What could it have cost to get them shortened? Twenty bucks at the dry cleaners? But we hadn’t been building anything to last. At least that’s how I’d been operating.
I clutched the handle in the car door. “How far is your house?”
“Should we go to the train station?” Sicily said. “See if anyone remembers seeing Mom there, and which way she was going?”
“Good idea, teen sleuth,” I said sarcastically. “What makes you think anyone would talk tous?”
I didn’t think anyone would. And also I didn’t think Marisa would have gone anywhere on the train. And I wanted to see Marisa’s house,okay? She’d come to my place uninvited, and I was going to repay the favor.
I didn’t really know how I could help track Marisa down, honestly. She’d lived a few miles away all this time, and I hadn’t known it, so being a detective was probably abigstretch for me. But the kid had stopped crying, and that seemed like progress of a sort.
When Sicily finally put the bumper of the SUV into a snowdrift, I unleashed myself from the seat belt and jumped out to feel the glory of solid ground under my feet. Sicily came around and gave me a going-over. “What’s your problem?”
“Did Marisa teach you to drive?”
“She— Oh!”
“Right. Where’s her car?” Why hadn’t we considered this? How had Marisa arrived at the pub, and where had she been walking when she left?
Sicily hurried up the walk, talking fast and excited about trains and taxis and receipts.
I followed, taking a look at the place. “Maybe,” I said. I was remembering a mom wagon parked badly against the curb near McPhee’s, an orange parking violation tucked under the windshield. When was that?
Marisa’s house was homey, wreaths in all the windows and a massive, brightly lit tree framed in the front bay window.
Christmas, right.
You could forget it was coming at you, with all this distraction. I usually scraped some kind of gift together for Alex, and Oona was being so cool about the room, I should probably get her something this year. What gift would sayplease don’t kick me out? For ten bucks or less.
Sicily fumbled her keys, dropping them off the porch into virgin snow. I stared hard at the tree through the window. Marisa seemed to have claimedherportion of joy to the world. I said, “I should have listened when you warned me Marisa was big on the holidays.”
“She’sregularon the holidays,” Sicily said, retrieving her keys. “You don’t likeChristmas? Oh. I suppose that’s another thing you’ll say Mom ruined for you.”
I sighed deeply, breath coming out in a cloud. “It would really save us time,” I said, “to say she ruined me entirely.”
22
Sicily wrestled the front door of her family house open and rushed in and away from me.
I came inside and closed the door behind me. I was always letting myself into places these days.
This house was nice, if not as palatial as Aunt Edith’s. Inside, there were no peacock feathers stabbed into vases. Lots of books, instead, but they were all paperbacks with cracked spines, books someone had read. The front room was maxed out on overstuffed furniture with impressions where butts had spent time and lots of pillows and soft, fluffy throws. Every seat faced the TV, per American tradition. The air was made fragrant by the real Christmas tree, not a candle, but also by whatever had last been cooked in the kitchen. The slightest hint of the trash bin needing to be taken out.
People actually lived here. And laughed and loved, presumably, and they didn’t need a sign out front to announce it.
I moved toward the tree. It had a paper garland, faded, from some other year. An impressive pile of presents already sat under the tree’s branches, all wrapped in red paper dotted with white snowflakes and decorated with stuck-on bows.
The place was cozy and cheerful and welcoming, and it was starting to tighten around me like a straightjacket. I turned from the tree and saw a piano in the corner, and Sicily’s face all over the room. A series of her school pictures stretched up a staircase to the second floor into infinity.
I listened to Sicily’s progress through the house, my throat tight. If only Marisa was here, then this search—this tether to Marisa and her new life—could come to an unceremonious end.
But no one was here. Sicily came into the room and flung her Arctic explorer coat onto the couch. “Her car isn’t in the garage. I thought—you know? Maybe she would just be home by now.”
Magical thinking. Didn’t I know it well? She was about to ask—
“Now what?” she asked.
“Can I get a glass of water?” I asked, for time.
