Dani put on her dress for the memorial, a simple black cotton one whose drooping hem she’d had to rig with double-sided tape. She scrunched up the toes of her flimsy black pantyhose and pulled them up her legs, hoping she wouldn’t snag the fabric on a fingernail. She slid on low black pumps whose scuff marks she’d filled in that morning with felt-tip pen.
When she looked in the mirror, she startled herself. Her hair, chopped off to her chin. Her eyes, lined like she’d seen in a fashion magazine while waiting for her hair appointment. That morning, she’d pulled out a stick of eyeliner, found a box of matches, and lit the end of the liner, smearing it hot across her lids. The sulfur from the match made her nostrils flare.
Don’t blink, Dani.
Jess had laughed. “Stop blinking. You’re making me smear it.” Dani had squeezed her eyes open and shut, feeling the liner and mascara wet on her cheekbones and brow bone. Jess laughed harder, her breath warm and minty. “Nice job, raccoon face,” she’d said, holding up the mirror, and Dani had laughed too, seeing the fat dark rings around her eyes and giddy with that new strange thing. Having a best friend. Being girly. “Now you,” Dani had said, picking up the eyeliner and the Bic. “Okay, now you don’t blink,” she’d said to Jess, and Jess said, “I won’t.” She’d held her eyes open.
But she’d missed everything anyway.
Dani blinked now, smoothing down her dress, turning sideways. She’d already messed up her makeup once today, crying on Paul’s shoulder out of the blue like a maniac. It had come up out of her like a wave. Like a flash flood. She got out the eyeliner and matches again and set to work repairing the mess. When she was finished, she pushed at the corner of her eyes and straightened her shoulders.
Time to go.
Dani climbed the steps to her mother’s front door. She stood on the porch of her childhood home in her worn funeral dress and peered in the sidelight window. She could see Hugh in the kitchen, lifting a steaming pot from the stove and carrying it to the sink. Her mother stood at the dining room window, looking out at the yard.
Her mother turned, smiling, probably at something Hugh said. For a moment, Dani almost didn’t recognize her. From that angle, she saw what she didn’t see in passing every day: time. The softening of the skin along the jawline, the puffiness of her cheeks, the slope at the top of her back, the silver at her temples. Her mother was growing old, and Dani had missed it.
Dani was about to knock, but her mother glanced at the front and saw Dani standing in the window. In that split second, Dani saw her mother’s whole face, her whole posture, change. In her mother’s face, Dani saw herself peering through a microscope for the first time, when the tiny unseen world suddenly snapped into sharp glorious focus. Oh! Look! Look at that! her mother’s face seemed to say. Dani realized now her mother had never stopped looking at her that way; Dani had missed that, too.
Her mother opened the door and smiled. “Dani,” she said. “You’re early.”
“I’m here,” she said.
“I’m glad,” she said. “Hugh!” she called. “Dani’s here.”
Hugh only had fifteen years on Dani, but he’d always seemed older than his age, puttering around the kitchen with hokey aprons that said things like “Kiss the Cook” or “Danger: Man in Kitchen.” About as exciting as sliced cheese, really, but innocuous. Plus, he made her mother smile like she was now, big and toothy.
“Well, there she is,” Hugh said. “Don’t you look nice.”
He put his arm around her mother’s shoulders, and Rachel leaned into him. That part had never gotten less strange, seeing her mother with another man, even after all this time. Those early images of her parents, embedded in her from infancy, had been difficult to shake. Mother, father, child. The family unit. Oddly she thought of images from the atomic bombing in Hiroshima. The explosion was so hot that the shadows of objects burned into the concrete. That was how it felt sometimes, that old bond, that old life. Burned straight into her, casting a permanent shadow.
Her mother smiled again at Dani in the doorway. “You really do look wonderful, sweetheart. Your hair. I do love it. It suits you.”
Her mother’s voice seemed to take on an exaggerated pitch when she spoke with Dani—to hide what Dani had believed was disapproval lurking below. But Dani understood now it was only awkwardness, her mother’s attempt to bridge the distance Dani had put between them when she’d walled herself off. Her mother, who’d taught her to use a microscope. Who’d first showed her the unseen world around her.
Dani did what she’d done earlier at the orchard. She flung herself at another human being and burst into tears.
“Okay.” Her mother held her. “Okay.”
“Oh, goodness,” Hugh said. He patted her shoulder. “Tea. I’ll make tea.”
“I can’t stop,” Dani said. “I can’t stop crying.”
“It’s okay,” her mother said. “I know.”
Dani relaxed in her mother’s arms.
“I failed,” Dani said. “I’m a failure. Me, smartest girl in school. Everyone must be having a good laugh.”
“No one’s laughing. And you’re not a failure.”
Dani lifted her head. “I’m a mess.”
Her mother laughed a little. “Your face is.”
“I know.” She started crying again. “See? I can’t stop.”
“So don’t,” her mother said. “Don’t stop. It’s okay.”
“I can’t go to the orchard like this. Will you tell Maud I’m sorry?” She hiccupped. “Tell her I’m sorry. Tell her—oh, I don’t know what to tell her.”
“I’ll tell her,” her mother said.
“She was my best friend,” Dani said, burying her face into her mother’s shoulder and smearing her with black. “My first real friend.”
“Yes, she was.” Her mother rubbed her back. “It might help to say good-bye.”
But Dani had already said good-bye.
As she’d lined her lids in the mirror again before she left her little guest house, she’d thought, How to begin?
With what was in front of her.
She’d said to the mirror, I live behind Ms. G’s house. Remember when we wondered if she and Mr. Manning were a couple? Um, no.
She said, I still live in Sycamore. I take people’s blood for a living. Go figure.
She said, I hated you for what you did. I hated you. I wanted you to be here so I could hate you some more. Blame you some more. You and my dad. But that’s not working out so hot for me. I always pictured someday being able to yell at you, to have it out again. To make you sorry. I always believed, really believed, you were out there. And some day, you would come home.
Then she’d had to redo her makeup again.
She’d said, Don’t blink, Jess. Blink and you miss it.
She said, I’ve missed too much now.
She said, I don’t know if I still look like him. I don’t know what he looks like anymore.
On the front porch, Dani let go of her mother. She said good-bye, went down the porch steps, and walked toward her guest house, on that old street in that old town she knew by heart.
She didn’t need any more good-byes.
How to begin?