Hold Still (24 page)

“Okay,” I say helplessly and he hands me the bowl.

Another inning passes and I’m getting desperate, so I just hope that Jayson was taught to walk his guests to the door, and tell them I have to get going.

“I’ll walk you,” Jayson says, and I want to hug him.

Once we’re out the door, Jayson tells me, “My dad’s totally gonna grill me when I get back inside, you know.”

“Sorry,” I say, knowing how weird it seems that I just showed up out of nowhere and watched half a game with them.

“No, it’s cool,” Jayson assures me. “We’re friends, you can come by anytime. But my dad’s gonna think you want to date me. He’ll be bummed when I tell him it’s not like that. Plenty of girls have come over before, but he’s never offered one of them his recliner.”

“Yeah, right.”

“No, I’m serious. He totally likes you.”

“Oh no!” I laugh. “I’m sorry to disappoint your dad. He’s so nice.”

Jayson waits while I unlock my car door and set my heavy bag down on the seat.

“What do you have in there?” he asks.

“Too much,” I say. “But some of it’s for you.”

“Oh yeah?”

I pull out his pages and place them in his hands.

“They’re copies I made from one of Ingrid’s journals.”

Jayson slides into my car and turns the light on inside. I sit up on my trunk, and give him time to look.

I’ve been trying to be honest about what I give people, but after thinking a lot about it, I decided to give Jayson only the good parts. I don’t think that the rest is something he would want to know, and I’m pretty sure Ingrid wouldn’t have wanted him to know, either.

I wait for what feels like an hour, and then I go back to where he’s sitting.

He’s hunched over the steering wheel with his head in his hands.

“Jayson,” I say.

He doesn’t move.

I feel a sudden burst of regret, like this was the worst thing I could have done.

“Jayson?”

I put my hand on his shoulder, searching for some way to make this right. I thought it would be good. I keep thinking about what he said on her birthday—
I felt like telling everyone that it was different for me, but I knew that was stupid. I didn’t deserve it, I wasn’t even close.
I really thought it would be good, but I realize I was wrong. This was too much for him to take. It’s true—he didn’t even know her that well. So they sat next to each other in bio, and once he said he liked her hat, but really, that was it. And now I’ve bombarded him with this.

“Jayson.”

I squeeze his shoulder.

“Jayson,”
I plead.

And he snaps out of it, lifts his head, climbs out of the car.

His face is wet. He says, “You have no idea how this makes me feel.”

And I open my mouth to tell him that I’m so sorry, but he opens his first.

“Thank you.”

21

The next place I drive to I know so well, almost as well as my own house. I pull onto the shady, tree-lined street, stop the car, and just sit.

It was hard to ring Davey’s doorbell this morning, but this feels worse than hard—it feels impossible. I wipe my hands on my skirt and glance over at the driveway. Her mom’s car is there. Her dad’s is, too. I feel like I’m standing at a high altitude, where the air is thin and icy and painful to breathe.

I take my bag from the passenger’s seat.

As I approach the walkway that spans their front lawn to their door, I realize that I should have given them some warning. I should have at least called an hour earlier or something to see if now was an okay time. But if I leave, I have no idea how long it will take me to get the courage to come back. I hesitate on their front stoop, force Ingrid’s drawing of the girl into my head, think,
Brave
.

I knock—three quick taps followed by two slower ones—the way I used to when I’d come over all the time, and I didn’t wait for anyone to open the door, just announced my presence and let myself in. Ingrid’s dog starts barking at the door, and I hear Susan calming him. I brace myself for her to look completely different, promise myself I won’t let her see my shock when I see that she’s become a different person, a skeleton, a shell.

The door eases open.

Her hair is grayer, longer. She looks a little heavier, but mostly she looks the same.

I open my mouth, but can’t think of what to say. Last time I was here, I’m sure I breezed past her, hardly noticed her, went straight to hang out with Ingrid in her room.

