Heart Like Mine: A Novel

With most things, there were rules about how to act. I knew how to be quiet and pay attention to my teachers when I was at school; I knew how to laugh with Bree and how to be sweet to my dad when I wanted something from him. I had no idea how to act now. Mama was dead and nothing else mattered. Not how I looked or what I did or didn’t do. I could eat or not eat, cry or not cry, and nothing would change. Brush your teeth, my brain told me. Walk down the hall. Sit at the table. Take a bite of toast. I responded to these thoughts in slow motion—with stiff, stilted movements, like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz when he rusted up after it rained. My body tingled the same way my mouth does after a visit to the dentist. There, but not there. Moving, but numb. Empty.

We didn’t have to go to school, so Max and I basically spent the entire week sitting around the house. I colored with him and read him his favorite stories, pointless forms of distraction that did little to make either of us feel better.

“How are you doing?” Dad asked us every day—usually more than once—and I didn’t know how to answer him. How did he think we were doing? I couldn’t have cried again if I tried. I was tired in a hollowed-out way I’d never been. We spent every night with Dad in his room, while Grace made a bed for herself on the living room couch. I don’t think any of us were really getting much sleep. The minute I closed my eyes, Mama’s face appeared and my pulse pounded noisily through my blood. I felt it throbbing in my head, my neck, my fingers—even my toes.

Now it was Thursday, the morning of the day everyone was coming to our house for some sort of weird gathering Dad wouldn’t call a funeral but actually kind of was. I wanted to escape what I had to face today. I wanted to stay curled up in Dad’s bed. He and Max had already gotten up—I was alone. Wrapping Mama’s red sweater tightly around me, I brought my knees to my chest beneath the covers and closed my eyes again.

“Ava?” My dad’s muffled voice came through the bedroom door. “Are you awake?”

I wondered what he’d do if I didn’t answer. Or if I pitched a fit and refused to leave the room. I could scream and kick and bite him if he tried to make me go. Part of me wanted to find out what might happen if I did, but the other, smarter part of me answered him. “I’m up.”

“People are going to be here soon and Grace has to get ready.”

My eyes snapped open. I threw the covers off and rolled over onto my back. “Okay, Dad! I said, I’m up.” I didn’t care that I was being sassy. He could punish me all he wanted and it wouldn’t matter. Nothing could make me feel worse than I already did.

He didn’t respond, so I figured he’d gone back down the hall to tell Grace she could have their room back. I wondered how she was feeling, being kicked out of my dad’s bed. I wondered if she was angry we were taking up so much of his time. She’d given me lots of space this week, only speaking to me to offer bits of food or to ask if I wanted to go for a walk with her and Max, letting Dad be the one to tell us we should shower or put our cereal bowl in the sink. She spent the days talking on the phone with her assistant, working on her computer, and cleaning the house. She was quieter than usual, tiptoeing around, hugging and kissing my dad when she didn’t think we were looking. Maybe she didn’t know how to act, either.

There was a soft knock on the door, and Grace opened it a second later. She gave me a half smile when she saw me still lying in their bed. “Hey there,” she said. “Is it okay if I get showered? You can stay in here awhile, if you want.”

I nodded, and she closed the door behind her after she entered. She was wearing black pajama pants with a loose purple T-shirt and her hair was a crazy mess around her face. She was about to go into their bathroom when I spoke up, my own voice surprising me. “Grace?”

She stopped, turned, and looked back at me. “Yeah?” She said the word softly, and with such tenderness, it almost made me cry. I had to force my jaw to stop trembling before I could speak.

“Do I have to be here today?”

Her mouth twitched into a quick frown. “I think it’s probably best if you are. It gives you a chance to say good-bye.”

I thought about this a moment. “But what if I don’t want to?”

She sighed. “I get why you’d feel like that, sweetie. This all really sucks, doesn’t it?”

I looked at her, eyebrows raised, shocked to have an adult speak so plainly, that someone who I’d been so mean to was being so nice to me. “Yeah, it does,” I said. I sat up, pulled Mama’s sweater closed, and dropped my gaze to the mattress. My insides were bound up in knots, but I knew I needed to apologize. “I don’t really hate you, Grace. I don’t know why I said that. I’m sorry.” My voice shook, feeling disloyal to Mama, somehow, with every word. She’d been jealous of Grace, I knew. Jealous of her job; jealous that Daddy loved her. I’d understood that I wasn’t supposed to like Grace, and yet, here she was while Mama was . . . gone. I didn’t know how to feel.

“Ava, honey, look at me,” she said. I did as she asked and gritted my teeth so I wouldn’t cry. She wasn’t smiling, but her green eyes were filled with kindness as she spoke. “I understand, okay? Sometimes we do and say things we don’t mean when we’re upset. So please don’t worry about it. I care about you very much and I’m here for you however you need me to be.”

