The cabinet door clicked as she pulled it closed behind her.
Twelve hours later, above the birdlike sounds that echoed through the sink chamber, Lydia finally heard tires crunching up the driveway. The air around her began to crack and she pushed open the door of her dark box. The lower half of her body was so numb she felt as if she’d been cast in concrete. It was impossible to walk, yet she managed to pull herself up tall enough to peer out the window above the sink.
Outside, at the peak of the driveway, she watched her father, dressed in an unbuttoned work shirt, lifting a heavy cardboard box from the backseat of the station wagon. He walked straight down the slope to his workshop and didn’t step foot into their cabin until long after Lydia had eaten dinner alone, taken a shower, climbed into bed, and—finally, thankfully—read herself to sleep.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
As Lydia awakened and her eyes adjusted to the light, she realized she’d been roused by the sound of snoring. Her first panicky thought was that David didn’t snore. She looked at the pillow pile and braided sheets next to her but the bed was strangely empty. When she followed the snores she found Raj on the floor next to her bed, sound asleep in David’s sleeping bag.
On the floor, she told herself. Not in the bed. Whew.
She remembered now: Last night they’d talked for so long that Lydia had suggested Raj stay over. He’d taken her up on the offer.
The morning was cold so Lydia decided to lie in bed for a while, but when the phone rang in the kitchen she hopped over Raj without waking him. She was wearing David’s sweats and David’s hoodie and as she stared at the ringing phone she imagined it was him, David, calling to let her know he was coming home early for sex or bagels.
One room away, Raj still snored. The phone stopped ringing.
As she contemplated coffee she spotted Joey’s milk crate underneath the table. She pulled out the pair of books she’d been hoping to decipher last night when Raj’s knock had interrupted her. One was a slim volume of poems called The Devil’s Tour and she was surprised, as she fanned through it, to find only a handful of tiny windows cut from its pages. This was, as far as she could tell, the shortest of the messages she’d seen thus far. The label on the back belonged to a different book, of course, a brisk novel called Sula that she’d borrowed from the store yesterday, and she could feel her vision blur a bit as she lifted it from the table, opened to the corresponding pages, and slid its text under the cut-up poems. When the pages lined up exactly, a few meager words appeared: my
1.
As
T
me. S
age
, f
In
D
her
. . .
My last message—except Lydia still had a small pile of books in the crate that she had yet to decipher. So while this may have been the last message Joey had carved, she realized, it was not the last one Lydia would decode. Even so, its directive was clear: Find her . . .
There she was again: Her.
Lydia felt her arms fall loosely to her sides as she realized, with great relief, that the woman in Joey’s messages—the Her that Lydia was directed to find, whatever that meant—was probably not herself. In the first message, Joey had addressed Lydia directly, had even used her name, so it seemed likely that Her was another person altogether. But who?
It was quiet in the apartment, but she could hear the first hints of traffic up on Colfax, as well as birds chirping between branches in the spruce trees that nuzzled her home. When she looked toward the bedroom, she saw Raj wriggling out of David’s bag and slipping on his sandals. His hair was a living mess.
Lydia closed the books and dropped them into the milk crate.
“What’s all that?” Raj said, coming into the kitchen.
“My inheritance. When someone hangs themselves in the store, they apparently feel the need to leave me a gift.”
“Ouch.” Raj looked down at the crate. “Can I?”
“I’d rather you didn’t,” she said.
He shrugged.
“Did I hear the phone?” he said.
“David’s coming home today.”
“Then I should probably go.”
“Probably.”
As Raj rolled up the sleeping bag and used the bathroom, Lydia—feeling guilty for denying him access to the crate—opened her sock drawer and pulled out the birthday party photo that Joey had had with him when he hanged himself. Raj was in the photo too, and maybe he’d even know something about it. When he came out of the bathroom, his hair was wet and pressed to the side, and she could smell toothpaste on his breath, and she wondered whether he’d used his finger to clean his teeth or her toothbrush—or, god forbid, David’s. He took the photo from her and his eyes widened as he studied it: Lydia blowing out the candles, Raj staring at her, Carol a blur on the boundary of the print.
“Recognize it?” she said.
But Raj didn’t say anything, just continued to stare.
“It’s us,” she said, hoping to break his trance. “Right around then.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” he said, barely audible. “Right around then.”
“What is it? The way you’re staring at it.”
“Just look at me fully crushing on you,” he said.
Lydia took the occasion to fiddle in the kitchen—lifting the kettle, rinsing out the sponge—rather than respond.
“Where’d you get this, anyway?” he said.
“From Joey. The guy who hanged himself.”
“Really?” Raj said, looking at it again. “What a creep. How’d he get it? Did you have it at the store or something?”
“No such luck,” she said. “I’d never seen it before the night he died. Not that I remember, anyway.”
The fact was, she still had no idea how Joey had obtained the photo, or why he would have even wanted it. Nothing about the scenario made sense, though she’d wondered about the possibility that a private detective or conspiracy theorist or investigative journalist had somehow enlisted Joey in the quest to uncover Little Lydia’s new identity. But that was as far as she’d gotten.
“That’s your old kitchen in the photo,” Raj said, “so we can assume that your dad took it.”
“He must have.”
“So then Joey would have gotten it from him.”
“From my dad? Okay, but that doesn’t explain when their paths would have crossed. Or how.”
As Raj continued to study the photo, caught in some loop of memory, Lydia’s mind bloomed in new directions. What if her father had persuaded Joey to help him reconnect with his estranged daughter? Or what if he’d enlisted Joey to keep an eye on her?
She felt a chill: Find her, Joey’s message had said. Find Little Lydia? Maybe she’d been too quick to omit herself— “You okay?” Raj said, gently tugging a loose thread on her sweatshirt.
“Yeah,” she said, collecting herself. “Sorry.”
“Was Joey from Rio Vista or something?”
“Joey was from nowhere, as far as I can tell.”
“And you’re still not talking to your dad? Because you could always just ask him.”
“He’s been calling,” she said. “I just haven’t called him back.”