‘Yeah?’
He looked at me but said nothing. All at once, we were us again. He was grateful, and I was tall and competent. I blew him a kiss and walked out the door. The hallway was blue carpeted, the same as it had always been. And as I walked down one flight for the front door, I remembered another time when I was walking down these same steps, back when I was little. I was following my brother and mother; we were in bathing suits, headed to the community pool. It was one of those blisteringly hot days where you couldn’t think straight, where everyone walked around on the streets squinty and cross. When we hit the street, we saw that one of the fire hydrants was spraying water everywhere. The neighborhood kids were playing in it-it was too hot and too stifling to resist. I looked at my mother, and she shrugged and put her hand on the small of my back. I pulled off my shorts and ran into the hose. Steven ran too. We screamed and pressed our faces into the water. And when we were finished, we walked the rest of the way to the pool.
I paused on the landing, smiling, remembering that. Sometimes, returning to places brought back good memories, too.
29
Before Stella died, she pressed a piece of paper into my hands. She had written an obituary, she said. The obituary. But she didn’t want me to read it until it was time to send it to the newspaper to be printed. She didn’t want me to diverge from the text, either, but to dictate it exactly as it was written. ‘I’ll know it if you do,’ she warned me. ‘I’ll see you. I’m going to follow you around when I’m dead.’
I had horrible thoughts about what the piece of paper would say:
Stella Rogers, mistakenly killed when an eagle dropped a large tortoise on her head, mistaking it for a stone.
or:
Stella Rogers, oldest woman in space, died on her mission because the parachute on her capsule failed to deploy.
Whatever it was, it had to be more extreme than those we’d crafted when the doctors had first diagnosed her-otherwise she wouldn’t have made me wait until after she’d died for me to open it. I kept the obituary in the pocket of my suitcase, which I’d folded up and stuffed in the back of the Cobalt house’s closet. I nearly forgot about it after she died.
It was late afternoon, and I sat at the old ice cream parlor near the Promenade, the one my father and I had gone to when he told me my mother had left us. I hadn’t been back here since he’d made that announcement, staying away because the place had felt cursed. Despite the frigid temperature, the line for ice cream grew longer and longer. My father said he would meet me here, but he was late. I considered calling Philip. I wanted to tell him that he was right, that I had been distracted. That I was scared. That maybe I was running from something.
I dialed his cell phone, but it went to voicemail, the very same voicemail message I heard over a year ago, in the hospital with Stella. I can’t come to the phone. Thanks. His voice sounded far away, aloof. Beep. I hung up.
I couldn’t make sense of our argument last night-it was the equivalent of seeing the beginning and end of a movie but missing the middle. I called his phone again. ‘It’s me,’ I said after the beep. I thought of everything I should say. Really, there was so much. Finally, I blurted out, ‘Please call me. Please. Okay? I’m sorry. I need you.’
The voicemail beeped again. There was a lump in my throat; had I really just said that?
Rosemary plopped down across from me. ‘So this is where you’re hiding.’
‘I’m not hiding.’ I cupped the still-warm cell phone between my hands.
‘No?’ Rosemary was wearing an oversized burnt orange sweater with a small moth hole in the shoulder. She wrapped her hands around a small paper cup from the coffee cart on the corner. There was a smudge of pink lipstick around the sip top. ‘You’ve been awfully quiet, Summer. Is everything all right?’
I shrugged.
‘Did you and Philip have a fight?’
‘I don’t know.’
A few seconds passed. A woman at the counter was yelling, appalled that this ice cream store didn’t offer anything for vegans. ‘Have you talked to your father much?’ Rosemary pressed.
I stared at the scuffed checkerboard floor. I didn’t want her to get this out of me. My father should be the one to tell her about my mother. ‘Not really.’
She cleared her throat. ‘Are you two still upset at each other?’
I looked at her suspiciously. ‘What do you mean?’