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But when she stepped inside her brother’s room, she knew immediately that her father had been in there. All the surfaces were free of dust, everything neat and tidy, far tidier than Luke had ever kept it. The room didn’t smell stale, a tragic time capsule. It smelled like lemon polish.
Her father must have come in here on his own, maybe many times, to have a private moment of grief he’d never even told her about. The thought brought a strange comfort, as well as an intense sadness. They weren’t able to share even this.
Abby ran her hand along the top of the dresser, smiling faintly at the sight of Luke’s soccer trophies lined up there. He’d loved soccer and piano equally, although he was much better at the latter. All the trophies were for most improved or just participating, but Luke had been proud of them all.
Luke. A shaft of grief, as fresh as ever, pierced her so deeply she nearly doubled over. Did it ever get easier? Did it ever stop taking you by surprise, leaving you winded and reeling? Even now, fifteen years later, she felt as if Luke could bound into the room with his lopsided smile and his messy hair and ask her if she wanted to play Monopoly. She could hear her mother’s laughing voice floating up the stairs, full of warmth.
Okay, but if there are arguments I’m throwing it out!
Another sigh escaped her, this one sounding alarmingly close to a sob. She hadn’t cried in ages, hadn’t let herself. It had been years, perhaps, since she’d let herself weep, although she’d certainly shed enough tears in the
weeks after her mother’s and brother’s deaths; she’d felt like a dried-out husk, hollowed out and empty inside, with nothing more to give, and yet somehow she and her father had had to go on and on and on.
As she stood there in her brother’s darkened bedroom, Abby knew she wasn’t ready to cry now, just as she knew if she did weep, it would not just be for her brother and mother, but for the relationship with her father that had been so less than it could have been. She could feel the emotion building inside her like water rising, a storm about to break, and she willed it back. One day maybe, if she was strong—or was it weak?—enough, but not now.
Right now, she wanted to feel hope. Frail, fledgling thing that it might be, tattered and desperate, barely there, poking up from the barren soil. She still wanted to feel it. She could almost grasp it with her fingertips, could see it just out of reach, and she longed for more.
She wanted to move on past the sorrowful stasis her life had become, without her even fully realizing it. Months and years had passed when she’d told herself she was happy, or at least happy enough, not even questioning the lie. Yet now she recognized it for what it was, and she wanted something else. But was that Simon? Did he fit into the reconfigured picture of her life at all, or was he just a passing fancy, someone she might recall one day with a faint smile, a wondering “what if”? Abby had no idea, or whether she’d ever be able to find out.
The next morning, her father was drinking coffee by the kitchen sink when Abby came into the room. He looked up, his hooded gaze lifting and dropping again in the matter of a second as he nodded his usual greeting. He was already dressed for a day spent in the orchard and barn, his gnarled fingers wrapped around a mug of coffee, an empty cereal bowl in the sink.
“Dad.” Abby took a deep breath, let it buoy her faltering courage. “I went into Luke’s room last night.”
Her father didn’t move, hadn’t been moving in the first place, but somehow it seemed as if he went even stiller.
“I saw how clean it was, everything dusted,” Abby continued, trying to pitch her voice both gentle and determined. She had a feeling she’d failed; it was wobbling all over the place. “It looked nice. Have—have you been going in there?”
Her father didn’t answer and Abby made herself continue.
“It’s only… I didn’t know. The door was always closed, but I would have… I would have gone in too.” She trailed off, realizing she didn’t actually know where she was going with this. She just wanted her father to say something, anything, to bridge the yawning space that had been there since the accident, even if Abby had acted like it hadn’t been. Even if she had done her best to step over it as if it didn’t matter, as if it wasn’t the huge gulf she knew it had been all along.
“Not that often,” he said, his voice giving nothing away. “Just once in a while.”
Abby nodded slowly, at a loss for her words. “I wish I’d known,” she finally said, and too late she realized she sounded reproachful.
Her father finished his coffee and put the cup in the sink.
“I’ll be out in the barn,” he said, and then he was gone, striding out the back door, the screen door slapping against the wood frame like a rebuke.
Was it ever going to change? Was he? Was she?
Abby stood in the center of the empty kitchen, her mind drifting despondently over old conversations, so many tired moments like this one.
She didn’t know how long she stood there, staring into space, the sun slanting across the floor even as her mind felt as if it were in a fog. Her phone buzzed and she took it out of her pocket, saw, with a flicker of trepidation, that it was Simon.
“Hey.” His voice was warm yet hesitant. “I hope you don’t mind me ringing.”
“No, I don’t mind.”
“I should have called before, I know. I wanted to. I just didn’t know what to say.”
Abby closed her eyes. “I didn’t, either,” she said. “I still don’t.”
“Are you angry with me?” Simon sounded as if the question cost him; here, perhaps, was the man who had been considered emotionally unavailable. When it wasn’t all easy chat and light flirting, musings about the distant past rather than the painful present, conversation was hard. For both of them.
“I don’t know,” Abby admitted. “I feel like I don’t know anything anymore.”
“That’s better than a ‘hell yes’, I suppose,” Simon said with an uncertain laugh.
