top, his gray feathers giving him away.
I try to remember the estimate that came with the thermal image of them.
“Well over fifty thousand now,” I tell her.
We sit in silence for a few minutes, sipping our coffee and watching the birds.
“He’s not a monster, Leighton,” she says. “He’s just a person. A flawed person, who has a lot of demons.”
“I know,” I say. But that’s not an excuse, I think.
“But that’s not an excuse,” she says, and I turn to her. Her eyes are still on the tree. “I know it’s been really strained here lately. I just want to believe that those good things can prevail. I still see that side of him. I see him fighting for it. Fighting for us. He spent the weekend sleeping on a friend’s couch, Leighton. He’s humiliated.”
“I don’t care if he’s humiliated.”
In fact, I like it. Most of the time it seems like we are the ones who feel all of his shame. “Where did he stay?”
I guess the answer before she says it, hope that I’m wrong.
“With Bill,” Mom says.
Officer DiMarco. Of course. It’s the only option awful enough to be true. Instead of protecting us, the police harbor him.
“He feels out of control,” I say. And it’s the truth, or at least what I can understand about it. All those promising futures closed off, and now this business is failing, and even though I think he must’ve hated his own father and some part of him resents the business, I know how stressful it is to fail. His anger is not some great mystery.
Maybe I never took his football dream, but I left the cap off the toothpaste so that it dripped all over the counter. I didn’t wreck his knee in that championship game, but I folded the towels wrong.
I didn’t steal his wife on purpose, but she loves us most, and he knows it.
Our family is a solar system of planets rocked off their orbits a little farther with each incident like the other night. We are moving around each other in increasing chaos, haphazard and violent, all of us bracing for impact. And I don’t know how to break away from it, because there’s gravity here, in between us. There are good things that bind us to each other.
I take Mom’s hand.
I see a fractured system, delicate and damaged, that could collapse right under our feet.
She sees home.
Chapter Fifty-Two
IN THE DARKNESS INSIDE THE ARMOIRE, we come home to each other. Things are quiet tonight, but it is not calm. It is disquiet. The house feels ill at ease with itself, the walls more shadowed than usual. The winter wind is blowing hard outside, and we can hear the bones of the house creaking from the force.
My job tonight is to reassure—to distract. Our lantern burns, and we play all our games. Anywhere But Here and Shadows. Juniper asks for a story, and I tell her about a girl made of flowers. She had big bluebells for eyes, and instead of hair, she grew sunflowers, heavy and swollen with seeds, and their faces would follow the sun as the girl walked. Her fingers were the fuzzy leaves of a violet.
The girl made of flowers was beloved. She was somehow both soft and strong, and girls like that always find admirers. Her honeysuckle scent drew them in like worker bees, and she never minded. She’d share her blooms, plucking a rose from her wrist and a dahlia from her slender neck.
One day, the flower girl fell in love with a man who was like an oak tree. Solid and strong. He offered her shade, protection from the harsher elements. Most important, he let her be still. She sunk her roots deep into the earth by his side. She flourished, blooming even larger and more beautiful petals. But then the oak tree started to lose its leaves, and the girl gave him her flowers in their place. She gave and she gave, and he took them all, not seeing the way she wilted without them. She loved the oak tree too much to leave him, but she could grow her flowers just fast enough for him to pluck them from her. She could no longer share her beauty with the world, so consumed was she with keeping him happy.
After the girls are asleep, I swing open the armoire door and lift them to my bed. Campbell is almost too big for this, but I manage it, barely. I push Campbell’s