You Don't Live Here Page 3

  “If you’d rather stay in the guest room—” Eleanor began doubtfully.

  “No, this is good,” I said. “I mean, this is great. I mean, thank you.”

  I wanted to be as little of an inconvenience as possible. To be a good houseguest, or whatever I was. I needed my grandparents to like the idea of having me around, because without them, I was screwed. Without them, it was Child Protective Services, which led to my dad, whose sole communications after ditching us were the emails he sent every year on my birthday. I deleted them unread.

  I wasn’t supposed to know that he was living in Bangkok, giving food tours, but I did. I’d found him one night on an internet deep dive, cringing with secondhand embarrassment at the pictures of him driving a tuk-tuk in a company T-shirt. His beard was patchy with gray, and he’d finished his tattoo sleeve. That was what he’d left us for. Not a successful music career, after all. Not even close.

  It had been a relief when he hadn’t flown in for the funeral. Or bothered to see how I was doing. But maybe he didn’t know. Maybe he’d deleted my grandparents’ email unread.

  “Bathroom’s just here,” Eleanor went on, opening the door to what I had initially taken for a closet. “There are fresh towels in the cabinet. Shampoo, conditioner, whatever you might need. Oh, and I almost forgot the most important thing: After you use the shower, you have to squeegee the glass.”

  “Squeegee the glass,” I echoed.

  “From top to bottom,” she elaborated.

  She said this as though it was perfectly normal.

  “There’s a squeegee in the shower,” my grandfather added helpfully, in case I might have worried I was expected to provide my own.

  “Great,” I said. “Thank you. For, um, everything.”

  “Well, of course, you’re family,” Eleanor said, moving toward me, like I was about to get some awkward hug that was all hands. Instead, she took back the dog.

  After they left, I changed into my pajamas and crawled under the covers. In the cool darkness, I could hear footsteps on the stairs, the soft gurgle of pipes, the thud of a door being shut.

  It was strange, realizing that these noises were unfamiliar to me, but to my mom, they were all part of the house she’d grown up in. Was this what it had sounded like when she fell asleep at night, before my dad and I were even a speck in the distance? Or maybe even when she was pregnant with me, over some school break, before her parents figured it out and lost their minds over their perfect daughter wrecking her perfect future?

  My existence had always been a burden to them. And now, staying here, I was even more of a burden. It wasn’t fair. Any of it. So many people who had stood within shouting distance of us both got to keep on living the same lives. Or at the very least, got to keep on living.

  On my classmates’ Instagrams, the earthquake had already become a meme. This weird earthquake expert interviewed on the news had gone viral, and now the whole thing was an enormous internet joke. Whenever I opened Instagram, it made me want to scream.

  I burrowed deeper under the covers, until I felt the edge of the bed with my toes, until the duvet was over my head, and I was breathing in my own warm breath. You could die like this. Suffocate from the carbon dioxide expelled by your own body. The idea sent a shiver through me. All I had to do was stay like this long enough and the nightmare would be over.

  And then I was ashamed I’d ever had that thought.

  “Mom,” I whispered. “I miss you.”

  No one had warned me grief would be like this. I ached so much that it felt like a vital part of me had been removed. And I didn’t know how I was still living and breathing without it. Without her.

  There, in the privacy of her childhood bedroom, I fell quietly to pieces, sobbing into her pillow with my jaw locked open, the tears hot and salty and never ending.

  The things I was feeling didn’t have words, didn’t have a name.

  I poked a tunnel in the covers, the cold air rushing in, clearing my head, and suddenly I was exhausted. It seemed impossible that, a week ago, I’d been concerned with nothing, with yearbook headlines and shoplifted erasers. That the chasm between one Wednesday and another could stretch so wide.

  Chapter 5

  I DROWNED IN MY GRIEF, and when I was done drowning, when I bobbed to the surface of that summer, it was already over.

  The backyard pool was my refuge. I sat out there every afternoon, reading the childhood classics from my mother’s bookshelf, trying to lose myself in Narnia and Xanth and Tortall.

