Aaron said nothing.
“I feel like someone’s squeezed the life from me. I feel like an old dishrag.” I stared into the backyard. Watched the rain. “I’m worried I’ll never see her again. Maybe she got hit by a car. I never even thought of calling the hospital.” Fear and grief, like fists, clutched at my insides.
“She didn’t get hit by a car,” Aaron said. “We would have seen the ambulance. Heard the sirens. Something. And anyway. She’s been here. You know that. We saw all the water. All the lights. She’s okay, Lacey.”
Outside the rain lessened a bit. The storm was moving on some. Not sitting right over the house.
“And what about Aunt Linda? Why isn’t she here yet?” I said. “St. Augustine isn’t that far.”
“It’s only been a couple of minutes since we called her,” Aaron said. “The storm’ll slow her down some.”
He was right.
“Thank you.” I paused.
Aaron shrugged. “No big deal.”
What if Aaron hadn’t spoken to me on the bus? What if he hadn’t said he would come back with me? I’da come here alone. Again. Found things this way. I moved near him. Kept my voice soft, almost a whisper. “I’m not so sure I coulda done it by myself. You know.” With my head I gestured at the ceiling even though I knew he couldn’t quite see me. I thought of this miracle. How Aaron was here at just this time. Aunt Linda would say Aaron was a gift. “It’s all so freaky. I’m not so sure what would have happened.”
Remembering my aunt’s room sent a shiver through me. And Mr. Dewey, dead. What would John think? What would Aunt Linda do? I shivered again. Had a goose run across my grave? Something Momma said when she saw me tremble for no reason.
“I don’t have a grave,” I had told her once.
“But you will,” she had said back.
“You would have done it, Lacey,” Aaron said. In the darkness of the room I could just see the blond of his hair. Could see his lips moving. There was a slim bit of light coming from somewhere outside. Light a person could talk in.
“You would have been fine if I hadn’t been here.”
“I don’t know,” I said again. “I’ve never been this afraid before.” That was true. I had seen Momma do some scary stuff. But not like this.
The room’s been like that a long time. And Mr. Dewey too, in there a long time.
I closed my eyes to the voice. Opened them to glance at Aaron.
That was true, too. The pages on Aunt Linda’s wall. That little bird dead. Maybe even the mannequin was something that had been there in that room for who knows how long. Just because I didn’t know what was behind a closed door didn’t mean it hadn’t been there.
“I’ve never been this worried for her.” Aaron said nothing. “I’ve always found her.”
I didn’t know how to explain what sat in my gut. A fear that something awful, something awful, had happened.
All of the things Momma had done didn’t amount to the way I felt. Somehow the bits and pieces were easier to clean up after. But this—how was I to clean up after something I couldn’t even see to fix?
“I’ve always found her before,” I said again. “And before that, Aunt Linda was here.”
It was then that Aaron took my hand. Just reached over and held my hand like it was something he did every day.
“Lacey,” he said. “You got guts. You’ve done things here no one at school could even begin to take care of.”
You do what you have to do. It was Momma’s voice in my head.
You make it because you have to.
You crawl through whatever crap is thrown at you.
All my mother’s words of wisdom. Sitting there in my head.
I didn’t want them a moment longer.
But they’re here.
So I’d get rid of them. I would.
’Cause truth be told, I wouldn’t want to do any more of this kind of stuff with her. Not any more of it.
I wanted a mother who was happy, and an aunt who never left. I didn’t want to tend my momma’s self-inflicted wounds. Didn’t want to make all her meals and clean her clothes and stay up with her at night watching for someone who’d been dead more than a decade.
Aaron called his mother after a while. Then he came back and sat down again. “She said she’d pick me up in a few minutes.” He gave a shrug, like maybe that’s how mothers were. “She doesn’t want me skateboarding home in the rain.”
I nodded.
“I told her to give me some time to wait for your aunt here.”
He sat next to me at the kitchen table close enough that our forearms touched. We both looked to the back door, to the rain, the whole house waiting behind us, like it was alive. I felt his skin on mine, felt the house breathing, felt worry and confusion and a little bit of happiness pushing in on the grief.
“Once,” I said, the memory fresh in my mind with the rain, “when Aunt Linda was still here, we found Momma outside during a storm like this.”
Aaron said nothing, moved a little in his seat. Looked me in the face.
I gestured with my head. “She was out there, standing, arms raised to the sky.”
I could see it all in my head again, the way she looked like an old picture, black and white in the darkness and downpour. I left out the part that Momma was naked. That it was winter and near to freezing.
“Her hair was plastered to her face and her eyes were like shadowed circles in her head. When Aunt Linda tried to get her in the house, she fought.”
The fight hadn’t lasted long, Momma was too weak to do much. Too cold. But slippery like a just-caught fish. Aunt Linda dragged her into
