My current journal is in the nightstand drawer, a pen hooked to the front cover. It’s decorated with what is, quite frankly, a profoundly disturbing collage of battered stone president heads, all but one pictures from the day trip Mum and I took with Eddison back when we lived in D.C. The exception is tiny, almost invisible in the gap between Kennedy and Taft, a little blue lizard with a placard gripped in its mouth, roman numerals on the little grey square. That lizard appears on all my journals, somewhere. Sometimes on the outside of a cover, sometimes on the inside, sometimes just tucked into a margin on one of the pages.
Chavi’s journals would be easy to put in order, because she was more consistent. The bottom left corner of the inside front cover always had a drawing of me, holding a date. It might be a picture of a page-a-day calendar, or a monthly calendar with one box circled, or a representative doodle for holidays. Each notebook started with the next day of the year. All you have to do to put them in order is look inside the front cover at the calendar.
Chavi was almost to August.
I am never going to fall asleep.
I wait until Mum is probably—hopefully—sleeping across the hall, then ease down the stairs. There’s one three-quarters of the way down that will creak unless you step just to the left of center, but the next one you have to step all the way to the right or it’ll groan. I grab hold of the railing and skip both.
The candle in front of Chavi is dark. The last one to bed blows it out so we don’t accidentally burn the house down. I want to—maybe need to—relight it. I don’t, though. There’s enough light bleeding in through the glass in the front door to make the picture visible, even if not clear. The streetlight, pale and somewhat yellowed, stretches up the walls and along the side of the stairs. It breaks at the hall ceiling, arcing up at strange angles to play along the banister for the landing.
A car drives by outside, shifting the light, and for the second before I can close my eyes, the shadows make it look like something is swaying from the banister.
My heart thumps painfully, and I duck my head as I walk down the hall to the living room. Something brushes my shoulder and I flinch, then call myself ten kinds of idiot when I realize it’s just my hair. We checked every inch of the house, then armed the alarm. There’s no one here but me and Mum. I can list reasons why it’s okay to be this jumpy. I can name them, and naming is supposed to help, but somewhere between wondering who’s dead and if someone is watching the house, there’s a memory that’s a little too present tonight.
When my dad hanged himself from the banister of the house in St. Louis two days before the first anniversary of Chavi’s death, his feet didn’t brush my shoulder. I didn’t get close enough to find out if they would.
I walked home from school, unlocked the front door, and before I could even bend down to kiss Chavi’s frame, I saw him. I stopped and looked up at him, but he’d been there a couple of hours maybe. He was definitely dead. I didn’t have to touch him to check. He’d bought the rope a few weeks ago so we could put up the hammock, only the hammock had never gone up.
I didn’t scream.
I’m still not sure why, but I remember standing there, looking up at my dead father, and just feeling . . . tired. Numb, maybe.
I walked back outside, locked the door, and called Mum, listened to her use her work cell to call the police as she raced home to me. She got there before the cops did, but didn’t go inside to look. We just sat together on the front step until the officers got there, followed by the ambulance that was probably protocol but also very unnecessary.
I was still holding the mail, including the brightly colored envelopes that had my birthday cards from the Quantico Three. They’d arrived exactly on time.
We stayed in a hotel that night, and we had just settled into bed, knowing we wouldn’t sleep, when there was a knock on the door. It was Vic, holding a bag with long-sleeved FBI shirts and fleecy pajama pants, a CVS bag of nonhotel toiletries, and a half gallon of ice cream.
I’d known Vic almost a year at that point, and already respected him, but what made me love him a little was that he didn’t tell me happy birthday. He didn’t even mention it, or the cards. Even though it was clearly a suicide, he still came out to Missouri to talk to us, to make sure we would be okay, and he never once asked us how we were feeling.
It was almost three o’clock before he left to go find his own room somewhere, but he pulled one more thing out of the bag and handed it to me. It was ungainly wrapped in a brown paper grocery bag, but when I opened it up after he left, Oreos spilled out onto the bed, twelve zipped sandwich baggies with three cookies each, and a day and date on each bag in Eddison’s spiky writing.
Acknowledging the need, rationing the impulse.
It was the day I fell a little in love with Eddison, too, as family, as a friend. Because the Oreos admitted I wasn’t okay, and the rationing said I was going to be.
There are no pictures of Dad on display, not the way we have Chavi still with us. That Chavi didn’t choose to leave is part of it, but more than that . . . if Dad had needed to leave, even if he thought suicide was the only thing that could give him relief, Mum would have understood. However their marriage did and did not work, it allowed for that, at least.
But Dad killed himself in a way that would guarantee I would be the one to find him. We’d only been in St. Louis a few months, and I’d very purposefully not joined any clubs or anything that would keep me late at school. Mum wouldn’t get home from work until the evening, so barring catastrophe, there was never a way I wouldn’t be the one to see him first.
Almost anything else Mum could have forgiven and mourned, but she’d never forgive him for making me find him.
I honestly don’t think he thought about it. Don’t think he could have thought about it by that point. Probably the only thing he was capable of thinking about by then was that he couldn’t use one of the trees out back, or a neighbor might see and cut him down before he died, save him somehow when he didn’t think there was anything to save. In my heart of hearts, I firmly believe he was so focused on making sure he wouldn’t be found that it didn’t occur to him that at some point, he would be.
That will never matter to Mum.
The pictures of him weren’t burned, they’re just not out. Carefully packed away, preserved, because someday I’ll want them even if Mum never looks at them again.
We called his family, that next day. When we left London, Mum and Dad cut ties with both families. Or maybe they left London because they cut ties. I’ve never been entirely sure what happened, only that neither of them liked speaking of it, so I have no idea how many cousins I have anymore. They left family, and religion, and maybe faith in its way, and the first time we talked to my grandparents since leaving was to tell them that Chavi had been murdered.
They blamed my parents for taking us away, for taking us to America, the land of guns and violence, and somehow it didn’t matter to them that she’d been killed with a knife in a neighborhood a hell of a lot safer than the one we’d lived in in London, it was my parents’ fault for leaving.
We didn’t talk to them again for a year, and then it was to tell them about Dad, and again somehow it was our fault. If Mum hadn’t taken him away from his family, he would have had the support he needed. If Mum wasn’t a heathen, he would have had the comfort he needed. Mum hung up before Dad’s mother could really get going. They needed to know he’d died, so she told them, and that was as far as she was willing to take things. We have, in theory, this massive family, but in reality it’s only me and Mum and the bit of Chavi we keep with us.
Like the little over two hundred notebooks filled with her large, loopy handwriting, stacked off to one side of the living room like a broken mountain.