“Great speckled bird,” I whispered.
“Huh?”
“You aren’t kidding about the gift-giving thing,” I said. “The tree’s already loaded and she’s got twenty-five tabs open on her laptop with more things you might like.”
“I think this is for you.”
I stared into the closet, everything within me going still. “What?”
“I’m pretty sure these are all presents for you. I always wondered what they were for. Even opened a few over the years. But I had to tape them back up, in case she noticed.” Sicily reached in and grabbed a thick and squishy one. The green-striped paper crinkled drily in her hand. She held it out. “Last year’s wrapping paper. Here, open it, if you don’t believe me.”
I backed up.
“It’s just a Christmas present, Dahlia,” she said. “From yourmother.”
My mouth was dry. “I don’t want it.”
“Why not? It’s probably something warm, and you look freezing most of the time. Okay, what about—”
“I don’t want—any of it.” I stepped back. I couldn’t look at the kid. “Thanks for the offer of lunch, but I—I have to… I can’t.” I was in the doorway, somehow, already gone. “Tell Bonnie I’m sorry.”
25
I let my head rest against the bus window. It was dreary outside, a gray and cold afternoon, and my head was noisy and cluttered. I kept seeing the sucking black hole of the gun pointed at me, like the sinkhole opening beneath me in my nightmares, my toes teetering at the edge. Marisa was gone, somehow, there and then gone, and Joey was still dead, kept being dead, and Alex—
And now Marisa was something entirely different from who I had believed. At what point had I stepped through a portal into another dimension where Alex was a murderer and Marisa was amom?
I’d freaked out about that closet of gifts, it was that simple. Those careful origami bundles meant something to me that I’d have to try to explain to Sicily. If I got another chance.
If Icouldexplain. What it felt like was that I’d got something horribly wrong, something fundamental. My version of the story of my own life was wrecked, and if I couldn’t be sure of even my own experience, I didn’t know who I was.
Maybe I wasn’t what I’d always thought I was, either.
The bus rolled past a line of shops, an Italian restaurant. We were nearing the northwest edge of the city. Wait—
The bus paused to let someone off just as I realized that I’d eaten at that Italian restaurant. With Joey. With his sister. We’d met Heather and her husband there because it was down the street from her house.
The bus pulled off from the stop, and I felt a gut pang of shame. I owed Heather—something. A call, at least.
But what would you say? To a pregnant woman who’d just lost her only brother. What would you say if you weren’t going to be as broken up about the loss as you would need to be?
If you might be, in many ways, the villain of the story?
I was not a grown-up—that’s what Joey and I had fought about that last time. We’d just learned his sister—hisyoungersister—and her husband were having a baby, and Joey had turned on me. I could see the renegotiation of terms bearing down like a train I was definitely not trying to catch.
How did people do it? How did they find someone they could say forever to? Take on a mortgage? Get a nameplate on a desk and show up every day?
How did they know they could do it, tomorrow, and the next day? That they’d always want to live in that house, with that person? That this person would always want to live withyou? That you could grow a kid, without spikes, into a functioning human?
Hardly anyone ever got it right. Right? It was all suchguesswork.
The bus let me off across the street from McPhee’s. The sign was off.
We should have been open, deep into a busy Friday afternoon by now. The red curtains at the window above the big booth had been tied back again. Through that opening, I could see the room was dark.
Maybe the curtains were tied back still, and Alex had never opened.
I crossed the street and used my key. Inside, the room was empty. The chairs were up on the tables, but the floors weren’t swept. The grill had been going, though. It smelled like burgers, and I could definitely use one.
