Fixing Delilah (19 page)
On the morning before we leave Red Falls, I awake to an unusual silence. No drills and hammers and saws chewing through the wood. No estate-sale customers haggling for cheaper knickknacks. No appraisers or lawyers to usher us closer to our final good-byes.
It’s the first time since our arrival that I hear so many birds outside my window, singing and chirping and wishing one another well, all the way from here to the lake.
I get out of bed slowly and stretch, enjoying the solitude as I begin to pull my clothes from the dresser and pack up my suitcase. I save Holden Caulfield for tomorrow, but I put the dog sweater in there and Patrick’s green guitar pick and the rock he carved with our initials and my new friend, Moo, smiling in her way. I brought her up from the windowsill in Nana’s kitchen to remind me of everything that happened this summer; how easily some things can be broken for good and for bad, and how some things, no matter how shattered, can still go back together. Like Moo, my family may never be as strong as it once was. There are chips and cracks and scars. But some of them can be repaired, piece by piece, rebuilt into something even more cherished and loved and unique. That’s what I’m working for now. That’s what I’m holding on to.
I don’t know what’s waiting for me back in Key. I cringe to think about the last time I was there, all the momentous screwups, my photo-worthy
Finndescretions
, the friends I left behind without explanation. We may not have much in common these days, but they’re still my classmates. We’ll still see each other in the halls of Kennedy High as we all prepare to cross the graduation stage together next spring. Our lives may be different this year, but they were once my friends, just like the people of Red Falls were once Mom’s and Rachel’s. And maybe, like the people of Red Falls who came back together after my grandmother’s passing, there’s still a way, a new way, a different way, that we can be friends again.
But if not, if they don’t like the changes I’ve made in my life, I have to accept that. I have to be okay. Emily, Megan, Jack, Luna, Patrick… they helped me learn what true friendship is. It’s never perfect, but it
is
important. And now that I’ve had the real thing, I’m not going to settle for anything less.
As for my non-boyfriend, Finn, there is no place in my life for him anymore. When I think of him now, of our spot in the woods, all my thoughts run into Seven Mile Creek and wash away. I don’t miss him. Finn and I never knew each other. Knowing each other wasn’t our thing. He just made it easy for me to drown it all out. He helped me run away from myself without really going anywhere.
I don’t regret my time with him. Without the dark contrast of Finn, I might never have seen the light of Patrick. In that way, I’ll always be grateful that he was part of my life.
But I’m not running away anymore.
I slide my phone from my pocket and scroll to his last text—the one he sent just before meeting me on the street corner that last night in Key.
pick u up at midnite? usual spot?
The words send a familiar rush through my chest, but this time, it’s the rush of something leaving. I feel the tide of it rise up inside as I delete his number from my contacts, pushing out against me until it reaches my fingertips and floats out into nothingness. Whatever happens when we return from Red Falls, that girl—the one waiting under the street lamp at midnight to sneak off to the woods and
forget
—she’s gone.
“You all packed up?” Mom asks, joining me in my summer bedroom.
“Mostly.” I shrug, watching a seagull dive across the lawn in front of the window. Mom tucks a section of hair behind my ear, and I find myself doing that old rock and a hard place thing with her again—the dance we’ve so perfected this year. Things
are
better, and I hope in time, forgiveness will come on all sides. But isn’t that enough? Will it ever be enough?
“Delilah, I know you’re still processing everything that happened,” she says. “It’s a lot to think about. I’m not expecting you to just get over it. You need time—as long as it takes.” She rests her hand on my knee.
“It hasn’t even hit me yet,” I say. “Not really. Sometimes I try to think about it, and it’s so unreal that my brain tells me it’s only a movie. A story. Not my life.”
“I understand. But I want things… I want everything to be out in the open now. No more secrets.” Mom nods, talking faster but softly. “If you have any questions about your father or me or our family, ask. I mean that. I might not have the answers, but I promise I’ll be straightforward with you.”
I take a deep breath. “Mom, does Casey Conroy know about me?”
