Chapter 4
I dragged myself home, shivering, my clothes soaking wet, legs like dead weight beneath me, as though I had cinder blocks for shoes.
My house sat at the bend of the cul-de-sac, redbrick with big bay windows and a whitewashed porch crowded with dusty rocking chairs.
I staggered inside to find my dad sitting in front of the TV, watching Jeopardy!
reruns the way he usually did at night when Mom was away at work.
There was a plastic tray balanced in his lap.
On it, one of those tasteless frozen TV meals that almost no one eats anymore.
Tonight’s feast was a gnarly piece of half-thawed Salisbury steak submerged in dark gravy, a mix of peas and carrots, and instant mashed potatoes topped with a pat of melting butter, which he mechanically ushered into his mouth.
“What is the ring-tailed lemur,” he said in unison with the contestant on TV.
I kicked my shoes off by the door. A few of Adeline’s pairs were still there; no one had the heart to donate them. “I’m thinking about going on a trip this weekend.”
Dad didn’t take his eyes off the TV. “Where to?”
I hadn’t had the chance to come up with a decent lie, and I floundered for a moment, sifting through possible options and ultimately seizing on something that sounded more like Adeline’s antics than mine.
“Um, the lake?” Guilt made my voice thin and pitchy. “A couple of my friends want to go camping over the weekend—”
“Friends?” He peeled his eyes from the TV for the first time since I walked in. “What friends?”
“Just a couple of girls I know. One of them invited me.”
I watched as my father digested this information, spooning soupy potatoes into his mouth, swallowing without bothering to chew the mush. “Have you talked to your mom?”
“You and I both know she won’t be around to say anything.
” This wasn’t a testament to how good, or present, of a mom she was or wasn’t.
In fact, in the scheme of moms, I think I got a good one.
But after Adeline disappeared, she became only half herself.
And I didn’t begrudge her that. Because it was the same with me, and with Dad too.
None of us knew how to function without her.
“If she even notices I’m gone, she’ll just think I’m at Conny’s. Let her.”
But Dad shook his head. “You should tell her. Give her a chance. She might surprise you.”
“Fine, but if she freaks out, I expect you to have my back.”
He made no promises. Turned back to the TV. “This girl, the one who invited you, what’s her name?”
“Shiloh,” I said to him, and I watched closely to see if the name sparked recognition in his eyes.
Before Adeline died, my dad had been the household’s secret keeper.
The one we confided in with the things we were too scared to tell Mom, who was shrewder.
I could see Adeline confiding in him instead of me, given how suspicious I was in the days after she returned.
“Never heard of her.”
Upstairs, I showered and got ready for bed, thinking about the girls and Shiloh and who Adeline was when she traveled with them.
I returned to my bedroom, and was halfway through packing—stuffing clothes into the duffel I used to take to track meets—when my mom knocked on my door.
She was still dressed in her nurse’s scrubs, her braids gathered into a loose bun at the back of her head. She was home earlier than expected.
Adeline joked that our parents made us make sense.
When we were alone, despite how close we were in age, we couldn’t pass for sisters unless you really squinted and searched for the resemblance.
While Adeline was all big hazel eyes, firm nose, wild curly hair, and deeply bronzed skin, I was paler like our dad but with my mom’s black hair and blunt eyebrows, her sharp cheekbones, and eyes the color of ink.
My mom and I had the same demeanor—shy and a little reclusive—with none of the charisma that came so easily to Adeline.
Even at her lowest, when she was most depressed, people liked being around my sister.
But the same couldn’t be said for me and Mom.
Maybe that’s why we were both closer to Adeline than we’d ever been to each other.
We just liked her better, though neither of us was willing to admit it out loud.
“Your dad said you wanted to talk?”
I straightened, faltered. I hadn’t expected to talk with her tonight, and my story was only half-baked.
“Yeah. I got invited to go up north, on a camping trip with some of my friends. We’ll leave tomorrow morning, probably before you get up.
That is…if you let me go?” I told myself I could explain everything to her later, over the phone if I had to.
I’d often found that the truth was best taken in small doses.
But my efforts to lessen the blow didn’t change the fact that this was a cruel thing to do to a woman who had just lost her first, and arguably favorite, daughter.
“Which friends are these?”
“They’re some girls I know from the diner. Don’t worry, they’re my age.”
To my surprise, Mom started to smile. She smothered it quickly, schooling her face firm and expressionless, but it was still more than I’d expected.
Perhaps it wasn’t lost on her that this was the first social event that I’d asked to attend since Adeline died.
If it hadn’t been for that fact, I don’t think she would’ve let me go, at least not without putting faces to the names of my friends, making sure they were trustworthy.
Mom didn’t mind if I went to the occasional house party or even on the odd overnight trip.
But she was always picky about who I hung out with.
Her preference, her demand, was that I spend my time with good girls, like the ones on my track team.
Honors students, positive influences, girls who had something to lose if they got caught drinking or doing drugs.
But grief, mine and hers, must have lowered her defenses, made her more desperate. Instead of the expected suspicion, she just seemed relieved that I was getting out of the house at all. “When will you be coming back?”
I realized that I didn’t know. Shiloh never said. “Um, next week? I think.”
Mom knew I was lying about how long I’d be away. I could tell by the small wrinkle that formed over the bridge of her nose when she frowned.
I knew she worried about me being alone and at home most of the time.
She’d pressed me to get the job at the diner so that I’d have a reason to leave the house and function like a normal person.
But I also think it was easier for her when I was away.
It was bad enough that she had to grieve over her own daughter.
I got the impression that watching me mourn was like doubling the pain.
In that way, the trip was good for both of us.
We needed the time apart from each other.
Mom stepped closer, brushed my curls away, and kissed me just above the arch of my eyebrow. “Have fun.”
I packed the last of my things and spent half the night tossing and turning fitfully in my bed before I gave up on trying to sleep, grabbed my duffel bag, and made for the woods behind our house.
I didn’t dress for the occasion—I wore nothing more than my thin pajamas and a pair of well-worn ballet flats that Adeline had bought at a vintage shop years before—but it was still surprisingly easy for me to find my way to the playhouse.
The path was well trod, my having tamped it down so many times in the months after Adeline’s death, and it wasn’t that far from our house to begin with, a few miles through the forest.
The playhouse emerged from the trees, moonlit and green with moss.
It was still sun-stained pink when they’d found Adeline, but the forest had hastily subsumed it in the months that followed, as if to erase all traces of her.
I nudged open the door and ducked inside.
There were weeds and mushrooms sprouting up from the dirt.
A canopy of silver spiderwebs hung from the low ceiling; a few snared on my hair as I settled myself and spread my comforter across the floor.
In the wake of Adeline’s death, I would come here and nestle myself in the right corner of the window, trying to arrange myself in the way that I imagined Adeline had the night she’d died here.
She had a particular way of sitting, slumped and boneless, with her legs bent and spread wide apart.
When she was a child, my mother had called this her rag doll pose, but once she became a teenager, Mom had scolded her for it, claimed that it was rude and unseemly and invited the wrong kind of attention.
Adeline, stubborn as all hell, had never stopped.
“What happened to you?” I asked aloud into the dark. “What secrets were you keeping from me?”
Of course, there was no answer.