Maybe she really should consider going into therapy sooner.
“Jesus Christ.” Lydia grabbed the socks away from Claire and started folding them. “Why are you so distracted?”
“Fred Nolan asked me out.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
Claire tossed her a stray sock. “It’s weird how the guy who seemed like he was into snuff porn was actually the only guy who wasn’t into snuff porn.”
“You’re not going to go out with him?”
Claire shrugged. Nolan was an asshole, but at least she would know it going in.
“Jesus Christ.”
“ ‘Jesus Christ,’ ” Claire mimicked.
Helen knocked on the open door. “Are you two squabbling?”
They both answered, “No, ma’am.”
Helen smiled the relaxed smile Claire remembered from her childhood. Even with the press hounding her door, Helen Carroll had finally found peace. She picked up one of Julia’s socks from the pile on the bed. There were two kissing dachshunds embroidered around the band. Helen found the match. She folded them together. The Carrolls weren’t sock rollers. They paired them together in a drawer and assumed they would manage to stay that way.
Lydia said, “Mom, can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
Lydia hesitated. They had been apart so long. Claire had keenly noticed that their rapport wasn’t as easy as it once had been.
Helen said, “It’s all right, sweetheart. What is it?”
Lydia still seemed hesitant, but she asked, “Why did you keep all this stuff when you knew she wasn’t coming back?”
“That’s a good question.” Helen smoothed Julia’s quilt before sitting down on the bed. She looked around the room. Lilac walls. Rock posters. Polaroids stuck in the mirror over the dresser. Nothing had changed since Julia had left for college, not even the ugly lava lamp that everyone knew their mother hated.
Helen said, “It made your father happy to know it was the same, that her room would be waiting for her if she ever came back.” Helen rested her hand on Claire’s ankle. “After I found out she was dead, I guess I just liked coming in here. I didn’t have her body. There was no grave to visit.” She invoked Grandma Ginny’s words. “I suppose this was the only place where I could come to leave my grief.”
Claire felt a lump come into her throat. “She would’ve liked that.”
“I think so.”
Lydia sat down beside Helen. She was crying. So was Claire. They were all crying. This was how it had been since they had looked down that well. Their lives had been rubbed raw. Only time could thicken their skin.
Lydia said, “We found her. We brought her home.”
Helen nodded. “You did.”
“It’s all that Daddy ever wanted.”
“No.” Helen squeezed Claire’s leg. She stroked a strand of hair behind Lydia’s ear.
Her family. They were all together again. Even Sam and Julia.
“This,” Helen said. “This is all your father ever wanted.”
vii.
I remember the first time you wouldn’t let me hold your hand. You were twelve years old. I was walking you to Janey Thompson’s birthday party. Saturday. Warm weather though it was early fall. The sunlight was drumming at our backs. The low heels of your new shoes were clicking against the sidewalk. You were wearing a yellow sundress with thin straps. Too old for you, I thought, but maybe not because suddenly, you were older. So much older. No more gangly arms and lanky legs knocking over books and bumping into furniture. No more excited giggles and pained screams at the injustice of denied cake. Golden hair turned blonde and wavy. Bright blue eyes squinted with skepticism. Mouth no longer so quick to smile when I pulled your pigtails or tickled your knee.
No pigtails today. Stockings covered your knees.
We stopped at the street corner and I instinctively reached for your hand.
“Dad.” You rolled your eyes. Your voice was older. A hint of the woman I would never get to meet.
Dad.
Not Daddy anymore.
Dad.
I knew that was it. No more holding my hand. No more sitting in my lap. No more throwing your arms around my waist when I walked through the front door or standing on my shoes while we danced around the kitchen. I would be the bank now. The ride to your friend’s house. The critic of your biology homework. The signature on the check mailed away with your college application.
And as I signed that check at our kitchen table, I would remember how I used to drink pretend tea from tiny china cups as you and Mr. Biggles excitedly told me about your day.
