Burn Our Bodies Down(80)

“I followed your rules,” I say. Tremble and quiver, my chin crumpling. I will not cry. I will not cry. “Keep a fire burning, right?”

Her breath catches. “Margot?”

“I know everything. I did it, Mom.”

I watch her wilt with relief. Wait for her to reach for me, to share this, because it’s only us. We’re the only ones who will ever know what this means, or what this feels like. But she collapses in on herself like she always does. And I get it. I do. She’s spent my whole life watching me grow, watching me turn into her, into Gram, into the sister she killed. Even if she didn’t know exactly how deep the sameness runs, even if she doesn’t now, it’s there in our faces. An echo in our voices. I don’t think I’d reach for me either.

She takes a deep breath, lets it out slow. “And the Bible? The record I left? Did you find that?”

“Yeah.” I don’t tell her about the other entries I read. I don’t think she meant for me to see them. But I’m so glad that I did. That I found my mother when she was young, when she was joking about Gram and when she loved her sister more than anything.

“Good.” She drops her gaze, fidgets with the pencils in a cup on the desk. “I know it’s hard to understand, but—”

“It’s okay.” I mean it. “It was the only thing to do.”

“Yeah,” she says, the worst kind of laughter in her voice. “It was. Nobody ever should have given me something to look after. Not Katherine.” She looks at me now, resolve holding her body tight. “Not you, either. And I wish I could tell you I’m sorry I didn’t do better, Margot. I wish I could say that. But I did the best I could.”

I try to hold it back. But I can’t. “It wasn’t good enough.”

“I know that,” Mom says plainly. It doesn’t seem to hurt her the way I thought it might.

“And you can’t say that you’re sorry?”

She looks at me for a long moment. “No,” she says. “If you’d grown up like me, Margot—”

“But I did.” If she can’t understand this, this most fundamental thing. If she can’t be sorry for it, then I don’t even know what we’re doing. “I grew up with you, Mom. You took everything Gram put on you and passed it on.”

Like the girls in the grove. Everything happening over and over, and I have to break it. I asked Tess if understanding a person meant I had to forgive them. And I do understand my mom. I know how she saw what happened to her sister, how she killed Katherine with her own hands. I know how she kept me, even though I bet she’s spent my whole life wondering if she would have to kill me too. I know what fires she walked through now.

”You’re right,” she says. “I did. But you’re stronger than me, Margot. You are. You bore what I never could.”

And the thing is, I know she means it like praise. Like pride. But it isn’t to me. Because yes, I bore this. I fixed it, but there’s a voice in my head, one I’ve never really heard before, and it says, I shouldn’t have had to.

I shouldn’t have had to be strong. Not like that. I should have been able to break. Maybe one day all that strength can just be a gift my mother gave me, and not the tool I used to survive her. But I don’t think it’s today.

“Well,” I say at last. “Thank you for coming back.”

She fidgets with the plastic bag, watching me. “And are you? Coming back?”

I want to say yes. I want everything to be fine, but whatever we do today to bridge the gap—it won’t hold. Not when I can still feel my whole life with her in every heartbeat.

“Not now,” I say instead. “Not yet.” It’s what I can say instead of “I love you.” It’s what I can do to look after myself.

Her face crumples for a moment. I watch as she blinks away tears, feel my own well up.

“Not yet?” she says. She swallows hard, her knuckles white. I wait for the fight. And it’s there. I can see it in the tremble of her body, in the shut of her eyes. But she says, “Okay.” And she says, “Not yet.”

It’s the kindest thing she’s ever done.





thirty





the Miller funeral falls on the hottest day of the summer so far. Eli and I go together, sit side by side in the first pew, a few feet from where the three coffins are set up across the front of the church.

“Don’t ever tell me,” he said this morning when I showed up on the church steps in a black dress his mother lent me. “I’ll ask. But don’t ever tell me what you saw in their house.”

It’s been a week, but it seems like yesterday. Mrs. Miller, still reaching for her phone. Mr. Miller in the closet, his body between his daughter and a shotgun. Gram told me she wasn’t there for all three of them, only for Tess. He could’ve stepped aside, but he didn’t.

“I won’t,” I said. It’s not a hard promise to make. I never want to think about it again.

There was no funeral for Gram. Mom left Phalene that night, went back to Calhoun and our old apartment. When I think of them now, I think of them together, standing on the porch at Fairhaven in the light of an unending afternoon. I’m too far away to see their faces, but I know they’re watching me.