“I haven’t been in touch with Casey since that night,” she says. “And I doubt my mother would’ve tracked him down after she found out. I don’t think he knows about you, Delilah. I guess I always knew that you’d learn the truth about your father, whether I told you or not. As hard as that was for me to accept, I also wanted it to be your decision to tell him or not. If you decide that you want to look for him, we can contact—”
I shake my head. “I don’t want to think about it yet. It’s still too soon.” My chest tightens, but I fight it. I don’t want to go back to the dark places—the sadness I wallowed in for days following Mom’s confession.
“I’m not asking you to make any decisions about your father right now,” Mom says. “Whatever you want to do—if anything—I’ll support. I just want you to—”
“Mom, what was Stephanie like?” I ask. “I mean, before she got sick.” Things are different now. I feel like she’ll tell me.
Mom smiles. “You look like her, you know. Same mischievous grin. Same eyes. We all get it from Nana, but you look especially like your aunt, even when you were little. Megan and I used to say that a piece of her lived on in you. Sometimes when I see you a certain way, like in a mirror or through the window, I see her. Especially here in the lake house.”
“Were you close? Was she funny? Was she smart?”
Mom nods, her face illuminated by the memories. “She was beautiful, Delilah. Alive. Impulsive. A little reckless, kind of like you. I always admired that about her. And about you—truly. It just conflicts with my mothering instincts.”
I smile. “Yeah, I kind of get that now.”
“Yes. Well, Stephie was really special, Del. Everyone fell in love with her—you couldn’t help it. It almost killed my father when she started unraveling, and by then, Rachel and I were already away at college, starting new lives in new places. We didn’t see it happening right away. But before, Stephie was the light in our lives—like a bright, bright star. People always say things like that when someone dies, don’t they?”
“I guess.” I never knew anyone who died like that—not someone close to me. Just Papa, and I don’t remember what they said about him at the funeral because the fight erupted, overshadowing all else.
“They do. But with Steph, it was true.”
“I wish I knew her.”
“Me, too, Delilah. You know, she almost died once before, when she was about five. She fell into the lake. I was supposed to be watching her, but Rachel and I were arguing on the dock. All of a sudden, Stephanie was just gone. The silence was deafening. I was only nine or ten myself, but I will never, ever forget the fear in my heart when I realized what happened.”
“What did you do?”
“I jumped off the dock and grabbed her, but she wasn’t breathing. We ran to the house. Jack was there. He took her from my arms and laid her in the grass and started CPR. It was like the whole world stopped, waiting for her to cough. Then she did. It was over. Jack never mentioned it again—not even to my mother. Stephie didn’t talk about it, either. It was like she knew how serious it was. How lucky… after that, Rachel and I promised each other we’d never let anything happen to her.”
Mom’s eyes go far away as she finds her way back through the tangles of her past.
“When she died,” she continues, “I took some comfort in the fact that after the accident at the lake, we brought her back. She was supposed to die
that
day, but we got to sneak in another fourteen years with her. I know we don’t talk about her, but my God, Delilah. I miss my sister every day. Every
single
day.”
Mom takes a deep breath and pulls me close to her, folding herself around me. As her tears soak into my hair, the truth of it hits me like a flash storm over Red Falls Lake. Above every role in her life—Claire Hannaford Speaking, Rachel’s and Stephanie’s sister, Casey’s grief-induced fling, Nana’s and Papa’s daughter,
my
mother—she’s a human being, just like me. Frail and faulty and flawed, capable of making the most heinous mistakes and inflicting the most severe pain.
But equally capable of the greatest love.
I wrap my arms around her and hold very still, grateful somehow for the twisted, rock- and root-strewn paths that brought us here.
