The music was still playing, now halfway through a song by the Cure. How many tracks had her mother crammed on to this tape? Kris recalled many cassettes being inserted into and ejected from the boombox during their long summer days, but her mother always returned to this mixtape.
When Kris was little, these were simply the songs her mother enjoyed. Bands like the Cure and the Smiths and Fleetwood Mac may as well have been items from the adult menu at a restaurant, and so Kris had disregarded them as such. They were not for her. But listening to them now, as a forty-one-year-old woman, Kris was reminded of how goddamn cool her mom had been. She was young when she was first diagnosed with cancer, just shy of her thirty-sixth birthday, and Kris was now a full year older than her when she died. She had officially outlived her own mother. As Robert Smith moaned his way through “Inbetween Days,” Kris was struck by how frightened her mother must have been. She was just a kid, only three decades into a life that should have lasted at least another half century more. She loved her family and the outdoors and bittersweet songs that bravely faced life’s coldest, darkest hours.
“Sa-die,” Kris sang loudly.
Crossing quickly to the fireplace, she punched a fingertip down onto the Stop button. There was a sharp click, and the music ceased.
The house was still.
From the corner of her eye, Kris caught a glimpse of her reflection in the towering windows. Her transparent form—this other, hollow self—matched her movement for movement as she slipped past the arm of the couch and stepped into the entryway to the hall. She yelled loud enough for her voice to carry upstairs, “Sadie! Time to get ready for bed!”
“I am.”
The voice was right beside her.
Startled, Kris whipped around.
A face was peeking out of the hall bathroom, half hidden by the doorframe. A toothbrush, still wet and sudsy with toothpaste, was clutched in Sadie’s hand. A thin line of slick white foam ran from the corner of her mouth to the edge of her chin.
Kris reached out and wiped it away with her thumb.
“Let’s get you in bed.”
She waited for Sadie to finish rinsing at the sink, and then she guided her across the hall and into the pink bedroom. Kris pulled back the covers and waited for the little girl to climb up onto the bed, but she never arrived. Kris could feel Sadie standing behind her, motionless.
She turned back.
Sadie was cradling Bounce in one arm, her other hand gently stroking his patchy fur. She stared down into the frog’s crooked eyes. Her own eyes were beginning to swim with the first threat of tears.
“Honey?”
Sadie’s bottom lip trembled.
She’s fighting it, Kris realized. Oh, my sweet baby, she’s fighting it. But she’s losing. She’s losing.
Carefully, as if she were afraid the girl would startle, Kris dropped down onto her knees and reached out to touch Sadie lightly on the arm. The second her fingers made contact, the girl’s entire body began to shake as her grief—held so long and so tightly within her—uncoiled like a frayed knot. Tears slipped free, flooding down her cheeks.
Words attempted to push through lips thick with mucus.
“I miss Daddy,” Sadie whimpered.
“I know,” Kris said.
“I miss Daddy.”
“I know, baby. I know. I know.”
A horrible, shuddering bellow erupted from Sadie’s open mouth.
Stop, Kris thought desperately.
Sadie fell against Kris, her face pressed hard into mother’s shoulder, her hands gripping for any hold. She was adrift in grief, untethered. Her teeth pressed against Kris’s neck as an animallike moan escaped her lips.
Please stop. Please stop please stop please stop!
The sound of Sadie’s wailing seemed to fill the entire house. It echoed off the walls of the bedroom, ricocheting violently until it found the open doorway and careened wildly down the hall, a spirit summoned without consent, desperate to escape.
Kris could feel Sadie’s cries, actually feel them pressing like invisible fingers that wormed deep into her ear canals.
A ridiculous thought popped into Kris’s mind: She was happy yesterday. This was working. This was going to work.
But had she ever truly believed that it would be that easy? That she could drive Sadie five hundred miles away from her pain and it wouldn’t follow her?
Glistening ropes of saliva stretched across Sadie’s gaping maw, her face bright red and locked in a silent scream.
All Kris could say was, “I know.” Over and over. “I know. I know. I know.”
The space within the house felt as though it were pushing against them, constricting them, squeezing the air from their lungs. It was going to crush them, this collapsing force. And then, with a snap like a buckling twig, it was gone.
Sound found its way to Sadie’s lips, and she shrieked with a force that left Kris’s ears ringing. It was a terrible sound that no child should ever make.
It was pain and suffering and the death of magic.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
SOMETHING HAD CHANGED. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but when Kris woke on the third day, once again in Sadie’s bed—this time with Sadie breathing softly beside her—the house just felt … lighter. The weight that she had felt the previous night, the intense pressure that had attempted to push every square inch of breath from her lungs while Sadie sobbed in her arms, was gone.
No, not just gone. Replaced. Replaced by a lightness that made Kris feel as though the weight of her body had no effect on the tired springs of Sadie’s mattress.
Sadie’s mattress. After only two nights, it’s her mattress now. Of course it is. This room is hers and everything in it.
She breathed in this new lighter air. It tasted purer across her tongue. It felt cleaner in her lungs. She had never smoked, except for the few random cigarettes she’d snuck as a teenager beneath the bridge where Overlook Boulevard crossed Sycamore Creek, but she assumed this was the sensation she would feel after two weeks of kicking the habit, the tar flaking away from her blackened lungs to reveal healthy, hopeful pink tissue beneath.
A line of sunlight streamed through the narrow slit between the yellowed drapes, and as Kris stared at the beam cutting across the dim room, she realized it was completely void of dust motes. It was a strip of flawless gold.
This is it, Kris thought. This is how we’ll feel every morning for the rest of the summer. Like we’re on vacation.
Because last night, Sadie had finally allowed herself to expunge the pain she had held deep within her tiny body. She had flushed it out of her soul with a shower of tears. And her release was exactly what Kris had needed too, to take that much needed next step forward. They could both move on now. Not completely. Not all the way to the finish line. She wasn’t naive enough to think that either of them was done dealing with the loss of Jonah, but she was certain that this … lightness—there was no other way to describe it—that this lightness was a sign of healing.
And they would heal together.
This summer.
Kris took another long, joyous breath, savoring its freshness.
This house is clean, she thought, and she had to clamp a hand over her mouth to keep her laughter from waking her sleeping daughter.
When Sadie woke almost thirty minutes later, she let out a long, contented sigh, as if she awoke to the same easiness that had greeted Kris. There was a casualness to her, to the way she stretched her arms wide and yawned a big gaping-mouthed yawn, to the way she blinked in the sunlight as her vision cleared.