shoes, the sky whispering to him about love and loneliness and me. But I liked to believe he felt the same. That he was the person who always understood.
I tried to get back to sleep. I lay in bed and closed my eyes, concentrating on the sound of the rain on the roof—hoping it might keep my mind empty, lull me into a gentle oblivion.
But Cooley Ridge was talking to me with each drop, nudging me awake.
Keep your eyes open. Look.
Time can weave around and show you things if you let it. Maybe this was how. Maybe Cooley Ridge was trying to show me. Time was trying to explain things.
Tick-tock.
The Day Before
DAY 7
The house looked brighter, more alive, with the fresh coat of paint that Laura had picked out—pale almond, she’d called it. But the furniture had been pulled away from the walls and sat at unnatural angles, haphazardly covered with sheets of plastic, giving the whole downstairs a fun-house feel. I must’ve grown immune to the smell of paint sometime during the night. It wasn’t until I stepped out to toss the plastic in the trash and went back inside that it hit me—the wall of fumes, sticky and suffocating—that no open windows could alleviate. We needed to run the air, to circulate everything through the filters. We needed the damn air-conditioning.
I positioned Daniel’s box fans throughout the downstairs, turned them on, and left the windows open.
And then I left. An accidental catastrophic electrical fire would not be the worst thing that could happen to this house.
* * *
THERE’S A SUNDAY BRUNCH at Grand Pines that makes it family day. Go to church, then visit the family you’ve sent away. A day of penance. Eat your weight in sins. Guilt by omelet.
It was a buffet, and I was following Dad down the line, my tray sliding along the metal grooves behind his, sounding like nails on a chalkboard.
“Try the bacon,” he said, and I obligingly placed a strip on my plate. “Skip the eggs,” he said from the side of his mouth. “Biscuits. Take two.” I took one—I had no appetite and didn’t want to waste them if they weren’t really that good.
In the bag slung over my shoulder, I carried a paper signed by a doctor that I’d picked up at the front desk. An affidavit attesting to my father’s mental incompetency and his need for a guardian. We needed one more before filing with the court, and the on-site doctor had already gotten me a referral for someone who would visit later this week.
I felt like I was lying to Dad, placing bacon on my plate, taking his advice, acting like I was here for the food, for his company. I wasn’t not here for those things, but they weren’t the primary reason. I wondered if Daniel and Laura made it a habit to meet him here for brunch. Probably. Dad had smiled when I came in, like it was the most natural thing in the world for me to be here, and part of me wondered if the affidavit was wrong. If maybe he was getting better. If this was all reversible—a horrible, temporary thing that would gradually unwind itself. Gosh, Dad, remember that time you couldn’t remember us? Really gave me a scare.
We sat at the table where I’d met him at last week—apparently, his regular spot. “You should see Laura,” I said to him. “I went to her shower yesterday. She looks like she’s about to pop.”
He laughed. “What are they having?”
He knew this. He should’ve known. “A girl.” A slight nod from him. “Shana,” I said, and his eyes locked on mine, then slowly drifted to the side. It was the wrong thing to say; I’d lose him to her now. Watch them both disappear.
“You know, when your mother brought me home the first time, I fell in love.”
Or this time he would take me there with him.
“With Cooley Ridge?” I asked.
“Well, you don’t have to make that face, Nic.” He grinned. “But no. Not Cooley Ridge. I fell in love with her. Because I could see all of her there. She was like a puzzle piece out of context, but when I put her there, where she was from, it was like I understood. She was so beautiful.”
My clearest memories of my mother were the ones where she was fading. Sick. In a wheelchair with a yellow and blue quilt across her legs because she was always cold, Daniel holding a cup