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I heard Dean’s voice, not from the room, but from memory.

Take care of yourself, Lorrie Hale.

“I will,” I whispered.

Then Paul’s voice, older and close.

Do you want to talk about it?

“Yes,” I said.

The music swelled. The cassette burned. The room disappeared in pieces, and the last thing I saw were the pink tulips on the counter.

24

Lorrie

Epilogue

October, 2011 — Cleveland, Ohio

When I opened my eyes, I was on the blue couch in our living room with the Purple Rain cassette pressed against my chest and Paul still upstairs in the shower.

For several seconds, I didn’t move. The house on Milburn was dark except for the streetlight casting a soft square on the living room wall. The blue couch sagged beneath me in the familiar place where I always sat, the throw was tangled around my legs, my shoes were on the floor where I’d kicked them off after dinner, and the birthday gift bag from Claire leaned against the coffee table with tissue paper puffing out of the top. The cassette was warm in my hands, and when I looked down at Dean’s old handwriting curling across the yellowed label, my breath caught.

Then everything came back.

Claire Elizabeth Ellsworth.

Benjamin Walter Ellsworth.

Their names hit first, clear and whole, and then their faces followed so sharply I made an awful sound and clapped one hand over my mouth.

Claire at the restaurant earlier that night, phone beside her bread plate, dark hair over one shoulder, with Paul’s pale gray eyes, my mother’s cheekbones, and that crease between her eyebrows when she was concentrating. Claire at six in a purple leotard, announcing she was training for the Olympics because she had completed two somersaults in a row on the living-room rug. Claire at fourteen, standing in the hallway wearing too much eyeliner and the injured dignity of a girl whose mother had asked whether she owned a shirt with both shoulders attached. Claire pale in a hospital bed after the car accident, furious because I was crying and making her nervous.

Ben came next, my beautiful, impossible boy, with dark curls and that crooked grin that had saved him from consequences far more often than good parenting should have allowed. Ben in the blue cast after jumping from the garage in a Batman cape. Ben at seventeen with one foot on the coffee table, arguing his curfew like a trial attorney who had misplaced his evidence. Ben at Hudson’s earlier tonight, making antlers behind my head while Claire took pictures, then hugging me outside the restaurant one beat longer than usual and saying into my hair, You know I love you, right?

I curled forward over the cassette and cried, the way women cry when they’ve held themselves together too long and everything breaks free. The memories kept coming too fast to sort through. My mother arriving in Cleveland after Claire was born with two casseroles, a bassinet, and the expression of a woman who’d waited all her life to reorganize someone’s nursery.

My father teaching Ben to fish and buying him a plastic tackle box shaped like a frog because Ben had looked at him once and said please.

Kim at fifty, blonde again after years of claiming she was going to let nature take its course, laughing into the phone while making soup because I had the flu and Paul was out of town.

Our first house with the ugly yellow linoleum came back, along with the Christmas Claire pulled the tree over, the time Ben put peanut butter in the VCR because he wanted to see whether the tape wanted a snack, and Paul in the hospital chair holding newborn Claire against his chest, frozen with terror as if someone had handed him a bomb wrapped in pink flannel.

Every damp towel, every grocery receipt, school pickup, birthday cake, silence, and every closed door returned to me until my life stood around me again, not perfect or tidy, but mine.

Upstairs, the shower shut off.

I tried to stop crying and failed. A drawer opened, and a few seconds later Paul came down the stairs in pajama pants and an old Case Western sweatshirt, rubbing a towel over his damp hair. He stopped in the doorway, his hair wet and darker than usual, gray at the temples where it had once been brown, his face older than the boyish version I had just left behind, fuller through the jaw and lined at the eyes.

He looked tired from dinner and confused by the sight of his wife sobbing into a cassette tape on the couch, but he came to me without hesitation, sitting on the coffee table in front of me with his knees close to mine. The towel slipped around his neck, forgotten, and his right hand flexed once, stiff from the old lacrosse injury, before he rested it on the cushion beside my leg instead of on me.

Still asking without asking.

That nearly undid me all over again.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, and when I shook my head because I couldn’t begin to answer, he reached for the tissue box on the side table and handed it over with the practical tenderness that had both comforted and infuriated me for twenty-seven years.