All the Dangerous Things(69)
But here, now, I can feel it flaring up again, the mere sight of this place hitting it in just the right way.
I push my finger into the bell now and hear the noise on the other side, bouncing off the walls, the empty space. I wait, trying not to fidget, knowing that, once they answer, I’ll be face-to-face with my parents for the first time since Mason was taken. Finally, I hear the twist of the lock; the old hinges creaking as the heavy door lurches open. I hear my father’s dry throat clearing—a habit he picked up from smoking and has never been able to drop—and say a silent thank-you that it’s him I’ll have to face first.
“Hey, Dad.” He looks up at me, obviously surprised to see me standing there. I flash him a meek smile, shrug a little, and look down at the ground, studying my shoes. “Mind if I come in?”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
THEN
It’s been six months without Margaret, and somehow both everything and nothing has changed.
We lowered her into the ground at Beaufort National Cemetery. I remember standing there, dressed in black, the little white headstones aligned in perfectly spaced straight lines. They reminded me of fangs, small and pointy, or of standing inside a giant shark’s mouth, lost amidst the endless rows of jagged teeth. All of us nothing more than scraps of flesh snagged against their serrated edges.
The pastor had called it an honor for her to be buried there among some of our nation’s bravest soldiers—Dad was a veteran, after all, which meant that one day, he would join her there, too. I didn’t see it as an honor, though. I saw it as a cruel dishonor, because burying her there implied that there was something valiant about her death—something heroic and necessary—when in reality, she died by choking on dirty marsh water, facedown in the mud.
It was raining, I remember, but nobody had thought to bring an umbrella, so we just stood there, the three of us, water dripping off my mother’s ringlet curls as we watched the tiny casket being lowered into a pit of sludge. Her doll was in there, too, tucked beneath her arm. Mom couldn’t stand the thought of Margaret being buried alone, but there was something eerie about it to me, imagining those porcelain eyes still open as the casket was being closed, enveloping them both in darkness. The fact that time would go on, Margret’s body would decay and rot and turn into nothing but bones, and there, still wedged into her armpit, would be Ellie, her baby—eyes open, lips grinning, buried alive.
After it was over, we drove home in silence, each of us retreating to our own quiet corners of the house. Mom couldn’t stop crying; Dad couldn’t stop drinking. He retired a few months later, deciding to stay home with Mom and me indefinitely. Maybe Margaret’s death forced him to realize how much of her life he had missed; maybe the publicity of her drowning was too hard to avoid, the questions too hard to answer, so he decided to just shut himself in.
Or maybe Mom made him. Maybe she was too afraid to spend any more nights with me alone.
In some ways, life has gone on as if nothing even happened, like stubbing your toe and trying to walk through the pain with tears in your eyes. School started up again in August, the way it always has, and I just went through the motions as if everything were fine. As if Margaret’s little backpack weren’t still suspended next to mine in the mudroom, partially zipped shut with her favorite sweater peeking out. It was like we all wanted it there for her, just in case she clawed her way out of that coffin and came walking back from the graveyard, wet and shivering and covered in mud, looking for something to keep her warm. Her bedroom remains untouched, though Mom insists on leaving the door shut. Dad says it’s because she can’t stand to see it: her little bed, her pink walls, her white mesh canopy dangling like a cobweb from the ceiling. Sometimes, I stop in the doorframe and try to imagine what it must have felt like for her to open her eyes and see me standing there, rigid and staring, a silhouette in the dark.
How afraid she must have been.
In other ways, though, life after Margaret has been unimaginably different. Holidays have come and gone and we’ve just ignored them all, pretended they didn’t exist, as if disregarding the passage of time would make the fact that the world was moving on without her a little less real. Everything reminds me of her now: the taste of sweet tea, the smell of the marsh. The quietness of the house every morning as I make my way downstairs, the deafening silence amplified even further by the fact that she isn’t here to fill it with her footsteps, her laughter, her voice.
Mom’s stopped painting, her third-floor studio slowly morphing into a room for storage. Dad’s home constantly, his cheeks, once perfectly smooth, sprouting wiry little hairs that have slowly grown into a fully formed beard peppered with gray. We have visitors on occasion: Chief Montgomery checking in, the neighbors offering casseroles and condolences. The tourists poking their heads through the bars feels even more ominous now, like it isn’t the history they want to see, but something darker. A week after Margaret died, a bald man with oval glasses started coming over twice a week, listening to Mom cry. He nods his head and scribbles notes on a legal pad as she talks—or, more often, just sits in silence, tears dripping from her chin—leaving her with various bottles of pills that keep multiplying on the countertop.
The biggest change, though, seems to be with my sleep—or, rather, my lack thereof. I used to be such a deep sleeper; I used to fall asleep in an instant, like the closing of my lids signaled to my brain that it was time to shut off, too. Parts of it, anyway. But now I lie awake, unblinking eyes on the ceiling, watching as my room morphs slowly from dusk to dawn. It’s like my brain wants me to remember something; it won’t shut down until I remember. And when I do fall asleep—finally, after hours of violent fits and bursts—I have the same dream, always.