“Oh my.” She covers her mouth with her hand, but I can see from her eyes that she’s smiling.

“Hi, Susan.”

She touches my shoulder.

“Come in,” she says, collecting herself. “What a surprise. What a nice surprise.”

I follow her to the living room, but freeze when I step inside.

In the center of the main wall, above the fireplace, hangs Ingrid’s winning portrait.

Susan glances toward the photo, glances toward me. She smiles, gently. “Is it strange to see yourself above my mantel?”

“A little,” I manage.

“Veena gave it to us.”

I nod.

“She brought it to us the evening after she showed you.”

It feels strange to hear her mention Ms. Delani, to know that Susan knows little things about me, like what day it was that I saw that photograph. All this time, I’ve been trying so hard to not think about Ingrid’s parents, so hard that for a while it was like they didn’t exist.

“You look beautiful,” Susan says.

In the photo, I’m in a plain tank top and grungy jeans. My hair’s messy and I look tired—whatever night Ingrid took it, I wasn’t exactly looking my best.

“I mean now,” Susan says. Then, “You look older.”

And I know she doesn’t mean it this way, but I can’t help but think,
Older than Ingrid will ever look
. I feel my eyes welling up. I thought I’d given myself enough time to prepare for this. Almost a year should have been enough time.

“Mitch is taking a nap,” Susan says. “He had a tough week at work. Why don’t you sit down and I’ll go get him. He’ll be so happy to see you.”

I sit on their leather couch, slip my shoes off, and curl my legs under me. I have the entries I’m giving them all picked out, but as I look through them I feel like they aren’t enough. I wish I framed them or bound them in a little book.

Footsteps come from down the hall, and then Ingrid’s dad is in front of me, his arms around me, lifting me up. I don’t know how to react—Mitch was never like this before. He was always nice, but was never the hugging type. He doesn’t say anything, just holds me tightly, desperately, and from over his shoulder, I can see Susan’s mascara pool around her eyes and streak her face, and this is worse than I thought it would be, and I hate myself so much right now because I know it’s awful, but I want nothing more than for him to let me go. His arms get tighter and I bite the inside of my mouth to keep myself from shouting,
I’m not her, I’m not your daughter, stop pretending I’m your daughter
. But he holds on. It hurts to breathe. I’m here, I’m in this house, and I’m seeing it the way Susan and Mitch saw it: waking in the morning to the sound of water running from the bathroom down the hall, thinking it must be Ingrid taking her shower a little early, fading back to sleep, waking up again to the sound of the alarm, Mitch asking,
Suzy, do you hear that?
Susan answering,
Yes
. Down the hall, the pat of two sets of slippers.
Mitch, wait here, I’ll see if she’s showering.
A tap on the bathroom door.
Ingrid?
Another tap, louder.
Ingrid!
The groan of hinges, the water, the smell—like urine, like heartbreak, like metal.
Oh my God.
Red everywhere.
Suzy, what? Suzy, I’m coming in.
Their daughter, naked—breasts and pubic hair, hips, and wounds, and blood, and skin, and half-closed, still eyes. And my legs are trembling, and Mitch’s arms are like a straitjacket, and Susan cries in the doorway, and I swallow the blood in my mouth, force my voice to come out steady when I whisper, “Hey, Mitch,” to remind him that it’s only me.

22

I’m back on the couch, sitting kind of awkwardly with my legs tucked under me because I’m not used to wearing skirts anymore, especially short ones.

Mitch sits on the opposite couch, looking a little shell-shocked. Every now and then he glances at me and shoots a nervous smile in my direction. Susan comes back from the kitchen, carrying a pitcher of lemonade and three glasses.

She pours my glass and sets it on the coffee table. “I made this from lemons your mom and dad grew,” she says. “Your mom gave me a whole bagful last week.”

“I didn’t know you saw my mom last week,” I say, surprised.

As Susan pours glasses for herself and Mitch, she tells me that she has lunch with my mom almost every week, and again it feels strange that so much could be going on without me even knowing.

