When I lived with Jones and Agnes, it was their daughter, Samantha, who made me breakfast. Wheat bread and applesauce, every morning. We ate matching meals, perched on the stools in their kitchen. She’d look over my homework if I had questions, but I remember not wanting to ask for much help. She’d always scrunch up her forehead and say how it had been a long time since she learned this stuff. She’d figure it out eventually and talk me through it, but it was more fun to ask about her magazines because she delighted in talking about them. I learned what DUIs were because Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie both got them. The news of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’s wedding was everywhere. I learned what to wait for with each new issue’s release.
I rarely saw Jones and Agnes until after school, because they slept late and entrusted Samantha with my morning care. She was always nice to me after that. She always did my nails for free.
I don’t have her number anymore. It’s been a long time since she’s lived with her parents. I wish I had it now. I call the salon, just in case she’s there early doing work before it opens, but the phone rings and rings and then goes to voice mail. I listen to her voice slowly stating the hours and location.
I pace the room for a while, waiting for it to be ten in San Francisco. As soon as it’s one here, I press call.
“It’s you,” Jones says when I say hello.
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s me.”
“Where are you?”
“School.”
He’s quiet.
“I see,” he says. “You spending the holiday with some fellow troublemakers?”
He’s probably running inventory of who I could be with, envisioning a few of us here, a scrappy team of orphans and outcasts.
“Something like that,” I say.
I should have prepared something to say to him. The truth is, I only called so that I could remind him—and myself, maybe—that I’m still a part of the world. It feels like now or never with him, and I’m not sure if I want to lose what’s left of the life Gramps and I shared. I used to be sure, but now I’m not.
I’m about to ask how Agnes is, but he speaks before I get the words out.
“I have everything,” he says. “Just so you know. Whether you want it or not, everything is here in the garage waiting for you. Not the beds or the refrigerator or nothin’ like that. But the real stuff. The owner arranged an estate sale after the place was vacant thirty days. But the guys and I, we bought it all.”
I close my eyes: brass candlesticks; the blue-and-gold blanket; my grandmother’s china with the tiny red flowers.
“We all feel real bad about it,” he says. “Feel like we shoulda done something. For you.”
“What about the letters?”
Quiet.
He clears his throat.
“They’re here. The landlord gave us the, uh, more personal stuff.”
“Can you get rid of them?”
“I can do that.”
“Keep the photographs, though. Okay?”
“Mm-hm,” he says.
I think of all of those pictures that Gramps kept for himself. My jaw clenches with the wrongness of it. He should have sat next to me and shown me. He should have said, Now, I think this was the time that . . . or Oh yes, I remember this day . . . He should have told me all the ways in which I reminded him of her. He should have helped me remember her. He never should have let me forget.
Jones is still quiet. I hear his throat clearing.
“Your gramps, he was in a hospital a long time ago, when you stayed with us. Not sure if you remember. It almost killed him, so we didn’t want to send him back there. Wish I could say that was the right decision. Wish I could say I didn’t realize it got so bad again. Wish I could say that.”
I breathe in and out. It requires effort. “I thought he was sick.”
“Well, he was. Just in more ways than you thought.”
He clears his throat again. I wait.
“Sometimes it’s difficult,” he says, “to know the right thing to do.”
I nod even though he can’t see me. There’s no arguing with a statement like that, even if a different future is unfurling in my head—one where I knew what Gramps’s prescriptions were for, and I watched to make sure he took them, and he took me along to his appointments and his doctors told me what to watch for.
I need to find something kind to say, something instead of these thoughts of how Gramps failed me, how Jones failed us. He knows it already; I can hear it in his voice.
“Merry Christmas Eve, Jones,” I finally say, wanting the conversation to end.
“You get religious all of a sudden? If your gramps had a grave, he’d be turning in it.”
It’s a rough joke, the kind they used to make in my kitchen.
“It’s just something to say,” I tell him. Out the window, the snow is starting again. Not stormlike, just scattered flakes drifting. “Give Agnes and Samantha my love, Jones. And tell the fellas I say hello.”
After I hang up, I cut open Hannah’s envelope and something flutters out. It unfolds in its descent: a paper chain of snowflakes, each one white and crisp. There is no message inside. It’s exactly what it appears to be.
chapter twenty-five
SEPTEMBER
I SHOWED UP on the day of freshman orientation, accompanied by no one, a duffel over my shoulder stuffed with my clothes, some crackers, and the picture of Birdie. I saw Hannah’s alarm when I appeared in our doorway. Then I saw her catch herself and smile.
She held out her hand, but her shock had taken me by the shoulders and shaken. I was here, at a school, surrounded by girls my own age. No one screamed at the television. No one stood for hours at their windows. No one avoided turning the tap for fear of ghosts.