Maybe I can put a few things in this room by the time Luke and Nora get here—a bouquet of flowers on one of my nightstands, the lamp I bought for it, which now resides in the living room downstairs. A little something to make it feel less like an interrogation chamber.
I walk over to the closet, grab the packages of bedding to bring down to the wash—a sheet set, pillowcases, and a down-filled comforter, all of it cream-colored, as neutral as it gets. Emily’s comforter had been black, dotted with glow-in-the-dark stars and planets. She’d wanted to paint the walls black too—black suddenly became her favorite color when she turned fourteen—but Matt and I had said no, not now, you don’t understand how small and sad the room will feel. （I’m small and sad, so that works. She’d said it without a hint of a smile, yet I still convinced myself she was just pulling my chain. It’s her dark sense of humor.） Forced to keep the walls the pale yellow of her childhood, Emily had covered them in posters of her favorite band, My Chemical Romance. The posters bore ghoulish illustrations, and from the little I heard of their gothic, melodramatic music, I didn’t understand their appeal. How had she shifted loyalties from the adorable One Direction to these creeps in less than two years? I had wondered. But puberty is a powerful thing, and parents aren’t supposed to understand what their teenagers listen to. That’s how I reasoned it back then, and it still makes sense. A kid’s music should be her own. I just wish Matt and I hadn’t given her the privacy that we did. . . .
I sit down on the bare mattress. After she died, Matt wanted to go the time-capsule route. “We don’t need the room anyway,” he said. “We never have guests.”
But I protested. Told Matt he could—and should—move his office up there, even though the one he’d created in the basement was spacious, soundproofed, more suited to his telecommuting needs. Plus, he said, he didn’t want to clean out Emily’s room. He thought getting rid of her things felt like another violation, and he didn’t want to hurt her any more than she’d already been hurt. Just leave her be, he pleaded, his eyes glistening. Leave her be. . . .
But as consuming as his need may have been to keep that room the same, mine bordered on obsession—the need to clean it. So I went into the room myself, threw open the door early one morning while Matt was still snoring in our bed. Dusting was what I told myself I wanted to do, but before I knew it, I’d ripped all the My Chemical Romance posters off her walls and ceiling, and there was no turning back. I cleared the knickknacks off her desk, emptied her drawers and shelves into black plastic garbage bags—her clothes, her books, her jewelry. The more I got rid of, the better I felt. And so I moved fast. I didn’t think. I saved nothing.
The whole time, I told myself that I was doing something therapeutic. But deep down, I knew where this urge was coming from, why it trumped Matt’s very valid feelings.
I wanted to destroy evidence.
Three weeks before Emily went to the frat party where she was killed, it was Matt’s and my seventeenth anniversary. We wanted to celebrate it in a special way, and so we spent the night at a lodge on Hunter Mountain. It was the first time we’d trusted Emily to be alone in the house overnight, and I’d been a little nervous about it. Fifteen is, after all, the most duplicitous age.
But Emily assured me she’d be responsible, and she seemed to make good on her word, responding to our frequent texts, calling before bedtime and in the morning, even texting us a picture of herself in her bedroom, just before lights-out. We’d come home to a neat house, our daughter assuring us she’d spent an uneventful night playing The Simms, chatting with friends, and watching TV. See? Matt had said. She’s a good kid. There was never anything to worry about.
I was worried, though, still. There was something a little too perfect about the way the house looked upon our return, something evasive in the way Emily met my gaze. And a few days later, when she told me about the college boy she’d met “at Brie’s party”—which had taken place a full week before our anniversary trip—her words felt hollow and rehearsed. His name is Harris, Mom. He’s really nice. And I thought: Why did she wait so long to tell me?