Chapter 24. Lenore
Lenore
My eyes flutter open to a whistling bird song.
At first, I think that’s what woke me. The sky through the windshield is a pale haze.
I drag my body upright with a groan, the change in temperature prickling goose bumps over my skin.
My joints ache from hours sharing the cramped space in the truck, contorting my limbs at strange angles to get comfortable, and I’m sticky with sweat thanks to cuddling with the human equivalent of a heating blanket.
Callan shifts beside me, blinking away sleep. His eyes are brighter blue than normal in the morning light, and he squints with his entire face, like keeping them open is painful. “What time is it?”
“Early,” I surmise, looking out at the mist crowding the orchard. I twist at the waist in search of my jeans, which are turned inside out on the floor mat. I rifle through the pockets and extract my phone to check the time.
It pings in my hand.
I blink, too groggy to make sense of what I’m looking at. A slew of pictures come through while I’m still staring at the latest unopened message.
“Is everything all right?”
I swipe to open the messages, scrolling back to the earliest one. They’re all from my brother.
“Nore,” Callan says, sitting up.
I look up from the screen, a smile splitting across my face. “Katie had the baby.”
Before he has a chance to reply, a slamming car door punctuates the quiet. People. For less than a blink, our eyes meet, my own panic reflected back at me.
I look down at my phone. It’s almost eight in the morning, which is when the orchard opens for pick-your-own.
We scramble to collect our clothes and tug them on. Cal starts the truck and we drive back to the house, leaving tire tracks in the silvery dew clinging to the grass.
“I’ll be back in a couple hours to get some work done, after I run a few errands,” he says, truck idling at the side door.
I bend forward in my seat to tug my tennis shoes over my bare feet, socks forgotten somewhere in the cab.
“All right.” I slide a thumb beneath my shirt collar to untwist my bra strap and tug it up over my shoulder.
An expectant silence hangs between us, both waiting for the other to take the lead.
“I’ll see you then,” I say, and climb out, shutting the door behind me.
I watch from the porch as he drives away. Exhaust hangs on the still morning air.
A strange sense of finality settles over me. Next time we see each other, a few small hours from now, everything will be different. No more what-ifs and stolen glances.
I glance down at my phone again, and my heart feels as weightless as a hot-air balloon.
It’s quiet in the house when I step into the mudroom. I kick my shoes off beneath the cedar chest and climb the stairs to my room.
I didn’t sleep well in the truck, but my mind is buzzing, so there’s no chance I’ll fall asleep right now.
I gather up a few things and head to the guest bathroom for a quick shower.
I crank the hot water and close my eyes, letting steam and searing heat relax my aching muscles, scrubbing memories of last night from my skin.
Afterward, with my hair in a towel, I flop onto the bed on my stomach and reach for my phone.
Thursday, October 1, the screen reminds me. Eloise Marie French was born at 5:09 in the morning.
Damien sent a series of pictures from the maternity ward with Katie in a hospital gown, looking exhausted but elated, and Eloise—my niece—swaddled in the hospital bassinet and looking like an adorable potato with a wisp of fine raven hair.
I feel a twinge of regret that I’m not there to welcome her, but Damien relayed a firm message from Katie: No visitors for the time being.
Katie’s mom will be coming to stay with them to help with household chores, but otherwise, they’ll be focused on Katie’s recovery and on bonding as a new family unit.
We made tentative plans to do a quick video call tomorrow night, contingent on whether they can find the mental and emotional bandwidth as sleep-deprived new parents.
Inevitably, my thoughts drift back to Callan. Not only to last night, but to the looming sale of the house. Next week, I’ll have no choice but to pack my bags and head back to New York. I can’t help feeling like we haven’t had enough time.
I open my travel app and swipe through the options for hotel stays in Whitbury and the surrounding area, but almost everything is booked up for peak autumn foliage.
My thumb hovers over a listing for an entire three-bedroom cabin, nestled on the forested shores of a nearby lake, for a whopping six hundred dollars a night.
I blow out a long breath, puffing my cheeks. What’s the matter with me? I have an apartment waiting for me back in the city. It would be absurd to shell out more cash to stay here in Vermont for a few more nights.
