nearer to the real me.
“Sorry,” I blurt out. “I, um… I should go. I need to go do this, um, this thing. It’s just that I told my mom that I’d help her later and I really should go now.”
“Are you sure she can’t wait a few minutes?” Patrick asks. He’s smiling, but his eyes hover on disappointment.
“Yes.”
“Good. Come here.”
“No—I mean,
yes,
I’m sure she can’t wait.” I stand to dust off my shorts and put some much-needed distance between us before he convinces me to stay. “You know my mother.”
“You okay, Del? I hope I didn’t… I’m… are you—”
“No, I’m good, I’m fine. I love the song. Very Bob Dylan.” If my words were footsteps, I’d have tripped over them and broken both legs by now. “I just remembered the thing with Mom, that’s all. Bad timing.”
“Nah, don’t worry about it. I’ll walk you home,” Patrick says. “Let me just pack this up and—”
“That’s okay. I’m fine. I need to go before she freaks out. I almost totally forgot and now I’m kind of late. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?” I don’t let Patrick answer or catch me in the net of his confused gaze before I’m through the door, the summer-sticky air condensing instantly on my skin. Outside, it takes a second for me to realize that I’m just standing here, shivering despite the humidity.
It’s one foot in front of the other, Delilah, remember?
