Emma
Years before Frank O’Farrell was killed, someone had already taken him away. Even Emma could see her father had been performing a slow vanishing, a marital sleight of hand for years. Once when they’d all gone to the Jersey shore for the day—a rare Saturday that Frank didn’t have paperwork to do or a case to work—Emma and Maggie had sat on a dune, watching Frank walk up and down the beach, and her mother had told her that she thought of marriage as driftwood: constantly reshaped by time, water, wind. But Emma knew driftwood didn’t stay put. It ended up in the bottom of your backpack with a pile of sand. It floated away for someone else to pick up the pieces.
The morning after her high school graduation party, Emma couldn’t sleep, woke early. In the kitchen, small gifts and envelopes still sat on the island, and balloons waved their bouncy congratulations in the corner. Half of a yellow-and-gray sheet cake—her college colors, but was there anything grosser than gray frosting?—waited on the counter, her name sliced in two. Ma, it said.
She stopped, surprised to see her father bent over, crouching, rooting in the dishwasher for the silver cake server. Cake and coffee for breakfast, his favorite. But why was he home? He stood up from his crouch, then stared out the window, oblivious to her or even to the coffee maker, singing its last gasp of steam. His eyes were fixed on something—a pattern in the lawn her mother had neatly mowed for the party, a bird settling into the weeping cherry tree. Beauty out there, past the patio with the last of the Solo cups and dewy crepe paper, all the stuff she’d have to clean up, something bright that held his attention. She’d always thought her father’s job kept him separate. A lie to help her believe it wasn’t her fault he stayed away. But that day, two weeks before his death, she saw that it was something else. Even when he was home, his mind and heart were elsewhere.
And then, just like that, he was actually gone. Her mom started watching crime shows while pretending it wasn’t because she missed him and wanted to stay close to his world. But there was no way for Emma to do the same. What was she going to do—play cops and robbers? Sign up for a criminal justice class?
She didn’t like thinking about the way he’d died. Didn’t like picturing the crime scene photos or imagining how the witness looked—the female detective with a blood-spattered blue shirt half torn off her body by something that wasn’t a bullet. Blood, sex, guts, drama, blended together with teddy bears and rocking chairs, and all of it, the total, made her father loom larger than ever, like those monuments in Philadelphia parks that were twice life-size. She’d looked at them as a kid, those Yankee soldiers on horseback, and wondered where there were stallions that big, huge as dinosaurs.
The day before he died, Emma had fallen ill with stomach cramps and vomiting and was taken by ambulance to the hospital. Maggie called Frank three times, five, ten, from behind the thin curtain of the ER. No answer. Finally, she begged Emma to call him from her phone.
“Maybe he’s not picking up because it’s me,” she’d said. “Maybe he’ll pick up for you?”
But he hadn’t. As they prepped her for an emergency appendectomy, Maggie assured her that her father loved her, that there was an explanation. Covering for him still.
And her mother’s secret prayer, that Emma had heard her whisper just before the morphine drip sent her into sleep: that if something had to go wrong, please, dear God, let it be her husband and not her daughter.
* * *
Emma woke up; Frank didn’t. She’d come out of surgery, woozy and feverish, and knew just from looking at her mother’s face that her father was dead. She was missing a part of her body and a part of her family, but she felt heavier, a weight on her chest. It was all on her now.
After that, she saw her family as driftwood, too. Three whittled down to two, and two wasn’t enough. Two was a broken triangle; two was a roof without walls. Two was barely holding on.
From that day forward, Em had promised to always let her mother know where she was. She’d seen what it could do to someone, the untethering, the where are they. Even when she went to college, that first few weeks she’d texted her mother every night before bed their shorthand—NILY. Short for Night, I Love You. She’d say it to Maggie, and Maggie would say it back. Even when Emma was shit-faced. Even when she was totally exhausted. Even when someone looked over her shoulder and said, “Oh my God, you are not texting your mom again.”
Their phones autocorrected to NILY the moment they typed in the N. Maggie had even knit Emma a pillow that spelled out NILY in pink and white for her narrow dorm bed.
