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Table of Contents
A Q&A with Sarah Ockler, author of Fixing Delilah
Copyright Page
For my mother, Sharon Ockler,
who keeps the family stories,
photographs, and treasures,
and for my father, Steven Ockler,
whose love of maple sugar candy found
its way to Red Falls.
fix n
1: a position from which it is difficult to escape; a predicament
fix v
1: to repair something broken, damaged, or spoiled; to mend
2: to make amends for something wrong
3: to restore a relationship by resolving a disagreement or rift
Chapter one
“Claire? It’s Rachel. I’m afraid I have some bad news.”
Chapter two
Mom and I didn’t sleep last night. She spent the predawn hours packing and mail-forwarding and making lists with colored Sharpies while I hung out on the couch, drinking cold coffee and trying not to ask too many questions. I was in enough trouble already—and that was before Aunt Rachel’s phone call sent her into overdrive and hijacked my summer plans.
“Here we go,” Mom says now, clicking the power locks and backing us down the driveway in the dark blue Lexus sedan. Actually, it’s a black sapphire pearl Lexus sedan, not dark blue. The bill for the custom paint job is tacked to the bulletin board over my desk—a constant reminder that I still owe her for the dent-and-scratch combo I added when she was out of town last month.
Including the backpack between my feet and a long black dress for the funeral, I brought three bags of stuff for the whole tragic summer. The rest of the black sapphire pearl trunk and the cashmere leather interior is full of Mom’s matching luggage and carefully labeled boxes of file folders, gel pens, computer cables, a printer-scanner–fax machine, and—should she be required during our dysfunctional family trip to showcase her management prowess—a collection of smartly tailored pantsuits in taupe, navy, and classic black.
“Left turn in four. Hundred. Feet.”
An invisible electronic woman navigates us toward the highway from the distant planet Monotone, where everyone is tranquil and directionally adept, but Mom isn’t listening. As vice president of marketing for DKI Group—“the most prestigious branding firm on the east coast”—Mom gets multitasking. She could eat a bagel, scan the morning headlines, and get to I-78 with her eyes closed. Even deprived of sleep she drives effortlessly, one hand on the wheel, the other tapping manicured fingers on the dash-mounted touch-screen phone. It takes her eight separate calls to her assistant’s voice mail to convey what I did in one text message to my non-boyfriend, Finn:
major family shit going down. off 2 vermont
4 the summer. L8trs.
“Merge on right. In one. Point five. Miles.”
Mom checks her rearview and eases the Lexus into the right lane. “Eyes on the road, mind on the goal, and everything will be okay,” she says, patting the steering wheel. It’s her corporate road-warrior mantra, and she’s already said it three times this morning. Usually, Mom’s mantras are pretty poster-worthy. Mom on doing homework without her help: The more you put into it, the more you get out of it. Mom on working weekends: You’ve got to plant the seeds of hard work to reap the harvest of a satisfied client. Mom on home cooking: I’m stuck at the office tonight, Del. There’s money in the coffee canister for pizza or Indian.
I want to believe her today, but the view isn’t looking too hot from the passenger seat.
Despite all evidence to the contrary, I’m really not the car-denting kind of girl. I’m also not the lipstick-stealing, school-skipping, off-in-the-woods-with-someone-I-barely-know kind of girl, or the kind who loses all of her dignity over a scandalous cell phone picture on a trashy blog. But that is the evidence, exhibits A through E, all stacked up against me, and now I’m like the bad guy on one of those cop shows, handcuffed to an airplane seat. Only instead of getting the handsome, tough-but-emotionally-wounded police escort, I’m stuck on a seven-hour road trip with Commander Mom and her arsenal of mobile communications devices.
I turn away from her and put on my sunglasses so she can’t see the tears stinging my eyes, but it’s too late.
“Delilah, we’ve been over this already. You can’t stay here in Key. Period.” She says it like it’s some big edict passed down by the Supreme Court. It’s all I can do not to play the “I wish my father was around, because he’d [insert better parenting strategy here]” card.
