“Mrs. Singer?” Em fumbled with the deadbolt.
“Are you—Emily Winters?” Mrs. Singer was wiry, small, and wrinkled: once beautiful, now raw. Em had only seen her a few times. She spoke with a tinge of the Maine accent that one rarely heard in the southern part of the state—drawing out certain sounds and narrowing her mouth around others.
“That’s me.” She motioned to her robe. “I, um, just got out of the shower,” she added, as though she had to explain her ensemble to Chase’s mom.
“I had to look you up,” Mrs. Singer said, sounding relieved.
“It’s, um, it’s nice to see you, Mrs. Singer,” Em said. What did Mrs. Singer want? What was Em supposed to say to her? “I hope . . . I hope you’re doing okay. Would you like to come in?” She stepped away from the doorway, opening the view into the house, cringing at the sight of the steak knife lying in the middle of the floor in front of the stairs.
“No, thank you.” Chase’s mom jutted her chin toward a cardboard box at her feet. There was a spiral notebook sticking out of it. Em recognized it instantly. “I just came back to town for a few days, to clean out our house—the trailer.”
Em nodded, remembering the night she’d met Chase there, after his fight at Galvin’s Pond with Zach. She remembered the cramped kitchen, the stained countertop, the peeling linoleum. The way Chase’s muscled body had seemed too big for the space.
“I’m leaving for good,” Chase’s mom continued, tucking her graying hair behind her ears. “Heading for Pennsylvania. My sister lives there. Anyway, I was going through Chase’s room—” Her voice caught here, and Em panicked. What should she do if Eileen Singer started sobbing on her stoop? But the meltdown didn’t come. Mrs. Singer cleared her throat and went on, “These are some of . . . Chase’s things. I kept the important stuff. But the notebook had your name in it. So I thought you might want it back. Or know what to do with the rest of it.”
Em bent over to pick up the box, thinking about how awful it was that both Sasha’s parents and Chase’s mom had been left with nothing but some stuff to represent their children. “Are you sure you don’t want to come in for a minute, Mrs. Singer?”
“I’m sure,” Chase’s mom said sharply. But she lingered still. They stood there for a moment. Then, “So, you two were friends? I didn’t know many of the . . . other kids he spent time with.”
There was another silence as Em weighed how to answer this question honestly. “We were always part of the same group,” she said, placing the box down just inside the door. “Well, ever since eighth grade. My best friend was dating his best friend—Zach—for a long time. But it wasn’t until recently that he and I . . . really started getting to know each other.”
Chase’s mom was watching Em talk with big, sorrowful eyes. They brightened a bit there.
“Not, like, in a romantic way,” Em heard herself saying, unable now to stop the waterfall of words. “But I started to understand him more. We were working on some poetry together.” That last part wasn’t exactly true, but it was close enough.
“I worked all the time,” Mrs. Singer said now, looking past Em at some unfocused point in the background. “I never got a chance to meet his friends.”
“Well, he had lots of them,” Em said with authority, tucking her fists into the cuffs of her sweatshirt. She flashed to the shirt Crow had lent her, how it had thumbholes in its sleeves, just as many of hers did. “He was an amazing athlete, and the boys loved him. And so did most girls,” she said with a smile, trying to gauge Mrs. Singer’s reaction. “He was very popular. We all . . . I . . . miss him. A lot.”
Chase’s mom exhaled forcefully, as though she’d been holding her breath. “Thank you, Emily,” she said. “Thank you for saying that. I miss him too.” Then she started back down the walkway, turning around just once more to say, “Good luck to you. And thank you again.”
Em watched her go with a lump in her throat.
Once Mrs. Singer had gotten back into her car, Em closed the door and kneeled down right in the front hall to start picking through the belongings in the box. Most of it was crap: school papers, receipts, a small Best Sportsmanship trophy from Chase’s sixth-grade rec camp, a cell phone charger. All of it seemed to be covered in a thin layer of dust, and Em kept having to wipe her hands on her pant legs to get off the grit. The lump kept swelling in her throat. It seemed inconceivable that this collection of random things could be her last connection to larger-than-life Chase.
At the bottom of the box were several printouts of the poems she’d “helped him write”—i.e., wrote herself—for Ty. And at the bottom of one of those was a small note, written in script.
Remember, you are bound to us, it read. Em squinted at it, read it again to make sure she was getting it right.