I minimize the app and switch over to my text messages. Among the pictures and texts about baby Eloise is a curt reply to the messages I sent after I left the real estate office.
Just saw ur text from yesterday
abt the house. Trust u to make
the right decision
Of course he won’t have time to deal with the agent now. I can’t fault him for that, but it also seems like an awfully big decision to make on my own.
Maybe I’m making a big deal out of nothing. Ten thousand dollars is a lot of money, but it isn’t going to change our lives. It’s not like it’s going to pay off my student loans.
I open a new message to Gita.
Please let the buyer know
we’ll accept their lower offer.
Afterward, I lock my phone and roll onto my side, staring out the window at the blazing orange maple leaves.
It feels like I’ve barely shut my eyes, but when I open them again, the sun has shifted behind the house.
I fumble with my phone, squinting one eye at the bright screen.
4:43 PM. What the hell? I push up from the bed and the damp towel tumbles from my head.
There’s a faint imprint in the quilt where I slept on top of it.
Staggering like a zombie, I leave my bedroom and make my way down to the kitchen, but there’s no one there.
Clean plates are slotted into the drying rack beside the sink.
I cross the mudroom, pushing open the creaky storm door, and take quick stock of the cars parked outside.
No sign of Callan’s pickup truck. I must’ve missed him.
Abruptly, I remember his promise last night to take me on a hike today. We didn’t exactly reconfirm plans this morning, but forgetting seems a little purposeful.
Maybe he is avoiding you. I think back to the first day I showed up here, him knocking at the door to my room to check on me. It’s hard to imagine that he wouldn’t have come looking for me again today.
Unless he thought I was avoiding him. That’s also a possibility.
I drag a hand over my face, still standing in the doorway. It’s a balmy afternoon. I should take advantage of this last week before returning to New York.
I head upstairs to grab my grandmother’s journal from the nightstand.
My phone chirrups on the bed and my heart ratchets into my throat as I reach for it, then sinks when the screen lights up and it’s only Gita responding to my earlier message to let me know she’ll send along the e-documents shortly.
I find bug repellant beneath the bathroom sink to spray down my legs and arms, and then slide into my clogs and step outside.
Weeds and dead leaves populate the troughs along the back side of the house where my grandmother used to tend her garden—her own private corner of the farm, fallen into disrepair in her absence.
I trudge in the opposite direction of the orchard, out across the open field.
The woods bordering the property burn red and orange in the late-day sun.
I walk until I reach the pond, where the dock that we used to play on has all but rotted with the unforgiving seasons.
The wood is sun bleached, planks groaning miserably beneath my weight.
I sit down cross-legged at the edge with the journal on my lap, watching dead leaves skate across the surface of the water.
I flip through the journal until I reach the page where I left off, an entry from almost eleven years ago. A cloud passes across the sinking sun, stealing the warmth from my back.
I don’t know where my head is anymore. I came back to Vermont hoping to find closure, but my wounds are as open and raw as ever.
Maybe it’s not a question of where, but who.
I’m the common denominator. A jigsaw puzzle with a missing piece.
I could travel the world over and it wouldn’t make me complete.
The wind picks up, curling the corner of the page against my hand. I lift my thumb, letting pages flutter past—a time capsule dialing back years. It stops on the entry from seventeen years ago, a few months after our mother brought us to stay with Gran.
There is something therapeutic about creating, I think. A way to get all your emotions out without having to put words to them, because finding the right words is not always easy.
Maybe reading isn’t what I need right now.
An unfamiliar sense of resentment simmers in my stomach. It’s so unexpected that it derails my focus entirely. When did I start feeling this angry? I don’t remember. All my emotions are so tangled together that it’s grown hard to distinguish one from the other.
I’ve played those words that Matt said on repeat in my head: You knew this was coming. You had three years to come to terms with this after moving her into the care home. Haven’t you already mourned enough?
It feels like my way of grieving has been wrong from the very beginning.
My grief has planted roots, and I can’t seem to rip them out.
Never growing around fond memories, but in the shadowy corners, the regrets, the questions I never asked and the parts of my grandmother that I’ll never get to know now that she’s gone.
So many pieces that make up a person—her stories, her regrets, her secrets—lost to time.