Burn Our Bodies Down(37)

Gram. It protects me from Gram.

I go flush with it, anger and resentment and a gratitude so deep it embarrasses me. She’s my family, and you don’t need protecting from family. Except, a little voice reminds me, I know better than anyone that sometimes, you do.

“And then they had to ask me,” Eli grumbles as he spoons a blueberry from the yogurt. “Like I had anything different to say. But why hear something once when you could hear it three times?” Tess snorts with laughter, and they share a wry smile. I wish I could thank him for playing along, for pretending. He carried that body out of the fire and everything since has clearly been more than he ever asked for.

“Is your mother with you?” Mrs. Miller asks me, and I know it’s only small talk, but it strikes me between the ribs.

“No,” Gram answers for me. She hasn’t touched anything—not her water glass, not the coffeepot, not the food. “Margot’s staying with me for the summer.”

I am? I smile, wide, and it’s nothing I could stop, even if I wanted to.

“Your daughter hasn’t been home in a long time, has she?”

Mrs. Miller doesn’t realize what she’s asked. But I see Gram flinch the same way I do, and I feel Tess’s eyes on me. Watchful, and quiet, two things I wouldn’t have called her yesterday.

“Phalene’s not for everyone,” Gram says. “Especially a Nielsen.”

“I’ll never understand all that.” Mrs. Miller looks at me and leans in a little, smiling. “More than fifteen years since we took the farm off Richard’s parents. Tess was barely walking. And by Phalene standards I’m still just visiting.”

“Did you know my mom?” I ask, and Gram makes a small sound. I might pay for this later, but I want anything anyone can give me of her.

“I didn’t,” Mrs. Miller says. “She was gone by the time we moved back. But my husband did.”

“Really?” He would have grown up with her, known her before she could close herself off. Maybe back then, the smile in the photograph I tucked in my nightstand was something she wore all the time. He can tell me that.

And he can tell me, too, if it was really the fire that drove her away, or if it was something else. I can tell by now that there’s no way I can talk to him with Gram here, though. But she’ll stand between me and any answers that she hasn’t already approved. I have to catch him alone—like he is now.

“Excuse me,” I say to Mrs. Miller. “May I use your restroom?”

She gives me that gracious hostess look and sends me down a hallway that splits off a smaller family room next to the kitchen. It’s narrow, cool and shadowed, lined with framed photographs of Tess posed on the porch, Tess by the Christmas tree, Tess younger and younger as I pass, until she’s a toddler sitting on someone’s knee. I think of the dining room wall at Fairhaven. Of the generations hung there, and of how none of those pictures seemed alive the way Tess’s portraits do.

The bathroom is on the right, white tile and white towels with a white monogram. I hesitate in the doorway, my eyes meeting my reflection in the mirror above the porcelain sink.

I look like a mess, my hair straggly and slick with grease even though I washed it in the bath last night. Slowly I reach up and run my fingers along my cheek, the one where a scar would be if my mother and I were really matching.

Now it’s me and Gram, and my somehow sister. I asked for this. I wanted a family. That body’s a problem in my way, but all I have to do is solve it. Then I can make a life with Gram worth something. Then I can have what I want.

I leave the bathroom and turn back to the hallway. It ends in another pair of french doors, their glass panels mostly covered by a dark curtain. Through a gap I can see the glow of a computer screen and a burnished wooden desk, and there’s a muffled voice coming from inside. It must be Mr. Miller talking to the police chief.

I lean back against the wall to wait, in a slot between two of the photographs. But something scuffs against the floor in the study, and it’s only a moment before one of the doors is being pulled open. I straighten in a hurry, try to look lost and unsure. It’s not really that far from the truth, anyway.

Mr. Miller isn’t what I expected after meeting his wife. She’s out of the pages of an old housekeeping magazine. But he’s more like Gram. Faded denim and a button-down with the sleeves rolled up, the starch all but gone from the collar, if it was ever there in the first place. He’s homegrown Phalene, just like her, I remind myself. That’s why I’m here looking for him.

“Oh,” he says, startled. “I didn’t know we had…”

He trails off, and I know that expression by now. Wide, wary eyes, like I’m something between a shock and a haunting.

“Sorry,” I say. “I was looking for the restroom.” And then, even though I probably don’t need to bother, “I’m Vera’s granddaughter.” I gesture to my face, the proof I was born with. “Margot.”

“Margot,” he says. “God.” But he seems, then, to remember his manners, because he reaches out, and we shake hands, his palm calloused against mine, just like Gram’s. “Welcome, Margot.” He’s still staring at me. It must be unnerving, if he knew my mother. To see me, just like her.

“Thanks for having us,” I say. “Tess invited us over to brunch. I hope you don’t mind.”