Page 44

“Gray.” She tips her chin up at me, her blue eyes glassy. “He doesn’t look good. I mean, he really doesn’t look good. I went up earlier and I had to come back down because I couldn’t...” She falters, pressing her lips together hard. “I just couldn’t sit in that room.”

“Okay,” I say.

“You don’t have to go up.” She catches my wrist as I move past her on the stairs. “Maggie is with him. He’s sleeping. You don’t have to go up right now.”

“I know,” I say, and I go up anyway.

I don’t want another minute to pass without me knowing the truth.

The bedroom door is cracked. I push it open with the flat of my hand and stop in the frame.

My father is asleep.

He’s propped against the headboard with the quilt pulled to his chest, his head lolling sideways, his breathing slow and audible from across the room. Maggie is beside him on top of the covers with her arms wrapped around him from behind, her cheek pressed between his shoulder blades, her eyes closed. She’s holding him the way you hold something you are not sure will still be there when you open your eyes again. Small and careful and completely still, like stillness itself is an act of will.

I know this. I’ve seen this before.

I was twelve years old when I stood in this doorway and watched my father hold my mother exactly like that. It was the last night my mother was alive. I hadn’t understood what the hospice nurse said. I didn’t really understand that the word hospice meant the end, but I remember the quiver in my father’s breath. I remember peeking at them through the crack in the door, like I’m doing now. I remember how my father climbed in behind my mother and wrapped his arms around her the same way Maggie’s arms are wrapped around him now, and I heard him say it, low and steady, his mouth against the back of her head while his hand moved through her hair.

“It’s okay,” he told her. “You can let go now, sweetheart. You can let go.”

By morning she was gone.

I didn’t understand what I was watching when I was twelve years old standing in that doorway. I know exactly what I’m looking at now, and I pull the door closed without a sound before the knowing can do anything else to me.

I don’t go back downstairs to Iris. I take the back stairs that lead right to the kitchen instead. I take them too fast, my shoulder catching the wall at the landing, and I keep moving until I’m through the back door and out into the rain.

It’s coming down hard now. Cold and straight and immediate, soaking my shirt through before I’ve gotten two steps off the porch. I stop at the edge of the porch with both hands pressing into my thighs and my chest trying to claw itself open. I push out every breath, but I still feel like I’m suffocating. The world caving in on me like it always does.

And that’s when I hear it.

Under the rain. A melody, soft thrumming rolling through the thunder, coming from the back of the property.

I stand on the porch in the rain and look at her playing guitar under the oak tree as if it’s the most natural thing in the world, and I feel the peculiar, exhausting weight of a woman who manages to be everywhere I’m not ready for her to be. I don’t want her here. She doesn’t belong in this yard, in this town, within fifty miles of any grief that belongs to me. Whenever I’m falling apart, Sienna Rhodes is supposed to be thousands of miles away, on a stage somewhere, under lights that have nothing to do with me. She is supposed to be unreachable. She has always been unreachable, and I’ve built my entire system around that fact. But now, she is sitting in my backyard, in the rain, with my dead mother’s guitar across her lap, and I cannot lose one more thing I love in a single night.

That’s the thought that stops me cold.

One more thing I love.

And like a fool who hasn’t been beaten enough, I cross the wet grass to her.

12

SIENNA

TEN YEARS AGO

Iris’s seventeenth birthday party has officially turned into the worst night of my life.

I’ve been crying my eyes out for the past hour, sitting in the second crotch of the big oak behind the Douglas house with my knees pulled to my chest and a Solo cup of warm grape Fanta I have no intention of drinking. My throat is so tight I couldn’t swallow anything even if I wanted to. Inside the Douglas mansion and on the west side of the property where there is a lake, the whole sophomore, junior and senior class of Hamilton County High are partying their lives away. They’re probably laughing and gossiping as well because every single one of them knows what happened.

Lionel Pryce, the hot guy with shaggy brown hair and a jaw dropping eight pack, kissed me twenty minutes ago. My first kiss happened publicly and embarrassingly late.

I don’t even know why I let him. Iris dared me during spin the bottle, and I thought a dare was safer than a choice, and a first kiss at a birthday party with forty witnesses was supposed to be some kind of milestone. I was wrong about that. It was fourteen seconds of his mouth on mine that tasted like beer and chips, and when we pulled apart, he wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and said, in front of everyone: “Well. That was terrible.”

And then the entire circle laughed. Iris told him to fuck off, but by Monday morning the whole town will know I’m a virgin with terrible kissing skills. My life is over.

I pour out the rest of the grape soda and toss the cup into the grass below, not wanting to hold anything anymore.