Mom continues, tapping my leg for emphasis. “It’s not just the sneaking out or the shoplifting.” Tap, tap, tap.
“How many times do I have to tell you?” I ask. “It was an accident!” It was. I didn’t even realize the lipstick was still in my hand when I walked out of Blush Cosmetics yesterday, bored and tired from wandering the mall alone.
“An accident,” Mom says. “Like the car? Like your grades?” She shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter, Delilah. There’s a lot of work to do up there.” Tap, tap, tap. “Other issues aside, you’d still be going with me.”
Right. I’m letting her think she’s won an important strategic battle in our ongoing war, but if things were different between us, more like they used to be, I’d want to go—not just because I need a break from Finn and pretty much everyone I know in Pennsylvania, but because nothing would be as important as helping my mother and aunt through this tragedy and tying up its many loose ends—the three remaining Hannaford women united and strong as an unsinkable ship.
But things aren’t different. She’s her and I’m me and surrounding us is an ocean of mess and misunderstanding, full of pirates and sharks just waiting to see who slips in first.
“Stay on interstate. Seventy-eight for. Fifty. Miles.”
After the directive, Mom cranks the air and switches off the freakishly calm GPS woman. Back here on planet Stress, it’s just the two of us, all the unsaid stuff made more unbearable by the artificial cold.
“Now that I have a captive audience,” she says, setting us on cruise control as the road opens up, “who did you sneak out with last night?”
Last night.
You’d think someone who’s seen you half-naked would be a little more enthusiastic about picking you up on time. Not Finn “forty-five minutes late” Gallo. From the driver’s seat of his old silver 4Runner, Finn crushed a spent butt into the ashtray and turned down the radio, blowing out a plume of blue smoke from between his lips. He didn’t say anything, like, “Thanks for waiting in the dark for me,” or “I’m sorry I put your life in danger with my lateness,” or “Allow me to apologize with this exquisite lavender rose bouquet.” He just pulled me to his mouth with one hand cool and firm on the back of my neck and somehow made up for everything bad he’d ever done in his whole entire life.
At our spot in the woods by Seven Mile Creek, Finn parked between two big pine trees and killed the engine. He asked me what was up, and I shrugged. I’d spent the whole night arguing with Mom about Blush Cosmetics and didn’t feel like talking. Finn and I aren’t that good at talking, anyway.
So we didn’t.
Aunt Rachel says that the universe is always trying to speak to us, and that the universe doesn’t waste time speaking about things that aren’t within our direct power to influence or change. But if that’s true, the universe needs a better signal. Because when Finn kisses me, hot and fast like each time might be the last, everything else in my life goes like the New England evergreens in a morning fog: gray, hazy, and just about gone.
Last night, I felt the familiar solidity of Finn’s body against mine, midnight air cool on my cheeks, rocks and sticks and living things pinned beneath me, bits of moon falling through the branches
in the tall pines bent over us. At the end of it all, Finn sucked a crackle from another cigarette and stood, reaching down to help me to my feet. I shook out the blankets and rolled them up and he pulled the leaves from my hair. One by one they floated and swirled and fell to my feet, and when he flashed his up-to-no-good smile with the moonlight soft and blue on his skin, I wanted to stay there forever. To hide. To forget. To numb the dull ache of something missing. To erase my mother and her expensive car and late nights at the office. To fill the empty spaces left by my father, killed before I was even born, with something other than endless unanswerable questions.
But it was time. Finn dropped me off on the corner. He called me Lilah with that devious smile and shook his head in that “you’re nothing but trouble” sort of way that gives me chills, but he didn’t say good-bye. Or wave. Or wait in the shadows until I was safely back in my house. He just drove away, and I walked on in the other direction, the distance between two points growing long and cold.
When I got back inside, Mom was there on the edge of my bed, a new eyebrow crease invented especially for the occasion of my tumbling through the open window at two in the morning with leaves in my hair.
