Hold Still (22 page)

I’m leaving huge openings in the center of all the walls. What’s the point of a treehouse if you don’t have a view? I attach long, thick canvas curtains above the openings, and hooks below to tie them down in case of rain and wind.

Later that day, at the cemetery, when Ingrid’s casket was about to be lowered into the ground, I covered my eyes. I thought it would be better that way, but it was worse because Ingrid’s mom let out this terrible sound. It wasn’t a scream and it wasn’t a moan. It was something I’ll never be able to describe, something that stayed in my ears for months, all during my family’s escape to the forest.

When my dad gets home from work, I ask for his help. He changes into a sweatsuit and comes out to the treehouse to see what I need.

“What progress!” He claps his hands.

The clap stays in the air. Everything else is quiet. He waits for me to tell him what to do, but I stand with my arms limp at my sides.

“Honey,” he says. “Honey.”

He wipes tears off my face and then snot. He uses his hands. He loves me that much.

“The roof,” I say.

“What?” He searches my face, trying to figure out what a roof has to do with why I’m crying.

“I need help with the roof.”

He scans the yard and sees the long beams waiting. Then he walks over to the pile and lifts one. “Do you want to climb up first and I’ll come after and hand it to you?”

At the cemetery, when I opened my eyes again, Ingrid’s dad was holding on to her mom, who was making normal sobbing sounds by then, and he was completely silent, but his whole body was shaking like crazy, like he was caught in a personal earthquake.

My dad looks lost in his sweatsuit and sneakers, waiting for an answer.

“Yes,” I say. “I’ll go first.” And I start climbing.

14

After dinner I put my pajamas on, get into bed, and just lie there. At eight, Dylan calls.

“You want the English homework?”

“I guess.”

“We’re supposed to read the first three chapters of
Frankenstein
and write a page-long response about the relationship between Mary Shelley’s dedication to her dad and the discussion of parenting in the book.”

“Okay.”

“Do you want to write it down?”

“Not really.”

She’s quiet. “Do you want me to come over? Do you need to talk?” “I’m just tired.”

“I know it’s more than that.”

I stare at the photo of Ingrid on my wall. “I’m sorry,” I say. I can hardly talk. My voice comes out slow and groggy. “Please don’t be mad. I just can’t talk right now.”

I pull the covers over my head. I open my eyes under the blankets and I can barely make out the little star pattern of my sheets.

“Caitlin,” she says. Her voice is soft. “You’re going to have to talk about it sometime.”

“I know.” I nod, even though I know she can’t see me.

15

The garage is a terrifying, claustrophobic mess of junk that my parents refuse to throw away, but right now, as I dig through it, I feel like a sweepstakes winner collecting on my prize. It’s too good to be true that any of this stuff—the old globe where the Soviet Union still exists, the five Persian rugs from when my mom was obsessed with auctions, the countless candleholders and little figurine things that my dad’s held on to from the seventies—any or all of this could be mine.

I’m furnishing my treehouse. Under boxes of dusty records, I find a rug with a blue and green design, bordered by a pretty amber color. Pushing more boxes aside on one of the shelves, I find some of my dad’s old things. I read the dirty quotes in his yearbooks and find his junior-year picture. His hair is a little long around the ears and he’s wearing a leather cord as a necklace. He looks surprisingly cool. Next, I find a hummingbird feeder that’s made of carved wood and glass. I hold it toward the lightbulb in the ceiling to get a better look at it. Whoever made it carved bird shapes into the wood and painted their beaks yellow and their eyes blue. The tips of their wings are painted red. I put it with the rug.

Soon it gets hard to breathe. Dust is everywhere. I grab a battery-operated boom box and a couple empty wine crates and escape into the fresh air. Before shutting the garage door, I pull out an old cardboard box and rip off a little part of it. In the house, I get a marker and tape to attach it to a stick. Like a little kid I write, Keep OUT.

Once I get everything brought up the treehouse ladder, I’m too tired to do anything else. I unroll the rug and lie down on top of it. It’s a little dusty, but at this point I don’t really care. I lie there and look out one of the windows across all the other trees. Up here, from this angle, it looks like I’m in the middle of a forest. I don’t close my eyes; I don’t fall asleep. I just stare out the opening and listen to the faraway sounds of cars on the road in front of the house.

Later, I hear footsteps through the yard, getting closer. I’m afraid it’s my parents because I decided to stay home from school again today, and I doubt they’ll be thrilled. The footsteps stop at the base of the tree. I hope my sign works.

Then I hear Dylan’s voice. “Is this real?” she asks.

I don’t get up because I don’t want her to see me. “It’s a joke,” I yell down.

“So can I come up, then?”

“No.”

I wait for her to say something else, but there’s just quiet, followed by the sound of her stomping away.

“Wait!” I yell. Her footsteps stop. I climb down.

“Let’s go somewhere else,” I say.

16

At the noodle place, sitting across from Dylan at our favorite booth, I confess.

