Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The party had run late—twenty people for a fortieth birthday, three toasts too many. By ten-fifteen the kitchen looked like it always looked after a four-course menu, and three half-empty bottles of red sat on the pass that the guests had forgotten to take with them.
Anna had gone straight to washing dishes. The water was as hot as her hands could stand. She had her sleeves up and Margo’s old apron on.
Tyler at the grill, scraping. He’d been quiet all night.
Meg in the dining room, breaking down. She’d put the chairs up on four tables and was working her way toward the windows with the broom.
Luke had gone home an hour ago, kissing Meg at the door the way he did, like he was leaving for a month instead of a night.
The lights over the booth were off. The lights over the bar were off.
Just the pendants over the pass and the small lamp Joey had installed last year in the corner because he’d said the room needed a “soft place to put things down.”
Anna liked the Shack at this hour. The room without people in it. The light low. The smell of the night’s food still lingering. The ocean through the open windows, louder now that everyone had gone.
She pulled the last bottle of red off the pass. About a third left. She got three of the rocks glasses they used for the late-night cleanup wine because nobody felt like washing wineglasses at this hour, poured and set them on the four-top closest to the kitchen.
“Come and sit for a minute,” she said to her brother and sister.
Meg leaned the broom against the wall and sat. Tyler set the grill scraper down, wiped his hands on the towel, and came over. He reached for his glass but didn’t drink.
“Good party,” Meg said.
Anna nodded and took a sip.
Nobody said anything for a while. The pendant over the pass made a small humming noise it had been making that Joey had a theory about.
Tyler leaned back and closed his eyes. Meg pulled her sleeves over her hands and wrapped them around her glass.
Anna looked at the booth—empty, the way it had been every evening since Bernie’s surgery—and then at her brother and her sister sitting at a table in a restaurant their grandmother had built, and she thought about how tired she was and how she didn’t want to go home yet and how none of them were going to say the thing until somebody actually did.
The ocean came through the open windows. The room settled around them.
Tyler opened his eyes, looked at the ceiling and closed them again.
“Gosh,” Meg said. She wasn’t talking to anyone. She was just saying it to the room.
Anna knew. Tyler knew. They all knew.
“One more week,” Meg said. “And they’re in her house. Alone. With Sam.”
Nobody answered. Anna let it sit. The girls in that house.
Sam being Sam. The warmth that would feel real and the moment it would turn and the two seventeen-year-olds who wouldn’t see it coming the way the three of them would see it coming because the three of them had been seeing it coming their whole lives.
Tyler rubbed his face with both hands.
Meg’s thumb moved along the rim of her glass. “I can’t stop thinking about the bracelet,” she said. “The turquoise one. For my twelfth birthday. Do you remember?”
“I remember,” Anna said softly.
“Three months late. Because she was supposed to come and didn’t.
” Meg’s voice thinned. “I cleaned my room for her. I never cleaned my room. I organized everything—files, planners, the whole shelf—because I thought she was going to walk through the door and come upstairs and see it.” She stopped and took a breath.
“I cried myself to sleep every night for a month. And then it stopped. And the clasp broke and I threw it away and I didn’t tell anyone. ”
Anna reached across and put her hand on Meg’s arm.
They were still for a moment, each of them somewhere else—in their own room, their own version of waiting for someone who wasn’t coming. The fridge behind the bar kicked on and hummed.
“I think you organized everything harder after that,” Anna said gently. “Like if you could just get it all in the right place—perfectly arranged, perfectly labeled—maybe she’d notice.”
Meg nodded. “I got more and more wound up in it. Anxious. Color-coded filing systems at thirteen. As if organizing the kitchen would make her walk through the door.”
They were silent again.
“Tyler disappeared into the darkroom,” Anna said.
“The darkroom was safe,” Tyler said, his eyes still closed. “Nobody expected anything from me in there. I could just be in the dark with the chemicals and nobody needed me to talk or smile or pretend I was fine.” He opened them. “It was easier to hide than to keep hoping.”
“And I performed,” Anna said. She lifted her wine.
“I made things. I cooked elaborate dinners for people who didn’t ask for them.
I followed the light to paint, just like she did—the grand gesture, the big entrance—because I thought if I was impressive enough, she’d stay to watch.
” She took a sip. “It was painful to try that hard and have nothing work. To notice her more than she ever noticed me. Like I loved her more than she loved me.”
“All those years,” Meg said quietly. “All the Christmases, birthdays—she’s never getting those back. Neither are we.”
