on the floor beside her. She meant to offer comfort, but her mother offered it to her instead, wrapping her up in her arms and leaning her head to Lia’s.
“I just needed to be with her,” Mamma whispered after a minute. “I miss her so much.”
“Me too,” was all Lia could say.
Snuggles scooted around and pushed his head between them, so he could love them both at the same time. They sat like that, on the floor in Elisa’s enshrined room, comforting each other as they felt their freshened grief.
“Do you blame Papa?” Lia asked when they’d been quiet for a bit. The question had been on her mind for weeks, but she hadn’t spoken it aloud. It was too explosive a question, and maybe the answer as well. But just now, with her writing so fresh in mind, and this moment of private grief between her and her mother, Lia needed to know.
“No, honey. No. Your papa … he is the man I fell in love with, and I’ve loved him wildly ever since. He never tried to pretend he was a different man. I went into a life with him with my eyes wide open. But I couldn’t have imagined how wonderful life would be for us. Your papa has always worked to give us a perfect life, and what we’ve made together is close. It’s hard for me sometimes to feel it, I get trapped in my own head sometimes, but we have do a wonderful life. Full of family and friends, and our amazing children …” She drifted off for a second, but came right back. “What happened isn’t your father’s fault. If anything, it’s our fault together, because we decided to have children, and you didn’t have a choice to live this life.” She leaned back and peered at Lia. “If you blame us, I would understand. What you said at the funeral was beautiful, but if your feelings have changed, it’s okay.”
“They haven’t. To blame him, or you, would kind of be saying I wish I had different parents and a different life, and I can’t imagine that. I love you and Papa more than anything. You’re right—it’s a pretty great life.” She sighed and set her head on Mamma’s soft shoulder. “I just miss her.”
“Yeah.” Mamma wiped her face then and said, “I think we should clean up in here. Just a tidy. Gather up the laundry, take that cup down to the kitchen, maybe ask Emilia to do a dust and vacuum. I don’t think I can do it alone. Will you help me?”
“Of course I will.” Lia stood and offered her hand to help her mother stand up.
~oOo~
That evening, Alex held the door at Santino’s, and Lia walked into the snowy night. As he turned up the collar on his pea coat against the bite of the brisk wind, and Lia pulled her mittens on, he asked, “Do you want to go home?”
Ever her protector, Alex had taken it upon himself in these first weeks of the year—a new year, and the beginning of the first year without Elisa—to make sure Lia had what she needed as she and her family settled into the way things now were. That meant he took her out frequently, not so much for dates, in the regular sense of the word, but for escapes. From the heavy pall over her home and family.
At first, she’d resisted, despite her sometimes desperate wish for relief. It had felt wrong to leave the house, just as it felt wrong to be happy when Alex was with her. They were all sad, and they were all supposed to be. Relief seemed like disrespect, to her sister’s memory and to her family’s sorrow. It was the same feeling that had made her mother refuse to leave the house for weeks, except in the service of Elisa’s memory.
Then one day Lia had thought she’d literally suffocate if she didn’t get a break, and Alex had come to rescue her. Once she was away from the house and could breathe, she’d understood she wasn’t running away, or leaving her grief behind for even a second. The loss came with her, but other pressures lifted so she could bear it.
On this night, almost two months after Elisa’s death, a few hours after she and her mother had tidied up her room, leaving it the way it had been when Elisa had merely lived in California, Lia wasn’t ready to go home yet.