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“I have to start getting the shuttle ready,” Adam said.
“Okay,” I said. I looked around and lowered my voice. “When will I see you?”
He grimaced. “I was going to ask you that. We need to talk.”
My stomach twisted, and my face must have done the same, because he did reach for me then. It wasn’t much, just a split second as his hand fell warm and heavy on my shoulder, but I felt myself relax.
“Nothing bad,” he said. “Could you get away tomorrow night? Maybe even,” and his voice dropped to a near whisper, “overnight? I know your family—”
“Yes,” I said, not having the slightest idea how I would explain being gone for the night, only knowing that I’d do anything to make it happen. A beat passed, the space between us suddenly pregnant with tension. I couldn’t stop looking at his hands, thinking about how it would feel to have them wrapped around my waist, my neck. The warmth and strength of him.
He walked away, motioning to the Willowcrest funeral tourists. They followed him out the door in a gaggle, bobbing and gossiping with their heads close together in a way that reminded me of chickens in a yard. My mother, stepping back through the door, smiled and thanked them for coming. When I looked back at Shelly Dyer, she had turned away; her gaze was aimed at the door, and so was her iPad camera. I watched her grip it with her good hand, scowling at the screen; her other hand rose, trembling, to tap it. The shutter sound was loud enough that one of the Willowcrest ladies turned her head as her picture was taken, looking for the camera. She gave Shelly a twinkly little wave. Shelly, apparently not interested in making friends, put the iPad back in her lap and resumed chewing on her tongue.
Twenty-four hours later, I left the house empty and drove to the mainland, traveling the familiar route to Willowcrest. Mimi’s glass pendant was around my neck, and I kept absently reaching for it, just as she had on her last night with us. I’d found it in her nightstand drawer the day after she died, along with countless other things she’d been apparently collecting from around the house. Spoons. Slips of paper. An acorn. A button. I’d held it all in my hands, thinking if I stared at it long enough I would find meaning, a pattern, a reason these things had been gathered together. But there was nothing. Maybe this collection had held meaning for Mimi. Without her, it was just junk, and I felt a lump in my throat as I realized how true this was, and for how many things. Her house, her clothes, her furniture, her photographs. All pieces of a story that would never be told again, each of them full of meaning that winked out of existence when she did. The only significance these things held now was that they had belonged to Mimi—that in her last days on earth, these were the objects she wanted near her. These were the last things she touched.
I think that’s why I kept them. Stashing them in my coat pockets, where they could gather meaning again. My grandmother’s acorn. My grandmother’s button. Mine now.
In the coming weeks, Mimi’s whole life would be cataloged, sold, scattered. The pendant around my neck would be inherited by somebody, probably Diana, and the rest of my family was already on their way to Bangor for a meeting with the agent who would help us sell off the estate piece by piece. I had to assure my mother a half-dozen times that no, I didn’t want to go with them, and yes, I’d be fine on my own for a night, but in the end she went and I was relieved. I was no good at comforting her; not just that, I was actively bad at it. All I could do was stammer and pat her on the shoulder, trying not to recoil at the damp heat of her skin beneath her shirt. She was making an effort notto cry too much in front of people, and it was like all the tears she was holding back were leaking out of her pores instead.
I picked up Adam in the same parking lot where we used to steal kisses behind my car. He had changed out of his uniform and was carrying a duffel bag, and everything felt almost normal, except that there was no grandmother waiting for me inside.
“Where should we go?” I asked. He peered out the window at the dark gray sky, the bare trees. There had been a foot of snow the day before the funeral, and the remnants of it were still lining the edges of the parking lot, filthy and crusted over with ice.
“I’m thinking California,” he deadpanned, and I laughed.
“Have you ever been there?”
“Nope. You?”
“Once. To look at colleges.”
He glanced at me curiously. “Not to visit your dad?”
“It was a quick trip, there wasn’t really time.” Or at least this was what my father said when he called me, days after I got home, to explain why he hadn’t returned any of my messages. I didn’t tell Adam that part, but he looked at me with so much sympathy that I think he must have guessed it. I put the car in gear. “Okay, let’s go to California.”
“Let’s stop in Ellsworth first.”
“What’s in Ellsworth?”
“The past,” he said, and took my hand, intertwining his fingers with mine. “And maybe something else.”
An hour later, we walked down the little main street, huddled together against the cold. Most of the stores were closed for the night, but many of them still had holiday displays in the windows, ghostly and twinkling in the gloom. A mannequin wearing a Santa hat and trendy glasses stared blankly from the window of an optician; a white Christmas tree glittered in the lobby of a bank. Up ahead, the door of a pub with a blinking neon Budweiser sign opened, spilling out a group of laughing people and the tantalizing scent of fried food. Acrossthe street, a gold and green deco theater marquee wished us a happy new year, the wordGRANDlooming over it in letters six feet high. Something stirred in my memory, a story I’d loved that wasn’t mine.
“Mimi was here,” I said. “This is where everyone came, after the fire.”
Adam nodded. “But she came by boat, with Theo. So they were here together—”
“Unchaperoned,” I finished, laughing a little. I pointed at the theater. “I wonder if that’s the same one they went to.” It had been one of the few perks for everyone from the island who arrived in Ellsworth with no home to go back to: free admission at the movie theater. My grandparents had used it as a meeting place, where they could hide together in a crowd, in the dark, safe from the prying eyes of Mimi’s parents. When I’d asked my grandmother which movies she’d seen here, she said, “I haven’t the faintest idea,” and winked.
I used to laugh at the idea of my grandparents, young and in love and surreptitiously canoodling in the back row of a theater, gazing at each other and completely ignoring whatever was on-screen. An old-timey precursor to “Netflix and chill.” But now I shivered, thinking of all the times I’d heard that story, and how I’d never hear it again. How the story itself would die, too, untold, gathering dust from disuse until you couldn’t even see the shape of it anymore. Mimi had entrusted me with her memories, each of them better and more fascinating than anything I’d ever done or lived myself—but all the fascination in the world couldn’t make them mine. How many details had I already forgotten? How many had I never known, because I didn’t think to ask?
Adam nudged his shoulder against mine. “What are you thinking?”
“I was thinking . . .” I paused, debating how honest to be. And then deciding, suddenly and recklessly, not to hold back. “All those days I spent with her, it was like I was hoping some of whatever she had would rub off on me. Like she could teach me how to live. I was using her to make myself more interesting . . . and it didn’t even work. Look at me right now: all I’m doing is retracing her steps, retellingher stories. Like I’m plagiarizing her life. She told my mom she was a parasite, but really—”
“Uh-uh,” he said, cutting me off, and grabbed me by both hands. “Nope, I’m sorry, but you’re not going to call yourself a parasite. Nobody talks about the girl I love that way.”
My mouth hung open as I stared at him. “Did you just...” I said, and he replied, “Yes I did,” and before I could speak again, he was kissing me. Right out in the open, as the cold and wind swirled around us, with one arm wrapped around my waist and his other hand resting against my cheek. Slowly and for a long time, as if he had all the time in the world. And then finally, finally, he pulled back and looked into my face. I smiled up at him. It took me a moment to realize that he wasn’t smiling back. He held my gaze, his eyes dark and serious.
