This Raging Light (20 page)

“I'm going to call it a night,” he says.

“Karl, you come back here,” Andrew says. His black cashmere coat is brushed and clean. I can see that even in the dark, even as my mind is trying to catch up to the truth.

Smoking Guy—Karl, I guess—rocks back on his heels and lets out an irritated whistle.

“So you guys are . . . what?” Digby asks, blowing into his hands. “Some kind of vigilante do-gooder co-op?”

“We saw a need,” Mrs. Albertson says.

“You're good.” Wren takes Mrs. Albertson's hand. “You are a amazing person.”

I am in an alternate reality where people are nice and do things just because, and I can't find my feet.

“Karl is a friend of your mother's, you know,” Andrew says.

“‘Friend' might be overstating things. She helped me out once, Laura did,” he says. It's a raspy sort of quiet, like a voice that's not used to working. “I try not to forget.”

I'm afraid to ask, but I have to. “Do you know where she is?”

“Sorry,” he says.

“Or if she's coming back?” I press.

When he shakes his head, I let go of that momentary leaping hope that somehow they were all just temporarily covering for her, knowing she was on her way home.

“Would you want her if she did come back?” Karl asks me.

I don't know. I've never thought about this before. Would I? Will I want Dad? I just don't know.

“Why would you ask this girl such a question?” Mrs. Albertson barks.

I can suddenly picture the three of them in my house, in the store, fighting over what to get. The potpies had to be from Andrew. Smoking Guy mowed the lawn. Mrs. A probably cleaned the house and baked the muffins. Then I get it.

I never had any secrets. Not really.

“Why didn't you say something?” I ask. “To me. Why didn't you tell someone, report us? Why did you do all this?”

Mrs. Albertson says, “Most people in this town knew your mom and your Aunt Jan at one time or another. Gosh, I remember when they were kids and I lived down the street in the big house. They used to come by every so often. We try to take care of our people. You girls are our people.”

“What's running hard for you ran hard for them, too, back when,” Smoking Guy says. “You understand?”

I do. Aunt Jan raised Mom. They didn't have parents either.

“We didn't want you to feel alone,” Mrs. Albertson says, “because you're not.”

“And also, being a little tricky is good fun,” Andrew says.

“But now that we're here,” Mrs. Albertson says, “it might be the best thing if we let someone know what's been going on. We thought your mother might be gone a little while, but now it's going on too long.”

“Hang on. Hang on now,” Karl says. “We talked about this.”

“Karl's not a fan of the man,” Andrew says, tapping his fingers on the top of the car. “Let's go inside,” he says after a pause. “I have an idea.”

Digby kisses my head. “I'll take Wren in the house.”

Before they get to the door, Wren gives Smoking Guy Karl a freakishly long hug, which he looks like he wants to get out of like I'd want to get out of a vat of snakes.

“Okay, okay,” he says, shimmying out of Wren's grasp. “That's good. Good enough.” He sighs. “I told you, woman,” he says to Mrs. Albertson, “some things should never be known.”

It's a peculiar thing how the house changes after that. It feels fuller, somehow. Digby leaves to go back to the hospital. It's like my own empty battery recharged, and I can't sit still. I want to paint a zillion pictures and clean everything.

Chicken sizzles in the pan and pasta boils and Wren and I eat dinner, barely talking. It's good and crunchy and tender and buttery. Wren is going to be a rock-star chef someday, I swear it. She curls up on the couch and falls asleep before I can tell her to get upstairs, so I'm roaming around the house like it can answer me about what to do now. What to do until Digby comes back, until we know what's going to happen with Eden, until the rest of everything reveals itself.

One picture, even a zillion of them, won't do. Not tonight. I need more. So I paint the sky in Wren's room. I do it for her. I do it for Mom. I do it for Dad. I even do it for my dead Aunt Jan, whose breasts got sick and did her in so early and who was so much like me. Mostly, though, I do it for myself.

I'm surprised at how the brush feels in my hand. Just right, like it clicks into place, a piece of me I didn't know I was missing. Like last time. The blue covering the stains calms me.

