Eleven
My parents are so taken aback by my words that even though both of their mouths are open, neither of them speak.
Mom’s at the stove, mid-stir with a wooden spoon in the boiling pot. She’s halfway turned towards me, at first not even bothering to look until she heard my words. Her eyes look vacant, like she’s too shocked to remain here. Dad’s at the kitchen table, reading yesterday’s newspaper. He’s looking up at me from under his glasses, his expression blank.
A blank expression on him is never a good one.
A loud burst of thunder breaks everyone from their shock.
“There’s no way she could be here,” Mom says, her tone dismissive.
“It does seem very unlikely, Bam,” Dad adds.
“I saw her,” I repeat. “She smiled at me.”
Dad looks like he’s thinking of the right word to say while my mother turns back towards the stove, shaking her head. She looks angry, whether that be from earlier or what’s going on right now, I do not know. Maybe both.
“What?” I ask her, taking a step closer to the oven. I’m dripping water all over the floor from my drenched locks but I don’t care. Mom shakes her head once more but doesn’t say anything, even when she stops. “What, Mom?”
When she doesn’t respond, Dad clears his throat. “Lilith…” At first I think he’s on her side, trying to get her to tell me something they’ve been talking about while I was gone. But when I see his worried eyes, staring at the back of her head, I know I’m wrong.
Mom stops stirring her pot physically, but mentally, she’s just started.
“I think you’re creating problems where there aren’t any, Alabama.”
The use of my full name makes me freeze. She never calls me that, only unless she’s talking about something very serious or she’s angry. I don’t know what to say so I stand in the doorway, creating a small puddle around my feet that I already refuse to clean up.
Mom starts stirring again.
“I’ve arrange for you to go to a counsellor later this week,” she says.
My lips part but no words come out.
“Your father and I discussed it earlier and it’s what we think is best.”
The word we gets to me. My head snaps towards my father, who’s lowered his paper slightly, even though he’s clearly not reading it. When he sees me staring he sets the newspaper on the tabletop and shrugs with his hands in the air, as if he’s trying to say he’s sorry, that my mother wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“Traitor,” I mouth to him. He frowns.
Cat climbs into my bed sometime throughout the night. I think he’s scared of the thunder, but he’s trying to act cool about it by licking his paws and not snuggling into me until a loud flash erupted across the sky. In the morning I wake up with my arm around his body, listening to his soft snoring as I flop onto my side.
The thunder is gone, replaced by the occasional sheet lightening over the ocean. It’s still raining a lot and the sky is so dark it looks like night, but it’s still morning.
When Cat wakes up together we creep downstairs, only to realize that we’re the first ones up. I glance at the clock above the stove, the hand pointing to the six. My parents probably won’t be up for hours since Dad doesn’t get to work on most days when the weather is bad.
I fix myself a bowl of cereal and find a small envelope on the counter as I walk past it. I pause, look it over in my hands and continue to the table. Once I’ve sat down and shoveled half of the bowl into my mouth, I finally open it. It’s the photos from the film that Dad stole.
Since the roll of film was brand new, only containing pictures I’ve taken since I arrived, I don’t hesitate when I rip open the folder. I’ve never been able to resist looking at pictures I took that I haven’t seen yet. It’s always felt like opening a present on Christmas morning, knowing what you wanted to get but excited to find out anyway.
The pictures of the whales are my favorite. Some of them turned out much darker than I thought they would, making it look as if they’re swimming at night. The one’s of me make me smile, despite how embarrassing I look, petting them in the water. I skim the rest of them as I finish off my cereal and quickly put my bowl in the sink.
On the way up the stairs a cool breeze comes in through the house, probably from a window my mother left open. She always wants fresh air in the house, even if it’s a blizzard outside, she’ll still crack a window.
I touch Evan’s sweater as I reach my bedroom. It hangs on the wall, still a bit damp at the end of the sleeves but mostly dry. It’s warmer than most of my sweaters, since it’s too big for me. So I pull it on over my head, fan my hair out around me and decide to do what my mom does. I open the screen door slightly in my doorway. The room was getting stuffy.
As much as I’ve been dreading it, I reach underneath my bed and pull out a decorative box I bought at the dollar store years ago. It’s white with black designs running across it, making it look fancier than my dollar could buy. I find it ironic that Evan and I have the same hiding spot for special things, but I don’t plan on discussing it with him.
Part of me doesn’t want to open the lid and look through the photographs inside, and that same part doesn’t want me to tape them to my walls like I never planned on doing. Back home, my bedroom was covered in them. Then, the night after Cade passed, I tore all of them down. The ones in the box are the ones my mother scavenged for me, not telling me about them until the day we left for the summer.
But then the other half of me wants to relive some of these memories, to look through the pictures and smiling faces and scenery to remember. And maybe Mom is right – taping them to my walls again might bring me closer to not only what’s on the thick paper, but also the old Bam – the old me.
I start out as safe as I can – I don’t open the box yet.
“This is you,” I say, bending down to hold the creepy picture of Cat in front of his own face. He barely glances at it before licking his paw, disinterested.
I start on the wall to the left of my bed, smack in the middle between where I sleep and the balcony sliding glass doors on the other wall. I don’t know how to do this without screwing it up; I never finished an entire wall last time. So I grab some double sided tape and stick the photo smack in the middle of the pale wall.
