Perfectly Undone. Jamie Raintree
me know he went on a hike with Stephen. His absence jars me—with a rare weekend off, I expected we’d make plans together—and I spend the day meandering around the house. Finally, I walk down to the creek, sit on the bench and watch the water hopscotch over the rocks to pass the time until Cooper and I are supposed to go to his parents’ house for dinner. At five thirty, though, he texts me to say that since I’m on call, he went straight over. Oftentimes, when I’m on call, I like to stay home, so I don’t have to bail on anyone. But I’m not on call tonight. I told him that. When I crawl into bed after ten, he still isn’t home.
The next morning, Cooper is as far away from me in bed as possible, so, disheartened, I sneak out of the house with the plan to visit my dad. Other than Abby, he’s the only one I’ve ever been able to really talk to.
When I get to my parents’ house, though, his car isn’t in the garage. I use my key, and I find no one in the kitchen. Dad isn’t in his study, and Mom isn’t in her garden. Dad often spends Sunday mornings at the office, but to be sure, I slip upstairs to his bedroom. Before I get to the door, I can already smell the scent of his aftershave, taking me back to when I was a little girl and I would curl up on his comforter and watch him get ready for work. He would make his bed with me inside it and pretend to lose me under the covers. When I peek my head inside now, though, the sheets are tucked tightly into place, and his electric shaver and comb are lined up neatly on his dresser. Dad himself is nowhere to be found.
As I pass Mom’s bedroom on my way out, I hear a thump come from the other side of her door. It stops me in my tracks. A quick debate fires in my mind, the louder voice urging me to leave before she sees me, before the feelings of guilt and inadequacy overtake me. Against my better judgment, I step closer and peek in through the sliver of the open door. I see Mom sit up on her bed, having scooped something off the floor. She sets the large, purple book on her lap, pushes her lifeless gray hair behind her ears and opens the cover. I recognize it as a photo album I haven’t seen in years.
I nudge the door open farther and catch sight of the storage tub we packed Abby’s most prized possessions into a few months after her death. Mom had fought Dad about sorting through Abby’s things to the point I thought she might actually hit him when he demanded we get rid of most of it. Left up to her, she would have turned Abby’s room into a shrine, but Dad insisted it was an important step in moving forward. He thought it would give us closure. Most important, he thought it would give Mom closure. His plan backfired on him, though, because she just moved her penance to another room.
I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t buried my tear-streaked face into Abby’s bed many nights after her death until one Saturday it was gone without explanation. I never asked Dad about it—I was too embarrassed. It would have meant admitting that I wasn’t ready to let go yet either, that I was no stronger than Mom.
Today Mom looks smaller and more fragile than ever—two words that, as a young girl, I never would have thought I’d one day use to describe my mother. Her movements are weary, lethargic. Every year it takes her weeks to recover from the anniversary of Abby’s death.
The picture the photo album is open to is one I chose, selected from the dozens Abby and I had stuck to our dresser mirrors in each of our bedrooms, where there were pictures of us on family vacations at the beach, or at Disneyland, and photo booth strips showcasing her array of silly faces and my poor attempts at playfulness. With her perfect features, she could afford to be silly. She looked beautiful no matter what. The one beneath Mom’s fingers is a picture she took of Abby and me before the homecoming dance the year before Abby’s death. We had our hair in identical updos, curls falling down from our temples, my dark features a photo negative of her fair ones. She smiled straight at the camera, all teeth, but I was looking at her with a close-lipped grin that captured exactly how I always felt about her: awestruck.
In her last year, she had drifted further away from me as she drew closer to Christian and her cheerleader friends. Prom night, though, we got ready for the dance together, just the two of us. I let her choose my dress, one that showed off my “basketball calves,” as she’d said it. Then we went to the salon, and she didn’t balk when I wanted the same hairstyle as her. She’d always hated my copycatting when we were younger, but not that night. That night was ours.
Mom flips another page of the photo album, a timeline of Abby’s life from birth to death. She must have every picture memorized. I don’t understand what she could still need to see there, in those seventy-five four-by-sixes. But then again, maybe I do. I try to tell myself Mom’s loss was no greater than the rest of ours, that her grief is overindulgent and selfish, but the truth is, we all knew there was a special connection between Mom and Abby. Everyone knew it. Everywhere we went, people commented on how much they looked alike—both of them short and petite, both with green eyes that shone like summer all year round, both with straw-blond hair. But there was more—in the way they loved to bake together, the way they could flash their smiles and talk anyone into anything, their earthiness, their impulsiveness.
I bump the bedroom door, and it creaks open another inch. Mom looks up from the photo album at me as I stand there watching her. I wait for her to get angry for invading her time with Abby’s memory, to insist I leave, but her shoulders are slumped, and she looks heavy under the weight of her losses. It’s been a while since I’ve really looked at her, and the skin around her eyes and mouth is more deeply wrinkled. She looks a decade older than her sixty years, and her eyes are vulnerable in a way I haven’t seen them in a while.
“I found this in your dresser,” she says. She leans over to grab another picture from the bin and holds it up. It’s the one picture I’d hidden in my room—the only picture of Abby I had that was truly mine.
I move farther into the room, but not too close for fear of getting sucked back into it all.
“You didn’t put it with the rest of her stuff,” she said.
I shake my head. I don’t apologize, though I sense she wants me to.
“Huh,” she says, and tosses the picture back into the tub. She rubs at the knees of her slacks. I say nothing, afraid of being lectured, like I’m a fourteen-year-old girl all over again. With my mom, I’ll always feel like a child.
She surprises me by asking, “Why that picture?”
It used to be in one of the collages Mom has hung in the living room before it got replaced by more updated pictures, posed shots of the family in matching outfits. I’d sneaked that one into my room even before Abby’s death because it wasn’t Abby I was looking for in that memory.
The photo was taken at our old house, in the backyard. Mom, Abby and I stood in front of the vegetable garden Mom had kept back then, before she focused all her talents into keeping up with the women in her gardening club. Abby must have been about eight years old then. I would have been six. The picture was full of color, from the vegetables themselves, to the mural of the sky Mom had allowed Abby, Charlie and I to sloppily paint on the wooden fence behind us, to Mom’s flowing skirt and the delicate headband wrapped loosely around her forehead. Dad had taken the picture to capture the size of Mom’s vegetables before we did our first harvest and only had us jump into the frame on a last-minute whim. But there was something about that picture that had always stirred something inside my heart when I looked at it, especially after we moved and Mom began to change into someone I didn’t recognize. The picture was a reminder of who our mom used to be and who I hoped she could be again one day.
“I always thought you looked beautiful in it,” I say honestly. Sure, fashion had changed since then and the picture quality wasn’t great, but the look in her eyes was real. It was happy.
Mom snorts a laugh. “My hair was a disaster.” She rests her elbows on her knees and runs her fingers through her hair now as if she could fix it in the past.
“It was perfect,” I say, not to make her feel better but to defend my choice. I’d go back to that day in a heartbeat. “What happened, Mom?” I almost clarify that I’m not talking about Abby’s death, but I think she knows that the rift in our relationship goes much deeper than that.
“Your dad’s at the office,” she says, avoiding