“You’re probably wondering about this Mr. Devlin character,” she says. It’s strange to hear her call him that—a character—as though he exists only in the pages of a novel and never as the man I’ve come to know, however mistakenly, as my father. It shocks me now to realize that in the weeks since I learned the truth, I
wasn’t
wondering about him—not in the way Mom’s playful tone implies. It was as though my heart made room for two truths that night—one real, the other safe and familiar and desirable—and even as Mom spoke the words that Thomas wasn’t my father, even as I screamed at her and ran out of the house, part of me went on believing that he
was
. Believing that wherever he was, all of the joys in my life he’d witnessed and shared—all of the disappointments he’d somehow seen. Believing that through them all, he’d reached out and rubbed my back and told me I’d be okay, even if I couldn’t hear his words or feel his protective hands on my shoulders. So many years ago, when my mother first gave me the article about his death and told me about their brief encounter in Philadelphia, I believed her then, too. I believed her then,
first
. Thomas has been with me a long time, and like the memory of anyone we love, a few nights without him isn’t going to erase him from my life. Nothing is.
“I met him at the bar in Philadelphia—just like I told you,” she says. “He asked me why I peeled the labels from the beer bottles before I drank them.”
“You still do that,” I say, remembering the last time I saw her drink one at DKI’s company picnic.
“I know. I don’t like how they feel. Anyway, he noticed, and we started chatting. We talked all night long, hanging out until the bar closed. In all this time, until you found those pictures in the closet, he was the only person I ever really talked to about my sister’s death. It was only a couple of weeks after her funeral. It was so much easier with him—a total stranger—than it was with my own family.
“There was a moment—a flash, really—where it could have gone another way, but we let it go. He had an early morning flight back to London and on to Afghanistan… if I had known his fate that night, I might have tried to… I don’t know, Del. I guess we never know what life is going to hand us. We kissed and walked away. I didn’t tell Rachel about him at first, even when I learned about what happened in Afghanistan. I still felt so guilty about Casey and so messed up about Stephanie.
“I saved the newspaper article about his death,” she says, tracing the lines of one hand with the other. “I wanted to remember him. Not long after I learned I was pregnant, I found the clipping on my desk, and it happened from there. All I had to do was stretch the truth just a little, and no one would have to be hurt by what happened between Casey and me. Especially not my child. It’s funny—I let Thomas walk away that night because I knew it wouldn’t turn into anything. I never expected that he’d become such a part of our history.”
He may not be my biological father, but Thomas Devlin was a real person, a man who lived and died for what he loved. A man who shared a few moments with my mother and who maybe, in some small way, is still connected to me on that same giant cosmic rubber band that keeps stretching and twisting and snapping us all back together when we least expect it. In that way, I’ll always consider him a part of me, and me of him, even more than Casey. And maybe somehow Thomas knows about me, too. Maybe he really
is
watching over me, smiling, telling us that we’re going to be okay. The daughter that was almost his. The woman with the hazel eyes.
I study the creases and curves of my mother’s face as she looks at me, her story over for now. I know it’s illogical, but before this summer, it always seemed that my mother sprang forth into this life fully grown, fully clothed, fully armed with her arsenal of logic and reason, unscathed by life’s garden-variety heartaches. All the time I was busy resenting her, I never considered that she was ever young or starry-eyed. That before I came into her life, my mother had an entire age of happiness and sadness and elation and fear and wonder. Layers on layers on layers, all part of the history of us.
“So…” Mom stretches, putting her arm around my shoulders. “How’s
Patrick?
”
“What?” My heart speeds up. “I don’t know. What do you mean? Why are you asking me about Patrick? What did he say?”
Mom smiles and waits for my neurosis to pass. “Rachel tells me I don’t have to worry. That everything will work out amazing with you two, so say the cards. What do you think?”
My face burns under her gaze, but I smile. I can’t help it. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Of
course
you don’t. Come on, Delilah. I’m not blind. I’ve seen the way you two look at each other.” She cups my chin in her hand.
“You have?”
“Yes. Just promise me one thing.”
“What’s that?” I ask.
“If you want to see him, no matter where he lives or where you live or what time it is, use the front door, okay? No more windows.”
I laugh. “Deal.”
“All right. Finish packing and come downstairs,” she says, patting my knee. “Patrick and Jack will be here soon. Rachel and I have some news for everyone.”