Mr. Biggles. That poor, stuffed shaggy dog had survived chicken pox, a spilled glass of Kool-Aid, and an unceremonious toss into the trashcan. He was flattened by your weight, accidentally burned when placed too close to a curling iron, and sheared for reasons unknown by your baby sister.
Me walking into your room as you packed for college: “Honey, did you mean to throw away Mr. Biggles?”
You looking up from your suitcase filled with too-small T-shirts and cutoffs and makeup and a box of tampons that we both chose to ignore.
Dad.
The same annoyed tone you’d used that day on the street corner when you wrenched your hand from mine.
The next times you touched me would be casually—as you grabbed car keys or money or hugged me quickly for letting you go to a concert, a movie, a date with a boy I would never like.
If you had lived past the age of nineteen—if you had survived—would you have married that boy? Would you have broken his heart? Would you have given me grandchildren? Great-grandchildren? Christmas mornings at your house. Sunday dinners. Birthday cards with hearts on them. Shared vacations. Complaining about your mother. Loving your mother. Babysitting your nieces and nephews. Annoying your sisters. Bossing them around. Calling them all the time. Not calling them enough. Fighting with them. Making up with them. Me in the center of all of this, taking late-night phone calls about croup and chicken pox and why won’t the baby stop crying and “what do you think, Daddy?” and “why does she do that, Daddy?” and “I need you, Daddy.”
Daddy.
I found one of your scrapbooks the other day. You and your sisters spent the fifteenth year of your brief life planning your dream wedding. The dresses and the cake, the handsome grooms and their sophisticated brides. Luke and Laura. Charles and Diana. You and Patrick Swayze or George Michael or Paul McCartney (though he was much too old for you, your sisters agreed).
Last night, I dreamed of your wedding—the wedding you never had.
Who would’ve been waiting for you at the end of the aisle? Sadly, not that purposeful young man you met at freshman orientation, or the premed student who had a ten-year plan. It’s more likely you would’ve chosen that slouchy, feckless boy with the floppy hair who so proudly declared his major was undeclared.
Since this wedding that never happened is my fantasy, that boy is clean-shaven on your special day, hair combed neatly, slightly nervous as he stands by the preacher, looking at you the way I always wanted a man to look at you: kind, loving, slightly in awe.
We would both be thinking the same thing, Mr. Feckless and I: Why on earth did you choose him?
The music plays. We begin our march. People are standing. There are whispers about your beauty. Your grace. You and I are a scant few feet away from the altar when suddenly, I want to grab you and run back up the aisle. I want to bribe you into waiting a year. Just living with him, though your Grandma Ginny would be scandalized. You could go to Paris and study Voltaire. Visit New York and see every Broadway show. Move back into your room with the posters on the walls and Mr. Biggles on your bed and that ugly lamp you found at a yard sale that your mother was praying you would take with you to college.
Though even in my
dream, I know that pushing you one way will send you hurtling in the other direction. You proved as much at the end of your life as you did at the beginning.
And so there I am standing beside you on your phantom wedding day, holding back tears, offering you to the future you will never have. Your mother is in the front row waiting for me to join her. Your sisters are by the preacher, opposite the boy, and they are beaming and nervous and proud and tearful from the romance and also from fear of the changes they know will come. They are both maids of honor. They are both wearing dresses that were fought over long ago. They are both so proud and so pretty and so ready to get out of their tight dresses and pinching heels.
You cling to my arm. You hold on to my hand—tightly, the way you used to do when we crossed the street, when a scary movie was on, when you just wanted to let me know that you were there and that you loved me.
You look up at me. I am startled. Suddenly, quite miraculously, you are a grown-up beautiful woman. You look so much like your mother, but you are still uniquely you. You have thoughts I will never know. Desires I will never understand. Friends I will never meet. Passions I will never share. You have a life. You have an entire world in front of you.
Then you smile, and you squeeze my hand, and even in my sleep, I understand the truth: No matter what happened to you, no matter what horrors you endured when you were taken away, you will always be my pretty little girl.