Page 92 of The Life She Had

Daisy

I amno stranger to grief. My entire family is gone. I hesitate even to think that, partly because it’s terrifying, and partly because it makes me sound like a girl from a Dickensian novel. I actually do have a living grandparent—my mother’s father—and an aunt with assorted cousins, but that side disowned Mom when she married Dad, and I’ve never had any inclination to reopen that channel.

What I understand of grief is this: that people try to cushion your feelings by avoiding talk of the dead, when all you want to do is talk about them. You long for fresh recollections to squirrel away with your own, and you want to pull out and polish up shared memories—remember the time we ... ?

Maybe it seems like picking at a healing sore, but for me, it was the salve that kept me going. Avoiding any mention of the lost felt like saving others from the discomfort of struggling for a response to my grief. I didn’t need responses. I just needed to talk about those I’d lost.

I’m torn between wanting to help Celeste through her grief and reminding myself of who she is, what she may have done. I settle for cooking comfort food—gooey grilled-cheese sandwiches with potato chips—and I bustle about the kitchen, letting her fix a plate and retreat. She sits, instead, and I join her and skate around mundane topics, seeing whether that’s where she wants to go, fill her brain with idle chatter. She doesn’t. She just eats.

After we’re done, I clear her plate as she stares at the peeling wallpaper. She looks lost. Confused. As if she’s not certain how she got here and what she’s supposed to do next.

“Are you planning to work this afternoon or rest?” I ask.

“Work, I think.”

“I’ll keep the noise down, then.”

“No need. I don’t notice anything when I’m working.”

I wash dishes as coffee brews, and she just sits there, like a child who hasn’t been released from the dinner table.

“I’m making coffee,” I say, as if that weren’t obvious. “I also baked brownies earlier.”

A strained smile, though she doesn’t turn my way. “I thought I was hallucinating the smell of chocolate when I woke up.”

“They’re just from a mix,” I say as I peel back the wrap over the scratched glass pan. “I hate doing that, but if you’re only making one batch, it’s cheaper than buying all the ingredients.”

“Then you’ll have to make more batches so we have the excuse to buy the ingredients.” She twists in her seat. “We’ll go grocery shopping this afternoon.”

Her face lights up, and I know that look. It’s her numb brain latching on to something she can do, something to get her out of this house and out of her head. Then her smile freezes, and she deflates a little against the counter. “That will look strange, won’t it? Me going shopping so soon after...”

“One, it’s groceries. Not like you’re buying new shoes. Two, the news probably hasn’t hit yet, and even if it has, it’s Sun City Center. Half the residents can’t remember what they had for breakfast.”

That’s cruel, but it makes her laugh, choking on her mouthful of coffee. “Fair point.”

“Three, if it really bothers you, we can go to Tampa, instead.”

She brightens again. “Let’s go to Tampa. I can get a cappuccino. I have been dying for a decent capp.” Again, that smile falters, the light dimming. “That sounds awful, doesn’t it? Liam’s gone, and I’m getting excited about coffee.”

“Don’t beat yourself up every moment you’re not lying in a puddle of grief. He was an asshole, wasn’t he?”

Her shoulders convulse in a silent sob. I hurry over and put an awkward arm around her shoulders, and she collapses into it, crying for a moment before backing up, sniffling.

She wipes her eyes as she stumbles over apologies even more awkward than the hug.

I suppose, if this were a movie, I’d look at Celeste, nibbling her brownie, and I’d think, In another life, we might have been friends. That isn’t true. At best, she’d have been the sort of classmate I wouldn’t cringe at being assigned for a lab partner. She reminds me of so many girls from my suburban high school. Pretty enough, popular enough, smart enough, confident in their future of a post-secondary education, a job with benefits and a 401(k), and a handsome and successful spouse to share it with.

A spouse like Liam.

What happened to you, Celeste?

That’s what I want to ask. That is the true mystery here. Not how she wriggled into my grandmother’s life and passed herself off as me. She comes from a background rungs above mine. I hear it in her speech, see it in her face, feel it in her confidence.

She comes from that background, and yet she’d played nurse to a difficult old woman in return for a rundown house. She may even have killed her for it.

Who are you, not-Celeste?

And how did you end up here?

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