Sign Here(44)
“Let’s go tomorrow,” I said. “First thing.”
Of course, I wouldn’t wait. I was already counting the steps between me and the elevator.
As if she could read my mind, Cal shook her head.
“Let’s go right now.”
LILY
LILY HELD HER HAND under the bathtub faucet, the water so hot, it felt like punishment. She unwrapped her summer dress and hung it on the towel hook.
Lily had always had a nice body. She didn’t stumble into it; she worked for it every day of her life. She could still throw up on demand, even though she hadn’t done so in over a decade. Not since Rose caught her and gave her such a tongue-lashing, it wasn’t just Lily’s throat that burned. It had been hard to adjust to swallowing being permanent. She saw food and thought instantly about what it would become inside her. The whole thing was disgusting. But then she had children and, for the first time, she saw her body itself as powerful. Before that, she believed her body’s only power was in the currency its shape gave her, which made her worth something to the strong. It wasn’t until she brought her children into the world through nothing but her body’s force that she realized she could be strong herself.
She looked in the foggy mirror, grateful for the kindness of blurred edges. It had been a long time since she gave birth, and her sense of strength waned the older her kids got, the less they needed from her. She placed one palm on her belly and pushed, before sliding into the steam of the old bathtub and thinking, once more, of Sarah.
* * *
—
PHILIP WAS SENTENCED TO fifteen years for killing Sarah Kelly. It wasn’t quite manslaughter, but it wasn’t cold-blooded murder either. A crime of passion, they called it. A mistake without the innocent glow of good intentions. The bruising on her chest strengthened the prosecution’s case, but her history of handjobs in the local cemetery after school weakened it. They said she liked it rough.
After the trial, Philip lasted three weeks before he hanged himself with his bedsheets. No note, no nothing.
Everyone thought he couldn’t handle the guilt, or the punishment. Silas swore up and down that there was foul play, threatening everyone from the attorneys to the police to the COs who found him. He went to the trial only once. He couldn’t stand sitting there silently, watching his brother’s hunched shoulders in the front row as person after person talked about his temper, his wild side, the way he could knock a tight end flat on his back without staggering. When they talked about the day a neighbor’s dog went missing and they found his collar inside the saddlebag of Philip’s motorcycle, flecks of blood morphing the name from “Otis” to “Is,” Silas lost it. He jumped to his feet and screamed, “Bullshit!” until a bailiff dragged him out.
As much as she knew he didn’t want to, a part of Silas blamed her nonetheless. If Lily hadn’t gone for that late-night walk and seen Philip, he could’ve gotten off. Whatever forensic evidence hadn’t been washed away by the lake was circumstantial. It could’ve been deemed an accident. But Evan and Rose never blamed her. She cried on their kitchen floor the day the detectives called her in for questioning, begging them to tell her what to do. Rose and Evan could have told her to lie. She was carrying their grandson; they were her family now. They could’ve told her to take the fall herself, and she just might have. But they didn’t. They told her to tell the truth. Rose held her in her arms in a way her own mother never had, stroked her hair, and called her “sweet girl.”
I’m so sorry, sweet girl.
Then Sean was born and present and in need of things daily, hourly, by the minute, and Silas, Evan, and Rose shifted everything to be about The Baby. After a while, the attention went from strained to genuine to genuinely normal. Silas was in awe of their son. He was always bouncing him in his arms, pointing at people and buildings and colors. Look, Sean! Garbage truck! Look, Sean, dog! Look, Sean, look. See? It’s all for you. As soon as Silas came back to her, Lily forgot that he had ever left. And she could’ve gone on forgetting. She could’ve stayed in that twilight state, a shade so close to happiness, it could have been mistaken as such, if not for the real thing for comparison.
If not for Gavin Kelly.
No one could call Silas a bad husband. She knew it almost because the marriage had never been happy, exactly, but he kept showing up anyway. Magazines and her mother taught her she should be grateful if a man stuck around for the taxing grind of normal. The part of marriage that is about cleaning the kitchen floor as opposed to fucking on it. As if the female gender were not equally capable of getting bored, of longing for the excitement brought by strange hands. But gratitude is not love, especially when the person dutifully practicing gratitude feels, fundamentally, that it is wrong to be grateful to someone for doing that which they vowed to do. That gratitude should be reserved for moments of awe, moments in which one doesn’t have to decide to be grateful but rather falls, blindly and without thought, to one’s knees.
Gavin was the person who saved her from the equally blissful and dangerous ignorance of the Forgetting Years, as Lily had come to think of the seventeen years between the trial and the minute she first touched his hand. Now, when she looked back, it scared her how much her mind could lie. Even to her. How, for seventeen years, it lulled her into a false sense of security, regardless of what stood right in front of her.