A Lily in the Light(15)
“All right.” Detective Ferrera snapped the notebook closed. “Thank you. I’ll be outside. You can stay here or come outside with your parents. There will be an officer outside the door or inside with you. Her name is Officer Rivera, but you can call her Jean. If anything bothers you, just let her know.” He stood from the chair and stretched, arching his back gently at the waist.
“Punching Denny. That’s how I got ballet,” Esme said quietly, so softly only Madeline heard, thinking of that bride stepping over the tangle of them on the stoop in her perfect peep-toe sandals. If it hadn’t been for that bride, Andre wouldn’t have said they needed something constructive to do with their free time.
“Not a bad punishment,” Madeline whispered. She reached for one of the fleece blankets behind the couch and pulled it around them both, tucking the top of the blanket around Esme’s shoulders before folding her legs into the empty space where Esme wasn’t. They were a nest. Two baby birds. The busy hum outside could have been a rare Saturday night when Cerise and Andre went out to dinner and they could stay up late watching SNICK or Tales from the Crypt, microwaving popcorn and making heaping bowls of ice cream because no one told them not to, not their parents, not Mrs. Rodriquez down the hall, whom they could go to if anything, anything, went wrong. This wasn’t the same kind of excitement. It felt lost, something they weren’t supposed to know. The clock chimed in the corner. Midnight. Come back, Esme prayed to Lily, thinking of her sister riding home in a pumpkin carriage. Madeline’s foot twitched under the blanket. Esme let her heavy lids close. In the morning, it would be over.
“I’m sorry,” Madeline whispered. “I wish you’d told me.”
Esme didn’t answer. She closed her mind around it and kept it safely there.
In the morning—well, no, it wasn’t morning, not the usual kind—she opened her eyes and squinted against the living room lights. Every lamp was on, throwing yellow light over all the furniture. The sky was a violet blue. It could have been early morning or just past sunset. Pain shot through Esme’s neck from sleeping without her pillow. Madeline was gone. Her mother was at the end of the couch, resting her chin against her hand, as delicate and gray as a dandelion puff.
A Bargain for Frances was on the table next to a pile of photo albums open to Lily’s last birthday, when Cerise had made a cake that looked like Flounder. That had been the day Lily had dragged a step stool to the kitchen and scooped her hand through Flounder’s face when no one was looking, skipping away blue mouthed and happy. “No yelling on birthdays,” Lily had said when Cerise had served a headless cake. Now, there were dried glue marks where some of the pictures had been. Esme’s throat tightened. She couldn’t remember the missing pictures.
Lily’s corduroy coat wasn’t hanging by the door. Cerise held rosary beads between her fingers, but her lips weren’t moving. The beads were still. The crucifix rested against Esme’s foot, metallic and cold. Lily wasn’t here. Someone had cut away a piece of time. They were suspended like dust in the air, rolling over and over slowly. Last night she’d told Detective Ferrera about Birdman. It flickered painfully through her head. Had he told Cerise? Esme swallowed, throat dry.
“Mom?” Esme whispered. She wanted to inch closer and rest her head against Cerise’s shoulder or feel her mother’s fingers through her hair, always cool and comfortingly sharp against her scalp, but Cerise stared upward as if she were talking to someone on the ceiling. She knows, Esme thought. That’s why she won’t look at me.
“Mom?” Esme tried again, louder, her voice raspy. Cerise turned slowly toward the sound, eyes red rimmed and puffy.
“It’s OK,” Cerise said, mouthing the words so quietly Esme had to hold her breath to listen. “They’re still looking. The news is outside.”
“What news?”
Cerise’s hand rested absently on Esme’s foot. The rosary beads left circle imprints on her arch. It was wrong for a holy thing to touch the bottom of her foot. Esme inched away and wandered toward the window. Outside, news trucks with big antennas and poles with swirling cables spanned the block. Seven, Four, One, Two, Five. All the main channels.
“We’re on TV?” Esme was shocked. They were the bad news, the sad things that happened to other people. They were the Do you know where your children are? people, with kids’ faces and lots of numbers about them cutting between whatever show they were watching. “Of course,” Andre would tell the TV. “They’re all right here.”
Cerise had a couch cushion pressed under her back the way she used to when she’d been pregnant with Lily. Except now her stomach was smooth instead of beach ball round, and Cerise didn’t have to pace with her hands on her lower back, holding the top half of her body to the bottom. Esme wished she could slip her hand over Cerise’s stomach and wait for Lily’s quick jabs from inside. It was incredible that something had lived in the same place Cerise stored the food she ate. Cerise had always known what the baby was thinking or feeling even though she couldn’t see it.
“How do you know it’s even alive?” Esme had asked once, her head pressed against the taut skin of Cerise’s stomach, listening to the watery world inside. “If you can’t always feel it moving?”
Cerise had smiled and rubbed her hand over Esme’s ear, holding in all the seashell sounds a covered ear made, something Cerise called human magic. “A mother always knows when something is wrong with her baby, no matter how old it gets or how big it grows.” Was it the same thing now that they were waiting in a different way? It felt almost the same, Lily missing and Lily yet to be born, only there was more Lily-ness now. She’d grown into the alphabet of their family in a way she hadn’t before she’d been born, when she was an idea of a baby, possibly a boy, possibly a girl, a no-name thing without a voice or a face instead of someone who made trails of peas on her plate to look like The Very Hungry Caterpillar and fed him first before she tasted her own food or who listened to Esme’s heart with a Fisher-Price stethoscope when she was sick.