Emma cried a little when Maggie gave it to her and said, “Mom, if I ever get a tattoo, it’s gonna be NILY.”
And Maggie replied, “Em, if you ever get a tattoo, I’m gonna kill you.”
Later in the fall, when Maggie had stopped by her dorm with two dozen oatmeal chocolate chip cookies she’d probably spent half the night baking and cooling, then drizzling with yellow icing, Emma opened the box and thanked her, then gently told Maggie that a lot of the other girls’ mothers didn’t text them three times a day. That the other local moms didn’t “drop by” on a Sunday because they were in the neighborhood. (No one was ever in Semper University’s neighborhood unless they were lost or buying drugs or heading north to another city.) Also, she added, “No one here really eats cookies.”
Everyone in her dorm knew about the freshman fifteen, which could just as easily turn into thirty if you weren’t careful. Already, there were girls selling their too-small jeans on Poshmark. Some of them drunk ate, but no one ate sugar when they were sober. Emma had seen how boys liked girls who were lean but muscular, how their gazes held when a certain body type walked by. The thought of them looking at her that way, the possibility, tasted sweeter than frosting.
“Maybe girls don’t eat them, but cute boy athletes do,” her mother had said. “Don’t a lot of the football players live next door? In Riordan?”
Her roommates were bent over their phones, but she knew they heard her mother’s chirping. And yes, she’d seen the boys moving in next door, boys so tall and wide, they looked like another species, lifting carefully packed boxes of books effortlessly, palming pillows in one large hand. But Maggie’s gaze had lingered on them a little too long. Cougar-ish, she’d thought. Emma didn’t say anything, but her mother was being totally embarrassing. Boys. Cookies. Jesus, was she twelve?
So even though they were separated by only a dozen or so miles, Emma’s “here” and Maggie’s “here” had to slide away from each other. Emma still missed her mother but forced herself to let go. She’d seen her roommates let their mothers’ phone calls go straight to their vacant voicemail boxes. They didn’t even seem to miss their moms when they were puking and needed ginger ale.
Emma pictured the divide between her and Maggie vividly sometimes, when she had trouble falling asleep, when she worried about a paper she didn’t understand or a party she wasn’t invited to, but didn’t want to rely on her mother’s voice to rock away her problems.
In her mind, where the dangerous edges of campus gave way to the beauty of the city and City Line Avenue held the suburbs from spilling in, she imagined that long boulevard as a kind of border wall, with her happy but clueless childhood pinned to it like a memorial. Turquoise Beanie Babies and red plastic barrettes, pink tutus, Pokémon cards, and Justin Bieber posters. The demarcation of before and after.
Maggie got the message. Emma didn’t have to spell it out, didn’t have to break her heart completely. And she’d just begun to back off. At Halloween, no decorations and frosted pumpkin cookies arrived at Emma’s door. Two days passed, sometimes three, before a heart emoji popped up in her text alerts. Emma had suggested a Sunday afternoon phone call, trying to anchor things, instead of FaceTiming every time they each saw something that reminded them of the other—a funny episode of Friends, a macaron decorated like a flower, a dog wearing goggles on the back of a motorcycle. Her mother had to learn to enjoy those things on her own for a while.
And Emma was seeing other things, new things. More differences between her and these party girls than just how often they spoke to their mothers. They drank like boys and danced like strippers. Shotgunning and twerking, skills Emma hadn’t mastered during her time on the high school yearbook staff. And some boys wanted more than cookies after parties, a lot more. There was shit going down in the dark stairways and cramped bathrooms she not only wouldn’t share with her mother but couldn’t.
Because Emma wanted to figure it all out on her own. Because after what had happened to her father, Emma would have to be a complete bitch to make her mother worry about the small crimes of college. The in-between offenses, the misdemeanors of he wanted, she didn’t; of he filmed and they laughed and she cried.
No, she couldn’t worry her mother.
But wow, yeah. Look how well that had worked out.