A Lily in the Light(88)



The disappointment in the room was palpable. They had all been hoping that this was the moment Lily would remember, but she didn’t.

“Right,” Cerise said. “Let’s give you the tour.”

But Nick was already punching in a number on the phone. The cord dangled at his side.

“Hey,” he said to Lily. “Pepperoni or mushrooms?”

It was a kind of test: she’d hated mushrooms and picked the “slugs” off her food. Lily slid her backpack to the floor and rested it against the couch. Lily looked from Esme to Madeline and to her parents, unused to making choices.

“Pepperoni,” she said at last. Nick gave her a thumbs-up, and Esme was thrilled. Even Cerise smiled.

“Come on,” Cerise said. “Let’s show you home.”

Esme watched as Cerise handed Lily a pile of clean, folded towels and led her from room to room, showing her where the forks and glasses were in the kitchen, which bed she’d sleep in.

“We’ll fix this room,” Cerise promised, eyeing the old posters and the furniture in Madeline and Esme’s room. “We’ll make it however you want, and I’m sorry we didn’t do it before you got here, but we were waiting for you.”

And on that, her voice caught. They’d always been waiting. Soon, Lily’s alarm clock would blare from her new room, and she’d sleep through it like a teenager and take long showers and fill the bathtub ledge with her shampoos and conditioners. Cerise would buy snacks again from the supermarket and teach Lily how to do laundry or set the table for dinner each night. Esme hoped Lily would fold into the fabric of their lives so much that they’d forget sometimes that she’d ever been gone at all.

But for now, Esme was struck by her sister sitting at the edge of her old bed in the same striped sheets Esme had slept on when she was her age and lived in this room last when her future hadn’t yet popped open before her.

“Come on,” Esme said, smiling at Lily as she led her teary mother from her old bedroom. “Let’s let Lily get changed.”

Esme met her mother’s eye. “She’s not going anywhere tonight.”

“No.” Cerise laughed and dabbed the corners of her eyes. “Thank God.”

And for the first time in many years, Esme thanked him or her too.





Chapter Twenty-Three

Esme pressed her eyes closed as they passed the watery blue stretch under a cloudless sky. Marsh grass reached for that same blue as the train rolled past. At home, Lily’s new bedroom walls were drying. They’d spent the morning pulling apart Madeline and Esme’s old bedroom furniture, emptying drawers of clothes no one remembered wearing, and painting the bedroom Lily’s winter-morning blue until the whole room felt like it was breathing. If only because she’d spent so much time sifting through the relics of the person she’d been and what she’d left behind, Esme felt drawn to the studio in a way she hadn’t felt since she was eleven years old. “Do you want to come?” she’d asked Lily. “It’s a special place for me.” Lily hadn’t answered, but she’d pulled herself up from the floor and found her shoes. Esme took that as a yes.

“Is this . . . ?” Lily asked, trailing off.

“It is.” Esme pointed past the marsh grass. “That’s where we had our picnic.”

Lily’s hands were still in her lap, not fidgeting like they often did. She was hard to read. Sometimes she pulled into herself and was quiet for hours, fumbling with the hem on her shirt or pulling at her cuticles, staring out the window at nothing in particular. Esme imagined it was from spending hours and hours alone. Esme fought the urge to put her arm around Lily because it didn’t feel natural yet. Was there a part of her sister who remembered these eleven train stops?

They stepped off the train and crossed the parking lot, where most of the boutique shops had changed but the glass windows still glinted back over the parked cars. The sign on the studio door said CLOSED, but Amelia was inside waiting. She’d been so excited over the phone, and Esme couldn’t wait to see her, to see her first studio. Without thinking, she reached for Lily’s hand and then felt the momentary panic when Lily’s warm skin touched hers. Lily wasn’t big on touching. Boundaries, Esme reminded herself, but while Lily didn’t hold Esme’s hand back, she hadn’t pulled away either. Esme took that as one hopeful step before letting go to push the studio door open.

The waiting area was dark, but that same grapefruit smell folded around her. The old broom leaned against the wall in the corner behind Amelia’s desk. A Chopin nocturne was playing inside, and those first few notes were enough to make Esme dizzy. Light spilled through the open door to the studio, throwing a triangle of sunlight over the floor and chairs where Cerise and Lily used to wait, making kissing-booth signs and sewing costumes.

“This—” Esme tried to explain, but her voice caught, and her eyes welled. She was eleven years old again, staring at those newspaper articles of other famous dancers on the wall while Lily crawled on the floor in her red corduroy coat, scratching away with crayons while Esme danced into her future, oblivious to all that would come next. And now Lily was here, too, just beside her, nearly the same age Esme had been when Lily had been here last.

Amelia filled the doorway, and even in the dim light, Esme could feel her smile.

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