In the morning I will be so tired, but right now I am free. I do all the cutting in, make every line perfect, and I am dancing a little myself. I take off Mom's jeans, and I am just me in my tank top and my underwear. And then I am rolling, rolling the blue blue I've Got the Blues all over everything, taking out every mark and stain and ugly that has layered our walls, and I am shaking my butt, listening to music on my headphones, even humming a little bit.

When I'm done, I take the white and I do the window frames, cover over the yellowing wood. I take my time, lost in every crease of the molding, every corner. It's bananas what paint does, how it makes everything better.

The sun is coming up. There will be
so much to do, so many more questions to ask, so many to try to answer, but right now I'm sitting in the middle of the room and I'm thinking how I made something lovely out of something so ugly. Like Andrew and Mrs. Albertson and Smoking Guy Karl did with me.

I want to understand my mother better, I think as I put all the clothes I have borrowed from her over the last months away, back into her drawers, quiet not to wake Wren. I want to know what makes a person do what she's done. I've been thinking that maybe it has something to do with the fact that her parents died when she was so young. Neither of my parents has any parents. That seems crazy to me.

Maybe Mom walked out because her sister raised her and she knew it could be done, figured I could handle it till Dad got back. Maybe she thought the two of them together were poison now and that we would be better off with just him, or maybe she's going to come back and this will all slip into a gray moment in the past.

For some people, like Janie, I think kids are what holds them to the earth, and for others, like John, it's their work. Maybe for Mom it was Dad, and without him the way she had always thought of him, she just floated away. The number 1031, the day she met Dad, was her key to everything, right? Maybe she tried to make a family with him in spite of the odds, tried to create the thing she always wished she had, and when it didn't work she fell apart.

Or maybe she didn't think at all. It's possible that she just couldn't anymore and that's as deep as it goes, I guess. I hang her skirt, the one I wore to Philly, back in her closet, then venture into my own room. It looks like somewhere I used to live. Bed made. Pictures of me and Eden. Pictures of me and my family stuck in the frame around my dresser mirror. It's cool and quiet in here.

This looks like a normal person's room, but I know what I have in me. I am a hell-breathing fire monster and I will not totter. I really did jump into a freezing river to pull Eden out. I would never walk out on Wren, and if Dad ever goes crazy again when he gets back, I will burn him up in my tiger dragon flames.

I am going to hold me to the ground because I can. And I know now how many hands I have to catch me if I fall down. Eden was wrong about some things after all. She was wrong about Digby and me. I like to think she knew that, that her soul has gotten to fly around some and when she came to visit us that night, she was telling me with her smile that she knew all the good things coming my way, that I would open my eyes and finally be able to see it all. And if it doesn't work, if Digby doesn't want to hold my hand anymore and I wind up all smashed up, I will bootstrap it until I'm whole again. Explain to me what the point of living is if you aren't willing to fight for the truths in your heart, to risk getting hurt.

You have to rage.

I lie in my bed, between my sheets, and try to let myself drift off.

But then I am missing my mom so much. I would take her back in, because I want to forgive her. I feel her smooth hand on my face, on my cheek, as my body starts to get light.

I am remembering her saying,
You have a hero's heart, Skip-to-My-Lu.

Almost one week since Eden,
and it's been a lifetime.

The smell of breakfast wakes me up. Wren is at the stove. She's rearranged some things, put cups where plates used to be, herbs and spices within reach. Everything that was haphazard about the way Mom did things makes sense under Wren's thumb. She's so . . . efficient in there.

I'm a wreck, but I feel completely awake anyway. Maybe it's some kind of creative magic. I heard artists can stay up for days at a time when they're in a zone. It wasn't a painting on a canvas, but there was magic in it. Later I'm sure I'll crash hard, but not now. For now I'm going to grind out this day.

I go into my bottom drawer, find my overalls, and slip them on over a black long-sleeved shirt. I brush my teeth, wash my face. As I'm drying I look at myself, and I don't hate what I see. Blue eyes. Dirty-blond hair. A puffy lower lip. Not-too-shabby eyelashes. Me. Not perfect. Not bad. Not Mom. Just me. I feel like me.

I go downstairs.

“I think I want bangs,” Wren says as she flips an egg into a perfect over-easy. “Can we do that?”

“Sure,” I say. “I'll ask Val where she got hers.”

She pushes bread down in the toaster.

“You painted my room,” she says, an elbow on the counter. “The way I wanted.”

