“I would never,” she says, crossing her arms in the doorframe.
“You could make better use out of this room, too,” I say, taking in the faint lines of the vacuum on the carpet, the chemical smell of Windex on the windows. Imagining my mom coming in here, week after week, cleaning it for nobody. “Turn it into an office or something.”
“Why are you so eager to move on from us, Margot?”
I turn to face her, the comment taking me by surprise. I never really thought my mom registered the way I’m always shrugging her off, pushing her back, letting her adulation slip away like salt water on sunscreened skin. I never considered myself worthy of such praise—I know I am, and always have been, painfully average—so I always assumed she was doing it for her own benefit: inflating all my attributes, reciting them in the mirror like an affirmation, a prayer. Like if she said it often enough, I might actually become the daughter she always wanted me to be.
“I’m not,” I say, cheeks burning.
“You are. You never come home. We missed you on Thanksgiving.”
“I’m busy at school—”
“You’re avoiding us.”
My mother gestures vaguely around the room and I know what she’s saying, the silent insinuation: that I’m not only avoiding them, but this. Her. Eliza and the memories of the two of us here, in this very room: faded pencil lines etched onto the trim, marking our growth spurts. The pictures we ripped out of magazines and taped to the wall. There are reminders of her everywhere, and I drop my bags on the floor and sit on the bed.
If only she knew the reminders were even stronger at school: between Lucy and Levi, Eliza is everywhere now. There’s nowhere safe.
“You should go see them,” my mom says, walking over to sit next to me. “I bet they’d love it.”
“Yeah,” I say, although the thought of visiting the Jeffersons is almost too much to bear.
“They’re bulldozing it, you know. Where it happened.”
I look at my mother, eyebrows lifting. Just like I’ve been avoiding home, I’ve been avoiding the thought of that place, too. Like a pothole in the road, a puddle in my path, my mind skirting around it if only to make myself more comfortable. I saw it on the news in the days immediately after, of course, that old, abandoned building with caution tape stretched tight across the ash-black entryways. Little red flags stuck in the grass, plastic flapping in the breeze.
“When?” I ask.
“Three weeks.”
“That’s good.”
“It is good,” she says. “They should have done it a long time ago. It’s completely unsafe, not to mention an eyesore.”
I nod, my mind on those videos again. On Eliza stumbling her way up the steps, one by one, the empty beach roaring beneath her and the glow of the moon high up above. That’s why they had been there: the moon. What a strange, stupid stroke of bad luck. If it wasn’t full that night, the party wouldn’t have happened. If it wasn’t so clear and cloudless, she wouldn’t have gone.
If she hadn’t been there with Levi, of all people, howling at it like a lonely wolf trying to find her pack, she wouldn’t have gotten so sloppy, so drunk.
She wouldn’t have fallen. She wouldn’t have died.
CHAPTER 39
It takes a few hours for me to finally fall asleep, my childhood bed feeling more foreign than my room back at Rutledge. Nestled between bursts of deep dreams that always startle me back awake—scared and sweaty, eyes darting madly around the room like my own body can’t remember where I am—I come to realize that my mother is right. She’s right about all of it.
The reason I haven’t been back is that I’m avoiding them, her. Here. The last conversation that took place in this very room.
I knew it the second Eliza started seeing him again. It was like an intuition, barely there, my eyes picking up on the subtle way she would smile when her phone chimed at night or how she’d started getting dressed up again any time we ventured out onto the dock. She had kept her distance for a while, the breakin spooking her just enough, but it didn’t last long, the pull of his attention stronger than anything I could say to convince her to stay away. And I’ll admit it: I liked the fact that I had been right. All along, I had been right about Levi. I had been right to be wary of him and it was always so tempting to remind her of that, the ever-present urge to pick at the crust of a scab before it could fully heal. I don’t know why I did it. I was boasting, I guess, reminding her in my own little way that I was useful, necessary.