Raised eyebrows. “Suit yourself then.” And to Catherine’s disbelief, Cordelia started to take the dress herself, picking it up with her fingers like it was something gross.
“This is soaking. Holy crap. What did you do, go swimming in it?” Her eyes, suddenly searching, caused a dull foreboding to prick at the back of Catherine’s neck. She dropped the dress back into the trash. “Catherine? Catherine? Are you okay?”
She closed her eyes, shutting out the memory, telling herself she wasn’t there, that she was home and safe and fine. She tried to think of how to pass the time. She didn’t think she could sleep any more, and the idea of scrolling through her Netflix recommendations made her twitch. It seemed to take her brain a long time to come up with something, but then she remembered with a little jolt that in two days, it would be Christmas Eve.
She wrapped herself in sweats and a bathrobe and tied her dirty hair in a low ponytail. The hardwood of the stairs was cold under her feet, the kitchen air chilled. Outside the window, the night was dark, but the porch light was on, and she could see that her father had been right: it was snowing. Light, drifting. She sat at the kitchen table and looked at the two gifts she’d brought down: a book for her dad, a paint set for her mother. She’d gotten the paints on Etsy, had paid extra to make sure the set shipped to the university before she left. She remembered getting a notice that she had a package, the day before the night it had happened.
Her parents still kept the scissors and tape in that long, narrow drawer to the left of the oven. She slid the scissors through the wrapping paper. It made a sound like a snake and she closed her eyes. When she opened them again, there was someone outside the kitchen window.
She could just make him out by the glow of the porch light on his blond hair. He was walking a chocolate Lab that was sniffing a tree in Catherine’s front yard. The boy seemed to sense somebody watching him, because he turned slowly, head tilted a little, and met her eyes. He raised a hand in greeting and after a moment, Catherine waved back. They looked at each other for another moment and the dog began to wag its tail madly, straining at the leash; unable to help herself, she got up and went to the door. When she opened it, the dog barked and jerked the boy forward with its enthusiasm to get to Catherine.
She knelt down and stroked the dog’s head. “Hey, Molly,” she said. The dog was somehow cold and warm at the same time, her muzzle grayer than Catherine had ever seen it. Catherine stood up and half smiled at the boy in the doorway.
“Henry,” she said. “You need a hat.”
He ran a hand through his short hair with a grimace. “No one told me about the snow.”
“Yeah, I know.” She took a step back, letting both him and the dog inside, and closed the door. She leaned against it, arms crossed, looking at him a little wonderingly.
They’d been seven years old the summer he moved in down the street. Both of them blond-haired, blue-eyed children who blistered in the rare Washington sun. It had been hotter than usual, but they discovered a shared love of the outdoors: running wild through tall, damp grass; coming home for dinner with cuts and grime up and down their bare, skinny calves; Henry pulling splinters from her palms when she’d tried to do a handstand on his deck. Children. Inseparable until they weren’t. Until she’d gone away the summer before high school, and when she came back, something had shifted between them. Suddenly they were teenagers instead of children, in a high school so large that they’d only had one class together the whole four years. This naturally led to different friends, different everything. She dated boys from the soccer team and went to midnight movie premieres and once attended a party across state lines in Portland. Then she went away to college, and he didn’t, but by that point they were so distant from each other he was just a wry memory to her. There and then not. Hers and then not.
At prom, she had run into him outside the hotel and they’d hugged with that why-not agreeableness that came with the end of senior year. She’d smiled up at him, handsome and navy-eyed under the stars, her long green dress sweeping the sidewalk. It had felt like a reprieve to see him smile back at her that night, to talk for just a few minutes, to say each other’s names. She hadn’t even realized until then, the guilt she felt about how she’d let him go.
I put you away, she thought, looking at him now. Like a toy I’d outgrown. Outside, snowflakes stuck to the window in jagged circles.
“Catherine Ellers,” he said. “Catherine Luana Ellers.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’d hoped you had forgotten that part.”
“Never.”
“Well, it’s not my fault my parents honeymooned in Hawaii. It means happy, anyway.”
“Yeah, but you never seemed too happy about it.”
“Whereas Durand is such a charming middle name.”
“It means enduring, Luana.”
“Also stubborn, Durand.”
They were both speaking softly, aware of her parents asleep upstairs, and there was something communal and conspiratorial in how they grinned at each other. She realized in that moment that he had no idea what had happened to her. There was a rushing feeling of relief in that; she didn’t have to pretend. He was the first person she’d talked to in days who had no idea what she’d been through, or that she’d been through something at all. To Henry, she was just a girl in her kitchen two nights before Christmas Eve, wrapping presents while it snowed outside.
So, when he asked her how she was, she walked to the kitchen table and finished taping the snowman wrapping paper around her father’s book.
“Shitty,” she said.
“Language,” he said, bending down to cover Molly’s ears.
Catherine’s lips twitched. “How old is she now?”
“Nine.”
“No way.” As soon as Catherine looked at Molly, the dog padded over to her, panting happily. Catherine stroked her fur slowly, frowning. “Time flies. Kind of late for a walk, isn’t it?”
Henry grinned. “You, uh, don’t really have a choice when it comes to a dog. And it wasn’t like my parents would take her. Not that I mind,” he added.
She knew he didn’t mind. Molly had been his idea, she remembered. He’d begged and begged his parents for a dog and they had finally relented under the agreement that Henry would take care of it entirely. Unlike most children, he had lived up to his word. Even now, nine years later, Molly still looked up at him in silent devotion.
“You’ve always been good to her,” Catherine said with a smile, then the smile fell a little. Henry Brisbois was in her kitchen. It was the strangest thing. She felt a pang of guilt looking at him, the same feeling she’d had talking to him at prom. She glanced at the staircase, then back at the door. “Well, I don’t want to keep you—”