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She smiled then. I think a lot about that smile. Blissful, distant and dreamy and already half asleep. Was she happy, there at the end? Was she ready? I’d like to believe she was.
But it’s because I want to believe it so badly that I know it might not be true.
What I do know is that she looked at us. One after another, like shewas trying to memorize our faces. Like she was fighting for this one last memory, even as everything else slipped away. “Thank you all,” she said. “It’s been so lovely.”
If she had any other last words, I wasn’t there to hear them.
People began to drift away after that, saying good night and wandering off to various rooms while the house muttered and groaned around us. Richard stood, yawning, and took a last look at Adam and me where we sat at opposite ends of the couch.
“You kids have yourselves a merry little Christmas,” he said, and then, with an exaggerated wink: “Not that you weren’t already.”
I tried to keep my expression neutral. “What?”
“Oh, no judgment,” he said. “Hell, I respect it.”
“I have literally no idea what you’re talking about,” I said, and my mother turned in her chair.
“Richard, whatareyou talking about?”
I held my breath then, mentally running back through all the times Adam and I had snuck off together. We’d always been alone, I was certain of that, except for that one kiss on the pine path while Mimi’s back was turned, a kiss there was no way he could’ve seen.He’s bluffing,I thought. He doesn’t know. He might suspect, because he’s some sort of freakish savant with a goddamn sixth sense for when people are horny for each other, but—
Richard yawned and shrugged. “Apparently I don’t know what I’m talking about. As usual, some might say.”
“No kidding,” I said, standing up, realizing as I did that I was very drunk. “Good night.”
I was swaying my way upstairs when Adam caught up to me.
“You left your phone downstairs,” he said, pressing it into my hand—but when my fist closed around it, I felt something else. There was a ribbon wrapped around the phone, and sitting on top of it, a small box wrapped in brown paper.
“What’s this?”
“Something you can’t open until Christmas,” he said.
“If this is that freaking missile toad—” I started to say, but even as I looked at the box, I knew it wasn’t. It was too small. So small that it could hold only one of a very few things, and when I looked at Adam’s face, I was suddenly certain that I knew what was in it. Certain and thrilled and terrified.
“Good night, Delphine,” he said, and before I could say anything else, before I could even decide whether or not to ask the obvious question, he was gone. Up the stairs, out of sight, and I didn’t call after him. I stood, staring at the box in my hand. I stared at it some more after I went to bed, wanting to look inside, but also not wanting to, knowing that once I opened it, I might be opening a door I couldn’t close. Outside, a thick fog was rising, rolling across the bay, blotting out the moon. I was still staring at the box where it sat on my nightstand when I fell asleep. Deeply and completely, a plunge into the dark. And for once, I didn’t dream.
14.
Someone was pounding on my door. The sound matched the pounding in my head.
“Delphine?” My mother’s voice. I struggled to peel my eyes open. Reached for my phone, but the screen stayed dark—dead. No charge. I turned my head to look out the window and saw fog, nothing but fog, as if the house had been picked up overnight and dropped into some other dimension, a deep gray void with no end.
I rubbed my eyes and shivered. The room was very, very cold. “What?” I croaked.
The door cracked open. “Are you sick? I’ve been knocking and knocking,” Mom said, and heaved a sigh. “Your grandmother is playing hide-and-seek again. You haven’t seen her, have you? She isn’t in her room.”
But nobody was worried. Not then, not really. After all, we thought we knew this game by now—and not just that, we thought we’d figured out that the winning move was not to play. Mimi would turn up when she got tired of hiding. All we had to do was wait.
“She does this because it gets a rise out of us,” Diana was saying asI came into the kitchen. “She always did love to make a stir. Well, I’m not worried. Irefuseto worry. It’s what she wants, for us to all lose our minds and run around like chickens with our heads cut off. I say, let’s just wait. She’ll come out when she gets hungry.”
“You make her sound like a lost cat,” my mom said, and Richard guffawed.
“Now, why didn’t I think of that before,” he said. “When she comes back, can we put a bell on her?”
Everyone laughed. Why not? It was funny.
It took an hour for it to stop being funny. We did start looking then, just like we’d done before. But we were annoyed, not scared, and the search had none of the urgency of the day before last. We dutifully fanned out, up the stairs, down the halls, in and out of the empty rooms—all the while expecting that we’d probably come back to the kitchen and find her waiting for us, eating the last of the cookies and smirking. The sky darkened and snow began to fall, huge fat flakes that accumulated quickly on the windowsills, the pathways, the bare branches of the trees. Diana abandoned the search in order to start making the turkey—still certain that Mimi would turn up by the time we sat down to eat it. But she stayed missing, and the snow kept falling, and finally my mother glanced out the window—at the foggy bay, at the swirling sky—and said, “I’m just going to check outside. Just in case.”
