Fixing Delilah (2 page)
On the way back to Pennsylvania, late at night on the road, she smoothed her hand on my cheek and sang classic rock songs with the radio on low, and I pretended to be asleep so she wouldn’t stop.
After her call, Mom clicks on the radio and I turn away, my breath fogging the glass of the passenger window. As the all-news-all-the-time station drones on about the latest economic trends, I trace a bead of leftover rain along the bottom edge of the window and watch it pass over my shoulder. Sometimes I think about telling Mom how much I hate being home alone every afternoon, turning on the television just to pretend there’s company. All those takeout dinners at the big dining room table, chairs empty, invisible guests eating invisible soup and drinking made-up wine in my head. I want to shake her and scream and tell her that for all her hard work to secure our future, the snake plants in the foyer know more about my life than she does. That I’d strike a single match and raze the whole damn place to the ground if it meant we could start over with nothing but the ocean, potato chip vending machines, and free cable.
Then again, I don’t need an arson charge on my record.
“At this rate, we’ll never get there,” Mom says, turning toward me to check the right lane as she merges back in. In the stifling beige-ness of the car interior, she looks weak and defeated and ten years older than she did yesterday, before she knew her mother was dead. She wears it like makeup—a paper-thin layer of unwavering resolve flaking away to reveal all the broken parts underneath.
“Mom, I’m… I’m really sorry about—”
Bzzzz.
“Hold on, Delilah.” Mom keeps one hand on the wheel, the other searching for the right button, fingers poking around the dash like a bird for worms as the unsaid end of my sympathy stumbles and slips back down my throat. On the phone, Claire Hannaford Speaking betrays none of our troubles, but as she engages her award-winning, smile-as-you-dial communication skills for the caller, a thing that’s been sitting like a rock at the bottom of my stomach grows an ounce heavier.
Dread.
Cold and unmoving, it drips with the murky memories of that place we’re going to. That place where she and Aunt Rachel shared their childhoods and, though my recollections are hazy, where I spent part of mine. That place I was ordered to forget right after my grandfather’s funeral more than eight years ago. That place yanked suddenly from the dark of the cellar, all those black-tarred Hannaford secrets still stuck to it like giant, undustable cobwebs.
The tension is crawling across my skin and making me itch.
I dig a Snickers bar from my backpack and offer Mom the first bite, but she refuses, waving her hand in front of me as if shooing a fly. After her call, she lets out a long sigh, tugging the phone device from her ear and flipping the GPS back on.
“Recalculating route for. Red Falls. Vermont.”
“Mom?”
“Not now, Delilah. I’m driving.”
“Location triangulated,” Lady GPS announces. “In two hundred. Four. Miles. You will reach your destination.”
Mom is missing.
The car windows are open, and a soft breeze blows over my skin, jostling the branches of a giant weeping willow next to the unfamiliar driveway where we’ve stopped. I peel my cheek from the
cashmere
leather seat and shake off the road-sleep, scooping up my backpack and climbing out of the car.
At the top of the driveway, there’s a house, big and solid, mustard yellow with white trim. It’s framed on both sides by rows of giant sugar maples that seem to reach all the way up to the sky.
I know those trees.
This is the house at Red Falls Lake where I spent every summer for eight years. My grandparents’ house. We’re here.
The old place seems only to have changed in relation to me. I’m bigger. It’s smaller. I’m older. It’s
ancient
. It’s still the same color that I remember, but now the paint along the bottom peels down in golden curls like lazy spring daffodils. The shutters are loose and crooked, some open on both sides while others are shut or half-shut, sneaking looks as if after all these years, the house no longer recognizes me.
I pull my backpack tight over my shoulders and walk alongside a row of maples that leads me around to the back. Warm and honeyed in the sun, the yard yawns and stretches its way down the hill to Red Falls Lake. The water, which is neither red nor falling, looks like a giant blue whale, shimmering peacefully behind the bleachers on the western shore. They used to hold boat races down there, loud and growling and filling the air with smoke. I remember hiding under the bleachers with Little Ricky from next door, creeping through the dirt in search of discarded soda cans that could be converted to nickels for candy at Crasner’s in town.
