By four o'clock, there were maybe a dozen people left in the hall. By four-thirty, it was just the church ladies clearing plates and a few of Cassie's colleagues finishing their tea. Lily had eaten two of the cookies she'd insisted on and nothing else. I didn't push it.
"You ready?" I said.
She shook her head.
"Okay."
She looked up at me, her face small and pale against the dark wood of the hall.. "Can we go back?"
I knew what she meant. "Yeah," I said. "We can go back."
We walked out through the side door and across the wet grass to the cemetery. The canopy was gone now. The folding chairs had been cleared, leaving nothing but the grave, the fresh earth, and the flowers starting to bow in the wind. Lily stood at the very edge of the cut and looked down. I stood beside her, myhand on her shoulder, and didn't say anything because there was nothing left to say.
The rain started quietly. Lily didn't move. I took my jacket off and draped it over her. It swallowed her completely, the hem reaching her shins and the empty sleeves dangling, but she pulled the lapels tight around her chest and stayed still.
We stayed.
The rain came harder. My shirt was soaked through inside of ten minutes, the cold getting into my shoulders, my neck. Lily was dry enough under the jacket, mostly. She hadn't moved except to pull it tighter. She was looking at the grave with that focused, serious expression she had, the one that meant she was working something out that didn't have a clean solution.
I knew that look. I'd worn it my whole life.
I didn't know how long we stood there. Long enough for the church ladies to appear in the side door, silhouetted against the warm yellow light of the hall, and decide against calling us in. They just watched us for a minute and then pulled the door shut, leaving us to the grey. Long enough for the light to start bruising at the edges. Long enough for the rain to ease off and come back again.
Then Lily reached up and found my hand.
Just that. Her small, cold fingers sliding into mine in the rain, holding on like I was the only solid thing left in the world.
I looked down at her. She wasn't crying. She was just standing there in a jacket that was too big for her, her rabbit tucked under one arm and her hand in mine, looking at the place where her mother was. She wasn't going anywhere, and neither was I.
We stood there until she was ready.
It took a while.
* * *
She was asleep before we were halfway home, a dead weight against the seat of the rental car. I carried her into the house, the rabbit still tucked under her chin. I managed to get her shoes off without waking her and pulled the duvet up to her ears. I stood in the doorway for a long minute, watching the steady rise and fall of her shoulders, before I headed back down.
The house was quiet. I sat at the kitchen table in my wet shirt and didn't move for a long time. The coloring book was still in the living room. The scattered crayons. Outside the rain was still going, softer now, just a presence against the window.
I thought about Cassie at twenty, laughing too loud in a movie theater, completely unapologetic about it. Cassie at the kitchen table at midnight with her hands over mine. Cassie on the phone, her voice easy and certain—take the ring, Jack, it should be Maddie's—like she'd already decided and was just waiting for me to catch up.
She'd always been waiting for me to catch up.
I sat there with the rain against the glass and let it be true. I let it be true that she was gone, and that there was nobody left who had known me my whole life and loved me anyway. I let it be true that the kid upstairs was mine now—that I was all she had, and that I had no idea what I was doing and had to do it regardless.
I sat there until the rain stopped. Then I got up and finally picked up the scattered crayons from the living room floor. I put them back in the box, closed the coloring book, and went to check the oil in the rental.
Monday was coming, and I had to be ready.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Jack
Aweek in and I'd learned a few things.
Lily took her cereal dry. No milk, just the flakes in the bowl, which she ate methodically from left to right. She needed the hall light on to fall asleep but would get up to kill it sometime in the night; by dawn, the house was always dark. She watched the same cartoon three mornings running without appearing to actually like it, just sitting there while she woke up, like it was a ritual rather than a preference. She was patient with me in the way of a child who had decided, quietly, to make the best of a bad situation.
She was also five years old and she hadn't laughed once. Not properly. A few small smiles, the corners of her mouth doing something brief before it went away again. I didn't know what her laugh sounded like. I didn't know if she was always like this or if grief had taken something and wasn't giving it back yet. I didn't know enough about her to know the difference, which was its own kind of problem.