Die for You by Lisa Unger Page B

Linda felt as though she were speaking to both of them.
    “The truth is, Em, we just don’t know what’s happening right now. The police are helping us and we’re going to figure everything out. Whatever happens, we’ll get through it together. That’s what a family does.”
    Emily leaned against her, wrapped her arms around Linda’s middle.
    “I think you and your brother should go to school today,” Linda said, rising. They moved together toward the door. “We’ll come get you if anything happens.”
    Emily nodded uncertainly but seemed okay with it. Sending them to school would make things seem normal, which they needed. Trevor was going to bitch a blue streak; she knew he was already banking on a sick day. People generally considered her son to be the sweeter of the two children. But he was less malleable, less cooperative than his sister, more prone to defiance and tantrum.
    “Your pants are folded on top of the dryer,” Linda said, patting Emily on her bottom. “Go get ready.”
    She heard her phone buzz again under the covers, but Emily seemed not to notice as she loped from the room. “I want jelly on mine, Dad!” she called, exiting and shutting the door behind her. Brown started barking again.
    Guilt, the river that runs through motherhood, threatened to rise over its banks. The day and all the misery it promised loomed like a thunderhead. She smelled the scent of coffee and figured there was no way out but through.
    T HE DAY MY father killed himself dawned blue and cold. I heard the hard wind rattling the windows and saw the bright sky and high cirrus clouds from my window as I woke. I looked across the room and saw my sister lying on the bed across from me. She stared up at the ceiling, her arms folded behind her head.
    “I had a bad dream,” she said, knowing somehow that I was awake. She looked pale, small in her bed like the child she was.
    “About what?”
    “I don’t know. Something terrible.”
    “Dreams can’t hurt you,” I said, only because that’s what she always told me. And she only told me that because that’s what Mom told her. She was fifteen. I was ten. But there had been no dream, I’d learn later. She’d seen him. Linda had been the one to find my father as he lay slumped in the toolshed far behind our house, the wall sprayed with his blood, the gun lying on the floor. Somehow she was the only one to hear the blast.
    It woke her from a deep sleep and she drifted out the back door to find him. He was always out there building things with wood—birdhouses, dollhouses, and tiny pieces of furniture, picture frames, curio cabinets. Everyone loved my father’s work. He was always making gifts for friends and neighbors, never accepting money. My mother complained about how he wasted his time with building trinkets when the lawn needed tending and the fence repair, that his hands were splintered and calloused, rough to the touch.
    Linda pushed open the door and saw him there. A cigarette still burned in the ashtray. She was surprised, had never seen him smoke. She said it was as if the rest of the scene just didn’t register. All she could think about was that cigarette and how she just couldn’t imagine him putting it to his lips, drawing the smoke into his lungs. She wasn’t sure how long she stood there.
    I often imagine her in the doorway, one hand resting on the frame, the other on the doorknob. The bright full moon making her white nightgown translucent, the slim form of her body visible beneath it. She might have shivered in the cold, wrapped her arms around herself.
    “Daddy, what’s wrong?”
    I know he never meant for Linda or me to find him that way. We were forbidden from bothering him when he was in there. He would have expected our mother to come out raging in the morning about how he’d stayed out there all night again, and didn’t he remember he had a wife?
    A fog fell over our lives. And it never lifted, not really. The contrast between our life