Her eyes stopped being Blinky but they stayed Sad.
“I’ll get it. Be right back.”
h h
h h
He didn’t notice that his mom didn’t come back right
away at first because he was thinking about the constel-
lations in his mural. Some things in the mural were from
the Real Sky and some things were from his Imagination
Sky. The constellations were from his Imagination Sky.
The first constellation he made for his mural was the
Hank Aaron constellation. He thought of it the day his
counselor Amanda asked if he was named after Hank Aaron.
She asked him if knew that Hank was a nickname for
Henry and he shook his head. No one ever told him that.
That made him wonder. Was he named for Hank
Aaron? His mom would know but he wasn’t sure if it
was an okay thing to ask her. It might make her Sad.
Sometimes he guessed right about what made her Sad
but not always. He really didn’t like when she was Sad.
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Thinking about her being Sad made him realize, she
hadn’t come back yet with her Show and Tell. He didn’t
have a clock in his room so he didn’t know what time it
was, but it felt like longer than, Be Right Back.
Maybe she was busy reading the letter from his dad.
Except the letter from his dad was short and his mom
always said she was the fastest reader in town.
He called out, “Mom?” but she didn’t answer. He
tried to think of all the reasons why she wouldn’t answer
and then he tried to only think about the reasons that
weren’t scary. One reason that wasn’t scary was that she
went on her computer and forgot to listen with one ear
while she was working. Another answer was he was too
quiet when he called. He tried again, louder. “Mom?”
Still no answer.
One time his mom told him the way to get his brain
to not think about scary things was to give it something
else to think about. He tried it now, but it didn’t work.
All he could think about were scary things. The most
scary thing. Was she dead?
He opened the door. She wasn’t dead in the hall. She
wasn’t dead on the toilet. He held his breath while he
pulled back the shower curtain. She wasn’t dead in the tub.
Grandma Sylvie’s door was open wide so he could
see his mom wasn’t dead in there unless she was dead in
the closet. Sometimes at night he hid in his closet but his mom didn’t know, which was good because that was a
thing that would definitely make her face Disappointed.
After his dad died a lot of people told him he was
brave. He didn’t know why they said that. If it was true
that he was brave, he would be able look in Grandma
Sylvie’s closet now. The closet door was only a little bit open so he closed his eyes and pushed it open more. He
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opened his eyes so they were tiny slits. No one was inside, dead or not dead. So, true. He was Brave.
When he walked out of Grandma Sylvie’s room he
heard people talking downstairs, one voice loud—his
mom’s—one voice quiet, probably Grandma Sylvie since
no one else lived with them.
He stopped at the top of the stairs and closed his eyes
to try and decide what his mom would want him to do:
Go Down Now and Remind Her She Forgot about Her
Show and Tell, or Stay Where He Was and Wait Until
She Remembered. The problem with Wait Until She
Remembered was what if she never remembered? The
problem with Go Down Now and Remind Her She
Forgot was what if she felt so bad about forgetting that
she had to hold her breath to keep her tears in, like the
day she told him What Happened to his dad?
He thought about going back to his room and getting
in his bed and going to sleep and Dreaming on It. But
his eyes were Poppy-Open Wide Awake and his heart
was Thumping Loud in His Ears. So he decided to Wait
and Sea.
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CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Lane gently touched her mother’s hair; as always, it was
pinned up in a bun of carefully coiled concentric circles.
The length of her hair was just one more mystery she and
Shelley used to guess about. No matter what time their
mother got up or where she was going, her fine dark-
blonde hair was up, anchored in a nest of bobby pins. But
now, it was coming undone. Her mother was undone.
What had brought Lane downstairs was a sound—a
long, quivering exhale that she heard when she came
out of her bedroom, right after discovering that Henry’s
drawings weren’t where she’d left them. Neither were
they in any of the places she checked where she might
have mindlessly put them. She was heading toward her
workspace to see if she’d left them on her desk when she
heard it. A sound of distress from the living room. The
sound of grief from her mother.
Her mother was sitting at the very edge of the couch.
At the sound of Lane coming down the stairs she quickly
sank back. Her arms were left splayed out at an awkward
angle, giving her the look of an injured bird.
It took Lane a long moment to realize her mother was
crying. Her mother, like Lane, never cried. None of them
cried, or at least none of them had in a very long while.
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She seemed to be distressed about her crying, and
quickly wiped her eyes with her sleeve. She seemed agi-
tated. Everything was agitating her. Now it was the damp
spot on her shirt that bothered her. Lane watched as she
pulled a tissue from her sleeve and started rubbing the spot, then pressing the tissue against it. She looked desperate
to make the spot disappear.
