A Lily in the Light(81)

There was a formality about her parents that struck Esme as odd. The parents. Honest people who’d tried to raise their kids right. They were so dressed up, dressed for an occasion or a trial where nice clothes from the back of the closet made them worthy instead of parents who’d failed somehow. Did her parents love each other anymore? Maybe not in the way they had when they’d first met, but they would try now, for Lily, because she deserved and needed them. They’d moved beyond husband and wife a long time ago. They were parents, and for Lily’s sake, that was what they would be.

“Good morning.” Andre stood beside the blanket. His shirt was so strongly starched that it barely moved in the breeze. Esme stifled a giggle. He rolled his eyes and shook his head, making eyes at Cerise, who was now rearranging food on the blanket, moving watermelon to the middle and a plate of cookies to the outside, correcting the spacing between plates, asking Madeline why she’d brought only paper plates instead of something nicer.

“It’s a picnic, Mom,” Madeline said, but Cerise ignored her.

Andre studied the bay, absorbing the tall wisps of marsh grass, the slow, snaking line of cars on the other side of the glimmering water, white dots of sleeping sailboats anchored to mud below the surface. He looked to the sky and back to the water. Sunlight flickered on its surface. He held his arm over his stomach like a brace, and despite the lines and shadows that had deepened over the years, Andre looked like he had so many years before: lost and stumbling through life with only his mother’s cross to guide him.

Then the lines and shadows lightened. His arm fell away from his stomach, and he looked toward the sky again. This time he was smiling.

“Would you look at that?” he mused, nodding with appreciation at the open sky before turning to Esme. “You picked the perfect place.” Andre’s eyes watered, and tears rolled down his face. “Who even knew this was here? Thank you.”

She hadn’t realized she’d been waiting for approval until he planted a kiss on her cheek. Tears sprang up behind her eyelids. Seagrass with gold wisps touched the sky, swaying as a breeze cut through the humidity. Sailboats moved silently along the water. Waves brushed moss-covered rocks at her feet. The silhouette of a horseshoe crab wandered beneath the surface. When she looked at it all together, it was as beautifully choreographed as any of the dances she’d ever performed. She lifted her head to the sky as her father had and whispered, “Thank you.”

For a long time no one spoke. Madeline lay back on the blanket and watched this new world. She blinked and held her arm over her eyes as if she wasn’t sure it was real. Nick sat on the edge of the blanket beside Madeline, toying with a blade of grass. Esme tried to pretend that picnics with her family were normal, only they weren’t. It felt better not to talk, where everyone could wander through their secret places, the ones they’d built after Lily, before the walls had come down.

Andre placed his hand over Cerise’s. It was a measured gesture, and the thought of Cerise pushing it away today was terrible, but she didn’t.

Cerise, remember Orchard Beach? Esme wished her father would say so her mother would look up, surprised, from the plates on the blanket. A daze would cross her father’s face and settle on them all. Cerise would smile, not the careful smile she’d had since Lily, but a real one. Her parents would be lost in something personal, a secret from before, rewinding time, and it would make Esme feel ten years old again, her world as small as a bird nest, padded with feathers and high above everything that could ever go wrong.

Cerise closed her hand around Andre’s. Despite whatever they felt for each other, Esme suspected they needed each other today because no one else would understand.

They heard the car coming before they saw it. Esme searched the tinted windows for any sign of the person inside, for the outline of her head, the shape of her shoulders, reminding herself that Lily was not four years old anymore, dressed in her blue-and-teal-striped skirt and polka-dot tights. She wouldn’t wrap her hair around her finger and suck her thumb or smell like strawberry detangler and baby soap. It took a long time for the car door to open. Esme wondered if Lily was studying them behind the tinted glass, comparing the family before her with the one she’d imagined. She tried to see them as Lily would, her parents sitting beside one another, Madeline’s uneven hair, the marks on her legs from sitting in the grass.

Lily stepped out of the car, so different from the girl in the picture. She was tall, wearing a pink T-shirt and paint-splattered jeans rolled up to her ankle, where her skin was a pale cream. Her hair was a mess of long, wild brown curls, red in the sun. A strand blew across her face and hid her eyes, but Lily didn’t brush it away. She watched them carefully from beneath it, almost like she was preparing to draw the people before her. She was so serious, so unlike the snake charmer who turned dirty tights into dancing cobras or once squeezed a tube of toothpaste onto the floor so she could paint a heart.

This was the same Lily who’d once packed a suitcase and waited by the front door to go to the moon, only she looked the same way Esme remembered herself at twelve years old, a quiet watcher, full of secrets. “She may or may not remember her life before,” Nancy had warned. The world around them felt lost now, held together by a girl in a pink T-shirt and jeans.

Cerise walked forward first, measuring her steps to a slow walk, fighting the urge to run.

“I—we—never stopped looking for you,” she said, voice breaking.