Eva
I’m not used to seeing my children rattled. They’re strong girls by nature, yes, but they’re also accustomed to hiding their issues from me, a holdover from my days as a grieving widow. Has this made them come across to the world as secretive or reticent? Probably. They certainly both carry themselves that way, inscrutable, unflappable. Hillary even more so than Hannah, due to a false chipper veneer layered on top. But Hannah just had a quiet kind of rectitude. Like she was preserving her energy and words for something else.
So when I turned onto Brindle Lane, just to say hello, I confess I wasn’t surprised the detectives were on the street first. I was, however, surprised to see them not at Hillary’s but on Hannah’s porch. As I pulled up closer, I was even more surprised by the high color in Hannah’s cheeks and her hands gesturing, flailing in the air as she spoke to them.
So I kept on driving. If they glanced in my direction, noticed my dull gray car moving up the street, I didn’t see or care. I went to the top of the street and turned around. I pulled in and parked in the circle at Hillary’s house, as if that was my intention all along. Morgan was at school. Hillary and Ben were clearly both gone, their cars missing from the garage. The blinds were at noncommittal half-mast, and token lights illuminated half the living room as well as the kitchen sink. The whole house had that tight look as if it had nothing to say. I suppose I should have been a burglar myself with insights like these, but a life of crime had never occurred to me. I was one of those people who couldn’t pass off bakery-bought cupcakes as my own. I could barely tell a white lie to my daughters when they asked me what I thought of their hair or clothes or why I’d called them back from a book club meeting.
I knew the code to the house alarm and also knew Hillary would want me to go in and make myself at home. Her voice was in my head, saying Go inside, Mom! When had that happened? I could hear her questioning me, asking why on earth I’d sit in the car and wait. Saying that was silly. And it was silly. But that’s part of the joy of being old—you can justify silly, lazy, or anything you want. I sat outside her house and listened to her admonish me for sitting outside her house as if she were there beside me. This was how people spoke to the dead, but this was also how people listened to the loud and the large, the biggest personalities in the room.
Did my daughters ever carry my voice in their heads? Was I ever their guidepost or even their woodpecker, their tape playing on repeat? I didn’t think so. If that was a failure of my youthful parenting or my grief or my lack of traditional rules, I couldn’t say. And perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps they carried me around, too. But I believed, more than ever, they carried around each other.
I sat there until I drowned out the voice. I sat there until I admitted to myself the real reason I wouldn’t go inside and make myself at home. The truth was I couldn’t stop thinking of that camera trained on the door. How everything looked different through that lens. Filmy. Suspicious. Guilty. I did not want anyone to know I was those things, too.
Which is why I punched the code into the garage instead, where there was no camera. Not to make myself at home amid the bikes and tools but to see if the binoculars were still hanging on the pegboard near the wellies and the wheelbarrow and the rake. So I could focus in and lip-read what was happening at my other daughter’s house and try to figure out all the things she wasn’t telling me.
They were there all right. Hanging next to a butterfly net and a nylon kite. I pulled them off and was about to leave when I noticed something odd. The gunmetal tray in front of the cubbies, the one that always held the family’s muddy wellies, boots never allowed inside the house or car. It was so very like Hillary to own something fancy to hold something plain, a tray perfectly sized to hold three pairs of green boots, lined up according to size. But now there were two pairs, just two. The smaller two.