Movement in the picture glass.
Deb turned, stared hard through the window behind her, into their backyard. The gate leading into it was open. A man was walking away. Deb watched him until he disappeared, hand over her heart, failing to control her breathing.
She tried to remember if she’d shut the gate before she left. Had it been open? She thought it’d been closed—it was always closed—but couldn’t remember. Deb couldn’t be sure of anything, given her foggy grief the past few days.
And that man could have been anyone. A neighbor, a gardener from the HOA, someone who mistakenly opened the wrong gate.
A gardener, probably. That’s what she decided. A gardener.
Her breathing slowed, calmed.
“Hey Mom.”
Kim walked into the living room, wearing a long T-shirt and flannel shorts. Her eyes were exhausted, half-lidded. She leaned against the wall, arms crossed over her chest.
“Did you take your medicine?” Deb asked.
Kim nodded. The Xanax usually hit Kim hard, left her sleepy. For Deb, it was more soothing than anything else. The pain was there, and the pain was raw, but not overwhelming.
“You want to go out for breakfast?” Kim asked.
Deb had always enjoyed cooking, even something as simple as breakfast. But she hadn’t turned on the oven since Grant’s death. He’d always been fond of her food, and preparing a meal seemed like too much of a memory.
Besides, since that night neither Kim nor Deb felt hungry. They ate when they remembered, maybe once a day.
“Let’s go.”
Kim gave her a thumbs-up, ran her other hand through her long dark hair. Grant had thought Kim could be a model. Deb agreed that their daughter was beautiful, but privately knew he was wrong. She was tall, but not tall enough. Thin, but not thin enough. Not that she would ever deny her daughter’s soft beauty, her lovely face and effortlessly long lashes, her black rope of hair, the naturally unbroken skin that Kim’s friends (and, to be honest, Deb) openly envied.
“Mom, stop staring at me.”
“Sorry.”
Deb had always worried about her daughter, and occasionally that worry nearly overwhelmed her—the first time Kim went out at night with friends, her first date, the night she hadn’t returned home until three AM. But Grant’s murder had thrown Deb’s emotions into turmoil. Her worry and love for her daughter had always felt like a balancing act, imaginary thoughts and gnawing fears fighting against Kim’s strain toward independence.
And now all those fears were real. There was no separation.
Violence had come.
Deb wondered again about that man in her garden.
* * *
Deb had lived in Northern Virginia for twenty years and still didn’t understand it. She’d grown up in a small town in Southern Virginia, where the cities and towns were spread apart, divided by mountains or wide stretches of flat land. Northern Virginia was split into almost a dozen different cities, and the borders were indecipherable, without geographic demarcation. You could drive from Vienna, where she lived, to cities like Fairfax and Arlington, without leaving a business district.
But it was nice, compared to the remote town her mother had settled in shortly after her adoption, to live someplace far more diverse. Deb had been the only Vietnamese child in that Southern community, and that was a lonely feeling, a sense that she never completely belonged, that there was a deeper association inaccessible to her.
Kim had never known that feeling. It was hard to find an ethnicity not represented in Northern Virginia, DC, or Maryland. Kim’s friends in high school, and now college, comprised a wide range of races.
But the DC region was famously expensive. Grant’s enormous salary had paid for all their expenses on its own; conversely, the money Deb made freelance writing for nonprofits couldn’t even cover one month. And it had been three months since she last worked.
That said, there was enough in their checking account for a year of expenses. It was a relief not to think about it. Looking into Grant’s life—even at the confusion of his insurance policies and finances—felt too much like staring at a photograph of him. Deb could function when Grant was floating in the background of her thoughts, but distantly.
She couldn’t do a thing when his presence was brought forth any further, was paralyzed when she heard Grant’s voice, or his footsteps on the stairs, or the sound of his car pulling into the garage. When she smelled his sharp aftershave in the morning.
And even though Deb knew she’d imagined those sounds or scents, grief still struck like arrows thudding into her heart.
She and Kim pulled into the IHOP parking lot, expecting to see a Sunday morning crowd, but no one was waiting at the doors.
“What day is it?” Deb asked.
“Wednesday, maybe?”
They parked and walked to the restaurant. The weather was chilly—sweater weather—Grant’s favorite time of year, which, in Virginia, only lasted for about a week. Summers were too sweatily humid, winters a bitter dry freeze. Every year, spring and fall merely peeked out before vanishing.
Kim ordered a stack of pancakes. Deb wanted something with more substance.
“You’re getting chicken fried steak?” Kim asked after the waiter left. “From IHOP?”
“Why not?”
“When you’re at IHOP, you should stay in their lane.”
Deb smiled at that. The sensation felt nice, but foreign.
Those muscles hadn’t been used for a while.
Kim took a sip from her water, swallowed.
“How are you, Mom?”
Given everything that had happened over the past week, the question came off as odd. But Deb and Kim hadn’t talked much about what had happened, or how they felt. Those first days had been stunned silence or body-shaking tears.
Being outside the house felt like a much-needed change.
And talking in public seemed to make things more open.
“I really don’t know,” Deb answered, and regretted her honesty.
She wanted to be honest, but she also wanted her daughter to think she was strong.
Deb had never considered herself emotionally withdrawn, but she was nowhere near as complicated as her daughter was about her feelings. Furious teenage years, marked by angry arguments and frightening periods of depression, had led Deb and Grant to enroll Kim in therapy. Kim had been surprisingly receptive to the idea, and it had helped. Deb would occasionally overhear Kim’s conversations with girlfriends, listen to Kim analyze her young relationships from a psychological perspective Deb hadn’t known at that age.
“I just feel,” she once heard Kim say, talking about a boy who had asked her out her sophomore year in high school, “that his values are more subjective than shared. You know?”
She and Grant had always supported Kim, even if, privately, her approach to life confused them. Grant had adopted much of his widowed father’s attitude—reserved, unmoved, the generational stereotype of a male baby boomer. When Grant’s mother had died, Deb had comforted Grant as he fought back tears. And she’d watched Grant’s father stoically pass through the funeral arrangements, the service, and the reception, distant, seemingly disinterested.
It was fitting behavior for Grant’s father, the same man who had never told his only son he loved him; had merely quietly shaken hands with Grant when he and Deb announced their engagement; never smiled for photos; and who, grimly, briefly, held Kim after she was born.