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She walked around the garden and onto Lucy’s unswept patio. She could smell the cigarette smoke from here, as if it were leaching through unseen cracks. She tried to look approachable, though she was suddenly self-conscious because she realized she didn’t know what approachable looked like. She hunched her shoulders a little and shifted her weight onto one foot. She put her hand on her hip, then dropped it. Oh for heaven’s sake, what was the matter with her? She reached out and knocked. Then she knocked again. Somewhere around minute three, she knew Lucy wasn’t going to answer. Still, she called, “Lucy? My name is Zoey. I live in the studio. I just wondered if you wanted to have lunch with me.”
Nothing.
“I’ll be finished cleaning out your sister’s place today. Frasier said repairs will be starting soon. I just… I thought you’d like to know.”
Wait, was there sound coming from inside? Was Lucy coming to the door?
Zoey held herself very still.
Nothing.
Zoey finally turned and left. It was a first step. She’d only been here a little over a week, and already she and Charlotte were friends, and Mac had invited them to his restaurant. Maybe Lucy would soon come into the fold, making their little Dellawisp circle complete.
She wasn’t going to give up on her just yet.
The last box, hundreds of free South Carolina tourism brochures Lizbeth had apparently liberated from local gas stations, was done.
Well, that was it.
Zoey stood and looked around the empty space. The infamous bookcase was still in the middle of the living room where she and Charlotte had moved it, but it was going to be removed soon, along with Lizbeth’s bedroom furniture. Frasier had taken the computer, but he said there wasn’t anything on it of interest to Roscoe.
Zoey picked up the box bound for the recycling dumpster and whispered, “Bye, Lizbeth.”
She turned, an edge of the box hitting the grimy window frame as she did so. The impact caused a small piece of paper to flutter out of nowhere from below the window. Zoey set the box down and picked it up. It was an old photo of two girls in bathing suits, standing in a trashy yard of dead grass. One was blond and pretty, about ten years old, striking a pose that was almost uncomfortably sexy for a girl that age. The other was about four, dark-haired andsquare-shaped, caught in midwail and holding her shoulder as if the other had just hit her.
On the back was writtenLucy and Lizbeth.
Excitement lit Zoey up like a sparkler. Out of all the paper she’d gone through, this was the only personal thing she’d found, besides the diaries. Where on earth had it come from? It had obviously been dislodged from somewhere. She knelt by the window and looked around it. She found several tiny stick figures drawn on the baseboard, so small she had mistaken them for the splotchy dirt that had permanently stained all of Lizbeth’s walls. It appeared as if a child had once spent a lot of time in this area. She felt along the edges of the window and discovered a gap where the frame met the wall, and from that gap she carefully plucked out several more photos.
She sat cross-legged on the floor and went through them slowly. The photo of Lucy and Lizbeth was the only older photo. The rest were fairly recent school photos of the same boy, an almost preternaturally pretty child with curly brown hair and green eyes that shone cleverly, like he was part avian. His smile was as charming as a piece of candy, which automatically made Zoey smile back at him. The school photos stopped sometime in his early teens, when he had grown gangly and awkward and his smile had turned into just a reluctant lift at the corners, as if he was trying not to laugh at something he actually found funny.
She turned over the photo of him at his youngest, and found the wordsOliver Lime. First Grade.
These weren’t Lizbeth’s photos, she realized. These wereOliver’s.
And this was where he’d lived. She looked around, trying to imagine him carving out space in all the clutter. She’d never before considered where he’d actually slept. There was only one bedroom, and that was all Lizbeth’s.
She wondered why he’d hidden the photos. Was it because he didn’t want his mother to have them? Or was it because his mother didn’t wanthimto have them?
She stood and picked up the box again.
With one last look, the photos safely in her pocket, she closed the door behind her
Pigeon finally flew in and landed noisily in her birdcage just as Zoey emerged from her bathroom after a shower.
“Where have you been?” Zoey asked as she got something to drink.
Pigeon cooed as if to say it was none of her business.
“Fine, don’t tell me,” she said, going to the white leather couch. She’d left Oliver’s photos on the coffee table, so she spread them out to stare at them again as she opened her Snapple bottle and took a sip. It was something of a surprise that Oliver didn’t look more messy and Harry Potterish, having grown up in a corner of a packed living room with little sunlight. Instead, he looked vibrant and popular. In one photo he was even wearing braces.Someonehad been caring for him. She wondered who. Frasier? Lucy?
She warred with herself for several minutes before she decided to take a photo of each and text them to Oliver. If he didn’t want them, he could just delete them and report her to Frasier again. But there had to have been a reason he’d kept these in his corner.
Once all the photos were sent, she checked the time on her phone. It would be hours before Charlotte got home. She sat back on the couch and wiped away the condensation on her Snapple bottle with the hem of her shirt. She looked around her studio listlessly. After a few moments, a frown began to form and she sat up. Where exactlyhad her mother planned for Zoey to sleep after they moved back to Mallow Island? There was only one bed, just like at Lizbeth’s.
Zoey had seen enough mothering to understand when it was done right. She’d watched her best friend Ingrid’s single mother hold down a full-time job on weekdays and a part-time job on the weekends, and yet it had still seemed like she’d been home with her two kids all the time. That was how present she’d been for them. She’d never been late signing permission slips, because she’d been the one who’d remembered to do it. Her children’s clothing had been cheap, but never snug, because she’d been the one who had noticed when her children were growing. It had never been up to the children to ask for these things, like Zoey had had to do. Even Zoey’s stepmother Tina, though clearly and unabashedly concerned with how other people saw her, still paid attention to her twins when no one was looking. So Zoey understood that mothering was in the details you never saw. And the lack of it was the things you always noticed.
And she saw now, for the first time, that whatever her mother had been planning for this move, it was without taking Zoey’s needs into consideration. Paloma had been a young mother, yes, but young or not, if you took the time to have a place redecorated before you and your daughter moved in, wouldn’t you at least think about where you were going to put her?
