Page 97 of The Family Plot
“Well, goodbye,” she says, thrusting out her hand.
It’s a strange, too-formal gesture, but I return it anyway.
As she pumps my arm, I’m surprised by the swell of regret inside me. Here is a girl who loved my brother—even with his anger, his tornadic moods—and I wish I knew what drew him toward her all those nights, what the two of them laughed about, if Ruby ever saw him cry.
I love her, Andy said to Charlie,but anyone who dares to love me will only be ruined.
He was wrong about that. Ruby wasn’t ruined. She’s intense and she’s odd, but she’s part of our story now. Without her memories of Andy, the key she offered without a clue of everything it would ultimately unlock, I’m not sure I’d have ever learned the truth.
So no. She isn’t ruined. In a way, she helped to save us.
“He did love you,” I tell her now.
“Andy?” she asks, apprehensive. Then her wariness dissolves as her eyes swell with hope. “How do you know? You said he never talked about me.”
“Trust me,” I say—and that’s all it takes. Light beams across Ruby’s face, even as the sky stays gray.
The next morning, our bags are by the door. We wait for Mom in the foyer, listening to the house groan in the wind.
“It’s complaining that we’re leaving,” Tate says.
“Let it,” Charlie scoffs.
We’ve managed to avoid the news so far, turned away the persistent reporters. But last night, voices frothed up from the street like waves, trying to drown us with their anger, their disgust, theirhow could they not have knowns. None of us blame them. Actually, it’s a relief, that the islanders, the victims’ families, finally have the answer they’ve always deserved.
When Mom appears, she seems haggard, overwhelmed, her hands lost in the sleeves of her oversize sweater, its pockets deep and sagging.
“Sorry,” she says. “That was Fritz on the phone, clarifying our arrangement. He’ll keep an eye on things while I’m gone.”
At Fritz’s name, I feel a twitch of discomfort, one I know is misplaced. I wonder when I’ll stop associating him with the room beneath the shed, when I’ll think of him again without flashing to his fearful grip on my ankle, when my body will accept the truth my mind already knows: Dad was the dangerous one among us. Only Dad.
“Oh,” Mom says. She reaches into her pockets, pulls out four slim candles and a lighter. “I thought we could…” she starts, but when she sees our faces, she stops. “What is it?”
“You said no Honorings,” Charlie says.
“There won’t be, once we leave. I just thought—well, we have to dosomethingfor Andy, don’t we? And how else can we… But no. No, you’re right.” She opens her palm to stare at the lighter. “I just don’t know another way.”
She isn’t wrong. Right now, there’s no grave we can visit, no ashes in an urn. Any other family would plan a service, scour a funeral home’s brochures. But we’re not another family. We will try to be, I think, in the future we’ll head toward when we walk out the door, but for now, we’re still just us. And this is what we know of honoring someone. This is how we remember the dead.
Tate and I glance at each other, and between us, Charlie rolls his eyes. “Fine,” he says, sighing. He grabs the candles from Mom and passes them out.
Something sour squats on the back of my tongue, a taste so potent I could gag. But as Mom tries to light her candle with a shaking hand, I force myself to swallow. In a moment, the flame catches, andfrom there, it’s muscle memory. Mom touches her wick to Tate’s, who touches hers to Charlie’s, and the circle’s complete when he passes the flame to me. Above the shared light of our candles, his gaze meets mine.
“You want to start?” he asks.
I inhale deeply, wondering if there’s any part of Andy that lingers in the air, if the cells he left behind could have lasted this long, survived the grime of all these years. He’d think it was stupid, me wishing for that, wanting so badly to breathe him in. But at my core, there’s a longing for Andy I know I’ll never lose. I feel it as I watch the flame, as I let his name fall from my lips like a tear from an eye.
“Andrew Lighthouse,” I say.
Then Charlie, voice foggy: “Andrew Lighthouse.”
Then Tate, quiet but controlled: “Andrew Lighthouse.”
And, finally, like we always did, we end with Mom. “Andrew Lighthouse,” she whispers.
We don’t need to look at one another to see when to speak. We know the rhythm of this moment, the space between the final utterance of his name and the first word of our prayer.
“We can’t restore your life,” we say together, “but we strive to restore your memory with this breath.”