“I have her journal.”

Dylan’s coffee mug is lifted to her mouth, but she doesn’t sip.

“She slid it under my bed before she killed herself. At least I’m pretty sure she slid it under.”

She lowers her mug to the table, and fixes me with the kind of stare only she can pull off, the kind that usually makes me squirm under the pressure of it. But this time, I just stare back.

I repeat myself: “I have her journal.”

She sips.

Holds the coffee in her mouth.

Swallows slowly.

Whispers,
“Fuck.”

Murmurs, “Why haven’t you told me?”

Reaches across to my arm.

She keeps her hand there until the waiter comes with our soup and surveys our table nervously, not sure where to set the giant bowls, and she has to let go. I open my backpack, and pull the journal out—black cover, a Wite-Out bird half chipped off. I hand it to her over the steam that rises from our soup. She takes it and looks down at the cover. Her hands are shaking, but her hands are always shaking. It could be the coffee, but I don’t think so.

She opens to the first page. I know it so well by now. I’ve probably memorized every entry. She is studying Ingrid’s self-portrait, reading what she wrote above it:
me on a sunday morning
. I keep wondering,
What Sunday? What was I doing when she was drawing that? Where was I when she was watching the Wite-Out dry?

I ask, “What about you?”

She looks, confused, from the journal.

“I want to know what happened to you. I know there was something.”

She looks back down, turns to the next page.

“Another time,” she says.

“When?”

“Later.”

“Later tonight?”

She doesn’t answer me. She turns to the last entry. While she reads, I carefully tear my napkin into strips.

17

It is later. We are in my room.

Dylan sits cross-legged on my floor and sets her hands, palms up, on her lap.

“I had a brother,” she says. “His name was Danny. You remember that picture in my room? The one you said was cute? That was him.”

I do remember, but I just nod, don’t say anything.

“When I was eleven and he was three, he got really sick.”

Dylan stops. She stares into her empty hands. Stays silent until her breathing steadies. She’s wearing a tank top and I can see the definition in her wiry arms. Her eyes look huge, greener than I remember.

When she talks again, her voice is so quiet I can barely hear her. “We tried,” she says. “We did everything we could. At the end he was so weak.”

I can’t look at her anymore, so I study the carpet. I remember the picture of him on her desk, and remember asking her about it, but I can’t think of the words I used. It’s hard for me to accept that I didn’t notice that he looked like her, or wonder why she didn’t say anything about it.

“Dylan,” I start. I don’t know what I’m going to say next, but I know I have to say something. “That must have been—” I try, but Dylan shakes her head, cuts me off.

“After it happened, we all felt alone. I was sure there was no way my parents could understand the way I felt, and my mom thought that my dad had no clue how much it hurt her because he still went to work every day. My dad thought that my mom couldn’t even begin to understand what it was like for him to lose his son. They had to split up for a year before they could understand the way they were hurting.”

I’m lying on the edge of the bed, watching her. I want to take her hand like she did for me earlier. I reach out, but she pulls back, only slightly, but enough for me to know that she doesn’t want to be consoled.

I sit up. “Tell me three things about him.”

She looks at me, surprised, but knows exactly how to answer.

“He loved chasing pigeons. Whenever he recited the alphabet, he switched the
B
and the
D
. He’d say,
‘A-
D
-C-
B
-E-F-G.
’ ”

I smile and wait. When a minute passes, I say, “One more.”

“He had the strongest little arms,” Dylan says. “He used to hug me around the neck so hard it hurt.”

It’s getting dark fast. Dylan tips her head up to my ceiling. Her face glows blue.

“I know how you feel,” she says. “Believe me. But you are not the only one hurting over Ingrid.”

She sits there for a minute longer and I think she’s going to say more, but she doesn’t. Instead, she climbs onto my bed and hugs me, tight and awkward, her arms squeezed around mine so I can’t hug back. It takes me by surprise. It knocks the wind out of me. She lets go and walks down the stairs and out the front door.

I sit still for a long time. I can still feel the pressure of her arms around me. Down the hall my parents are talking, brushing teeth, opening drawers. I unzip my backpack and take out Ingrid’s journal. I lay it, exposed, on my desk. When I know my parents are asleep, I cross the room to my window. I look down at my car. Out at the sky.

An idea comes. I wait for morning.

18

Hope starts over. At 8 A.M., I’m out the sliding-glass door and onto the patio, note left for my parents next to the espresso machine explaining everything I’m about to do, bag heavy with all the things I’ll need for today. I pass the last stack of wood, the planter boxes of yellow flowers, my parents’ tomatoes reddening on their vines.

When I slide into my car, the fake fur of the driver’s seat feels soft against my legs. I’m wearing a skirt I haven’t worn for a year—green and yellow checkered, short enough to show my pale, sharp knees. I start the ignition, remembering Taylor’s fingertips running down my thighs. Deep in my stomach, something tightens. In a good way.