A Lily in the Light(87)
“What’s its name?” Andre asked.
“Does it need one?” Lily asked. She traced her finger over the delicate line of its ear, but there was an edge in her voice that hadn’t been there before.
“Of course it needs one,” Cerise said. “If it’s going to be part of our family, then it has to have a name.”
Lily blanched and just as quickly lowered the kitten down to the ground, where it stood on four wobbly legs, its tail as straight as a pin.
“What’s wrong, Lily?” Cerise asked.
“Maybe it doesn’t want to go,” Lily mumbled. Dust kicked up behind Lily as she walked to her cabin alone, head down, hands hanging at her sides, empty where the kitten had been. The cabin door opened and closed.
Madeline scooped the kitten into the crook of her elbow.
“Let’s go inside too,” she whispered.
Esme closed her eyes, and the sun blinked yellow and black behind her lids. Please let her love us, she prayed, however long it takes—because the thought of keeping her captive again was worse than losing her the first time.
Madeline set the kitten up with bowls of milk and water and a nest of towels outside Lily’s door. A little while later, it disappeared inside.
“Because it’s cold at night,” Lily explained at breakfast the next day. “And there might be bigger animals outside, but I left the window open in case it wanted to go outside, but it didn’t. It slept on my pillow all night by my head.”
The cat squirmed in Lily’s lap, walking in a circle until it found the right spot. Lily fed it a piece of egg from her plate.
“He likes you,” Cerise said. “He feels safe with you.”
“Maybe,” Lily said, her fingers sticky with yolk.
Esme hoped the same would eventually be true for Lily.
They left a week later without the kitten. Lily had named it Garfield and changed its water and milk bowls and left the pillow from her bed outside on the porch for him. It seemed fitting that Lily would leave him here, under so much sky and with so many places to explore, instead of bringing him home to Queens, where he’d be an indoor cat, confined to their small apartment, forced to live in an unfamiliar place.
They came home to the same kind of street altar people had built years before with teddy bears and balloons, candles, posters that welcomed Lily home, and flowers, especially lilies. The community needed to heal, too, Esme realized, because what had happened to them could have happened to anyone, anywhere, but it had been here.
“They made this for you,” Cerise explained to Lily, “because the whole world was hoping and praying you’d come home safe, but no one prayed as much as we did.”
Lily picked one of the flowers from the street. If they weighed everything left on the sidewalk, it would outweigh Lily. The enormity of it sat on Lily’s shoulders. She fumbled with the petals of a lily until her fingers were covered with yellow pollen and the edges withered. It must be so overwhelming, Esme thought sadly, for a girl who’d known almost no one for her entire life to suddenly be so known.
“We could donate everything,” Esme suggested, “to children’s hospitals. They might like the toys. Or we could put some of the flowers in a vase for your room.”
Lily gathered the boldest pink and orange flowers.
Birdman’s old window was covered with jelly stickers of little hearts and stars. The new family had put Styrofoam grow cups full of overflowing clover on the window ledge. He was gone, and yet it still felt like he was watching, presiding over what their lives had become. Four-year-old Lily would’ve loved a new cast of stuffed animals, but now she studied the glittery letters on the welcome-home posters, the side-by-side pictures of herself at four and herself today.
“Your favorite color was hot pink,” Cerise said sadly as the bouquet in Lily’s hands grew.
“It still is,” Lily said finally. Clouds rolled in over the 7 train tracks, low and heavy. Esme caught her mother’s eye and smiled. At least that hadn’t changed.
Nick and Andre were waiting by the front door with the pile of mismatched luggage. On any other day, they would’ve been quick to go upstairs, change into sweatpants, and click the TV on, but today they lingered by the mailboxes, waiting for Lily to come home.
When they stepped through the lobby, Esme hoped Lily would recognize the mailboxes they’d checked for birthday cards every day when Lily was too young to understand that her birthday only happened once per year, but she didn’t. She waited as someone else pushed the elevator button to their floor, even though it used to be her favorite job. Lily carried her backpack over one shoulder, her hair loose from her ponytail, studying the green-gray hallway and the dim lights as Cerise narrated their journey from the lobby to their front door. This is where the trash goes, these are the stairs we use sometimes, this is the good elevator, as if Lily had never been here before.
Andre handed Lily a new set of house keys with a key chain that looked like her horse, Diamond, and on the back, he’d etched Lily’s name with a pin in imperfect script. Esme’s eyes flooded. He’d bought her a souvenir as if they’d been on vacation, and in a way, they had been. It was a journey. Lily put her new keys in her pocket.
They stepped inside. Esme realized, as Cerise shifted from foot to foot and fumbled with her fingers, that she was not the only one waiting for Lily to recognize the faded rug or the crocheted blankets on the couch, the bin of toys under the window, the boxes of cereal on the table. She did not remember to take her shoes off by the front door or hang her jacket in the closet. She stood in the middle of the living room, studying the doors that opened to other rooms, the faded pictures on the walls, as if it were the first time seeing these things her parents had spent so long preserving just for this moment.