  Instead, I lost May, June, July, and the better part of August. I was sleepy all of the time, which was a new and surprising side effect of my chronic sadness. I had trouble concentrating on people, conversations, meals. And I cried at the drop of a hat. I used to be the stoic one, dry-eyed during death scenes on our favorite TV shows, making fun of my mom for needing a tissue. Now, I wept unexpectedly during breakup scenes in cheesy movies and sad songs on old playlists. I even cried over the scent of Kérastase shampoo in the shower, which my mom always brought home from the salon and had gifted to my grandmother at Christmas. No matter what I was doing, I was moments away from tears. They hovered just beneath the surface, along with the French for Hello, my name is Sasha and the catchy lyrics of a pop song that was getting beaten to death on the radio.

  On the upside, my grandparents weren’t around that much. They kept busy, too busy, which I knew was their way of coping. They filled the painful hours with trivial commitments, and I was strangely grateful for it, since it meant that having me around was less of an inconvenience.

  I hid on a different floor when the maid came twice a month, and I felt impossibly awkward whenever I ran into her and she asked if I needed anything. Even after a summer together, Eleanor and Joel still felt like strangers, whose lives and habits baffled me. Once, in search of a Band-Aid, I’d caught my grandfather on the floor of their bedroom, doing push-ups in his underwear. Another time, I’d opened the freezer and found it full of my grandmother’s face creams. And so I tiptoed around them in a cloud of grief, while they fluttered around me in one of cautious politeness.

  It wasn’t until the end of August that everything seemed to click back into focus. I brought my book out to the pool as usual, but everything felt different, clearer, like life was starting over again, the way Fitzgerald always claimed it did in the fall.

  My grandmother was at Zumba, and my grandfather was at the office, doing lawyering. I had therapy later—that summer it seemed I was always in the waiting room of that unpleasantly cold medical center, pretending to be occupied on my phone while my grandmother leafed through celebrity magazines.

  I made progress in the therapy sessions, googling late into the night to figure out what I should say so my grandparents didn’t worry. I didn’t want them to think that they were stuck with some depressing, broken person moping around their life.

  That afternoon, like every other, I got out a plastic float and propped my book on my chest, squinting at it through my sunglasses.

  It was incredibly peaceful, having the entire pool to myself. And then there was the view. In the bright morning sunshine, the ocean was everywhere. It was as though we were floating in it, suspended in glass. The air carried a salty tang, and seagulls screeched and swooped overhead.

  This sun-bleached stretch reminded me of the book I was reading, set on the French Riviera, of the poolside parties at an Art Deco chateau. I closed my eyes and imagined I was there, a raucous 1930s soiree all around me, with glamorous actresses sipping cocktails and sad-eyed young artists memorizing every detail.

  Except, the way I imagined it, I wasn’t one of the gorgeous women. I was one of the artists, collecting it all. I pictured myself reaching for my camera, capturing those wild parties. Which was a good feeling, because I hadn’t wanted to photograph anything in a long time. Not since the first public exhibition of my work had been my mother’s funeral.

  I got out of the pool to make some lunch, and Pearl trailed after me, letting
out a string of insistent whines and then racing up and down the hallway. It was pretty cute.

  “Um, hi,” I said. “Do you want to go for a walk?”

  She went crazy, taking off toward the front door.

  “Guess that’s a yes,” I mumbled.

  I could walk a dog. I was capable of that much, I told myself. So I scooped her up and clipped on her leash, letting her lead me around the neighborhood. I hadn’t been outside much, hadn’t left the house unless it was absolutely necessary. My mother’s room—now mine—felt like enough world, and when I got restless there was always the kitchen and the backyard. Seeing just how far in every direction my new life extended, that there was an entire town full of people just beyond the walls of my grandparents’ house, startled me.

  A shirtless older gentleman was backing a golf cart out of his driveway, his face shadowed by a baseball cap. Long-haired blond boys played a game of street hockey at the end of a cul-de-sac. An Asian grandmother in an enormous sun visor, Darth Vader style, power-walked down the opposite side of the street.

