The car was dark, the night even darker. A light drizzle was falling again, and between the darkness, the rain, and the confines of the Jeep, my worries had nowhere to go but back into the gathering swirl in my head. When Edward reached out a hand, I pulled it into my lap and held on tightly.
“Having second thoughts?” he asked.
I glanced his way. Spikes of hair, straight nose, neat beard—his profile was vague in the murk, but what I couldn’t physically see, my mind filled in. He was stability. I clung to that as I did to his hand and gave a mildly hysterical laugh. “About which part—bringing her here, meeting with Zwick, or consorting with you?”
“All of the above,” he said.
“All of the above,” I confirmed and let slip the noise in my head. “What if Mom hates it here? What if she finds she can’t stand seeing me after all? What if Grace is into something serious—I mean, really serious—like something that overshadows anything Chris might have done, so her life is at risk?”
“Do you think that?” he cut in.
“I don’t know, but what if something ticks off Shanahan, and he makes an issue of it, and my past comes out? What if Ben Zwick already knows my past? And this meeting? What if Grace refuses to see him or storms out when she hears what he says and then hates me for setting her up? What if you’re pulled into it and the Inn suffers and your group votes you out? What if my probation is revoked?”
He was silent for so long that I wondered if he was having second thoughts himself. But he didn’t pull his hand back. His fingers stayed around mine, tight as ever. We were turning onto Pepin Hill when he said, “I love you.”
“That is not the issue.”
“Do you love me?”
Though the forest cocooned us enough for the Jeep’s headlights to reflect off wet fronds, I couldn’t see his eyes, but I felt his presence keenly, just as I had this whole long day. If he hadn’t been with me, what I thought to be challenging would have been ten times more so. This was what he and I had.
“I’ve always loved you,” I admitted, “but that is not the issue.”
“It is.”
I knew he was thinking that if we loved each other, we would get through whatever came our way. Only, we hadn’t after Lily died. We had failed spectacularly.
“The difference,” he finally said when he turned to me after parking at the house, “is that back then we got trampled by the outside world. We lost sight of what we wanted.”
“We wanted Lily,” I reminded him, feeling a visceral ache in my gut.
“We wanted each other first,” Edward countered. “Lily came from us, but if there hadn’t been a ‘we,’ she wouldn’t have existed at all.”
I killed her, I thought but knew not to say. Edward didn’t like that wording, and maybe he was right. Technically, I had been responsible for her death. But I hadn’t planned the accident. Had I seen it coming, I would have slammed on the brakes.
There was some consolation in finally accepting that. Still, a weight remained. “She was our child,” I said. “She didn’t ask to be born. We decided that. We took the responsibility.”
He brought my hand to his mouth, kissed it, and held it there. The whiskers above his lip chafed, then soothed. His breath was warm, his voice sad. “Some kids are born with medical conditions and die within hours. Some grow big enough to be riding their bikes on the sidewalk when a car jumps the curb. There’s no sense to any of these things—or maybe there is. Maybe Lily wasn’t destined to live beyond five. Maybe she was a lesson we had to learn.”
That sounded merciless. Affronted, I asked, “What kind of lesson?”
“Humility. Vulnerability. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. My mother said that all through chemo.”
“Actually, chemo killed her.”
“Actually, cancer killed her, but maybe I didn’t take my part of the lesson to heart. As hard as my mother’s death was, Lily’s was ten times worse, a hundred times worse. I never expected to have to live through something like that. But I did. And it didn’t kill me. I’m here. And I have choices. I want to be better, Maggie. So yes. I’m trying to be stronger.”
The strength of his belief resonated in his voice, which seemed suddenly deeper and, in that, soothing. I couldn’t disagree with him, at least not entirely. Strength had been my major goal for the last five years—well, for four really, after that first year during which I’d been a hot mess. But weighing life lessons against cruelty was a toughie.
“When you talk about destiny, are you talking about God?” I asked.
