“I get a dinner out of this too, right?” he asks.
“If you’re good,” Mom tells him. He leaves and she starts pulling what we do have out of the cupboards and fridge. She gives me a bag of carrots to chop, because we’re starting with her famous carrot soup. We settle in at the kitchen counter, shoulder to shoulder.
“How are you?” she asks after a minute.
“They kept the sex a secret,” I say, which isn’t even an answer. “Caro and her husband. They didn’t want to know what they were having until they had it.”
Mom smashes some garlic with the side of her knife. “Your father and I did that.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“As soon as we found out I was pregnant, I wanted to keep it a secret. Your father didn’t, but since I was the one giving birth, that got to be my call.”
“Did you want a girl?” I ask.
“I wanted a baby.”
“Did Dad want a girl?”
I ask it before realizing it’s nothing I really want to know. She pauses and answers too carefully.
“He was happy when you were born, Romy. It was different then.”
“I didn’t ask if he was sorry he had me. I wanted to know if he wanted a girl.”
“Okay. Well … at first, he wanted a boy because he was nervous about having a girl. He was afraid he wouldn’t be able to understand you or relate to you if you were a girl but when you were born—he cried harder than I did. He was thrilled.”
It’s too hard to picture, so I don’t.
“How often do you talk to him?”
I don’t know why that’s the next question inside me.
“I don’t,” she says. It surprises me. I thought they were still in touch. I always imagined her hiding up in the bedroom, whispering furiously at him over the phone. That’s what they did when I was really young. Stood behind closed doors and whispered, like I would never be able to tell things were bad if they were whispered.
“Even when I was missing?”
She hesitates. “Do you want me to—if there’s ever an emergency—”
“No. I’m just—I just thought you would have.”
“Maybe once,” she says and I know we’re both thinking of a time she made excuse after excuse for him until finally, there were none. “Your father loves you, Romy—”
“Mom, don’t—”
Because I don’t need her to tell me because— “But it’s not enough.”
I know.
I knew it before she did.
“And you,” she says. “You feel how you want to feel about your dad. It’s not ever going to be wrong, you understand me?”
I don’t know what to say. She continues to prep and I try to do the same but it’s hard to focus. Todd comes home forty minutes later with all the groceries. I keep my eyes on my cutting board, don’t realize there’s anything worth looking up for until Mom asks, “What is it?”
I turn. Todd stands in the kitchen doorway, the handles of the plastic grocery bags twisting slowly in his grip. He looks paler than I’ve ever seen him, paler than he gets when he’s in the worst kind of pain. He sets the groceries down and runs his hands over his mouth a couple of times before he finally speaks and when he does, he says— He says, “They pulled Penny Young’s body out of Gadwall River last night.”
ARE YOU OKAY? he asks.
I CAN’T SEE YOU TOMORROW, I tell him.
He says, I UNDERSTAND.
He says, IF YOU NEED ANYTHING …
But what could I need?
What could I need, that she doesn’t anymore?
MISSING GIRL FOUND
A headline terrible enough to stop hearts and a story to crush them. A story the Ibis Daily isn’t supposed to have yet. They missed the weekend print edition, but put it on their Web site and that’s what Todd shows us, the crumpled printout someone passed to him at the grocery store, like a note in class.
A family friend, who does not want to be identified, says the body of 18-year-old Penny Young was recovered from the Gadwall River early Friday night. The Young family was notified of the discovery earlier this morning.
The Grebe and Ibis Sheriff’s Departments would not confirm this, but said they will hold a news conference Sunday at 1 p.m. to discuss the latest developments in the case.
Young, who divided her time between her mother’s residence in Ibis and her father’s residence in Grebe, was last seen at a party in Grebe. She was reported missing by her mother when she did not arrive at her house the next morning.
I smooth the paper out on my desk and then I press my left hand flat against it. I reach for my nail polish. Before I tore the label off, this color was either called Paradise or Hit and Run. I wonder what it would be named if they had to call it what it really is. The color of your insides. The stuff your heart beats. Nothing you can afford to lose. I lift the brush and watch the red drip unhurriedly back into the bottle.
“Romy,” Mom calls.
I run the brush against the edge of the bottle’s opening, until the bristles are barely coated. I start at my pinkie finger and paint it carefully. My hands don’t shake. Not even a little.
“Romy, it’s starting soon.”
The first coat is dry by the time I’m on the last nail of the first hand. I move onto the next one. And then the second coat. I don’t go outside the lines. If you don’t go outside the lines, not once, you’re even more the person you’re trying to be, maybe.
And then I’m ready.
“Romy, it’s starting now.”
I sit on the couch between Mom and Todd. The sides of my legs touch theirs. I lean forward, my fresh-painted fingernails against my fresh-painted lips.
There’s a table of officials stretched across the length of the television screen, all of them somber. A man I don’t recognize stands at a podium, too tall for its microphone. I want to reach through somehow and adjust it for him. He thanks an audience I can’t see for attending and when he tells us what happened to her, his voice doesn’t shake.