Chapter 20

The house was smaller than I remembered.

Not literally. I'd only been gone two months. Houses don't shrink.

But standing on the porch while Dad fumbled with his keys, I looked at the place I'd grown up in and something about the proportions had shifted. The steps I'd climbed ten thousand times seemed narrower. The front window where Mom's Christmas lights used to hang seemed closer to the ground.

Inside, the house smelled like burned garlic and something that might have been chicken parmesan if chicken parmesan had been through a difficult experience. Dad's cooking hadn't improved in my absence. The kitchen counter was cluttered with spice bottles he'd clearly bought recently, labels still bright, and a cookbook propped open to a page splattered with tomato sauce.

"You didn't have to cook," I said.

"I wanted to. Sit down."

I sat at the kitchen table. My chair. My spot. The same place I'd eaten cereal every morning for thirteen years, where Mom used to spread her lesson plans out on Sunday nights, where Dad and I had sat across from each other in those terrible months after the funeral trying to figure out how to be two people instead of three.

The table was set for two and he'd used the good plates.

Dinner was bad in the specific way Dad's cooking was always bad. Overcooked pasta, sauce from a jar with added ingredients that didn't need adding, chicken that had been in the oven too long because he'd gotten distracted watching TV. He ate it like it was fine. I ate it like it was fine. We both knew it wasn't fine and neither of us said anything because this was our language. Showing up and sitting down. Eating what was put in front of you.

"How's work?" I asked.

"Same. They moved my shift again." He shrugged the way he always shrugged about the distribution center. Accepting without accepting. "Boring, mostly."

"You look tired."

"End of semester so everyone's tired."

He nodded. Took another bite. Chewed slowly. I could feel him navigating around all the questions he wanted to ask and all the answers he knew he wouldn't get.

"I put clean sheets on your bed," he said. "And I fixed that window that sticks. Only took me two months and two YouTube videos."

"A new record."

He smiled. That transforming smile that made his whole face different. I had that same smile. People used to tell me that, back when people talked to me.

After dinner I went upstairs. My room was exactly the same. Posters on the walls. Books on the shelf. The rabbit-shaped water stain on the ceiling that Mom used to say was a dog and I used to say was a dragon and neither of us was right.

I put my bag on the floor and sat on the edge of the mattress. Took the coin out of my pocket and set it on the nightstand.

The room was quiet in a way my dorm room never was. No Dao breathing in the bunk across from me. No late-night jazz from his speaker. No residual traces of decades of students soaked into the walls. Or maybe there were traces here too, just different ones. The leftover feelings of a kid who'd spent years lying in this bed wondering what was wrong with him.

I could feel them now. I hadn't been able to before.

I unpacked. Plugged in my phone. Changed into a t-shirt and sweatpants. And then, reaching into the nightstand drawer for the charger cord I kept there, my hand brushed something smooth and cold.

The rock.

I pulled it out and held it in my palm. Small, dark gray, worn smooth by water. I'd found it on the beach at Lake Erie the summer before Mom died. The last real vacation we took as a family, the three of us in a rented cabin for a week in August, and I'd picked this rock up off the shoreline because it fit perfectly in my hand and Mom had smiled and said it was a keeper.

Before Mudwick, it was just a rock. A memento. The kind of thing a kid holds onto because the moment it came from was good and good moments were rare.

But I knew what tokens were now. Cross had taught me. Objects hold residue just like places do. Stones from significant places. Things that people pour enough of themselves into until the object becomes saturated with who they are.

I closed my fingers around the rock and let myself feel it the way Cross had taught me to feel the tokens in her wooden box.

The surface came first. Warmth. Not physical warmth, even though the rock was cold from the drawer. The concentrated feeling of a specific afternoon. Sun on water, sand between toes, my mother's laugh carrying across a beach. I was maybe nine. She was sitting in a folding chair with a book in her lap, watching me wade into the shallows while Dad built something ambitious and doomed out of sand.

I pushed deeper.

Sadness. Not the sharp kind. The kind that lives underneath happy moments when the person having them knows the happy moments are numbered. My mother had been carrying something that day. I could feel it now, pressed into the stone along with the sunlight and the lakewater. She'd been watching me pick up rocks on the shoreline and she'd been sad in a way she'd hidden from both of us. A low steady current running beneath the warmth like cold water under a sunny surface.

And then the third layer. Faint. Almost too faint to catch.

There was purpose. Deliberate and careful. The feeling of someone choosing to leave a mark. Not accidentally, the way most people saturated the objects around them through proximity and time, but intentionally. My mother had put something into this rock on purpose. A deposit. Like hiding money inside a mattress for someone to find later.

I couldn't read what she'd put there. Not yet. My layered reading was good but not that good. The third layer was like trying to read a book through frosted glass. I could see the shape of the words but not the words themselves.

But I knew it was there. And I knew it wasn't an accident.

My mother took me to that beach on purpose. Let me find this rock on purpose. Smiled when I put it in my pocket because she'd wanted me to keep it.

I sat on the edge of my childhood bed holding a rock from a dead woman and felt the distance between who I'd been last August and who I was now stretch out like a road I could never walk backward.

The coin sat on the nightstand.

The rock sat in my palm. Mom's token. Warmer than it should have been. And underneath the warmth, something hidden. Something she'd buried for me to find when I was ready.

I put the rock next to the coin and went back downstairs because the quiet was starting to feel like weight.

The next morning I found the notebook.

I wasn't looking for it. I went downstairs early, before Dad was up, to make coffee. The notebook was on the desk in the living room. Not hidden or displayed. Just sitting there next to a stack of bills and the reading glasses Dad refused to admit he needed. A small hardcover, dark green, the corners soft from handling.