I nodded briskly, grateful that she wasn’t going to make a big deal out of it. If I had said something like that to Mama, I’d have been grounded for weeks. Grace smiled at me, then went into the bathroom. I lay there a while longer, oddly comforted by the sound of her getting ready—the water running, the hair dryer’s low buzz. It reminded me of listening to Mama get “prettied up” for work. I decided to skip taking a shower and went to my bedroom to get dressed, pulling my hair into a tight ponytail to hide that it hadn’t been washed. I looked in the mirror, reviewing the black skirt and blouse I wore with Mama’s sweater. “Dress for yourself,” she always told me. “What matters is how you feel in what you’re wearing, not what anyone else thinks of it.”

Crossing my arms over my chest, I rubbed my hands over my biceps. “I hope you can see me,” I whispered. “I’m wearing this for you.”

*  *  *

Spencer was the first to arrive, looking handsome in a navy blue suit. His dark hair was slicked back and he had a red kerchief tucked into his breast pocket. He shook Dad’s hand, then pulled him into a one-armed hug, and they patted each other’s backs like they were trying to burp a baby.

“Hey there, monkeys,” he said to us, and Max and I both gave him a little wave. We liked Spencer. Whenever we visited the restaurant, he made us a special garlic cheese toast and snuck us bites of expensive desserts. “Can I help set up?” he asked, looking around the living room. Grace had kept the house so clean all week, it barely looked like anybody lived there.

“I still need to move the dining room chairs in here,” Dad said. “So people will have a place to sit.”

“Let’s do it,” Spencer said, slapping his hands together. They made their way into the other room, and Max and I walked over to the couch and dropped onto it together.

“What’re we supposed to do?” Max whispered, and I shrugged. There weren’t going to be very many people coming over—maybe Diane and her son, Patrick, plus a couple of people from Mama’s work. Dad said her parents couldn’t come because their health wasn’t good enough to travel. I supposed if I knew them I’d have been upset, but I honestly didn’t know how to miss someone I’d never met.

Before I could answer my brother, Melody walked in through the front door wearing a simple black dress and matching ballet flats. Her hair was pulled into a bun at the base of her neck, which was encircled by a strand of pearls. She looked like a blond Audrey Hepburn. Grace gave her a big hug, then offered to take her coat. Spencer and my dad emerged from the dining room, each carrying a couple of chairs. Melody saw them, did a double take, then nudged Grace. “Who is that?” she whispered.

“Spencer,” Grace said. At the sound of his name, Spencer set the chairs down and walked over to them. “This is my friend Melody,” Grace continued. “Melody, this is Spencer. He’s the chef at the Loft. The one whose food I’m always raving about?”

“Nice to meet you,” Spencer said with a small smile, and held out his hand. Melody shook it and nodded, and I thought I caught her giving him a second glance after he’d already looked away.

“Ava, what’re we supposed to do?” Max asked again, pulling at my sleeve. I yanked away from his touch.

“I don’t know!” I snapped. His eyes glossed with tears and I immediately felt like crap for being mean to him. “Why don’t you go eat something?” I suggested in a much nicer voice. “There’s a ton of food on the table.” He shook his head, then leaned it against my arm. I sighed and took his hand in mine. His fingers were warm and sweaty, but I held on to them anyway. I knew he couldn’t always help being a pain. He was only seven.

I felt Grace’s eyes on me from across the room, then she made her way over to the couch. “I brought some of your mom’s photo albums from her house, remember?” she said quietly. “Do you two want to look through them?”

I shrugged again, my stomach flipping over inside me. I’d forgotten about those albums, and suddenly, I wanted to do nothing else. Grace gave my arm a gentle touch before going into the den and returning with a stack of albums. She sat down in between Max and me, giving me one I didn’t recognize from the top of the pile—it had a worn black vinyl cover and spiral edges.

I ran my palm over the front of the album and wondered why Mama hadn’t shown it to me. She had stacks and stacks of albums from when Max and I were babies—I made fun of her for how many pictures she took of us just lying on a blanket on the floor, doing nothing. “What was so interesting about that?” I asked her, and she’d smile. “Every single little thing you did as a baby was like magic,” she said. “I couldn’t take my eyes off of you for a second. You were the best thing that ever happened to me.”

Swallowing the lump in my throat, I opened the album to the first page, and Max reached over Grace’s lap to point at a picture of an unsmiling little girl who stood in front of a red brick house. She wore a plain, dark blue dress and her blond hair was pulled into a ponytail at her neck. What looked like dead shrubs grew up around her, right out of the dusty ground.

“Who’s that?” Max asked.