“Get in here, Delilah,” she said, tugging me the rest of the way inside. I’m not playing games. Only she didn’t actually say the games part. She didn’t have to. I climbed in and sat on the bed and chewed on my thumbnail as she recounted the last fifteen minutes in alternating bursts of finger-wagging and foot-stomping. She’d been waiting for me (wag) in the bedroom (stomp) the entire time (wag) with news from Aunt Rachel.
I spit out a piece of my thumbnail and met her eyes, matching the curious exasperation behind them as she passed along her sister’s announcement, direct from the staff at Maple Valley Hospital up in Vermont.
Elizabeth Rose Hannaford, the grandmother whose name I hadn’t been allowed to speak in over eight years, was dead.
“I told you last night,” I say to Mom, inching down the window to thaw the freeze in the car. “I needed some air.”
Mom’s voice is about to jump an octave. I see it coming and make a silent little wish on the dash lights that somewhere among all those tailored pantsuits she’s packed her Xanax. For now, I imagine how much better life would be for all of us if her lectures were delivered through the GPS device.
“Delilah. I had. To. Leave work yesterday. To. Pick. You up from Blush.” In six point. Four. Miles.
“So?”
“You were supposed to be grounded! You almost got arrested yesterday!” she says, as if I could forget the detective’s dramatic lecture on the downfall of our nation’s youth. “One more dollar in merchandise,” he’d warned, knuckle jabbing my shoulder, “and we’d have to press charges.”
“Prisoners don’t deserve air?” I ask. “Why don’t you just pull off my fingernails next time.”
“Unbelievable, Delilah. I really thought I could count—”
Bzzzz.
“Hang on. I have to get this.” Mom touches a button on the dash and activates her public persona. “Claire Hannaford speaking.”
She has a plaque on her desk at work by the phone:
SMILE before you dial! SMILING helps you sound more relaxed on the phone!
She does it, too. Even in the car. No wonder she’s so great at rebranding entire corporations for DKI. She rebrands herself every fifteen minutes.
I lower my window all the way down and stick out my arm. The breeze whooshes through my fingers and carries my hand over the highway, zooming past lines of orange cones and construction signs until Mom nudges my ribs. “I’m on the phone,” she mouths, still smiling but eyes mad and wide as she circles her finger in the international gesture for “roll up the windows.” I pretend to turn the nonexistent crank on the door. She raises my window from the button on her side and locks the controls.
“Sorry for the background noise,” she continues into the earpiece. “Yes, the final invoice was sent on Thursday with a thirty-day grace.”
The sun is fully up now, bleaching the sky from orangey-pink to a pale, sad white. Corpse-white. It’s horrendously early and the daylight hurts the stuff behind my eyes. It rained earlier this morning, though—right after I heard about our disastrous summer plans, which I thought was fitting. Now the road is all patent-leathery and sets our wheels to a whisper, raspy and hypnotic like the ocean. The sound reminds me of this Memorial Day road trip Mom and I took to the Connecticut coast when I was six—just the two of us. New London—only time I’ve ever seen the ocean. We couldn’t swim the first day because it rained, so we just walked along the shore with bright yellow raincoats buttoned up over our bathing suits, looking for shells and sea glass and dizzy little hermit crabs. The rain kept coming the next day, so we stayed inside the motel eating Doritos from the vending machine and watching movies on cable—a luxury for us back in Mom’s pre-DKI days. Even when I accidentally pulled the pin out of the motel fire extinguisher and shot a blast of white across the floor, she laughed, chasing after my little white footprints as I ran into the bathroom to hide. On the last day, the sun came out and we swam in the ocean, no lifeguards, just Mom’s hand firm in mine as the waves crashed around us.
On the way back to Pennsylvania, late at night on the road, she smoothed her hand on my cheek and sang classic rock songs with the radio on low, and I pretended to be asleep so she wouldn’t stop.