He considered that with my knuckles to his mouth, then breathed against them. “I don’t know. I struggle to find an explanation for what happened, and He’s all I get.” He looked sharply at me. “Don’t you ever think that?”
I didn’t. I was still angry at Him. But I tried to hear Edward. “You’re saying we should be grateful for the five years we had.”
“Yeah, I’m saying that. When we lose someone we love, we can either die with them or live on to celebrate their life. I’m tired of focusing on what we lost, Maggie. I want to focus on what we had.”
I was about to argue that five years wasn’t enough, that Lily had been a key part of our future, and what about her dreams—when I heard his words—and even then, it was another minute before they fully registered. When they did, though, they went straight to the soul of the person I was trying to become. He was talking about the photographs neither of us could put on a desk. Or nightstand or bookshelf. He was talking about the memories I had so fiercely locked away. He was talking about the same things my therapist had, until I got tired of failing at it, and stopped seeing her.
And where was I now? My ex-husband had stolen back into my life, my brother was occupying my loft, and my mother had become my responsibility. The past was crowding in. It was unexpected and, in many regards, daunting. And yet, there was something good about having family again.
If Lily wasn’t part of it, she was forgotten. I couldn’t let that happen.
In that instant, urgency hit—like I had wasted too much time and was suddenly on the verge of irrevocably losing her. Pulling my hand free, I dashed out of the car and ran through the drizzle to the house. Liam must have let Jonah out before he left, because the dog stayed inside, craning his neck on my thigh when I dropped to my knees and buried my face in cat fur. I felt like it had been a year since I’d been home, not twelve hours.
But I couldn’t linger here, either. These three were my babies, but they weren’t the only ones. Dropping my coat on the newel post as I passed, I was on the stairs when I heard Edward enter the house, but I didn’t look back. I didn’t stop until I was on my knees on the floor by the bed and had pulled out my grandmother’s green velvet box.
I wavered then. There was pain in this box. I had kept it closed these four years not because I didn’t want to see Lily; wasn’t she with me in the dark most nights? But the physical somethings from her life, held in this box, were actual, touchable proof that she was gone. I hadn’t been ready.
I wasn’t sure I was now. But the past seemed destined to pop up, and focusing on loss was limiting. I agreed with Edward. I wanted to focus on the joy my daughter had brought. I did not want to lose her, could not lose her.
Touching the latch, I felt a spark and pulled my hand back fast. Not only grief, I told myself. Beauty, too. I reached out again, but hesitated. Fisting my hands on my thighs, I rocked back and forth, near the box and away, near and away. Then I raised my eyes. Edward stood at the door with his shoulders slumped, seeming as lost as I felt. And suddenly I couldn’t do this alone.
“Help me?” I begged softly.
The question was barely out when he came forward, as though he had been waiting, as though he understood that a mother’s grief—or joy—was different from a father’s, as though he understood that I wasn’t yet ready to make the commitment to him that he was to me but that, in matters of Lily, we were together.
On the floor, in the ligh
t of my bedside lamp, the green box seemed etched in amber. He hunkering down and eyed it. “In there?”
I nodded. Reassured by his nearness, I slipped the latch and raised the lid.
The smell hit first. It was my grandmother’s trademark gardenia, conjuring summer and age. Though pale in comparison to the woman herself, it had defied the years by clinging to her letters, to the sepia portraits of her parents and the sketches she had done of my mother as a child, of flowers and friends and the dogs she had loved and lost. I didn’t see these things now, though. They were simply a nest for my daughter.
At my shoulder, Edward’s breath tripped, because there she was looking up at us—Lily Reid Cooper, all blond-white hair, silver-blue eyes, and impish mouth, as real as ever. My chest tightened until he leaned closer. “We can do this,” he said, and although his voice held a quiver, it was determined.
Only then did I realize that this was hard for him, too, and suddenly, being together had greater meaning. He needed me as much as I needed him.
