Look Closely - Laura Caldwell [18]
I felt that I’d know true love when a kiss could make everything, the rest of the world, disappear. I kept waiting for that moment with Michael. I didn’t expect it to happen right away, but I hoped each time. I’d close my eyes, feel his lips settle over mine, and while I enjoyed it, I was always still right there. Nothing ever disappeared, not the Miles Davis music Michael always played or his high-rise apartment where we often stayed. I began to wonder if maybe I was incapable of feeling that kind of love, or maybe I was laboring beneath an unattainable fantasy.
Della asked me about college at UCLA, about high school on Long Island, about the tutors in Europe and grade school before that in San Francisco. And then we were back to Woodland Dunes, to the year my father and I left.
“I missed you all so much when you were gone,” Della said. She raised a paper napkin to her eyes, and I wondered for a second if she was going to cry. “It was like a part of my family had left.” Her voice creaked, betraying her age. “Of course, I had my own family to take care of. Max was twelve and Delphine ten. My husband said I had to get over it. I had to get over Leah’s death and get a new job.”
“And did you?”
“Oh, I got other jobs, although never as a housekeeper or a nanny again. I cleaned office buildings for a janitorial service, and I cooked meals for the sick.” Della tsked, as if none of that had mattered much. “I never got over Leah.”
“You two were close,” I said. An image drifted back of my mom and Della in the kitchen, sun slanting through the high window over the sink, the two of them laughing as they washed dishes. It seemed to me now that my mother probably kept Della around as much for her company as her housekeeping skills. I couldn’t remember my mom having any other close friends.
“She was a wonderful woman.” Della’s voice was softer now. “A good friend. And I miss her every day.”
I stayed silent, and tilted my head up for a moment, watching a squirrel above me racing from branch to branch. I had missed my mom every day, too, but not in the same way. I longed for the vague concept of my mother, of a mother in my life. I missed her especially when I was learning about boys, shopping for prom dresses, graduating from college, from law school. I had my dad for all those things, and he tried to be everything—father, mother, friend—but sometimes I craved female guidance and companionship. My friendship with Maddy had filled some of that void, yet no one could totally replace a mother.
“How did she die?” It was the question I came to ask, the one that had been haunting me since I read that letter, but I hadn’t meant to say it so abruptly.
Della sat straighter in her chair, then raised a hand to her lips. She lifted her shoulders, then let them fall again. “It’s hard to say. What do you remember?”
I pushed my mind back to that time when I was seven years old. I remember not needing to ask the question of how she had died, as if I had known the answer and didn’t want to be reminded. But somewhere along the way, I lost the knowledge.
“I don’t really remember anything specific,” I said. “That’s the problem. And I need to know.”
Della pushed her plate away and leaned on the table. “Do you remember talking to the police?”
I felt a strange pulse beating in my neck. “The police? I talked to the police?”
“We all did.”
I tried to conjure up some sense of my seven-year-old self, in a police station, sitting across from a detective, swinging my legs underneath the table. “I don’t remember.”
“Well, they never made any decisions. They never drew any conclusions. Just looked