Fixing Delilah by Sarah Ockler

Fixing Delilah by Sarah Ockler

Author:Sarah Ockler
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: JUV000000
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Published: 2010-12-01T07:00:00+00:00


Chapter nineteen

Patrick walks me home to a dark house. After confirming that Rachel is out and Mom is tucked away in her room, I sneak him upstairs, locking my bedroom door and tiptoeing in the dark to the bed. We try to pick up where we left off beneath the willow tree, but it doesn’t feel right, Holden Caulfield looking on, Nana’s sewing stuff watching from the table, the weight of Stephanie’s frantic diary entries like an invisible force in the room. So instead of kissing Patrick, I lead him to the closet, leaning in to whisper about the diary and show him the hole where it used to live.

“Hey. There’s something else up there,” he says when I yank on the chain for the closet light and bathe us in a soft, white glow.

“What do you mean?”

“Shoved in the back. Looks like an envelope or something.” He stretches to reach it, pulling out a thick manila envelope, yellowed sides tearing at the seams. “Pictures.”

Together, we sit on the floor and spread them out between us—photographs of my family that my grandmother must’ve tucked away after each member died. Or in our case, left.

With Patrick strong and warm beside me, I flip through all of them, my mother and Rachel as girls with another who looks like a younger version of me—Stephanie. I hold her up to the light and look into her eyes and wish she was here with us now, looking at the photos, telling me where they were taken and sharing the thousand words each of them is supposed to be worth, cashed in so I could finally know. There are school pictures and drawings and a photo booth strip of a teenaged Stephanie and Megan. There are shots of my mother asleep on the couch with books and papers and Rachel pulling Steph in a little red wagon and my grandfather, standing for his wedding photo, before they took his leg and confined him to the wheelchair. There is more Hannaford family history on the floor between us than I’ve ever seen in my life, yet there are still missing years. No photos of Stephanie in her late teens, near the end. None of Mom and Rachel during college or even from the holiday breaks when they must’ve come home. None that could be Casey—just a few of Stephanie with someone ripped or scratched away. Removed. Erased. More questions.

I know I told Mom that I’d stay focused, that I’d stop asking questions that don’t have answers, that I’d stop delving into the past. But now, with snapshots of all that’s left of our family swirling in front of me on the hardwood floor of Stephanie’s old bedroom, I know that I can’t keep that promise forever. And my mother shouldn’t ask me to.

I pull the diary from the drawer, and though I don’t let it out from between my hands, I tell Patrick about Casey Conroy and some of the things I’ve read. Some of my suspicions that my late aunt, like my grandmother, may have suffered from some form of depression.



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