  I didn’t recognize any of them. We were neighbors, I guessed, but it didn’t feel like it, and I wondered if it ever would.

  Eventually, Pearl dragged me back toward the house, stopping to roll around on someone’s lawn. Their grass was freshly cut, and the little green shavings stuck to her white fluff like spikes. She stared up at me, panting in a way that seemed like smiling.

  “You look like a tiny dragon,” I said, bending down to brush her off. She whined, hating it. I wasn’t sure what kind of dog she was. My grandparents had rescued her from a shelter where my grandmother did a lot of fund-raising, and their thoughts were: part Maltese, part Bichon. My thoughts were: part dandelion, part hyperactive marshmallow.

  “Hey,” someone called, startling me.

  It was a boy around my age, with dark curly hair and a varsity jacket, although he didn’t look like much of an athlete. He was standing on the curb, two houses down from my grandparents’ place, carrying a grocery bag full of snacks. He had on a pair of neon-green wayfarers, which he pushed up into his hair, squinting at me.

  I wasn’t expecting him. I wasn’t expecting to have to talk to someone, especially a boy my age. He had a Baycrest High School insignia on his ocean-blue varsity jacket. I was supposed to go there, I knew, but I’d tried not to think about it. The summer had seemed endless, until suddenly it wasn’t, and ads for spiral-bound notebooks and back-to-school fashion had appeared in the local mailers.

  “You’re not a dog thief, are you?” he asked pleasantly.

  “Only on alternate Tuesdays,” I said, surprising myself with how easily the joke spilled out. But then, I was good at keeping up appearances. I always had been.

  “Well, that’s a relief.” He grinned.

  “I tell you that I steal dogs twice a month, and you’re relieved?” I asked, frowning.

  “Eh, I’m chaotic neutral,” he replied, walking over and sticking out his hand. “Adam. I live here. In this house.”

  “Sasha. My grandparents live there, in that house,” I said, waving toward it.

  His hand was still out, so I shook it briefly, thrown by the formality. He was more eccentric-looking close up, and the script on his varsity jacket read Academic Decathlon, which I hadn’t known it was possible to letter in.

  “Have you been here all summer?” he asked.

  “Um, pretty much.”

  “We just got back this week,” he said. “School starts on Monday.”

  Did it? I hadn’t been paying attention. Today was Thursday. No, Friday. Because therapy.

  “Getting a head start on your school spirit?” I asked, gesturing at his letter jacket.

  “Psh, my school spirit is perpetual,” he said. “What’s your excuse?”

  I was confused for a moment, and then I realized I was wearing one of my old RHS shirts. Randall High Lion Pride, my chest advertised.

  “Oh, this?” I shrugged, keeping a straight face. “Yves Saint Laurent is having an exceptionally weird fashion moment.”

  “Aren’t they always?” he returned, not missing a beat.

  And then a low-slung white Mercedes pulled up. A gorgeous Asian girl in cat-eye sunglasses and bright red lipstick lowered the passenger side window. Françoise Hardy crooned loudly for a few moments before she turned the stereo down.

  She stared at us, and I stared back, fascinated. I couldn’t stop staring. She felt like someone I had conjured from the pages of my book. Even though she was around my age, I couldn’t possibly imagine her sitting in a high school cafeteria with a sack lunch and a binder full of math homework. She seemed somehow better than that, and more interesting.

  “Hi,” she said, and it took me a moment to realize she meant me.

  “Um, hi,” I said, feeling self-conscious in my dog-walking clothes.

  “Let’s go!” she called. “Club presidents have to get there early, remember?”

  “Trust me, no one’s gonna care!” Adam yelled back, and then swiveled toward me with a sheepish grin. “That’s my ride. See you around?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  The girl turned the music back up as Adam climbed into the passenger seat. She said something, but I couldn’t hear what. And then the car swung around, white paint gleaming in the sun and music trailing from the windows like smoke as the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen sped away.

  Chapter 6

  LIFE REALLY WAS STARTING OVER IN the fall, because my grandparents were going out on Saturday night, and they were taking me with them. To dinner. “As a family.”