After her call, Mom clicks on the radio and I turn away, my breath fogging the glass of the passenger window. As the all-news-all-the-time station drones on about the latest economic trends, I trace a bead of leftover rain along the bottom edge of the window and watch it pass over my shoulder. Sometimes I think about telling Mom how much I hate being home alone every afternoon, turning on the television just to pretend there’s company. All those takeout dinners at the big dining room table, chairs empty, invisible guests eating invisible soup and drinking made-up wine in my head. I want to shake her and scream and tell her that for all her hard work to secure our future, the snake plants in the foyer know more about my life than she does. That I’d strike a single match and raze the whole damn place to the ground if it meant we could start over with nothing but the ocean, potato chip vending machines, and free cable.
Then again, I don’t need an arson charge on my record.
“At this rate, we’ll never get there,” Mom says, turning toward me to check the right lane as she merges back in. In the stifling beige-ness of the car interior, she looks weak and defeated and ten years older than she did yesterday, before she knew her mother was dead. She wears it like makeup—a paper-thin layer of unwavering resolve flaking away to reveal all the broken parts underneath.
“Mom, I’m… I’m really sorry about—”
Bzzzz.
“Hold on, Delilah.” Mom keeps one hand on the wheel, the other searching for the right button, fingers poking around the dash like a bird for worms as the unsaid end of my sympathy stumbles and slips back down my throat. On the phone, Claire Hannaford Speaking betrays none of our troubles, but as she engages her award-winning, smile-as-you-dial communication skills for the caller, a thing that’s been sitting like a rock at the bottom of my stomach grows an ounce heavier.
Dread.
Cold and unmoving, it drips with the murky memories of that place we’re going to. That place where she and Aunt Rachel shared their childhoods and, though my recollections are hazy, where I spent part of mine. That place I was ordered to forget right after my grandfather’s funeral more than eight years ago. That place yanked suddenly from the dark of the cellar, all those black-tarred Hannaford secrets still stuck to it like giant, undustable cobwebs.
The tension is crawling across my skin and making me itch.
I dig a Snickers bar from my backpack and offer Mom the first bite, but she refuses, waving her hand in front of me as if shooing a fly. After her call, she lets out a long sigh, tugging the phone device from her ear and flipping the GPS back on.
“Recalculating route for. Red Falls
. Vermont.”
“Mom?”
“Not now, Delilah. I’m driving.”
“Location triangulated,” Lady GPS announces. “In two hundred. Four. Miles. You will reach your destination.”
Chapter three
Mom is missing.
The car windows are open, and a soft breeze blows over my skin, jostling the branches of a giant weeping willow next to the unfamiliar driveway where we’ve stopped. I peel my cheek from the cashmere leather seat and shake off the road-sleep, scooping up my backpack and climbing out of the car.
At the top of the driveway, there’s a house, big and solid, mustard yellow with white trim. It’s framed on both sides by rows of giant sugar maples that seem to reach all the way up to the sky.
I know those trees.
This is the house at Red Falls Lake where I spent every summer for eight years. My grandparents’ house. We’re here.
The old place seems only to have changed in relation to me. I’m bigger. It’s smaller. I’m older. It’s ancient. It’s still the same color that I remember, but now the paint along the bottom peels down in golden curls like lazy spring daffodils. The shutters are loose and crooked, some open on both sides while others are shut or half-shut, sneaking looks as if after all these years, the house no longer recognizes me.
I pull my backpack tight over my shoulders and walk alongside a row of maples that leads me around to the back. Warm and honeyed in the sun, the yard yawns and stretches its way down the hill to Red Falls Lake. The water, which is neither red nor falling, looks like a giant blue whale, shimmering peacefully behind the bleachers on the western shore. They used to hold boat races down there, loud and growling and filling the air with smoke. I remember hiding under the bleachers with Little Ricky from next door, creeping through the dirt in search of discarded soda cans that could be converted to nickels for candy at Crasner’s in town.