Page 6 of The Glass Girl

“Oh, for sure,” I say quickly, because the best thing to do here is just to get into Laurel’s as fast as possible. “I’m gonna ditch this inside and then head home.”

“Love you, B,” she says.

“Love you, too, A.”

—

There’s a part of the bricked walkway leading up to my grandmother’s house that I always avoid. I’ve learned to count how many steps it is to her front door. On the fifteenth, I know to swerve off the path and return only when I know it’s time for step eighteen.

A little part of me always blanks out at step fifteen and comes back to life at step eighteen. I know nothing will happen if my sneakers land on those particular bricks, but it still seems wrong.

It hurts knowing what happened there.

I exhale deeply as I unlock and open her front door, a blast of warmth hitting me. It’s November in Tucson, so the nights dip down to the fifties and the stars hang crisply against the dark blue night sky. My mother still hasn’t turned off the gas, or the electricity, or changed anything. Laurel’s house is still Laurel’s house, five doors down from ours, just like she left it. Like she’s going to come back any minute from a trip she forgot to tell us she was going to take.

She’s not coming back.

Every time my dad tells my mom it’s time to put the house on the market, her face turns ugly with a mix of sadness and anger.You don’t get it,she tells him.You just want the money. Haven’t you taken enough from me?

And then my dad shuts down. And then my mom shuts down. And then Ricci amps up and starts hitting, or yelling, or kicking the dishwasher, and then

Bella, calm your sister.

Bella, tell your father it’s time to leave.

Bella, tell your mother I’m out of here.

I unlock the front door and walk straight through Laurel’s living room, past her pretty vintage robin’s-egg-blue velvet couch, past all the pristinely framed black-and-white photographs of my mother as a child that first made Laurel famous, the ones I usually like to stop and look at for a long time, my mother frozen at four, seven, ten, her skin luminous and ethereal in the woods of upstate New York, her body like some sort of marbled girl ghost.

Sometimes I look at my mom now and try to find that girl in the photographs, the one whose eyes stared out fiercely, who seemed not just a girl but an otherworldly entity, brave and powerful even in her smallness.

I’m not sure I see her now in my mom’s matted, hastily pulled-back hair, in her eyes, which have seemed so sad for years and even more now that Laurel, her mother, is gone.

I wish I could find her. I feel like we could have been friends, that girl and me.

I head straight to the kitchen, to the pantry, which is also still the same: boxes of tea, cans of soup, bags of rice and pinto beans, canisters of incense and flour.

And the endless bottles of gin and vodka and vermouth and brandy and schnapps.

We don’thaveto go out and shoulder-tap at Lucy Licker. We could come here. My mother never comes here. But I don’t want them here. I love Cherie and Kristen, but they’d get loud after a while. Messy. Something about them being here would ruin it, maybe. The stillness.

It’s my place.

—

I never sit in the living room because that makes me lonely, seeing her empty lounger and the tray table where she’d set her dinner while she watched television. Plus, once, Mrs. Rabinowitz saw the lights on and came over and knocked on the door to see if everything was okay and I had to stand there for like ten hours listening to her yammer about her cat and her bad back, praying the whole time she wouldn’t notice I was a little drunk.

“Such a nice girl to watch over her house. She loved you so much.” Mrs. Rabinowitz had tiny, kind eyes behind her giant glasses. One hand stroked the thick white braid resting on her shoulder, and when I saw the tears starting, I almost lost it, so I told her I heard my phone ringing and shut the door practically in her face.

You’d think an old lady would like cozy romances or historical stuff, but Laurel liked murder, especially true crime. I feel like after she stopped being a photographer, she should have had a second life as a detective, really, because she could solve half the stuff onForensic Fileswithin the first fifteen minutes. “All people,” she used to say, nibbling cheese and crackers, her delicate hands shaking like they always did, “have a darkness inside them. You just need to dig a little.”

I pass the hallway leading to the bathroom and the bedrooms. One was Laurel’s bedroom, one was for me and Ricci if we stayed over, and the other is where she stored her photo archives. I don’t think she liked to go in there much on her own anymore, but sometimes she’d let me look through her files, which I could do for hours. She made a lot of money at one point photographing actors and rock stars. Sometimes she’d tell me little stories about the famous people she met.

I walk to the kitchen to sit at the long, old-fashionedwooden lab table she found at 22nd Street Antique Mall, her favorite place to wander for hours before driving got hard and she couldn’t get there. She and I would play Scrabble on this table, or backgammon or Go Fish.

“Just a bit,” she’d say, pouring me some schnapps. “Something sweet for my best girl.”

She never gave me too much. Just enough to send prickles of pleasure down my spine. Enough to make me somehow feelbetter.

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