I feel myself grin.

“That's awesome.” Pretty soon two gorgeous eggs and toast appear before me.

“Thank you,” I say.

She takes a ketchup bottle. Writes
LOVE YOU
across my eggs all in red.

I don't like ketchup on my eggs and she knows this, but today I eat them anyway and the ketchup is a sloppy kind of sweet.

“I don't want to go to Fred's anymore. It makes me tired. I can stay home alone,” she tells me.

She's determined. I can see that in the way she's rinsing off the frying pan.

“I have to talk to you about something.”

She turns off the water.

“Mrs. A said maybe she could watch you, maybe sleep here until my birthday or until Mom or Dad come back. If that happens.”

“It will.”

“Yeah. You're probably right.”

I can feel Mom, out there somewhere. The waves are going to roll her back through the door. I don't expect she will be holding me up, though. I expect to catch her where she falls.

“Anyway,” I go on, “Mrs. A would still mostly be at her house, but that way if anyone comes to look at the house and see how we're doing, they'll be able to see that we have someone helping. Like if you do talk to that lady at school or something. Because like we said, you don't have to keep secrets anymore.” Wren only briefly stops what she's doing, then goes back to it. “She's going to be in Mom's room sometimes, okay?”

“Okay,” she says.

“So I'm going to go back in my room, and you're going to go back in yours, okay?”

“Okay,” she says. “Do you think she likes to bake?”

A glob of butter slides across her shirt when she goes to eat her toast.

Which is when there's a knock at the door. It could be one of about ten people at this point. Maybe it's Smoking Guy, coming to bring the battery for the car. It's not, though. It's who I hoped it would be.

“Hi there, Digby Jones,” I say to his beautiful face, take his sweet hand in mine.

“Hi there, Lucille Bennett.” He's wild, a wild thing standing there, like everything got loosed at once.

“What's going on?” It's barely seven thirty. I tug at him. “Do you want to come in?”

No, he tells me. He wants me to come out. Wren too. Right now.

Because she blinked.

Eden blinked.

The writing of a book (this one, anyway) is a long and winding road, one impossible to contend with in the absence of many hands, much inspiration, and the creativity of an entire city, never mind a village. To start, without my brother Chris—we aren't twins, but I wouldn't be without you, would NEVER be without you. Without my super-rebel parents, Dhyan Eagleton and Michel Meiffren; my brother, Gabriel, and sisters Renee, Celeste, and Lili; my twenty-some cousins; and my many uncles and aunties, I would probably be much better adjusted and therefore would never have written this novel. So thank you for being the brave wildlings you all are.

Joy Romero, Jessie Woodall, Laine Overley, Shandra vom Dorp, and Mindy Laks, my dead body friends, I'm honored to walk this world with all of you. Niko, Satya, Kaelin, Ryder, Ruby, Oliver, Brytin, Louis, Violet, Janie, and Mechi, I love you.

Cory, thanks for not being surprised. I am so glad I had my babies with you and so grateful for our many years together.

Eliam, my writing brother-in-arms, thank you for the perfect Philly day, for all the years of friendship that came before it, and for those that will follow. You are amazing.

Stu McKee, you have been the sweetest boy BFF for twenty years. May there be twenty more.

Thanks to Alex Eagleton, Elena Eagleton, Sarah Eagleton, Dani Kraiem, Robin Eagleton, SJ Drummey, Eric Rosse, Jill Bailey, Stephanie Payne, Tobias Duncan, Elisa Romero, Laura Evelyn, Amanda Jane, Amber Pinnow, Charly Mabry, Prairie Rose, Jesika Brenna, Zena Hodges, Robert Sandoval, Oliver Charity, David Adjmi, Bonnie Pipkin, Tessa Roehl, Rachel Bell, Anais Rumfelt, Andrew Nowick, Cynthia Olguin, the whole vom Dorp clan, Dora McQuaid, the Robinsons, Erin Eagleton, Ted Wiard, Lisa Lastra, and Pamela Pereyra, for your general badassery. Each of you in some way made this book possible, whether by accidental inspiration, with drives across the country, kind words in difficult moments, or in leading by example with your fierce creativity and resilience. I am lucky beyond measure to know each of you, to have you in my life.