Little Ricky.
I look across the yard at the neighboring blue-and-white Victorian and wonder if his family still lives there. We were so close back then—best summer friends. I remember the feeling even now; an inescapable stickiness to each other like magnets on the fridge. It’s funny how someone can be such an integral part of your life, like you laugh at the same jokes and eat your ice cream cones the same way and share your toys and dreams and everything but your heartbeats, and then one day—
nothing
. You share
nothing.
It’s like none of it ever happened.
Only it
totally
happened, I know it did, the memories of it forced suddenly from their hiding places by the reality of this house. My chest tightens, a lump rising up inside me with everything I want to scream at my mother. It’s
her
fault my grandmother died alone here, forgotten. It’s
her
fault our days back home melt into one another in their dreary sameness, a thick gray soup of
don’t wait up. Not tonight. Not now.
I look at the trees and the grass and the lake and wonder—is this my destiny, too? In twenty years, will I drive across the states with my own daughter, back to my mother’s house in Key, back to bury the things I tried for so long to forget?
When I find my mother at the top of the slope, I wipe my eyes on the back of my hand and stomp across the yard, ready to let loose all that I’d bottled up on our long drive from Pennsylvania. But as soon as I see her up close, sitting there in the grass and looking out over the town’s namesake lake beyond, all the fight in me scatters, clearing the way for something worse.
Fear.
In these quiet moments, Claire Hannaford doesn’t belong; her face is vulnerable and far away. She watches me awhile with a tilted head, strands of brown-and-gray hair blowing gently over her eyes as I approach. I wonder if she’s thinking about her departed mother, or Aunt Rachel, or the sister that died when they were younger, or the call from the Blush Cosmetics security guard, or maybe the cattails at the edge of the lake—how she used to cut them with a pocketknife and chase me with them, all the while my grandfather laughing from his wheelchair parked in the grass, pointing out circus animals in the clouds overhead.
“Mom?” I rub my arms as I get close to her, though the air doesn’t seem chilly enough to make my skin prickle.
“I couldn’t go in,” she says, yanking up fingerfuls of grass. “I got all the way up the driveway, but once I smelled that honeysuckle, I couldn’t go near the front door.”
I sit down next to her on the ground, not touching or talking, wedged into the familiar space between the rock part of me that mostly hates her and the hard-place part that dies to see her so uncertain.
“I just can’t believe my mother is dead, Honeybee.”
Like the fragile side of my mother, her old nickname for me no longer fits. Awareness of its long absence creeps between us like a serpent in the grass of her childhood home, and Mom shakes her head as if to erase the word, looking back out over the water.
We sit for a while, watching the lake breeze carry seagulls in search of castaway popcorn along the shore. The birds sing to each other in a mournful way, the echo of their calls floating up from the beach, and I try to imagine what it’s like for her—eight years dodging that one phone call, that one ringing in the middle of the night, the death knell for someone she once loved. I think about the Hannaford women and can’t help wondering if we’re all alike—me and my mother, she and hers, all of our problems starting this way. A tiny crack in the previously solid understanding of one another. A crack to a fissure. A fissure to a break. And then a gulf, big and empty and impossible to cross.
“Aunt Rachel will be here soon.” Mom stands to brush the grass from her pants and holds out a cool hand. I take it without hesitation because I don’t want to hurt her feelings. Because I don’t want to know the lost side of her, and I need to feel her hand in mine, familiar and strong and absolutely certain again. Because I need to know that eyes on the road, mind on the goal, everything really
will
be okay.
But I can’t know that, and neither can she. The old house on Red Falls Lake is like a cemetery now—hallowed. Haunted. Not the place for questions.
I squeeze her fingers anyway.
Mom takes a deep breath and marches us toward the driveway, shedding her frailty like a jacket too warm for summer.
“Let’s move this stuff into the house,” she says, dropping my hand. “I’d like to get my workspace set up before Rachel arrives and the arguing starts.”
“What time is she coming?”
“She said two o’clock,” Mom says. “That means four.”
