Wish You Were Gone(6)

“I still can’t believe it,” Willow said, and sat across from her, dropping a box of Entenmann’s donuts on the table, next to the deck of cards that was always nearby, like a favored accessory. The chair scraping against the linoleum was oddly electrifying, and Lizzie felt almost awake, suddenly. She and her daughter stared at each other through the steam coming off of their mugs. Lizzie’s pulse thrummed a frantic beat in her wrists. For half a second, she thought she knew what her daughter was thinking, but then, Willow looked away.

“Poor Hunter,” Willow said.

“How is Hunter?”

Willow slurped her coffee, then shoved half a powdered donut into her mouth. She lifted one shoulder and spoke with her mouth full.

“I don’t know. He barely said anything the entire time we were there. He just… cried. I’ve never seen a guy cry like that.”

There was a cold, hard rock wedged into the spot between Lizzie’s heart and her stomach. Willow reached for the deck of cards and her hands became a familiar blur, cutting and recutting, spinning and flipping.

“Him and his dad, they were really close, you know?” Willow continued. “Like with the baseball and everything? They just… got each other.”

Lizzie’s eyes filled with tears. She swiped at one before it could fall. Hunter Walsh was a baseball phenom—the perfect son for a man like James Walsh, who made a living off of crafting the personas of professional athletes the world over. Hunter was being scouted as early as eighth grade, but was applying early decision to Duke. The recruiters would come in the spring, no doubt, but Hunter had already decided to wait until he had a degree, to play for the college team. James must have been so proud of him. And now, he’d never see his son take the field in a professional game, never play catch with him in the backyard again.

The injustice was so acute that, for a second, Lizzie could barely breathe. Sometimes the world did that to her—nearly flattened her with its take, take, take. And then, in the next moment, she would see something beautiful—like a sunset or a bright green caterpillar or a baby laughing—and it would be the give, give, give that overwhelmed her.

She looked at her daughter and cleared her throat. Part of her didn’t want to ask this, but she knew she should. “How are you doing with all this?” Willow put the cards down.

“Me? It’s just weird. I mean, I just saw him.” Willow reached for her coffee cup. Her dark purple nail polish glittered in the sun. “But I’m fine.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah, I mean… I barely knew the guy.” Willow gave her mother that favored look of teenagers everywhere—the one that said duh, Mom. Why are you asking me such a stupid question? She supposed turnabout was fair play. She’d certainly given her own parents that look plenty of times.

“Okay. Fair enough,” Lizzie said.

Willow shifted in her seat and considered the second half of the donut, but left it in the box. “So… what’re we supposed to do now?” she asked.

“We’re going to do everything we can to support Emma and her family. We’re going to be there for our friends.”

Lizzie hoped she sounded far more certain and more mature and more solid than she felt. Because what she really felt that morning, as she looked into her daughter’s beautiful, dark eyes, was fear.





KELSEY


Your dad mustve been on hella drugs. Was it because he couldn’t stand looking at you?

Maybe he killed himself to get away from you.

Your such a freak walsh. Youre hole family is freaks.



By Wednesday morning, Kelsey had shut off her phone. It wasn’t that there weren’t any nice messages. They were just so few and far between they weren’t worth it. She texted Alexa to call her on the landline if she needed her, held her finger down on the off button, and shoved the dead phone under her mattress.

But now she couldn’t sit still.

Kelsey’s room was too small. That was the problem. Or maybe it was just too messy. She needed to throw stuff out. Purge. Clean it from top to bottom. Maybe even move stuff around. No. Of course move stuff around. Her furniture had been in roughly the same configuration since she could remember—her double bed positioned in the same exact spot her baby crib had been. If Kelsey had learned one thing from watching HGTV with her mother, it was that a room refresh could fix everything. It could change your perspective. Your outlook on life. It could change your life altogether.

It was the Wednesday morning of her forced week off from school—both her mother and her guidance counselor had mandated it—when Kelsey got to work. She took all her books and snow globes and little frames and old My Little Ponies—she couldn’t bring herself to throw them out no matter how many times she tried—down from her shelves and dusted. She cleaned out her desk drawers, polished the wooden surface, and took out the pink-and-gold desk set her grandmother had sent her from France for her birthday, positioning everything around her computer just so. She tore apart her closet, making a donate pile and a keep pile and then hanging everything in the keep pile neatly on hangers, organizing everything by color.

By noon, she had amassed four garbage bags in the hallway and had only been bothered once, by her nana—the grandmother who lived in the States—who asked her if she wanted a snack.