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Lavender on my grandmother’s arthritic hands as I held them in mine.
My eyes flew open and I sat up so fast I saw stars. “Oh my god,” I said.
Adam sat up, too, looking scared. “What? What is it?”
My breath caught in my throat. “Mimi. When they found her, I just remembered—”
“Oh, babe, you shouldn’t,” he started to say, but I cut him off with a furious shake of my head.
“No, you don’t understand. She was wearing her boots.”
He stared at me, his face blank. “Of course she was. It was freezing outside.”
“Adam,” I said. My heart began to race as gooseflesh rippled over my bare skin. “How did she get them on?”
18.
For two weeks, I kept the engagement a secret. More than a secret: it sat in my guts like a stone, weighed down by the horrifying possibility that Mimi hadn’t wandered onto the ice by accident. I’d been so consumed by guilt, the sense that she’d still be alive if only I’d heard her get out of bed that night, it seemed like nothing could be worse. But there was something worse. More haunting, more horrible, and now I saw it every time I closed my eyes. A shadow shaped like a man, black and spectral, with long fingers and no face. I imagined him standing over my grandmother as she slept, whispering into her ear. I saw him bending low to tie the laces of her boots and stretching a skeletal hand to disengage the dead bolt above the back door. I saw him drifting alongside her as she walked the pine path, those long fingers wrapped around her arm. Sometimes he was broad-shouldered, wearing a peaked cap, like the silhouette I thought I imagined in the hallway. A shadow among the shadows.
He always comes at night,she’d said.
I thought she was being haunted by the ghostly fragments of her own memories. What if the ghost wasn’t a ghost at all?
Even with so many of us in the house, even with Adam here, nobody could watch her every second. There had been so many times when Mimi was alone, and that one day, those many hours, when she’d disappeared completely. What if someone had been watching her, watchingus? Creeping around corners, hiding in the shadows, filling the blank spaces in her mind with poisonous thoughts. Planting the seeds, biding his time. Waiting for the chance he knew would come, to lead her away into the dark. Someone who wanted to hurt her.
But I couldn’t say that aloud. Just thinking about it made me feel hysterical, paranoid, insane. The more I imagined that shadow, the more indistinct it became, until it started to look like anyone—or everyone. It was Richard, getting the payback he felt he deserved for the weird grudge he’d been nursing since childhood. It was Diana, who wanted Mimi to hurry up and die so that she could claim her inheritance. It was my own mother, angry and exhausted by the endless grind of keeping the house and managing my grandmother’s affairs, giving both herself and Mimi the gift of a quick release. They appeared in my mind one by one, lacing up Mimi’s boots, taking her by the arm, disengaging the dead bolt, and leading her out into the dark.
I couldn’t say that to anyone. Certainly not to my family or the police. And when I tried to say it to Adam, he stared at me like I’d grown a second head. “You can’t really believe that,” he said.
We were sitting in the parking lot at McDonald’s, holding coffees that were too hot to drink as the wind blew furiously outside. He’d begun working extra hours at Willowcrest—so we could save up to get married, he said, which was so sweet that I couldn’t bring myself to point out how unnecessary it was. But Willowcrest was the one place I had no reason or desire to go to anymore, and this was the first time I’d seen him in nearly a week, stealing an hour of time and a shitty coffee before I drove back to the island and he started his evening shift.
“I don’t know what I believe,” I said.
Adam shook his head. “Baby, I know you’re grieving. You’re looking for an explanation. Nobody planned—”
“Of course nobody planned!” My voice broke. “Who would plan for this? She drowned in the middle of the night, cold and alone, in her fucking nightgown.”
“Yeah, but”—he grimaced, looking uncomfortable—“you and your mom, and your aunt and your uncle, you tried to... orchestrate. All families do. You wanted to control what was happening. So you make a schedule, you lock the doors, you do everything you can to make a bad thing less bad. But people die. They die no matter what you do and how much you try, and no matter how much you love them. All the planning in the world doesn’t change how it ends.”
I didn’t answer. It was a pretty speech, one in which he’d said all the right things, but all I could hear was what he didn’t say: that when Adam saidplanning,what he really meant was money. All the money in the world. And he was right: My family had tried to buy ourselves a sense of control. We tried to buy time, to buy a gentler, softer goodbye—not for my grandmother’s sake, but for ours. And in return, we’d been taught a brutal lesson about what we could and couldn’t control. Adam was trying to help me see that, to help me let go.
But I couldn’t.
“She still had her boots on, Adam. Even if you’re right about everything, how do you explain that?”
He sighed. “She must have put them on herself.”
“But she couldn’t. You know she couldn’t. Someone had to have helped her.”
“Who, though?”
I hesitated. “I don’t know. Richard. Or—” I broke off, frustrated. “That’s the thing. It could have been anyone. Everyone in the house had a reason to want her gone.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Everyone?”
“Fine, not you. And not me. But everyone else? My uncle didn’t even try to hide how he felt about her. My aunt . . . I told you what I heard. The will reading is tomorrow, and she’s so impatient about itthat she flew in today so we could do it first thing in the morning. I think she needs money, or her husband does.”
“You said everyone. What about your mom?”
