IT WAS JUST after one in the afternoon when the Jeep pulled into the front drive, flattening the weeds that grew up through the two inches of dirty white gravel.
Kris brought the car to a stop, shifting it into park and killing the engine, but she did not move. One hand remained on the gearshift, the other with a finger resting against the ignition button. She stared through the windshield just as a shadow fell over the lake house. Without the golden glow of the sun to give it life, the house looked like a corpse tossed into a weed-filled ditch to—
Rot.
The word made even less sense to her now. After all these years, why would her father want to abandon this place? He knew that when his drinking finally finished toying with his liver and decided to off it once and for all, the lake house would go to his only child, just like his home in Blantonville and the meager retirement funds that made up his “estate.” So why let it fall into ruin knowing that—to use it or to sell it—Kris would have to fix everything Hargrove could have easily maintained?
Unless he thought I wouldn’t come back here.
It was true she hadn’t even asked about the lake house since their last summer here. But if he suspected she would never use the place herself, that left only two options: let Hargrove try to sell it or …
Let it rot.
No. Her father had always been a practical man. Buying a summer home, even one as modest as this, had been the one extravagance he ever allowed himself. Plus, there were too many memories associated with the house. Good memories of fun and love and family.
The door at the back of her mind creaked open.
Not all good, the dark voice sang.
In the back seat, Sadie’s seat belt clicked as she unbuckled it. There was a soft zipping sound as it retracted into the plastic wall.
“Hand me that iPad, would ya?” Kris asked.
Sadie looked down at the device beside her on the seat. She stared at it as if she had forgotten what it was, and then she held it out for her mother to take.
Kris made sure it was powered down. She slid the iPad into the glove compartment and slammed it shut. “Sorry, kid, no Wi-Fi means no iPad. We’re unplugged. Think you can handle that for the summer?”
Sadie said nothing. Before the accident, losing her device privileges would have resulted in, at the very least, a pouty “No fair!” But now it seemed she couldn’t care less.
Kris gave a sharp sigh and climbed out of the car. As she had done a thousand times before, she opened the rear side door and waited as Sadie slipped down from her booster seat. Gravel crunched as Sadie landed on her dingy white Converse.
Kris slammed the door and crouched down so that her eyes were level with Sadie’s.
“Help me carry in the groceries?”
Sadie nodded obediently.
For a moment, neither of them moved.
Kris bit her bottom lip between her front teeth. “The house is kind of gross, isn’t it?”
Another pause, and then Sadie gave her head a small nod, her curls bouncing like weak springs.
“Well,” Kris said, “we’re going to fix that. Together. Okay?”
An equally timid nod of the head, quicker this time.
“Okay. Good.”
Kris took the tips of Sadie’s tiny fingers in her own, running the pad of her thumb over the shiny surface of Sadie’s nails. She remembered holding Sadie’s hand just after she was born, the digits impossibly small, her entire hand curling around Kris’s index finger and squeezing as if asking, out of some preternatural instinct, if she were safe.
Kris gazed up at the dilapidated lake house. Sound in his mind or not, her father had let it fall to ruin. But she would restore it. She would bring the house known as “River’s End” back to life.
The metal bucket clanked loudly as it was set into the sink basin, and a plastic bottle went glug-glug-glug as a healthy dose of Pine-Sol spread across its bottom. Kris turned on the faucet, and the bucket instantly filled with suds.
“Go wild,” she said as she held the mop out to Sadie.
Her daughter stared up at her skeptically.
“Seriously,” Kris told her. “The entire floor is your canvas and this mop is your paintbrush. Get to work, Picasso.”
Sadie’s lips spread into a smile.
Kris felt her heart flutter in her chest.
A smile!
An actual smile!
How long had it been?
Kris did not want to entertain the question. The equation was too easily solved.
The top of the handle towered a good twelve inches over Sadie’s head as she carefully dropped the mop into the sudsy water. The bucket jiggled in place, threatening to fall over. Sadie shot a concerned look to her mother.
Kris smiled. “For real, you can dump the whole damn thing. It’ll just make the floor cleaner than it already is.”