I picked it up before I could decide not to.

Her handwriting. My mother's handwriting. I'd seen it on grocery lists and birthday cards and the note she'd left on the fridge the morning of the day she died. Leftovers in the blue container. Love you both. But I'd never seen this much of it in one place. Page after page of small, careful script. She wrote like someone who was used to being precise.

The first entry was dated three years before I was born.

Starting this record because I need to track something and I can't trust anyone else to do it. If I'm wrong, this notebook is just the anxious scribblings of a paranoid woman and nobody will ever need to read it. If I'm right, someone will need to read it very much.

I turned pages. Not reading everything. Not yet. That felt too much like trespassing. But I let my eyes catch fragments.

Eli shows sensitivity earlier than expected. Three years old and he won't let strangers hold him. Not shyness but overwhelm. He's reading them without knowing what reading is.

A few pages later:

Tested the rock today. Still holding. The saturation is stable. I'm getting better at controlled deposits but I don't know if what I'm leaving will be readable. He might not develop the layered perception. If he doesn't, the rock is just a rock and there's nothing lost. If he does, it's a letter.

The coffee machine beeped. I looked up. The kitchen was pale with early light and the house was quiet and my hands were shaking.

She'd put something in the rock. On purpose. I'd felt it last night. The third layer. The deliberate deposit she'd pressed into the stone and covered with sunlight and lakewater and a child's happiness so that someday, when I was ready, I would push past the surface and find what she'd hidden there.

A letter. She'd called it a letter.

I closed the notebook and put it back on the desk. Exactly where it had been. Poured my coffee and drank it standing at the kitchen counter while the morning got brighter.

There were more pages with more entries. Things I needed to read and things I wasn't ready to read. But not now. Now I was going to drink my coffee and make eggs and wait for my father to wake up and be his son for a few more hours before the rest of it came flooding back.

Shelby was waiting at Denny's.

Our booth. The one in the back corner by the window, where you could see the parking lot and the strip mall across the street and the mountains of plowed snow that lined the curbs like dirty glaciers.

She was already sitting when I walked in. Purple hoodie. Hair in a ponytail that was already losing the fight. Menu open in front of her even though she'd known what she was ordering since the day she was born.

"Eli Lawrence." She stood up and hugged me. Tight, the way she did everything. "You got taller."

"That's what everyone keeps saying."

"Well, everyone's very observant." She sat back down and slid the menu across the table. "I've already decided on my order but I'm leaving the menu open so the waitress doesn't rush us. It's a power move."

"You learned that from a documentary?"

"I learned that from life."

She grinned. The same grin. Everything about her was the same and I sat across from her in our booth and felt the distance between us like standing on opposite sides of a river that was getting wider.

The waitress came. Shelby ordered cheese fries, a chocolate milkshake, and onion rings. I got a burger and a Coke. Then it was just us.

"So." She put her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands. "Tell me about boarding school."

I told her about boarding school.

I told her the food was okay and the classes were hard and my roommate was funny and the campus was pretty. I told her about Dao's music and Thaddeus's manners and Sasha's notebooks. I described a version of my life that was true in every detail and false in every way that mattered.

"Do you like it?" she asked.

"Yeah. I think I do."

"Better than Millbrook?"

"Different from Millbrook."

She picked up an onion ring and studied it like it contained information. "You're doing that thing."

"What thing?"

"The thing where you answer questions without actually answering them. You used to do it with the guidance counselor when she asked how you were adjusting after your mom died." She bit the onion ring. "You'd give her these perfectly shaped responses that sounded right but didn't have anything inside them."

The cheese fries arrived. She pushed the plate to the middle and we both reached for one, the way we always did, and for a second it was exactly like before. Two kids at Denny's eating terrible food and being comfortable together in a world that only extended to the edges of the parking lot.

"I'm not trying to dodge your questions," I said.

"I know you're not trying. That's what worries me. I think it's automatic now."

She said it without anger. Without accusation. Just observation.

"Tell me something real," she said. "One real thing. It doesn't have to be big."

I looked at her across the table. Purple hoodie, cheese fry in hand, ponytail coming undone. My oldest friend.

"I'm scared," I said.

It came out before I could stop it. Not the whole truth. Not even close. But a piece of it.

She didn't flinch. Didn't ask what I was scared of. She just nodded and took another cheese fry.

"Okay," she said. "Thank you."

We spent the next forty minutes talking about other things. Volleyball, her mom's new soap-making hobby, a true crime podcast she'd gotten addicted to, whether the Denny's had changed their onion ring recipe. The kind of conversation where both people know there's something bigger underneath and they're choosing, together, to let it sit for now.

When we left she hugged me in the parking lot. Held on for a beat longer than usual.

"Same time next week?" she said.

"Absolutely."

"Good. I'm trying the pancakes next time. I've decided to expand my horizons."

I watched her walk to her dad's Honda. She waved through the windshield. I waved back.

Christmas was quiet. Dad and me. Turkey from the store because the one he'd tried to cook had dried out beyond recognition.

He'd gotten me new headphones and a gift card for books and a framed photo of Mom I'd never seen before. She was sitting on the porch steps of this house, hair down, laughing at something off-camera. She looked young. She looked like someone who hadn't started running yet.

"Found it in that box," he said. "The one from the basement. Thought you should have it."

I held the photo and tried to feel something clear. Love, grief, anger, longing. Instead I felt all of them at once, tangled together, the way emotions always are when they involve someone who left before you were ready.

I'd gotten him a scarf. Nice one, dark blue, from a shop near Mudwick that sold regular things alongside practitioner supplies. He wore it the rest of the day. Even inside. Even when the furnace was running and the house was warm.