When my lemonade is half gone, and our conversation subsides for a moment, I pull out the pages I chose for them.

I don’t know how to start explaining, so I just tell them everything—how I discovered Ingrid’s journal under my bed, and only read a little at a time, and found a suicide note at the end. Susan and Mitch watch me intently as I explain all of this. At one point, Susan reaches over, and squeezes Mitch’s hand.

“These are some pages,” I say, placing the copies on the coffee table, “that I want you to have.”

After the way they look at each other with tenderness, and at me with gratitude, and pick the copies up, I know that they don’t expect anything more. They start with
Me on a Sunday Morning,
turn to
Dear Mom, I take it back
. Susan’s chin trembles, Mitch takes her hand. Next, they read,
Dear Dad, I’m sorry
. And then they read the suicide note. I just sit quietly and let them go through them all. And even though the entries are obviously really meaningful to them, I still feel like they aren’t enough. I mean, these are her
parents,
which means that they lost the most, more than I did, and I feel like they should have everything. I reach into my bag, ready to give it all up.

The bird on the cover is almost all chipped away now. And it feels surprisingly natural, even easy, when I place Ingrid’s journal on the coffee table.

“You should have this, too,” I say.

And then.

All at once I remember everything written inside—the way she wanted Jayson to hurt her, her anger at her mom, the creek, the guys. She didn’t want them to know. I feel the blood draining from my face, get instantly nauseous. I’m not sure this is something I can take back.

Mitch studies my expression. He clears his throat. “We have so many of her diaries,” he says. “You should see them. She kept them ever since she was a little girl. We even have a couple boxes in the garage full of them.”

Susan touches the cover, but doesn’t open it. “We’ve been reading some from her childhood, before she became ill. It’s been a comfort to remember her that way—young and excited about her life.” She shakes her head, picks up the journal, hands it back to me.

“If Ingrid wanted this to stay with you, then you should have it,” she tells me, and she places it back in my hands. I slip it into its familiar compartment. Part of me is relieved, but later, as I walk out, my backpack feels heavier than it has ever felt before.

23

It is late and dark. Dylan is studying for finals, but I show up at her house and convince her to come out with me. I leave my parked car in front of her white picket fence and we walk to the theater. It is one of the first warm nights of the year. A million stars are out.

I’m relieved to find that the window hasn’t been boarded up. I push the drape aside and we climb in.

“I can’t see anything,” Dylan says.

I unzip my backpack, pull out a flashlight.

When I click it on, Dylan says, “So this was part of the grand scheme of your day?”

I nod. Even with the flashlight, we have to feel our way down the aisle to the rows of seats. We choose two right in the center, and I tell Dylan everything about my day, from the moment I woke up until now.

“What about me?” she asks when I’m finished, and holds out her hands. I pull two folders out of my backpack, place one of them in her palms.

She doesn’t open it. “Do you mind if I save it for later?”

I shake my head. “I gave you a lot,” I say. “You can read them whenever you want to.”

She slips the folder in her messenger bag. I open the second folder and pass it to Dylan. I shine the light for her as she flips through the photographs I borrowed from Ms. Delani.

“What I want,” I say, “is to see these up there.” I move the light away from the photographs and toward the white screen. “Do you think there’s any way?”

Dylan squints.

“I mean, it might not be possible, but you’re good at figuring this stuff out, right?”

I can almost see the procession of ideas filing, neatly and logically, behind her eyes. “Can you make them into slides?” she finally asks.

“Yes.”

“We’ll need a small battery-operated generator, but that’s easy. . .”

She thinks a little longer. Then she says, “Sure. No problem.”

She takes the flashlight from me, strides down the row of seats, and heads up the aisle. I hear her creak up the stairs to the projection room. Above me, through the projection window, the small beam of light appears—there she is, moving things around, untangling cords, making something out of nothing.

summers, again