Gratified by that thought, I picked up one photo. “How beautiful she is,” I whispered and, emboldened by that first view, set it aside and went to the next.
“Look at her here,” Edward said, holding another. It was taken by one of Lily’s playgroup moms, who had thought it so special that she’d had it printed. The occasion was a birthday party, the setting a princess bounce house. The camera caught Lily mid-air, her hands and legs askew, her expression the embodiment of glee. She was three at the time.
We had hundreds—no, thousands of digital shots. Most of these physical prints were copies of those we had either given to grandparents or put on our family room wall. I held up one of her grinning around a roasted marshmallow, Edward held up one of her scowling in time-out. I spotted one of her with Edward and pushed others aside to reach it, while he dug out one of her on her brand new, training wheel–less, five-year-old’s bike.
I might have recalled that when she died, we donated that barely used bike to charity, if I hadn’t just then spotted my old phone—not the one the police had confiscated, but the one I’d bought to replace it. We had always backed up to the Cloud, so restoring pictures had been a cinch. Not so easy? Reliving them. So I had packed away the phone, too.
Taking it in my palm now, I turned it on. Naturally, after all this time, it was dead. I nearly wept at that alone.
“We can charge it,” Edward quickly offered when he saw the tears that hung, just hung on my lower lids. “I have them on my phone, too, but I haven’t been able…” His voice cracked. Abandoning the thought, he returned to the box and lifted a photo of the three of us that had been taken by a professional photographer when Lily was one.
Blinking it into focus, I smiled. “She does not look happy here. Remember?”
“Oh yeah.” I heard his grin. “Tantrum city. Did not want her picture taken.”
“She didn’t like her hair,” I joked.
“What hair?”
“Exactly. Poor thing. It was late coming in, but the wait was worth it.” I wondered whether that gorgeous white-blond silk would have darkened at ten, as mine had. And at eleven, twelve, or thirteen? Even beyond hair, I wondered how puberty would have treated her nose, her skin, her moods.
Rather than tightening up, my chest was suddenly empty, like a huge hole had opened where the future should have been. New tears welled but didn’t spill. The purpose of this was to celebrate the life we’d had, not the one we’d lost.
My probation agreement didn’t help. There it suddenly was with its business end peering out, that big, bold COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS in the upper left hard to miss. Like the mug shot in my medicine chest, I had meant it to be a truth in this box of truths, but it hurt in a different way from the others. It was a pollutant here, celebrating death far more than life. I saw that now. This was definitely not the place it should be.
“Move it,” Edward ordered in a low voice.
Grateful for the direction, I snatched the envelope up and flipped it into the darkness where the light of the small lamp couldn’t reach—and wasn’t there satisfaction in that? For the first time, perhaps, I was separating what didn’t belong from what did. That quickly, the green velvet box was pure.
One deep breath of gardenia had me fully back, and though the hole inside me remained, it, too, seemed more pure. Needing to be with my baby again, I moved aside the shot of Lily’s wall graffiti to unearth pencil sketches I had made of her, and crayon drawings she had made of us. Under the layer of drawings were formal photos from preschool in which she looked stiff and photo-booth strips in which she looked irreverent. Edward chuckled at the last from my shoulder—but then there was Bunny! Tucked in at the side of the box, she was tiny, not much bigger than my hand, and oh-so-well-loved. There was a piece of the sleeper Lily had outgrown, but still cuddled. There was the ugly rubber rose barrette and a six-inch rendition of Sophia the First. She had loved both the barrette and Sophia, who debuted on TV less than a year before her death.
And there was a baggie. Victorious, I held it up. “First haircut,” I crowed. “I took off two inches and thought I would die.”
I stroked the hair through the plastic, then pressed it between my thumb and finger, as if holding it tightly would make it more mine. Her hair was real. It was part of her body in ways that the documents I found next—birth certificate, medical records, preschool papers—were not. But I had no sooner begun lifting them out when what I saw beneath stopped me cold.
“Her wish box,” Edward said in a hushed voice.
