She brought the ice over to the sink from the freezer and splurged on cubes. Seven in each tall glass. She ran the tap to make the water as cold as it would come. Her Abigail was coming home again. Her strange Abigail, whom she loved.
But when she looked up and through the window, she swore she saw a young girl wearing the clothes of her youth sitting outside Buckley’s garden-shed fort and staring back at her. The next moment the girl was gone. She shook it off. The day was busy. She would not tell anyone.
When my father’s car pulled into the drive, I was beginning to wonder if this had been what I’d been waiting for, for my family to come home, not to me anymore but to one another with me gone.
In the afternoon light my father looked smaller somehow, thinner, but his eyes looked grateful in a way they had not in years.
My mother, for her part, was thinking moment by moment that she might be able to survive being home again.
All four of them got out at once. Buckley came forward from the rear passenger seat to assist my father perhaps more than he needed assistance, perhaps protecting him from my mother. Lindsey looked over the hood of the car at our brother – her habitual check-in mode still operating. She felt responsible, just as my brother did, just as my father did. And then she turned back and saw my mother looking at her, her face lit by the yellowy light of the daffodils.
“What?”
“You are the spitting image of your father’s mother,” my mother said.
“Help me with the bags,” my sister said.
They walked to the trunk together as Buckley led my father up the front path.
Lindsey stared into the dark space of the trunk. She wanted to know only one thing.
“Are you going to hurt him again?”
“I’m going to do everything I can not to,” my mother said, “but no promises this time.” She waited until Lindsey glanced up and looked at her, her eyes a challenge now as much as the eyes of a child who had grown up fast, run fast since the day the police had said too much blood in the earth, your daughter/sister/child is dead.
“I know what you did.”
“I stand warned.”
My sister hefted the bag.
They heard shouting. Buckley ran out onto the front porch. “Lindsey!” he said, forgetting his serious self, his heavy body buoyant. “Come see what Hal got me!”
He banged. And he banged and he banged and he banged. And Hal was the only one still smiling after five minutes of it. Everyone else had glimpsed the future and it was loud.
“I think now would be a good time to introduce him to the brush,” Grandma Lynn said. Hal obliged.
My mother had handed the daffodils to Grandma Lynn and gone upstairs almost immediately, using the bathroom as an excuse. Everyone knew where she was going: my old room.
She stood at the edge of it, alone, as if she were standing at the edge of the Pacific. It was still lavender. The furniture, save for a reclining chair of my grandmother’s, was unchanged.
“I love you, Susie,” she said.
I had heard these words so many times from my father that it shocked me now; I had been waiting, unknowingly, to hear it from my mother. She had needed the time to know that this love would not destroy her, and I had, I now knew, given her that time, could give it, for it was what I had in great supply.
She noticed a photograph on my old dresser, which Grandma Lynn had put in a gold frame. It was the very first photograph I’d ever taken of her – my secret portrait of Abigail before her family woke and she put on her lipstick. Susie Salmon, wildlife photographer, had captured a woman staring out across her misty suburban lawn.
She used the bathroom, running the tap noisily and disturbing the towels. She knew immediately that her mother had bought these towels – cream, a ridiculous color for towels – and monogrammed – also ridiculous, my mother thought. But then, just as quickly, she laughed at herself. She was beginning to wonder how useful her scorched-earth policy had been to her all these years. Her mother was loving if she was drunk, solid if she was vain. When was it all right to let go not only of the dead but of the living – to learn to accept?
