in the bedroom of their Georgia island home. It was after breakfast on a Thursday, and Claudine’s father had left the house moments earlier. Claudine was the one who heard the gunshot, who found her mom lying in a pool of her own blood. It was one of those tragedies that my mom the writer refers to as a defining moment: that moment when life suddenly changes and you’re left picking up the pieces. She says it’s actually how you pick up the pieces that defines you.
Aunt Claudine and her father remained in the house, even after that. She spent a few years in Connecticut at Miss Porter’s School for Girls, but returned to the island for good when she was nineteen. When her father died, she inherited the house. I often wondered what that must have been like, to grow up in the same space where your mother killed herself, to walk by that bedroom thousands of times over the years.
Aunt Claudine was my mother’s favorite relative. When Mom was ten, she went to visit her and found the bullet hole in the closet door. She said she could fit her finger inside it. From the pictures I’ve seen of Claudine, she looked like a neat and tidy woman with a short blond bob and three fat dachshunds that supposedly followed her everywhere. She dressed in button-down shirts and khakis, but according to my mom, she carried herself like royalty.
I wish I could ask Aunt Claudine if, looking back, there were signs leading up to what her mother did, but Claudine died before I was born. And maybe she noticed signs, maybe she didn’t. After all, Aunt Claudine was only five when it happened. Whatever memories of her mom, and the girl Claudine might have been if that gun had never gone off, went with her. She didn’t leave a husband or children behind, or anyone who could tell us why she stayed her whole life in that house on some island off the coast of Georgia.
It makes me wonder, Is this a defining moment for me? And if so, what will I do with all these pieces?
At some point I realize that I should keep moving. That lying here is only making it worse. So I pick up my phone. Saz has sent fifteen texts and left three messages. Instead of going downstairs to eat what my dad calls “breakfast for lunch,” like I have every Saturday morning for the past eighteen years, I turn the phone off and reach for the notebook and pen I keep on my bedside table. All my life, I’ve given stories to everything because I’ve felt that everything deserved to have a history. Even if it was just an old marble lodged into the basement wall. Where did it come from? Who put it there? And why?
The thing no one knows—I am writing a novel. A bad, overly long novel that I am in love with even though it has no plot and about seven hundred characters and I’ll probably never finish it. So far it fills three notebooks, and I am still going. One day I will either throw the notebooks away or type all these words into my laptop.
I open the notebook. Uncap the pen.
I stare at the page.
It stares back.
“Stop staring at me,” I tell it.
I write my name on it, just to show it who’s in charge here. Claude.
I circle it. Circle it again and again until my name looks like it’s trapped inside an angry cloud.
I write my full name. Claudine Llewelyn Henry. Llewelyn, as in my mom’s maiden name. I cross out the Henry and write: Claudine Llewelyn. Maybe this is who I’ll be from now on.
I reach for my phone, turn it back on, and call Saz.
“What did your dad want?”
“What?”
“Your dad,” she says. “What did he want?”
“Nothing. Just to talk to me about graduation. My grandparents are coming to visit us so they can hear my speech.” And I think, Oh, I’m really doing this. I am really not telling her. I look down at the inside of my arm, where I am pinching the skin so hard it’s turning blue.
“You sound weird. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m good. Just tired. I didn’t sleep much.” I think about telling her then, even though my dad said not to, even though my mom agreed I shouldn’t, about the bomb he just dropped onto my head and onto my heart. But that would make