“He’s gone.” She says this like it means nothing.
“Yeah…” I’m not about to ask her to elaborate, because the last thing I need to do is fuck up whatever understanding she has of death. I’d probably just end up traumatizing her with my luck. I point beside Jeremy. “Who’s that?”
“Bea.” She presses her pudgy finger against the screen.
The gallery disappears from the screen. I take the phone from her and pop it back open again, and Bea is there again, next to Jeremy. Living and dead. Both of them ghosts.
“Who’s Bea?”
“My friend.”
“Just your friend?”
“My friend,” Emmy repeats.
I stare at Bea’s picture.
I hate her for this.
I hate that she has a daughter who doesn’t understand who her mother is—if she understands what a mother is at all—and I hate that I’ve spent the last six years of my life believing my sister was held hostage by people who took advantage of her pain. I hate that Bea made herself the author of all our narratives, twisting us into the characters that best served her purposes. I feel like a lie my sister told.
I don’t want Emmy to be another.
I shove my phone back in my pocket.
“Can I tell you a secret, Emmy?”
Emmy scribbles across one of the circles. “Okay.”
“Something just between you and me.”
She stops coloring. “Okay.”
“And you won’t tell anyone? It’s a big secret.”
I glance toward the front of the room. I can make out Foster through a slit in the curtain covering the window. He doesn’t seem like he’s coming back in anytime soon. When I glance back at Emmy, I have her full attention. I guess four-year-olds know what secrets are.
“Bea is your mom.” Emmy stares at me, and I don’t know if she understands and I don’t know what to reach for to make her understand. “Bea made you, Emmy. She’s your mom. Do you know what a mom is?”
“Like Mommy Shark?” she asks.
“Uh…”
I don’t know what the fuck that is.
“Emmy.”
Her face brightens at the voice and my stomach crashes to my feet. I stand slowly and turn and Lev is in the hall, his arms crossed, watching us. I don’t know how long he’s been watching us. However much sleep he managed to get, it doesn’t seem like it was enough. I’ve never seen him so unkempt: his clothes wrinkled, his face pinched with exhaustion.
“Emmy, go on into the kitchen for a minute.”
She does as she’s told, pausing at his side to give him a hug. He rests his hand lightly on her head and then she’s gone. He stares at me for a long moment, and then asks in a voice I’ve never heard from him before: “What are you doing, Lo?”
“I thought she should know.”
“You’re just going to confuse her.”
“She should know about Bea.”
“She does.”
“Yeah, Bea is her ‘friend.’”
“I thought we talked about this,” he says. “Emmy has everything she needs. She’s never wanted for anything—”
“She doesn’t know what’s there to want,” I interrupt. “And why does Bea get to decide that? Why do you? Why don’t you look for Bea, why don’t—”
“You think I just accepted this?” Lev steps into the room. “You think I wouldn’t do everything in my power to make her see reason, to see the light, to come back and to embrace her daughter? Your sister was broken, Lo. Even God wasn’t good enough for her—”
“Emmy still needs to know—”
“She needs to know what? Rejection? Absence? Wanting? Tell me how well those feelings have served you.”
I flush. “That’s not fair—”
“They’ve twisted you. You know they’ve twisted you.”
“Maybe if someone had told me the fucking truth—”
“She’s too young to understand that right now,” Lev says sharply, and I suddenly realize he’s seething and the only reason I didn’t recognize it before was because he was working so hard to stay in control. “Why are you determined to inflict pain on a child?”
“I’m not—”
“Emmy is surrounded by love,” Lev says over me. “I told you this. She has a father who loves her. She has countless members in The Project who all love her, who want her to be happy, who fill the gaps. I thought you understood and that it might inspire you to be brave enough to take this opportunity to fill those gaps in your own life … but now I see you just want to pull Emmy into your pain so you don’t have to be so alone with it.”
“Fuck you—”
“I won’t let you poison my family.”
“She’s my family too!”
A small movement out of the corner of my eye: Emmy, clearly upset, cowering in the hall, the conversation itself so far beyond her years, but the anger driving it easy enough to parse at any age. She starts to cry and Lev goes to her, lifting her from the ground. Emmy buries her head into his shoulder and he rubs her back, soothing her from the nightmare that is me.
“I only ever asked you to write a profile,” he tells me. “You need to leave.”
The drive from the station back to Morel takes me past the cemetery. I watch it come up on my phone. I tell my cabdriver to stop, to let me out.
I stand outside the gate.
Bea buried our parents while I was unconscious. The consequence was an awful, unfinished feeling inside me; this faint belief that Mom and Dad could step through the door at any moment and tell me it was all a dream. Patty always tried to get me to visit, as though seeing the grave would help resolve the open-ended note Bea left me on, but I refused. Worse than the lingering expectation that my parents were still alive was the reality they were not.
I can’t bring myself to step inside.
My phone rings, the sound awful, startling.
I dig into my pocket to answer it.
I want it to be Lev.
I want him to tell me he was wrong.
“Hello?”
The silence that greets me is crushing in its familiarity and the day has left me feeling so defeated, I can’t even muster the will to disconnect. I just listen to the breathing on the other end of the line and then …
My grip tightens as a strange, sick thought takes hold of me.
“… Bea?”
The breathing on the line pauses, electrifying me: confirmation. I close my eyes and tears immediately form, slipping down my face. I can sense her impending hang-up and I say, quickly, desperately, “Wait.”
Silence.
“If it’s you, stay on. Stay on the line. Please.”
She doesn’t hang up.
“Oh my God,” I whisper.
I bring my free hand to my eyes, covering them.
“I miss you so much.” As soon as the words leave my mouth, I’m crying in earnest, can’t even hear her over the sounds of myself. I struggle to regain composure, quieting enough to be sure she’s still on the line. For one terrifying second, there’s nothing. “Bea?”
And then the relief of her breathing.