“It’s just tears,” Lane told her. “They’ll dry.” But her
mother kept rubbing. “What’s wrong?”
Her mother shook her head and then said something
so quietly Lane wasn’t sure whether it was, I know, or, I’ll go. She gave up rubbing her shirt and laid the damp tissue on the coffee table. “Oh no,” she said. “Now look what
I’ve done.” She moved the tissue off— there they were—
Henry’s drawings. Her mother saw her notice them and
reclaimed her tissue and started blotting her sleeve again, and then her eyes, and then her sleeve.
“It’s okay,” Lane told her mother. “The drawings are
fine. Nothing happened to them.”
Her mother gave sharp shake of her head. She wasn’t
upset that she ruined the drawings.
Lane looked at them again. The drawing on the top
was the one of the woman getting hit. “Don’t worry about
that picture,” Lane said. “That’s not me.”
Another quick shake of the head. More blotting of
her sleeve with the tissue.
Lane went to the kitchen and got her a paper towel.
“Here,” she said when she came back. “Let me.” She
pressed the towel onto the sleeve. She could not imagine
why her mother was distraught about her sleeve. B
ut like
her father said, she wasn’t an expert on everything. Maybe tears did stain. And it was her mother’s favorite shirt.
She’d had arrived with a suitcase full of shirts but this
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was the one she kept wearing and washing and wearing
again. What she loved about it, Lane had no idea. Maybe
the patriotic colors. Maybe the abstract pattern, which,
she saw now, as she pressed the paper towel, were small
simple geometric shapes.
And then she saw it; they weren’t simple shapes at all.
The white triangles were sails. The red semicircles were
boats. The blue background was the sea. She hadn’t no-
ticed it, but Henry had because Henry noticed everything,
including that the pattern on his grandmother’s favorite
shirt was made up of sailboats. The woman he drew in
the apartment with his father was her mother. She held
her mother’s arm and asked, “Did Aaron hit you?”
“Why would you say such a thing?”
Lane looked at the drawing again, this time at the
man. The man did not have a pencil slash of a dimple on
his cheek. “That’s not Aaron.” She scanned the picture
again and noticed, for the first time, the room had a roof.
The room wasn’t in an apartment; it was in a house. A
house with a roof that looked exactly like the roof in her parents’ house in Florida. “That’s Dad.”
Her mother pulled in her lips until they disappeared
and her face turned into an inscrutable mask and the
mask turned toward the stairs and her gaze shifted and
she smiled and said, “Hello dear.”
Henry was standing at the bottom of the stairs.
“Hey buddy,” Lane said and then remembered, with
a start. “You were waiting for me.” He nodded. “I’m so
sorry. I was talking to Grandma and I guess time got
away from me.”
He was crying, she now saw. “Oh buddy.” She opened
her arms and he ran into them. “There there,” she said,
and stroked his soft curls. “There there,” she said again.
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It was only when Henry stopped crying that she real-
ized her mother had disappeared up the stairs, as silent
as a ghost.
She gently wiped the tears off Henry’s face with her
hand and then twirled her finger around one of his curls.
“I’m sorry. I was looking for your drawings. That was
what my Show and Tell was going to be. I wanted to talk
to you about them. But they weren’t where I left them
and when I came downstairs I saw they were here, with
Grandma.”
Henry straightened up and saw the drawings on the
table. “How did they get here?”
“Nathan gave them to me,” she said. “Because he
thought it was important that I see them. And he was
right. That’s what I wanted talk to you about.” She pulled Henry close and held him while she asked, “Can you tell
me about the picture on the table?”
He pulled away. Now it was Henry’s lips that disap-
peared. He shook his head and didn’t stop for what felt
like a minute. When he did stop, he closed his eyes. He
sat, completely still. He was shutting down.
“Want to dream on it, before we talk about it?”
His head moved, a tiny nod. “Okay. Dream on it
tonight. We’ll talk about it tomorrow?”
He opened his eyes and nodded again.
“Okay, good.”
As Henry got ready for bed, he slowly seemed to
return to himself. When Lane asked him if he wanted
to be tucked in, “snug as a bug in a rug,” he smiled and
said, “Yes.” When she offered three Tell Me That Story
choices, he asked for the one about the day his parents met.
“Dad’s roommate in college was my study partner—”
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“I know this part. He told Dad he should marry you
because you were smart and beautiful and kind and a
good listener. And he shouldn’t let you be the one who
got away.”