  I let that phrase hang there, not even wanting to merit it with a response.

  “Cocktail attire,” my grandmother warned. “No jeans.”

  I didn’t own any cocktail attire, seeing as how I wasn’t old enough to drink one. But I knew where I could find some.

  I’d gone into my mom’s old closet just once, during my first few days in Bayport, when I was half out of my mind with grief. Tears had bubbled up, hot and fast, as I ran my fingers over the abandoned pieces of my mother’s unfinished life. The soft college sweatshirt. The vintage prom dress. The thrift store finds she’d loved even back when she was my age. I couldn’t help myself: I’d sat down at the bottom of the closet, closed the door with me inside, and bawled.

  Now when I pulled open the door, my hands only shook the tiniest bit.

  It’s just a closet, I told myself. It’s just a dress.

  I almost believed it.

  I took out a cream-colored sheath that looked like it might fit. The dress was a little snug, but thankfully it zipped. I stared at myself in the mirror. My hair was a lighter shade of brown than my mother’s, but it had the same wave. My bangs had grown out from neglect, parting like curtains. Without them to hide behind, her face stared back at me. The barely there freckles, the wide brown eyes, the lashes that could never hold a curl.

  I was a lesser version: shorter, curvier, with a rounder face and a sharper nose. A knockoff of the original.

  Except not even that, because I wasn’t anything like her in the ways that actually mattered. My mom was charming and brave and immediately likable. She made a great first impression, whereas people tended to forget they’d ever met me. She was forever chatting with strangers in checkout lines or singing along to the car radio or wearing enormous vintage earrings.

  I was never going to be her. But I also wasn’t going to snap back into being me again. And that was the part I couldn’t quite wrap my head around. The earthquake and its aftermath had changed me, and I wasn’t quite sure who this new person staring back at me from the mirror was, or who she was supposed to be.

  “We’re leaving in five,” my grandfather called, his voice floating up the stairs.

  “I’ll be ready!” I called back.

  I twisted my hair up, put on a quick swipe of winged liner, and stepped into my ballet flats. When I came downstairs, my grandparents were waiting, calm and cool and perfectly pressed as always. My gra
ndfather in his pink Hermès tie with little elephants on it. My grandmother in a beige leather jacket and black silk pants, her hair in a French twist.

  They stared at me, and I saw the pain in their eyes. I was the ghost of the daughter they’d lost.

  “White?” Eleanor said, pursing her lips, her haunted expression clearing as she surveyed my dress. “It’s almost Labor Day.”

  “Should I change?” I asked, unsure.

  “It’s fine,” she said.

  “You look beautiful,” my grandfather added.

  The dress had been a mistake.

  I knew that as my grandfather maneuvered his car through the weekend traffic down on Ocean, the three of us sitting in awkward silence. Now, instead of just leaving the house, we’d also left the neighborhood. It was a lot. I thought wistfully of the Korean drama I’d been watching in bed, full of ridiculous fashion and even more ridiculous hair, about a girl masquerading as her twin brother to join a boy band. I’d just gotten to a good part.

  The radio was turned too low, and was just that type of jazz that gets piped into waiting rooms, but my grandfather tapped along on the steering wheel anyway as he turned through the gates to the Bayport Country Club.

  “This is dinner?” I asked, confused. I’d been expecting a restaurant.

  “They have excellent food here,” my grandfather promised. “Best dinner rolls I’ve ever had. Served warm. And don’t even get me started on the salmon.”

  “Sounds great,” I said, forcing myself to smile.

  I stared at the massive Craftsman-style building, all exposed beams and geometric windows that overlooked the ocean. Now the whole cocktail attire thing made sense. My grandparents weren’t trying to make “dinner as a family” feel special. We’d gotten dressed up because there was literally a dress code.

  “Some of our friends will be here tonight,” Eleanor said, studying me with a frown. She reached forward and smoothed back a loose wisp of my hair. “And some of their grandchildren. We thought it might be nice for you to make friends before school starts.”