Sadie’s furrowed brow, seemingly chiseled into stone up to that point, relaxed, her eyes widening with the look of a child who had just realized there were no consequences to her actions. She pulled the mop head from the bucket and slapped it down onto the kitchen floor with a wet smack. Kris watched as Sadie slopped the mop’s wet cloth fingers across the large cracked tiles, and she felt a tingling warmth rise into her chest like embers kicked into the air by a fire that refused to die.
Outside, the wind picked up, gliding up from the lake and over the rooftop. It moaned low into the shingles, and its voice echoed down through the chimney’s open flue and into the great room. The walls and ceiling creaked loudly against the force of the wind, but the structure was sound. It was not ready to let the elements win.
And they won’t, Kris told herself.
First, the countertops. She soaked a sponge under the sink faucet and gave it a squeeze. She picked up one of the spray bottles from her collection, twisted the nozzle to on, and pulled the trigger. A thick mist of cleaner settled onto the grimy tiles, the scent of lemon filling the air. It was artificial, a man-made approximation of citrus, but Kris breathed it in deeply, enjoying the illusion of what it wanted to be. Fresh. Clean.
She leaned down hard on the sponge and worked it across the dull yellow tiles in short, forceful strokes. She made her way from the end closest to the foyer, over the grease-specked surface of the 1960s-era GE electric range and down toward the sink where the collection of old beer cans still stood like a redneck Stonehenge. Kris snatched up the cans and tossed them into an empty Safeway bag, then scrubbed at a beer stain that darkened the tiles like an irregular mole until every trace of it was gone.
It took about half an hour for Kris to make her way to the end of the counter, across the dusty shell and filthy top of the fridge (where an entire army of crickets had met their demise) and over the island’s butcher block surface with its countless knife wounds. Another twenty minutes, and she had given each of the upper cabinets a quick cleaning, not exactly thorough but “good enough for jazz” as her father used to say. Most of the hinges on the cabinet doors needed to be tightened and a few would have to be replaced, but that could wait.
Tossing the now-blackened sponge into the sink, Kris stepped back and allowed herself a moment to admire her work. The yellow-tiled countertops sparkled with a cheerful retro charm. The dampness from the sponge brought a richness to the cherry cabinets. Sunlight filtering in through trees outside the breakfast nook windows cast leaf-shaped shadows across the entire room. They swam over the island like lazy tadpoles.
She could see the faint image of herself there, not much older than Sadie, standing beside the island while her mother, wearing her favorite Heart T-shirt (from the actual concert, not the bullshit recycled shirts twenty-somethings wore these days) and jean shorts, cooked grilled cheese sandwiches dripping with gooey Velveeta in a cast-iron skillet.
Kris took a deep breath and slowly exhaled. The stress of the day loosened a bit in her chest and shoulders. A warmth shimmered through her tight muscles.
Behind her, a small figure moved by in a strange swaying dance.
Kris turned.
There on a stage streaked with irregular lines of soapy water, backlit by the golden pillars of the towering windows, stood the silhouette of a small girl. She grasped a tall wooden handle at its center and clumsily yet methodically dragged its end back and forth over the floor.
Another ripple of warmth shifted through the twisted ropes of muscle at the base of Kris’s neck.
She’s been at it this whole time. Helping her mama.
“Sadie,” Kris called out.
The sound startled the little girl, the mop handle slipping from her hands and tipping like a felled tree. It hit the floor with a sharp crack.
“I’m sorry,” Sadie said in her soft, timid voice. “I didn’t mean to …”
“Oh God, no, it’s okay, sweetie.”
Kris carefully crossed the wet floor and lifted up the mop, leaning the handle against the side of the couch. She crouched down as she always did when she wanted to speak to Sadie on her level.
“Do you want to take a break?” Kris asked.
Sadie considered the question for a moment, and then she shook her head.
Kris smiled. “Okay, well …”
She looked around the massive room. Shadows clung to every corner. It was so strangely dim for such a sunny day. At first Kris assumed another cloud had momentarily covered the sun, but the windows still glowed with golden fire. It was as if the light stopped there, the grime covering the glass refusing to let it pass through.
The windows, Kris thought.
It was time to let the light in.
“I have an idea,” Kris told her daughter.
