“Always pepperoni for him, and I chose something different every time. We’d eat it in the backyard.” I reach for his letter opener and look down at the engraved handle.R. St. Clair.“He always made sure he was home that week. No business trips or meetings.”
Even the last few years, we’d had dinner together on that day. We’d skipped the pizza. Our conversations hadn’t been lively or deep. They’d been what they always had been. Businesslike and demanding and, running like a current beneath the surface, our shared loss.
“That was thoughtful of him,” she says. “Do you miss him?”
“You’ve asked me that before.”
“I know. But sometimes questions have different answers.”
I brace my hands against the desk, the gold of my wedding band hard against the oak. A grown man’s hands indeed, like my father’s.
“Yes,” I say. “He was the last piece, you know? Connecting me back to my family. The last source of information about my mother and father.”
“He was your father’s father?”
“Yes.”
She rises from the floor in a smooth movement. Dark curls fall down her back, tickling the edge of her tank top. She walks to the wall and the framed picture that hangs there.
She plucks it off the wall, and my heart feels like it’s standing still in my chest. “These are your parents?”
“Yeah.”
She turns toward me, frame gripped tightly. There’s a smile on her lips. “You look like your dad a bit, but you have your mother’s smile. Not that you use it often enough.”
I swallow. “Right.”
“You look similar to your big brother too. I’ve always loved that about siblings. The same features but tossed together in a different order. How much older was Phillip?”
“Three years.”
“Did you look up to him?”
A memory breaks through, and I chuckle. “Yes. I followed him around everywhere when I was a kid. Every single interest he had, I picked up a week later, without fail.”
Cecilia smiles down at the picture, and then back up at me. “I have a feeling you were even more stubborn as a kid.”
“I’ve been told I was, yes.”
She walks around the desk, picture frame still in her grip. “Are they part of your nightmares? The time you lost them?”
I can’t get air into my lungs. They work, uselessly, against the tide of shame that rises up inside me. It had been too much to hope that she’d never bring them up.
In all the years I lived in this house, my grandfather had mentioned my nightmares exactly once, and then only to tell me to keep it down. They got rarer and rarer with the years, but fatigue or stress brought them out in full force. Or, it seemed, lusting painfully after Cecilia.
She puts the frame down on the desk and steps behind my chair, hands landing on my shoulders. “I’m sorry,” she says. “We can pretend I never asked.”
Her palms against my chest restarts my breathing. I look down at the frame, at the familiar image of all of us happy and blissfully unaware.
“Yes, they’re what I dream about.”
Her hand traces the scar through my shirt. It doesn’t surprise me that she’s put it together. What surprises me are my own words, slow and pained. “It was a car accident. A drunk driver. We were driving home from dinner in this very house, actually.”
“Oh.”
I grip her wrist and tug her around, pushing back from the desk. She settles onto my lap with a sigh. I fit my hands to her hips, pressing her tight against my chest. Something to hold on to.
“Dad and Phillip died right away. They were on the left side of the car, where the other car hit.”