Lily

Chapter One — What My Father Left Behind

There are things you carry so long you forget you're carrying them. You just think that's what standing feels like.

I was sixteen when I started at Jefferson High, which made me a year older than most of my sophomore class. My mother liked to say I came into the world in no particular hurry and hadn't changed much since. She said it the way she said most things — with a smile that made you feel like the joke was a gift she was giving you. That was Carol. Even at the end she was giving things away.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

My father left the way weather leaves — gradually and then all at once. His name was Paul and he was not a bad man. I want to be clear about that because it would be easier, maybe, to make him one. Easier to say he was selfish or cold or that there was some flaw in him obvious enough to explain everything. But the truth is he was ordinary in the way that most people are ordinary — decent enough in good weather, not built for the storm.

My mother was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis when I was thirteen. I didn't know what it meant at first. The word sounded almost elegant, like something you'd name a flower. What it meant, as it turned out, was that her lungs were slowly losing the argument. Not quickly. Not all at once. Just steadily, the way a house settles — a little more each year, in ways you don't always notice until you look at an old photograph and realize how much has changed.

My father noticed. He noticed in the way that frightened people notice things — by looking away from them. He worked longer hours. He found reasons to be somewhere else on the hard evenings. He was kind to her when he was present, which made it more confusing when he began to be present less and less. By the time I was fourteen he was sleeping in the spare room. By fifteen he had an apartment across town that I visited twice before we both stopped pretending the visits were going to continue.

He called on birthdays. He still does, actually. We are cordial in the careful way of people who share history but not much else. I don't hate him. I'm not sure I ever did. What I felt for a long time was something closer to a question I couldn't quite finish asking.

What I know now, at thirty-two, is that some people are not capable of staying inside a grief that isn't finished yet. They need an ending before they can bear the middle. My father needed an ending. My mother and I were still very much in the middle.

So it was the two of us.

Our house on Aldine Street was small and yellow and needed paint by the time I started high school. I had learned by then to do most things — groceries, laundry, the particular pharmacy on Clement Street where Mr. Okafor knew our name and always put the bag on the counter without making me ask twice. I had learned to cook four things well and several things adequately. I had learned that my mother slept better when the house was quiet before nine and that she needed her morning medication with food or it made her stomach hurt and that the oxygen concentrator made a sound sometimes, a faint rhythmic clicking, that meant the filter needed checking.

I had learned not to talk about any of this at school.

It wasn't a decision exactly. It was more like instinct — the same instinct that tells you not to leave a door open in winter. Some things you keep inside because the outside isn't built to hold them. My friends were good people. They talked about basketball and girls and whose older brother could buy beer and what they were going to do after graduation. That was the right conversation for sixteen. I participated in it genuinely and went home afterward and checked the oxygen concentrator and started dinner.

I was good at the distance between those two things. I had practiced.

The first day of sophomore year was a Tuesday in early September, which always felt wrong to me. Mondays you expected to be difficult. Tuesdays promised something and then didn't deliver. I walked the fourteen blocks to Jefferson in the particular way I walked most places — quickly, with my head slightly down, not unfriendly but not available either.

The hallways were loud in that first-day way, everyone performing a version of themselves they hoped would stick. I found my locker, checked my schedule, and was making my way toward first period when I became aware that someone was looking at me.

Not the glancing, reflexive way people look at each other in crowded hallways. This was different. Steadier.

I looked up.

She was standing near the water fountain with a girl I didn't recognize, dark hair, wearing a green jacket that I would later learn she wore almost every day until November. She wasn't smiling. She was just looking at me with an expression I couldn't immediately read — not unfriendly, not flirtatious, just attentive. Like she had noticed something and was deciding what to do about it.

I looked away first.

I didn't think about it again, or told myself I didn't. I went to first period and took a seat near the window and wrote my name on the inside cover of a new notebook. Outside the trees were still full and green. It would be weeks before they started letting go.

Her name, I would find out later, was Lily.

I would find out a great many things about her later. That is, after all, what this is.