Perhaps she is hungry, having used her only bread as a futile trail home.
The paper was fragile, like chalky wings, and I was worried that it might crumble in my hands when I unfolded it. But remarkably, more than fifteen years after they were written, the words were still intact.
Edelweiss, edelweiss, edelweiss.
I remember falling asleep on the long bus ride back from Stowe. It was while I was sleeping that he slipped the music box into my backpack and changed everything. I didn’t hear him or feel him come or go, but when I awoke I knew that nothing would be the same again. Shivering, my head pressed against the cold window, I made a cloud with my breath on the glass and started to write his name with my finger. I stopped after the first letter, realizing that despite the gift, the admission, I could never write his name, not even in the clouds I made with my own breath.
He was my secret. He was everything I kept hidden and inside. Even at fourteen years old, I knew plenty about deceit: I had lied to (and been lied to by) everyone I had ever loved. I guess that’s why I wasn’t afraid. At least this secret belonged to me. But because I was only fourteen, I also lied to myself. I believed that he was the end of the world. He appeared after I’d already lost everything. He arrived just in time; I thought then that he was saving me.
I am aware of my body now, sixteen years and as many lovers later. I am ever conscious of skin and bones and marrow. The distant dankness of breath and the gentle yellowing of teeth. I am older than I seem. These creases run deeper than you’d think. I know who I am and what a body can and cannot do. But then, when I was a child, I knew only what he told me. And that was love and music, music and love. I only vaguely understood the power of one hand on my hip, defiant, or the potency of my braid swinging over my shoulder, loose hairs making me wrinkle my nose. I didn’t know that a single careless gesture of mine could be the end of his world, too.
I don’t know what happened to that girl.
He was already broken when I met him. I was wise enough to see right away that he was made of fragments too, that he was also comprised of slivers. He offered me his sorrow, not as an explanation, but as a gift. He gave me in whispers the names of his lost wife and then his lost child. Felicity. Felicity. Her name sounded like a constellation to me, like an imagined girl. But all that happened long before I knew him. When I met him, he was already broken. I know I’m not to blame for that, at least. And now, that is what comforts me.
I was not innocent. I am not innocent. But sometimes I look for ways to blame him for what is happening to my body now. I sometimes imagine that the decay began the moment I saw his face. That it infected me. That he started killing me all those years ago, and that now the dying is just finally settling in. I think that this must simply be the completion of our exchange: a life for a life.
After the birds descended, after the trail of bread was gone, where did she go? I imagine she spun on the tips of her toes, until dizzy, and the wet green of leaves could have been a kaleidoscope of tears.
After I reread the poem, I carefully folded it along its familiar creases and put it back inside the music box. I wrapped it up again in my mother’s soft blue dress (whose pockets were filled with their own secrets) and wondered what would happen to it after I was gone. Becca has the best intentions. She has denied me my thrift store, pawnshop, yard sale pleas. She’s told me that she’ll take care of my belongings if she needs to, but for now I don’t need to get rid of anything. That I should leave the door to my closet closed, keep the artifacts inside: my mausoleum of not-forgotten things. I’m grateful for her tenacity: I would never really be able to get rid of the closet’s contents. Like my mother, I have unwittingly become a reluctant but proud curator of broken things.
Autumn, and everything was falling.
For the first few weeks after Mum left, we expected her to return. We all pretended that she’d only gone for a walk, that any moment she would walk back in the door with a handful of late-summer berries or a single fallen maple leaf, like a giant golden palm. We pretended that she’d only gotten lost in the colors of fall.
Sometimes I’d sit on the porch and squint my eyes, imagining that the red of a maple tree was the velour bathrobe Daddy had given her three Christmases earlier. That the wind was her hair. But inevitably, the trees remained trees and she didn’t come home.
When she left, she didn’t take much, just enough to let us know that she’d gone willingly. A suitcase, a fisherman’s sweater. Her favorite jeans, her shoes and socks and toothbrush. When I ran away at six years old, I took the same sorts of things: my tattered sock monkey, six pairs of underwear, a hairbrush. Of course, I only got as far as Lake Gormlaith before I turned around and came home. But she wasn’t a child; she wasn’t afraid of leaving.
It wasn’t until later that I found the other missing things. The good flashlight, the radio, the pocketknife I’d won at the state fair. Her best slip, a scarab bracelet from Boo, and the copy of Alice in Wonderland we bought at the library sale that reminded her of the one she had when she was little. The magnetic plastic pages of the photo album didn’t lie right now that some of the photos were gone: my first cartwheel, Quinn learning to ski. I searched my drawers for other things she might have taken; I ran my fingers through my hair, wondering if she might have cut a lock of it while I was sleeping.
I think I was the first one to realize that she wasn’t coming home. Daddy and Quinn didn’t know her like I did. They believed she needed them, when I knew she didn’t need any of us.
In September, I started high school, terrified by the maze of classrooms and the ease with which everyone seemed to move along the pale green hallways. I sat near windows. I spoke to no one. I thought my silence might make me invisible, as if a voice alone could make you real. Becca and I had opposite schedules. We passed each other in the hall, similarly scared, but reversed, like faces in a funhouse mirror. We had the same lunch period, thankfully, and we sat at the far end of the cafeteria, studying the gestures of the pretty girls and the way the boys walked. For twenty minutes each day we pretended that all of this would be all right, that some of the Quimby kids might befriend us, that we didn’t come from a town without a name. But it was clear early on that the dividing lines were drawn long before we got there. We were the poor kids, the Pond kids—as if we’d come from the murky depths of the sawdust-bottomed Pond instead of from our mothers’ wombs. And with my mother gone, it seemed this could be true.
Quinn was a senior that year. Sometimes I saw him emerging from the boys’ bathroom in a halo of smoke, hands shoved into his pockets, laughing with the other guys. He would nod at me, but we didn’t speak. I knew that he had worked too hard for this, and I wouldn’t take it from him. He’d fought his way from the depths of the Pond, crawled out, evolved.
When school was over and we were outside the big brick building, he’d find Becca and me sitting under a tree by the football field and offer to drive us to Boo’s on his way to work at the Shop-N-Save. Quinn drove our mother’s car, another thing she had left behind. There were still candy wrappers from her Tootsie Rolls in the ashtray, and an empty paper coffee cup rimmed with her lipstick rolling on the floor. I would let Becca sit up front while I peered through the back window at everything falling away.
At Boo’s shop, we played dress-up: Becca searching the discarded clothes for some hidden treasure, and I for clues about where my mother had gone.
“Look at this!” Becca said, pulling a paisley scarf from a plastic bag like a magician.
Someone