Ignoring the front door, we head for the porch that starts on the side of the house near the maples and wraps around back in a giant L. The third stair creaks loudly as we land on it, one foot after the other, marching up to the unlocked side door and through it, into the kitchen.
“Wow,” Mom whispers, setting her purse on the counter. “It’s the same. Exactly the same. Even the curtains.” I follow her gaze to the white fabric panels hanging limp over the sink, tiny red-and-gold roosters trotting across the bottom in pairs. The cupboards are the old kind—wood painted white with windowlike panes so you can see the dishes inside. On the spots where the sun hits sideways, the blocky, black-and-white-tiled floor reflects in the glass. The skin on my arms prickles again as the breeze moves through the screen door, the red-and-gold roosters marching back and forth, back and forth as the curtains sway.
I leave Mom with her memories and start unloading the car, never venturing beyond the kitchen entryway, never raising my eyes more than the transfer of our belongings from the
black sapphire pearl
car to the black-and-white-tiled floor necessitates. As I travel from the car to the driveway to the third creaky stair to the kitchen and back, the series of accidental screwups that earned me a summer of estate sale duty fades from my mind, clearing the way for the scattered memories of our last trip to Red Falls—the yelling. Tears. Flashes of the fight between my mother, Aunt Rachel, and my grandmother that sent us packing. It was at Papa’s funeral, after the church service but before the burial. They’d said I was too young for that part—the burial—but after all the screaming, Mom and Aunt Rachel didn’t go to the cemetery, either. As we backed out of the driveway—gravel back then, I remember it crunching under the tires—I watched the house and the willow tree in front of it get smaller and smaller until they both disappeared.
It was the last time any of us saw my grandmother alive.
I want to ask a hundred questions now—all the ones I held back in the car and in the yard, still pinned beneath my tongue by a waning sympathy for my mother’s pain. But we lose our words easily here. I don’t ask, she doesn’t offer, and through our mutual silence we set about our work efficiently, all the kitchen windows opened, me bringing in boxes and Mom sorting their contents into stacks and rows.
On my last trip to the car, Aunt Rachel’s rickety black pickup bleats and bumps its way up the driveway, late as Mom predicted. As my aunt approaches, the sadness of the house reflects in her face, just as it did in her sister’s.
“Aunt Rachel!” I wrap myself around her and my heart unsticks, just a little. She rubs my back and kisses the top of my head, squeezing me tight as a line of jingle-jangle silver bracelets slides down her arm, a small hiccup catching in the back of her throat.
We all look alike, the three remaining Hannaford women. Same hazel eyes with various brown flecks. Same small ears. Same unruly eyebrows. Same long, wavy, chocolate-brown hair. And we all have those parentheses around our mouths—the ones that betray everything we feel and say all the things we don’t. I haven’t seen her since my solo trip to D.C. last Christmas, but feeling her warm against me with her cinnamon ginger breath and homemade lavender soap–scented skin erases all the time and distance between us. Her light blue vintage T-shirt (
Annapurna—a woman’s place is on top
) is soon covered in our mixed-up tears.
“I have no idea how to handle this,” I say, kicking the driveway with my flip-flop as we break our hug. “Mom’s in total denial, as usual.”
Aunt Rachel blots her eyes with her shirtsleeve. “I think we all are, hon.” She tries to laugh, but it’s as sad and faraway as the seagull songs, and I know she doesn’t mean it. She and Mom haven’t seen each other in two years—not since my aunt’s last Thanksgiving visit. She only stayed two of the planned five days. And Mom—well, the closest she gets to Rachel’s apartment is dropping me off at Philadelphia International Airport for the Philly to D.C. nonstop.
When we reach the porch, Mom opens the side door and leans forward like she’s going to envelop her sister in a hug but stops just short, her shoulders tightening from the effort of holding back. “Rachel?” she whispers.
The maples near the porch shake their rustling green heads in the breeze, but Mom and Aunt Rachel don’t notice. They just stare at each other, standing here in the middle of things with their arms dangling and the screen door half-open, the same blood flowing through their veins and a thousand pounds of unspoken words keeping them apart.