Eventually I decide that not looking in the box is going to be harder than looking in it, so I start taking out photos and taping them to the walls. The ones of Cade are too painful to look at so I stick them up without looking at his face.
When my parents find my empty bowl in the kitchen sink hours later, I hear them come up the staircase to see what I’m doing. Neither of them says anything as they stand at the other side of the room, looking from behind me. I can practically feel my mother’s grin, so elastic that I’m putting my pictures up as if it’s some kind of masterpiece. To her, it probably is.
After a little while Mom goes downstairs to probably work on her book. Dad sits against the old, antique dresser, gripping the sides with his fingers. I turn around momentarily, feeling him watching and realize he’s staring at the photos. So far they just look like a multi-coloured blob on the plain wall, but Dad is looking at them with his head tilted, as if he’s seeing something that I don’t.
“I like it,” he says after a while.
Then he rises from his perch and leaves me alone to put the rest of the photographs up in piece.
“Who is it?” I ask, wearingly jumping down the steps of the lighthouse. Only a few photographs remain, which means that most of the wall is covered except for the edges where some don’t fit.
“Just answer the phone,” Mom says with a small smile. Even her eyes light up and I can see that she’s taking my photo collage as some kind of peace treaty, as if I did it for her. She’s no longer mad.
Confused, and slightly cautious at who could possibly be calling me here, I walk to the old coral pink phone hanging on the wall and take the receiver from my mother’s hand. Turning around, I slowly raise it to my face.
“Hello?”
“Bam,” someone says on the other side. “It’s Evan.
“Evan?” I scrunch my face up. “How did you get my number?”
“I have my ways.”
I can feel him smiling on the other end.
“How did you get my number?” I repeat.
Evan laughs. “I asked Hadley and she asked her mom and her mom has an old address book of most of the places in town.”
“Oh,” I say, my cheeks reddening. “I wasn’t trying to be rude but I was just-“
He cuts me off. “What are you doing tomorrow?”
I turn around to my mother, who’s at the stove cooking dinner and Dad, who’s in his usual chair, looking over papers for work.
“What am I doing tomorrow?”
I can hear Evan laugh and pull the phone away from my ear slightly. Mom smiles but keeps her eyes on the pot she’s stirring.
“Whatever you want, sweetie,” Dad says, not looking up either.
The behavior is strange, but I don’t want to get into what’s going on right now, especially with Mom no longer being her hovering self. I turn away from them and walk into the other room, pulling the old cord attached to the phone with me. When I’m in the front foyer, I lean my back against the wall.
“Nothing,” I tell Evan. “Tomorrow I’m doing nothing.”
“Great! We’re doing something.”
I roll my eyes but I’m smiling.
“And what is that something?”
“Well, it’s still raining, so our treasure, rumor, whatever you want to call it hunting is still taking a rain check – literally. So I was thinking we could go into the town over and get supplies.”
Despite not knowing what supplies we need or why we need them, I decide to go along with this short trip. I don’t usually mind staying inside often but with the storm still continuing, the old cottage smells mustier than ever. I want to breathe fresh air.
“Okay, sure!”
“I’ll pick you up tomorrow then.”
He gives me the details and we hang up. Slowly, I sink down until I’m sitting on the floor, smiling slightly. I don’t remember the last time I felt so giddy – so happy. It had to have been before Cade passed.
My mood immediately drops.
Quickly, I jump to my feet and return to the kitchen. As soon as my socks step onto the tile, two pairs of eyes are on me, waiting to see what I’m doing, waiting to see me smile. Without a word, I step towards the wall, hang up the phone, and leave them with their questions.
In my room, I stand in front of the photo wall, glaring at it. I feel like it’s mocking me, showing me thousands of things I can’t go back to; thousands of things I can’t have. I want to burn it, to destroy it, but I can’t.
I spot one picture in the very middle. It’s the one with Cade holding his rabbit. Without thinking, I launch myself towards the wall and grab the paper with my fingertips. I don’t rip it as I pry it with a snap from the wall. When it’s in my hands, I shove it in the decorative box underneath my bed and stand back up. There’s a blank rectangle in the middle of the wall.
Cat sleeps with me again when I climb into my bed. The storm is a bit worse, casting more thunder and lightning, but slightly less rain. I try to sleep, listening to the sounds of the calming rain, but it doesn’t come. I toss and turn, left and right, on my stomach, on my back, but nothing seems to work. I debate getting up and going downstairs, but the thought of the cold stairs on my bare feet make me shiver.
“Why can’t I sleep?” I ask Cat, who’s looking up at me through slits in his eyes. He looks upset that I woke him, as if he was having a good dream.
As soon as he closes my eyes, I look up and I have my answer. It’s the damn spot in the middle of the wall.
I throw the covers off of me and stomp towards it, seething. I feel like it’s a real person, screaming at me from across the room. I know it’s missing the picture, the one with Cade and the bunny, but I refuse to put it back on the wall.
Instead, I find myself digging through the bedside table drawer and pulling out one of the remaining pictures of the whales. In the dark I tape it onto the wall and step back to investigate. I look at it without light. I hold my hands up like an art designer, observing it through my fingers. I do a spin and look at the wall, trying to tell if it’s noticeable. (it is) And I flick the light on. It fits perfectly in the square, but it’s horribly out of place.
It’s just not Cade.
But for tonight, it will have to do.