"We are going to open a women's shelter," Richard piped in.
"Sammy's House," Kitty finished. "We wanted to tell you guys sooner, but there are a lot of legalities involved. We wanted to make sure we worked out all the kinks with the local governments, find employees, all that. We wanted to make it real first. But it's real now. We're moving forward. We thought... we thought that Sammy would have liked her trust money to go to helping other women. We just... we wanted to honor her correctly."
There was more crying that night.
At dinner with her parents, later when she talked with her brother, their legs kicking in the water as they sat off the side, and in bed with me.
I knew it for what it was.
More healing.
Pieces of the family being sewn back together.
And I suspected that it meant something that I had been allowed to be a part of it, that I was invited to the opening of the shelter at the beginning of the next year."Babe," I called, walking through the empty house, her parents having already said goodbye to us that morning before catching a plane of their own.
"Down here," she called back, making me turn direction back to the "kid wing" as her parents had called it, the part of the house where Reagan's, Luis's, and Sammy's rooms were located, where none of us had gone for the whole week we had been there.
"Is this your old room?" I asked, finding the bright pink walls in contrast with the woman I knew. But time made women out of girls. Who knew what she had liked all those years before.
"No. This is Sammy's old room," she told me, sitting on the top of a lacy bedspread, a small floral pillow clutched to her chest. "I left in such a rush, I never got to bring anything of hers with me," she told me, eyes moving around the pictures, the trophies, the knick knacks lining a small white desk. "Now, I don't know what to take," she admitted, sounding lost.
I moved over toward her, sitting down at her side. I remembered a moment much like this. After our mom passed. We all tried to find one thing of hers that we wanted to keep with us always. Scotti had earrings and a necklace, Kingston had her camera, Atlas got her passport that she'd never gotten any stamps in, Rush had her old keychain.
They'd all made their decisions so easily, without needing to give it much thought.
I'd been crippled by the options, unable to decide.
Until Kingston gave me a speech that I would now give to Reagan.
"Close your eyes," I suggested, repeating myself when she didn't immediately do so. "Now, think of a time you spent with Sammy. Not just any day. A really special day. A day that still makes you smile."
"We went to the beach. Not our beach. A normal beach for normal people. We were twelve and we'd never been to a normal beach. We never walked a boardwalk and we never squished in between other blankets, listened to someone else's radio blaring music we hated. We never rinsed off in a public outdoor shower that sprayed dirty sea water all over us, leaving us dry and itchy. But we loved it."
"What else did you two do?" I asked, not figuring there was much to go on with a sea water shower.
"We went to the arcade. God, it was so loud. All the dinging and sirens and kids squealing. It was amazing. I sucked at everything, but Sammy was amazing at skee-ball, something we never would have known if not for that day. Sammy had her eyes on this pair of heart-shaped sunglasses at the counter. She wanted to buy them. But, of course, they don't let you do that. They make you spend five times the amount to earn the tickets to buy the glasses. I was getting grumpy. I wanted to go get food, get home before our parents started to worry. But Sammy refused to leave until she got the sunglasses. She got them eventually. And she wore them every single day for the rest of that summer. Then she got me ice cream on the way home to shut me up about being hungry."
"Do you think Sammy kept the glasses?" I asked when she was done, smiling, but tears were moving down her cheeks.
"Sammy kept everything."
"Okay. Let's find them," I said, hopping off the bed, systematically working our way through the room until we found them in a box on the top shelf of the closet.
They were light pink, purple, and blue lenses with a silver heart-shaped frame. The kind of glasses that only worked on a young girl.
But Reagan slipped them on her face, beamed ear-to-ear, and turned back toward me.