In the elevator going down, Lindsey stared into the throats of the bright yellow flowers. She remembered that Samuel and Hal had found yellow daffodils lying in the cornfield on the afternoon of the first memorial. They had never known who placed them there. My sister looked at the flowers and then my mother. She could feel my brother’s body touching hers, and our father, sitting in the shiny hospital chair, looking tired but happy to be going home. When they reached the lobby and the doors opened I knew they were meant to be there, the four of them together, alone.
While Ruana’s hands grew wet and swollen paring apple after apple, she began to say the word in her mind, the one she had avoided for years: divorce. It had been something about the crumpled, clinging postures of her son and Ruth that finally freed her. She could not remember the last time she had gone to bed at the same time as her husband. He walked in the room like a ghost and like a ghost slipped in between the sheets, barely creasing them. He was not unkind in the ways that the television and newspapers were full of. His cruelty was in his absence. Even when he came and sat at her dinner table and ate her food, he was not there.
She heard the sound of water running in the bathroom above her and waited what she thought was a considerate interval before calling up to them. My mother had called that morning to thank her for having talked to her when she called from California, and Ruana had decided to drop off a pie.
After handing a mug of coffee each to Ruth and Ray, Ruana announced that it was already late and she wanted Ray to accompany her to the Salmons’, where she intended to run quietly to the door and place a pie on their doorstep.
“Whoa, pony,” Ruth managed.
Ruana stared at her.
“Sorry, Mom,” Ray said. “We had a pretty intense day yesterday.” But he wondered, might his mother ever believe him?
Ruana turned toward the counter and brought one of two pies she had baked to the table, where the scent of it rose in a steamy mist from the holes cut into the crust. “Breakfast?” she said.
“You’re a goddess!” said Ruth.
Ruana smiled.
“Eat your fill and then get dressed and both of you can come with me.”
Ruth looked at Ray while she said, “Actually, I have somewhere to go, but I’ll drop by later.”
Hal brought the drum set over for my brother. Hal and my grandmother had agreed. Though it was still weeks before Buckley turned thirteen, he needed them. Samuel had let Lindsey and Buckley meet my parents at the hospital without him. It would be a double homecoming for them. My mother had stayed with my father for forty-eight hours straight, during which the world had changed for them and for others and would, I saw now, change again and again and again. There was no way to stop it.
“I know we shouldn’t start too early,” Grandma Lynn said, “but what’s your poison, boys?”
“I thought we were set up for champagne,” Samuel said.
“We are later,” she said. “I’m offering an aperitif.”
“I think I’m passing,” Samuel said. “I’ll have something when Lindsey does.”
“Hal?”
“I’m teaching Buck the drums.”
Grandma Lynn held her tongue about the questionable sobriety of known jazz greats. “Well, how about three scintillating tumblers of water?”
My grandmother stepped back into the kitchen to get their drinks. I had come to love her more after death than I ever had on Earth. I wish I could say that in that moment in the kitchen she decided to quit drinking, but I now saw that drinking was part of what made her who she was. If the worst of what she left on Earth was a legacy of inebriated support, it was a good legacy in my book.
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?
I was not in the bathroom, in the tub, or in the spigot; I did not hold court in the mirror above her head or stand in miniature at the tip of every bristle on Lindsey’s or Buckley’s toothbrush. In some way I could not account for – had they reached a state of bliss? were my parents back together forever? had Buckley begun to tell someone his troubles? would my father’s heart truly heal? – I was done yearning for them, needing them to yearn for me. Though I still would. Though they still would. Always.