“Dad told you that?”
He nodded. “And Dad told him, maybe he should
meet you before he proposed.”
Lane laughed. “I never heard that before.” Her eyes
filled for the second time that day. “What else did Dad
tell you about that?”
“He said you were the last girl he met in college and
that he saved the Best for Last. And that the biggest thing he learned in college was, The Best Things in Life Are
Worth Waiting For. Why are you crying?”
“I guess because I miss your dad.”
Henry touched her tears with his finger and then tasted
them. “Salty.” Then he tasted his own. “Salty.” They lay,
side by side, silent for several minutes. Then Henry asked,
“Want me to tell you what happens next in the story of
how you met Dad?” She nodded and he did.
Hearing Henry’s version felt to Lane like listening to a
familiar fairy tale where all the unpleasant parts had been carefully erased, leaving only the good and the sweet.
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CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Emergencies, Lane thought as she called her sister the
required three times in a row, were really in the eye of
the beholder. To her eye, this was one. Henry had drawn
a picture of her father striking her mother, which meant
Henry had seen her father striking her mother, which
phone now, all of them now, at once, if possible—before
anyone visited.
It was her niece, Melinda, who answered. “Is it Nan?”
she asked. “Or is it Gramps? It can’t be Gramps because
he’s with Mum unless—collywobbles, is it Mum? Say it
fast. Who died?”
“No one died,” Lane said.
“Oh well that’s a relief, isn’t it? I thought Mum told
me that was the rule. I thought she said, ‘If Auntie Lane
rings the home phone times three in a row, it means
someone died and you have to pick up.’ Less than three
times, means you just want to have an ordinary chat and
it’s fine if I let the call go through to the machine. Did I not get that right?”
“You got it right. No one died. I just need to talk
to your mom. I tried her cell three times but the calls
keep dropping so I can’t leave a message. Maybe her
phone died.”
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“Could be. I wouldn’t know. She’s visiting Florida.
With Gramps. What a relief. I probably wasn’t meant to
say that. Don’t tell Mum I said that. Doesn’t take much
for her to go all argy on me these days.”
“Florida? When did they go to Florida?”
“Two days ago? Three? Let’s see. How many days in
a row have I had Pot Noodles for dinner? Three. They’ve
been gone three days.”
After Lane got off the phone, she went to Henry’s
room and stood for a moment, watching him sleep. Asleep
he looked so peaceful. She checked the time—so much
for peace—and stroked his foreh
ead. “Rise and Shine.”
His eyelids fluttered open and then closed. “Five more
minutes, okay? I’m going down to get breakfast started.”
He nodded.
She found her mother in the kitchen, watching the
toaster. There’d been a chill between them, over the past
few days, her mother and Henry equally intent on avoiding
all discussion of his drawings. She’d broached the subject with Henry three times and each time he reacted the same
way, by lowering his gaze and pulling in his cheeks. Each
time, Lane backed off. With her mother, she’d broached
the subject twice. Both times her mother mumbled, “It’s
not what you think,” and then changed the subject to
the weather. It seemed now they did nothing but discuss
the weather. The heat index. The low pressure. The risk
of high wind and possibly hail.
Lane had only so much to say about the weather, even
hail. She was tempted to turn silent, but while it was okay to be silent as she passed her mother in the hall, it was
not okay to be silent in front of Henry. So in the night,
during one of her usual hours of sleeplessness, she resolved that today would be different. Whatever problems she
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and her mother had needed to be set aside. Today was
Henry’s end-of-camp celebration. Eclipse day. Lane’s
second dreaded eclipse of the sun; her mother’s third.
“Guess what,” she said, to break the kitchen chill. “I
just spoke to Melinda.” Her mother turned around. She
looked even more pale than usual. “She told me Dad and
Shelley are in Florida. Why do you think they would go
there?”
“No idea.” Sylvie’s toast popped. She picked the slices
out of the slats and carried her plate to the table. Another day, another jailhouse breakfast of dry toast and black
tea. She sat with her back to Lane, so Lane moved and
sat down in the chair facing her.
“Look,” Lane said gently. “I know today’s going to
be hard for both of us.”
“Not for me,” her mother said. She broke off little
bits of toast and began moving them around on her plate.
“I’ll be fine.” She met Lane’s eyes. “We know how to do
that, be fine.”
Henry padded in and came over to see what his grand-
mother was eating. He looked confused and pointed to
the little pieces of bread. Then he made a frowny face.
Lane hadn’t noticed it, but he was right; the pieces of toast her mother had been playing with were assembled into a