I panicked. Oh, I had known it was there. I had packed it in myself, deliberately placed where Lily’s things ended and my grandmother’s began, and, knowing it was safe, I had pushed it from mind. That was where it had stayed, out of mind until now.
Lily and I had made it together. Since Nana’s box was long and narrow, so was this one, but on a miniature scale, and rather than being green velvet, it was clay. I had done the basics, trueing up the sides and making sure the lid was snug, but Lily had added fingerprints and thumb spots, and splashes of color, a bird of sorts, and three rabbits, all of which I’d topped off with a rainbow and stars. The idea, she excitedly told Edward after it was glazed and fired, was that she could write anything she wanted and put it inside—wishes, secrets, notes to me or to him or to her friend Mia.
My tactic, of course, was to get her to write. But she hadn’t lived long enough to learn how, much less to fill the box with wishes, secrets, or anything else.
So I had filled it with her ashes.
My strength vanished. I could take photos, dolls, and beloved shreds of a sleeper, but not my daughter’s ashes. Granted, they were sealed in a bag. They might have been sealed in ten, but it wouldn’t have mattered. They were Lily in the flesh, or what was left of the flesh after the flames had done their thing.
In that moment, I would have done anything not to have cremated her. But the idea of her body lying alone in the ground had been way too brutal. I wanted her in a gentle, loving place, and she was, but even this was brutal.
Hurriedly, I tried to replace what I’d taken out so that the clay box was buried again, but it wouldn’t comply. Through a blur of tears, I mounded papers over it, and still it glared at me. I pushed it deeper, using both hands now to thicken the cover. When I could still see a corner, an edge, even a bright pink spatter, I thought to use my scarf to hide it. Desperate, I began tugging and yanking, nearly choking myself in my haste before an end finally came free.
From behind came Edward’s arms, his hands closing firmly on mine. “Stop,” he said in a broken voice.
Despite the warmth of him against my back, I couldn’t begin to think CALM thoughts. “I can’t—that box—I have to—”
“Shhh,” he whispered as he pulled my hands away from my neck, “shhh, baby.”
Twisting, I raised my eyes. His lips were a thin slash in his beard, his cheekbones severe over skin washed of color. And his eyes? Usually that startling pale-blue, the
y were flooded with grief.
Had he cried when Lily died? I couldn’t remember. Couldn’t remember. He must have, but with me? Possibly not, if he had wanted to keep a strong front. And then there was the public spectacle that our daughter’s death had quickly become.
Edward was strong. There had been arrangements to make, and I was useless. I knew he grieved; I had seen it etched on his face, ever more deeply as the days without Lily dragged on. But tears? I don’t recall seeing tears. Had he cried when he was alone, which increasingly he had been, since I was emotionally gone?
When the criminal case exploded and his stoicism remained, I interpreted it as anger, and we had gone downhill from there. I wondered now if I had been wrong. I wondered if stoicism had been Edward’s own personal form of anguish.
If so, that had changed. Here in my little cabin, with the velvet box open and the remains of Lily’s life laid out, it wasn’t my suffering versus his grief. We shared the sorrow now. For the first time, we were absolutely, totally together in this. For the first time, it wasn’t about how Lily had died, but the simple fact of her loss. Perhaps being apart had given us the space for this. Perhaps, over five years, our grief had taken its natural course, gradually evolving into something we could live with. Perhaps we were simply new people.
Whatever, his tears were my undoing. My own suddenly came in a torrent, gathering in my heart and erupting past my throat with such force that when they reached my eyes they had nowhere to go but out. Edward barely had time to turn me into him when I broke into gut-deep, soulful sobs. I had no control at all. Clutching handfuls of his black turtleneck, I held on for dear life, helpless to stop what was happening—not trying to—not wanting to. And that was okay. Because he was crying, too. I felt it in the convulsive way he held me, in the tremors that came from deep within him and the strangled sounds that escaped his throat.
Before and Again Page 33