Nobody spoke for a moment.
“Do you remember when we stopped calling her Mom?” Meg asked.
“I was fourteen,” Tyler said. “Anna started it.”
“I didn’t start it. I just stopped correcting myself.”
“Same thing.”
“’Mom’ is a promise,” Meg said. “She wasn’t keeping it.”
Tyler was looking at his wine. His jaw was set, his eyes somewhere else.
“Tyler,” Meg said. “What did Sam say when you called?”
Tyler turned the glass slowly on the table. He didn’t answer.
“Tyler?”
He rubbed the back of his neck. “I haven’t called.”
The table went still.
“I don’t want to talk to her,” he said. “I don’t know what to say. We don’t talk. That’s the whole thing.”
Anna looked at him. Of course he hadn’t called. Tyler, who had survived Sam by hiding in the darkroom. Tyler, who had learned that the easiest way to deal with something painful was to not deal with it. Of course he hadn’t picked up the phone.
“Nobody wants to talk to her,” Anna said. “None of us do.”
“But you’re not going to let Stella walk into that house without Sam knowing she’s coming,” Meg said. Not a question.
“Of course not. I wouldn’t do that.” Tyler set his glass down. “I just—I keep picking up the phone and putting it down.”
They were still. Anna watched her brother’s hands on the table—flat, steady, the hands of a man who had spent his whole life being steady for other people and couldn’t figure out how to be steady for himself right now.
“Do you want us to be here when you call?” Anna asked.
Tyler met her eyes. Something moved across his face. He pressed his hands against the table. His eyes were wet and he didn’t try to hide it. He reached across and took Anna’s hand, then Meg’s.
“I didn’t know it would be so hard to come out of the darkroom,” he said.
Anna squeezed his hand. Meg squeezed the other one.
“You’ve been coming out of hiding for a while, Tyler,” Anna said. “Since Stella showed up. You’re good at it. This is just the last hard part.”
Tyler took a breath. Let it out. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay. But not tomorrow. Now. Before I lose my nerve.”
“Now?” Meg said. “Tyler, it’s ten-thirty.”
“If I wait until tomorrow I’ll talk myself out of it again.” He pulled his phone from his jacket on the back of the chair. Looked at it. “I don’t even have her number.”
“I have it,” Meg said. “She sent it on a postcard last spring. I wrote it down.” She pulled out her own phone and found it and held it out.
Tyler took the number. Typed it in. His thumb hovered over the screen.
“Just hit it,” Anna said.
“I’m going to.”
“Tyler.”
Meg reached across and pressed the green button.
“Meg!”
It was ringing. Tyler put the phone to his ear.
Anna could hear the rings from across the table—one, two, three, four.
Meg gripped the edge of the table with both hands.
Then voicemail. A recording of Sam’s voice, warm and easy, the voice of a woman who didn’t answer her phone at ten-thirty at night or possibly any other time.
Tyler closed his eyes.
“Hi, Sam. It’s Tyler.” His voice was steady.
Anna watched him hold it steady. “I know Bea is coming to visit you next week. And she’s bringing someone—her cousin—my daughter.
Her name is Stella. She’s seventeen. She’s a photographer.
” He paused. “I should have called sooner. I’ll text you the flight details. Okay. Bye.”
He hung up and set the phone on the table.
“She didn’t pick up,” Anna said.
Tyler exhaled. “Thank goodness for voicemail.”
Meg laughed. Anna laughed. Tyler actually laughed—all three of them, in the empty room, at ten-thirty at night.
Anna lifted her glass. “To coming out of the darkroom.”
Tyler glanced at her. He reached for his glass.
Meg reached for hers. They didn’t clink. They just drank.
“And,” Anna said, “if Sam hurts a single hair on either of their heads, we ride at dawn. No mercy.”
Tyler laughed.
“I’m serious.”
Meg laughed too. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
Anna put her hand in the middle of the table. Palm down. Didn’t say anything.
Meg looked at her. Put her hand on top of Anna’s.
Tyler put his on top of Meg’s.
They held it for a second. Nobody said anything.
Meg sighed. “I hope if I’m lucky enough to ever be a parent, I’m half as good at it as you guys are.”
Then Meg lifted her glass and the others followed.
Tyler went back to the grill. Meg took up the broom.
Anna turned the water back on. They cleaned the room in the quiet, the same as they’d cleaned it a hundred times—Tyler scraping, Anna washing, Meg sweeping.
The way Margo had taught them without teaching them, just by doing it in front of them every day until they knew how.