Burn Our Bodies Down(27)

Still, I reach out and hold one finger under the drip. The next droplet splashes onto my finger, and I draw back, hold the water into the light from the windows. At first it seems normal. But the more I look at it, the more I realize: it’s pink. So soft and so blushing you wouldn’t notice if you didn’t look close enough. But the color is there, along with a touch of grit that I can feel as I rub my thumb and index finger together.

I wipe my skin clean on the towel hanging from the oven handle. No sign of Gram coming back yet. Through the back windows, the trees on the horizon look blackened, their branches broken, bodies standing like columns of ash against the sky. That must be where the old fire was. The one Tess mentioned, the one that sent Mom running.

When Gram comes back, I’ll ask.

I cross the kitchen, heading out to the entryway. The hallway leading to the rest of the house looks too complicated, full of too many corners and too many closed doors. I choose the other direction, the double doors and the dining room.

Here the rug is plush and thick, and clean. I wince at the ash and dirt covering my clothes, but that doesn’t keep me from going in. The table is lined with four chairs on either side, and one each at the foot and the head. Each has elegant scrollwork along the back, gleaming and smooth. There was money here, once.

The table matches. It’s covered in a film of dust that’s broken here and there by smudges and tracks I think must belong to mice. I step closer, drag my hand along the surface, leaving trails behind. There’s a strange texture. I bend down, squint to get a good look.

Scratches on the table, long and thin. Near the edge and close to me. Scars in the wood, biting deep and sliding shallow at the ends.

“Margot.”

I jump. When I turn, Gram is watching me from the doorway. She doesn’t look mad. But maybe that only means the worst is coming.

“Sorry,” I say quickly, and I step back. I mean to head for the kitchen, but something catches my attention. Photographs, hung the whole length of the wall behind me, dusty glass glinting dully. The faces in each of them are almost familiar. None of them look as similar as Mom and Gram and I do, but I can spot our eyes looking out at me from a dozen photographs.

“Is that—” I start, and Gram nods.

“That’s us,” she says. A catch in my throat, and an ache in my chest. Us. All these people. All this history. And Mom just cut it out of our lives. Closed the door on it and left us out there, alone. What happened to her here? What could be so bad that she’d leave this behind?

I look more closely at the photographs. I’m not sure, but I think they run from past to present, older and more faded closer to the door. More and more people in each one, arranged on what must be the front porch, staring into the camera with only a handful of smiles between them.

“Is there one of you and my grandfather?” I ask. The Nielsen name probably came from him, and I’d like to see him, to see what our line looked like before Gram was part of it. But she shakes her head and points to the far end of the photographs.

I frown, staring at the last picture—a man and a woman, in black-and-white, with a little girl standing between them, her hair in two braids, a stuffed animal of some sort hanging from one hand. The girl’s face is immediately recognizable. That’s Gram, and her parents.

“You were the Nielsen?” But as soon as I say it, it’s not a surprise. Of course she was. I can’t imagine her arriving in her husband’s car, getting out and looking at a Fairhaven that wasn’t already hers.

Gram sniffs disdainfully. “As if I’d give up my own name for anybody.”

I look back at the photographs. It seems like they take one of every generation, so there has to be one of Mom’s. But there isn’t. The whole row’s off center, like it’s missing something, and there’s a slightly paler rectangle on the wall next to the last photo, and a hole where a nail was.

There was one, once. And now it’s gone.

“She took it with her when she left,” Gram says. “I don’t suppose she ever showed you, did she?”

I can’t help laughing. “Of course not.” I don’t know how to explain to Gram that this, everything—it’s more than I would ever get from her, even if I tried my whole life.

“Then what did she tell you, exactly? About us.”

There’s something careful about the way Gram is asking. But there’s nothing careful about my answer.

“She never told me anything,” I say. Gram raises her eyebrows, like I’m exaggerating. “I mean it,” I say. “I only found your number by accident. Whatever I know, I know from here. From you. From—”

I break off. Gram’s already dismissed everything the police said. She’d hate the kind of rumors I heard from Tess. But my face must give it away, because she says, “You spoke to Theresa, didn’t you?”

“Maybe.”

“That girl loves a good story.” She holds out her hand, ushers me through the double doors and back toward the kitchen. “It comes down to your mother leaving home and this town being full of busybodies. Do people say that anymore? Busybodies?”

“No,” I say, smiling, and Gram gives it right back.

“One day you’ll find yourself left behind just like me,” she says, knocking her knuckles gently against my cheekbone in a way I think is meant to be fond. “She got pregnant with you when she was just eighteen. No father in the picture. You must know all that.”