I scrunched my eyes up to read the tiny letters written on the white edge of the photo—“Kelli, three years old,” I said, then looked at Max. “It’s Mama.” I scanned the other photos on the two open pages, then flipped through a couple more, taking in the images in front of me. “These are all of Mama growing up.” There were pictures of her standing with her mother—a wisp of a woman with dirty-blond hair and heavy lines across her forehead; an image or two of her father resting his large hand on her small shoulder. He was a tall, grim-looking man with blond, slicked-back hair and black-rimmed glasses. His white, short-sleeved shirt was buttoned all the way to the top, and the wobbly skin of his neck was pinched with a bow tie. There was Mama standing in front of a church in a long white dress, a lacy cap pinned in her hair, with the words, “Kelli, first communion,” written on the picture’s edge.

“She never showed us these before,” Max said, and as he did, Dad approached us and sat down on the chair next to the couch.

“Never showed you what?” he asked.

Grace smiled at him. “One of the albums I brought from Kelli’s house.”

“It has pictures of Mama when she was little,” Max said, and just as he did, my eyes landed on a picture of Mama that had “Kelli, 13,” written in spidery script on its edge. We almost could have been twins, only Mama had blond hair and mine was dark. But our bodies were the same, slight and skinny, all elbows and knobby knees. She sat on a white wicker chair, holding a thick book in her lap. Her mouth was smiling, but her eyes were not. We turned a few more pages of the album, seeing more pictures of Mama around my age, looking unhappy and dark, and I thought about the pictures Bree and I took with our cell phones—goofy shots of both of us making faces or puckering our lips and pretending to be glamorous. There was nothing like that here. Maybe Mama had never had many friends. Maybe her life was just so miserable with her parents that she had to leave. There was something so plain about her in these pictures, so the opposite of the woman I watched spend an hour straightening her hair and carefully applying her makeup. The woman who wore tight blue jeans and knee-high, black leather boots.

“Why didn’t she ever show us these?” I asked Dad, then swallowed to ease the cottony feel in my mouth. I kept my eyes on the album, afraid I might miss something if I looked away.

Dad sighed. “Probably because she didn’t like talking about her past very much, honey. It was hard for her.”

I turned another page, stopping short when I saw the last ten pages or so were blank. The pictures just stopped after the ones of her at fourteen. I finally looked over to my dad. “Did you ever see any from when she was in high school? When she was a cheerleader?”

Dad shook his head. “I don’t think so, sweetie.”

“But why would they just stop?” I asked. “You guys have tons from when you met and got married. And tons from when me and Max were babies. Why wouldn’t she have any from when she was a teenager?”

“I guess because she didn’t take any with her when she left California,” he said. “Her parents probably still have them.”

“But she has this one,” I said, giving the album a little shake. “Why wouldn’t she have taken those, too?”

“I don’t know, Ava. Okay?” His voice held a sharp edge, one I’d heard him use on Mama more than once. Grace reached out to touch his hand. He took a couple of deep breaths, his face softening almost immediately when she touched him. I wondered why Mama never reached out to him like that when he was angry, instead of screaming or crying about how bad a husband he was. Maybe if she had, he’d never have left us.

He spoke again, more gently this time. “Sweetie, look. I understand you want to feel close to your mom right now. You want to know more about her. But there just isn’t that much more to know. She and her parents just didn’t get along. For all sorts of reasons.” He paused and reached out to take my hand. “She didn’t believe the same things they believed, and I think for them, that was bad enough for them to not want to see her anymore. When she left, she left everything behind. Pictures included. Maybe this album was all she could take with her.”

I considered this, not quite believing he was telling me everything he knew. A panicky thought rose up inside me and I looked at him with wide eyes. “Could I ever do anything so bad that you’d not want to see me?”

“Never,” he said quickly. “Not in a million years. No matter what you do, I will always be here for you, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, allowing myself to be momentarily comforted. He and Grace got up when the doorbell rang, and a couple of people Mama worked with entered the house, staring at Max and me with such intense pity, I had to look away.

“Thanks for coming,” Dad said to them. “Kelli would have appreciated it.”

Max scooted closer to me and tried to take the album out of my lap. “Hey!” I said, yanking it out of his reach. “Don’t!”

“It’s my turn,” he whined.

“No. You’ll get it . . . sticky.”

“I will not!” He regarded his hands a moment, palms up, then began to lick his fingers.

“Gross, Max!” I said, loud enough for Grace to shoot me a brief warning look. “Knock it off,” I whispered.

He dropped his hands to his lap and wiped them on his pants. “I just want to look at it again,” he pleaded. “Please?”

“Okay, but I’m holding it.” He nodded, and I turned back to the first page, examining each image of my mother when she was a child. Over the next couple of hours, more people trickled in and out of the house, murmuring how sorry they were about Mama. I only nodded in response, not lifting my gaze to meet theirs. Not trusting myself to speak without crying.

After a while, Max got bored looking at the album and went to get something to eat. I still sat on the couch, trying to ignore everything that was going on around me. Dad checked on me; Grace did, too. I told them I was fine, unable to focus on anything but the album I held in my lap. But as the day went on, as most of the people finally left, it wasn’t the pictures I found myself thinking about. It was the blank space of her high school years, the place where Mama just seemed to disappear.