Locust Lane(97)

She went alone to the crematorium. They put the body into the oven. There was a whoosh and that was that. The end of Eden.

There was a reception afterward at her house. The Slaters ran the show. They really outdid themselves with the food. And Steve had pried open his wallet to buy too much booze. Gates didn’t come; the Bondurants left after less than a half hour. Four of the weird girls from the graveyard showed up. They lurked in the corner, nibbling defiantly on raw vegetables, resisting all efforts to be drawn into conversation.

It broke up after less than two hours. The Slater twins offered to clean up, but she told them to go—they had their hands full with Steve, who’d been leaning pretty heavily on Mr. Jack Daniels. Her sister and mother offered to stay the night, but Danielle didn’t want that. If she was going to be on her own, she might as well get started now.

And then there were just cold cuts and an ocean of liquor and the crushing emptiness she’d been dodging for the last couple of weeks. The Bondurants had brought the rest of Eden’s stuff, quietly leaving it in a corner of the living room. Danielle had picked up most of her clothes earlier in the week, but there were still shoes and a few cosmetics scattered throughout the house. Her hairbrush was there as well, full of her hair. Danielle lugged it all up to her room. She’d either unpack it later or never. It didn’t make the slightest bit of difference where Eden’s old Chucks lived now.

At the bedroom door, she thought about what Gates had said about the message on her mother’s answering machine, and she wondered how long she’d leave that Eden Hazard sign up there. She’d intended to dump the bags just inside but something drew her into the room. She looked around at the posters, as random as her daughter’s mind. Reservoir Dogs, Van Gogh’s sunflowers, some skinny tattooed nitwit with his shirt unbuttoned. Makeup was scattered on her dresser, surrounding a foul ball she’d got at Fenway.

Danielle lay down on the stripped bed. As she did, something fell out of her side pocket. It was the envelope the green-eyed woman had given her at the funeral home. “For Eden’s Mother.” She tore it open. The card was a nice one. No corny writing, just a black-and-white photo of an orchid. She opened it to see who this person was. Several pages of notepaper fell out, each of them covered, front and back, with small, neat handwriting. She looked at the last page. It was signed Alice Hill. Of course. Hannah’s mother. There’s something in there you’re going to want to read.

She dropped the pages on the bedspread. Reading was beyond her just now. She’d do it later. Even though she hadn’t had a drop to drink, she was suddenly overwhelmed by exhaustion. The house’s emptiness was like sleeping gas leaking invisibly into the room. She didn’t necessarily want to lie here and think about her dead child, but she was too weak to resist the memory when it came. Eden was young, three or four. They’d gone to the mall, just the two of them. Danielle needed a new dress—her friend Maude was marrying the wrong guy, yet again. She’d taken Eden into the changing room, where she’d amused herself by looking at her reflections in the opposing mirrors. An infinity of Edens. And then, at just the moment Danielle’s head was hooded by the dress she was trying to squirm into, Eden bolted, moving as fast as an unleashed spaniel. Danielle called out as she frantically finished dressing, first to her daughter, and then to any adult within earshot. By the time she staggered through the curtains, the girl was gone. Nobody had seen anything. Panic ensued. Sales people, security guards, concerned citizens. Their own little Amber Alert right there in Filene’s.

It was Danielle who found her. Probably just sheer dumb luck, though maybe it was something more, a homing instinct that took her inside one of the squared counters in the cosmetics section, where her daughter was happily applying lipstick in front of a mirrored pillar. Streaks of it on her lips and cheeks and forehead and neck. She smiled when she looked up at her mother, proud to show off what she’d done. Danielle wanted to yell at her but what was the point? The stupid girl never even knew she was lost.

Danielle fell asleep, a sudden plummet into a dreamless darkness that welcomed her like a warm bath. She had no idea how long she was out. It could have been only a few seconds. It could have been an hour. All she was certain of was the manner of her waking. A voice had spoken to her, not of this world, but too clear and too real to be a dream. Gently urging her to do something.

“Mom?”





Acknowledgments


I’d like to thank my friend and agent Henry Dunow, who has been providing wise counsel and finding homes for my books for more than two decades. I’d also like to thank Deb Futter and Randi Kramer at Celadon—their astute editing proved invaluable to the completion of this novel.

And I’d like to thank my family: Caryl, Clementine, Alexander, Aurora, and Celeste. They are my constant inspirations and best readers. They make it all possible.





Founded in 2017, Celadon Books, a division of

Macmillan Publishers, publishes a highly curated list

of twenty to twenty-five new titles a year. The list of

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