She crossed back into the kitchen and dug into one of the Safeway bags, fishing around until she found two fresh rags. She snatched the bottle of Windex from the breakfast nook table as she passed back through the archway, into the great room. She held one of the rags out to Sadie.
“Let’s see who can clean the windows the fastest. What do ya say?”
Sadie did not move.
Kris held the rag up higher, just to the side of Sadie’s face. “You take the left, I’ll take the right. First one to finish gets to eat that Hershey’s bar.”
For the second time that day, a smile succeeded in lifting Sadie’s cheeks. In a flash, she reached out and snatched the rag from Kris’s hand.
“On your mark …” Kris set the toes of her boots against the floor as if she meant to launch into a sprint. “Get set …”
She won’t go for it, Kris’s mind told her. She’s in mourning. She doesn’t want to play games. She’s only helping you clean because it takes her mind off of the awful fucking situation you and Jonah have put her in.
Jonah put her in, Kris corrected herself.
But a child did not think such things. A child looked to both of her parents equally, expecting them to do everything possible to protect her from pain and sorrow. And in that sense, both Jonah and Kris had failed. They had allowed Sadie to know the harshest truth that life has to offer: happiness is not guaranteed. It is not a God-given right. It is not forever earned. We are all children with our hands in the cookie jar, and our happiness can be snatched away at any moment and held cruelly out of our reach.
“Go!” Kris heard herself cry.
But Sadie did go for it.
Without warning, she snatched up the bottle of Windex sitting by Kris’s foot and raced to her section of windows.
“Hey!” Kris yelled playfully.
Sadie giggled—Giggled! Sweet baby fucking Jesus she’s laughing!—and with both hands, the rag still clutched tightly in the palm of one, she squeezed the trigger and sprayed a thick mist of cleaner across the smeared, filthy glass.
Kris rocked back on one foot, a hand to her lips, and watched as her daughter frantically swiped through the dirty lines of cleaning fluid quickly running down to the base of the window. The other side of the pane would need to be cleaned as well, but even with this simple action, streams of sunlight burst through the clear sections of glass, brightening the room.
One room at a time. We will bring this place back to life.
Sadie had just sprayed another healthy dose of cleaner across a dingy section of the window when Kris walked briskly by and snatched the plastic Windex bottle from her hand.
Sadie cried out in exaggerated protest.
“It’s a race,” Kris told her with a wry smile. “You gotta do what it takes to win.”
She gave the squirt bottle’s trigger a few quick squeezes, covering a large section of the right windows with bubbling solution.
Kris brought her own rag up to begin sweeping away the running lines of liquid, but her hand froze inches from the glass. The Windex bottle dangled from the fingertips of her other hand, suddenly forgotten.
She frowned.
It was not dirt that was caking the glass, that was keeping the sunshine from fully penetrating. It was countless smudges, the same odd shape stacked one upon the other.
For a moment, Kris stared dumbly at the window, unable to separate the layers to create a single, concrete image.
A flat center, about the size of a silver dollar. Thin lines stretching out from this. Four on top. A smaller one off to the side.
Fingers, she realized. And the silver dollars were the flat smudges of palms.
They were handprints. Countless little handprints.
Without realizing exactly what she was doing, Kris reached up and wiped the rag across the glass. It cut through the smudges and streaks of cleaning liquid slipping quickly down to the base of the window.
They were on the inside. Tens. Hundreds. Thousands of handprints. Small, like a child’s.
They covered each column of the rear windows from the bottom frame to a spot about five feet up where the finger marks became impossibly long, streaking down to the flat of the palm, as if something—someone—had leapt up and let their hands slide down the pane until their feet were firmly on the ground again.
Someone had been in the house. A child.
Pressing their hands against the windows as they looked out. Jumping up to bang on the glass in a desperate attempt to get someone’s attention.
Kris stared at the layers of little handprints covering the glass, and the skin on the back of her neck prickled.
It was just a kid playing, a kid pounding on the window, something a parent should have stopped. Just a rowdy game. That’s all it was.
Yet she was filled with the unbearable need to quickly wipe them all away, to scrub the window until every last fingerprint was gone and the window sparkled, clean and clear.