“It’s okay, kitty.” She crouched down to get a better look. Its fur was pristine white and its eyes a crystalline blue, but it had no collar. “What are you doing under there?”
Her cell phone rang in the kitchen. Margot reluctantly dragged herself back inside to see who had the poor taste not to text instead. The enormous decorative clock she’d tentatively hung on the far wall told her it was seven fifteen. She checked the name on the caller ID and let her head sag back on her neck in exasperation, debating whether to pick up. With a grimace of obligation, she pressed a button.
“Mom.” Margot said the word with a mix of surprise and resentment. “I—uh—didn’t expect . . . How are you?”
There was a long pause while the clock ticked.
Margot picked up her mug and took a long, exhausted drink as though the coffee would make the woman on the other end of the phone go away. “Oh, he’s fine. I mean, it’s tough getting used to a new place, but he’s looking forward to school starting.” Her gaze drifted up to the ceiling toward Hunter’s room.
She held the phone an inch away from her ear while her mother continued to talk as if the sound of her voice might infect her with madness.
“He’s asleep right now, but I’ll be sure to tell him.” Her short, terse response made clear that she wanted the conversation to end as quickly as possible. Her shoulders slumped as the strong hint fell on deaf ears. Whatever came next sent her staggering a step back against one of the enormous boxes. She furtively checked the calendar hanging in her office nook and set down her mug. July 29. “Yes, it is, isn’t it? . . . I suppose that’s why you . . .”
Margot’s grip on the phone tightened, as did her face, while the woman on the other end made some sort of plea. “No. I’m fine . . . I know you think it’s important, but I can’t . . . You should go. I’m not stopping you . . . Be my guest! Go! Pray! Pay your respects! Do whatever you want to do . . . Of course, it’s a nice thing to do . . .
“No, I am not trying to deny anything!” Her voice sharpened to a knifepoint. “I know she’s dead! I was there! . . . Stop telling me how to deal with this! Every year we go through this! Every fucking year, Mom! I refuse to wallow in this and be miserable for the rest of my life!”
Margot’s knuckles turned white as she strangled the phone to keep from throwing it. She closed her eyes and forced herself to take a slow, deep breath, counting silently to ten until she could talk without yelling. “I know you don’t. Mom. Stop . . . Yes, I’ve been taking my medication. It’s fine . . . I’ve been to therapy . . . Yes, I know, but I’m fine now . . . and I’m sorry I put you through that. I just need space, okay? Don’t tell me how to feel today of all days . . . Well, I loved her too . . . Yes, but the rest of us have to keep living! Look, I have to go . . . I will.” Sigh. “You too.”
With that she slapped her phone back onto the folding table. Margot glanced down at her coffee a moment, then stormed off into the den. Hands suddenly more thin and frail, she poured whiskey into a tumbler and slammed it back. A slow, boozy breath hissed out of her as the angry balloon swelling inside her chest deflated down, down, down.
Margot sank down onto Myron’s desk chair. Against her better judgment, she opened a drawer and pulled out a framed photograph lying there facedown. It was a family portrait. Myron with a beard and bushy hair holding a baby boy in tiny trousers and a sweater vest. Margot full lipped and rosy cheeked with a little girl on her lap. Yellow dress. Yellow curls. Blue eyes. She looked to be about three years old.
The loneliness, the constant dissatisfaction, the hollow void inside Margot matched this little girl’s dimensions in every way—her shape, her smile, her twinkling laugh frozen in the resin. She leaned the photograph against her heart and slumped back in the chair. Dry tears rolled down her face. She didn’t have it in her to cry. Drained of all emotion, Margot looked seventy, left with nothing but photographs of children who had vanished like ghosts.
“Hey.” Myron stopped in the doorway of the den, freshly showered. He was surprised to see her sitting there. Then his eyes found the familiar frame of the photograph against her chest and fell to the floor. The days of the calendar ticked through his mind, and he nodded his head slowly. July 29. It didn’t cut him the same way, but it hurt. He hadn’t just lost a daughter. “You, uh . . . you okay, honey?”
She didn’t answer. She just looked out the window. Outside, the gate between the driveway and the backyard stood open. She absently made a note of it.
Worried, but also visibly exhausted and resentful for never once being able to not worry about her, he tried again. Myron walked over and put a hand on her shoulder. She stiffened slightly. Don’t touch me. “You want to talk about it?”
She shook her head just enough to say no. The distance between them echoed like a moonlit canyon.
He withdrew his hand, wondering what, if anything else, he should say. There was nothing to say, of course. Saying things never seemed to do a damn bit of good in these situations, he mused to himself. He debated throwing his arms around her, picking her up, and holding her like the wounded deer she was, but he didn’t debate it long. From the defeated look in his eyes, it was clear it had all been tried before, and too much blame had been set at his feet for him to try again. He needed coffee. He needed a lot of things that he would be keeping to himself.
Unwilling to give up entirely, he lifted her chin with his finger and planted an unwanted kiss on her cheek almost out of spite. “I love you.”
She forced herself to not recoil from the gesture and pressed her lips into a smile. “I love you too.” And she did. From the other side of the canyon, she did. Her eyes softened at him as he turned toward the kitchen.
“Thanks,” she said as a way of apologizing for not knowing what she needed him to say, what she needed him to do, for hating him for everything that wasn’t his fault.
Myron had already turned away and didn’t get the message. It was a flimsy consolation prize anyway, and she knew it. She watched him go.
After another minute held to the chair by the weight of the photograph and her abject resignation, Margot finally put the picture frame back in the drawer facedown and shut it with a hollow tick.
She gazed out the window at the unwieldy trees, overgrown shrubs, and neglected flower beds in the backyard. The stone pavers of Georgina Rawlings’s manicured English garden lay four inches beneath the grass.
18
The Rawlings Family
January 5, 1930
Georgina sat in her sewing room, staring out the window into the back garden. The flowers and shrubs lay buried beneath a blanket of snow. The fountain sat frozen in the center of a dead white expanse.
She hadn’t slept well in weeks. Her husband had been gone over two months, but the weight of his loss grew heavier with each day. She sat there listening for his footsteps, startling at every sound that rattled through the yawning expanses of the house. The memory of him standing outside her son’s door the night he’d died lingered. The animal look in his eyes in the dim light of the hall still haunted her.
What’s wrong, she’d whispered.
Nothing, darling. Go back to sleep.
“They’re coming for us, aren’t they?” she said softly into her needlepoint, as though he were still standing there. “What have you done, Walter?”