The Ryans still said grace at Thanksgiving dinner, a sort of modified, more secular acknowledgment of their good fortune.
The tables in the dining room and living room were full, the card table for the kids missing a person because Evan, Myra’s oldest, had been elevated to the adult table.
It still would have been Kelly’s spot, but Kelly wasn’t eating with the family.
Jacqueline Ryan finished reciting the thank yous, stood, topped off the wine glasses of the guests, grabbed an extra glass from the rack, filled it, and walked upstairs to Kelly’s room while Billy started his first not-really-suitable-for-the-dinner- table story with his mouth already full of mashed potatoes.
“Kell?”
There was no answer.
Jacqueline didn’t expect one at the first knock, whether the silence was due to earbuds or sedative induced sleep.
She couldn’t imagine ever excusing her daughter from their Thanksgiving festivities, but she also couldn’t imagine Kelly losing her best friend.
Jacqueline remembered walking past the TV seeing flames out of the corner of her eye, hearing “abandoned property” and distinctly thinking “who cares?”
Kelly cared, because it was an unoccupied home that many of her circle of friends threw parties and even acoustic concerts in.
Jacqueline had no idea. She considered herself a good parent, but…they’re always gonna have secrets.
“Kell?”
Jacqueline slowly cracked the door open, hoping to see her daughter asleep, or otherwise occupied, but she wasn’t there.
Kelly was the youngest, and Jacqueline was too experienced to panic, but a slight chest clutching mini-freakout hit.
The window was cracked open.
Jacqueline walked to it, looked down, and saw the marks in the light snow where Kelly landed after hangdropping.
Her omnipresent teal backpack was gone.
Jacqueline didn’t panic, still, but fear entered.
Lorraine Commor was not a good kid, but she had been a bright, creative kid, and certainly loyal and kind to Kelly Ryan.
The party house fire was a tragedy, to be sure, but it seemed somehow unfair that the only person to die in it had been Kelly’s best friend.
Jacqueline caught herself.
Someone’s child died. It’s horrible. Now find Kelly.
She called Kelly’s cell phone. It rang, sitting right next to the pillow.
Jacqueline slammed the wine she had brought upstairs for her 19 year old daughter, walked downstairs, announced “I gotta grab more whipped cream,” and threw her coat on.
Billy gave her the “are you out of your mind?” look. He had bought enough whipped cream for a swingers sex party, they could have put whipped cream inside both turkeys.
Jacqueline shot back a look that said:
“I’ll explain later,” Billy nodded and seamlessly kicked back into a story about beating the snot out of a Blackhawks fan in standing room at Joe Louis Arena.
Kelly’s footprints made it to the end of the street, then Jacqueline lost them in a wash of blown snow.
She jogged back to the garage, gauging that the very longest Kelly could have been gone would have been 70 minutes. She also had the odd comfort of knowing that no way would Kelly get on a bus to nowhere without her cell phone.
No way, right?
Kelly had been at the party house that night. The kids had a name for it and Jacqueline had already blanked on it.
She left with some guy.
Nick.
Fuck, Jacqueline thought, I should have grabbed her cell phone to see who she had talked to last.
She couldn’t return to the house without whipped cream, without alerting the family that Kelly was missing.
She wondered if Thanksgiving dinner would turn into a huge hunt for Kelly.
That wouldn’t be the worst thing, actually.
She just wanted to know her kid was safe, something the Commors would never have again.
Jacqueline could feel, could smell her daughter next to her, as they watched the morning news report together on the giant, too giant TV that Billy watched the Red Wings on.
It seemed perverse, but Kelly wanted to see it. Demanded to see it, firefighters blasting water onto what once had been a gorgeous Victorian, lost to time and economics and now flames.
Kids and adults being loaded into ambulances.
Jacqueline didn’t breath through the whole report, wondering if they’d see some glimpse of Lorraine.
Kelly cried, stone still and stone silent, like her voice and her muscles had left her body. Just tears,
Jacqueline stayed silent too, knowing she couldn’t say anything that would be of any help.
She only hoped Lorraine was so stoned she didn’t know she was dying.
A thought cut through Jacqueline’s fear and sadness and she punched the gas, the tail end of the car dancing out from behind her on the slippery pavement, before she compensated and righted it.
The home was at the end of a dead end, near the one remaining wall of what once had been a small furniture store turned arcade turned crumbling hunk of spraypainted cinderblock.
In the yard, just inside the yellow police tape, was a dark coat hunched over a large sketchpad leaning against a rock.
Jacqueline parked a few empty lots away and walked toward her daughter.
“Krunchy?” Jacqueline said softly. She hadn’t called her daughter that in a decade.
Kelly looked up. Jacqueline might have been wrong, but she swore she saw a slight smile.
Beyond her daughter, the west wall of the house still stood, along with the arched entry and a piece of the rear wall with a window frame still intact.
Thick, almost muscular icicles hung from where the firefighters sprayed.
On Kelly’s sketch pad was a drawing of the icicles, Lorraine’s face coming to life inside them.
Jacqueline knew her daughter’s art long enough to know she wasn’t close to finished.
“Can I bring you anything,honey?”
Kelly was silent, working on a curl of Lorraine’s always messy hair.
Then: “Some pumpkin pie, please?”
Jacqueline said “Certainly. Be right back.”
As she turned, Kelly said “And maybe…umm…some wine?”
Jacqueline pulled into Sammi’s Deli Lotto, where she always felt bad for the Chaldean guys behind the ballistic glass on the holidays.
She grabbed a canister of whipped cream-her excuse for leaving the house- then looked around the store.
She walked out with the canister of whipped cream, two bottles of Chardonnay, a flimsy corkscrew, a terribly processed pumpkin pie, a box of plastic forks and a quiet smile.
Jacqueline’s husband had enough stories to entertain the family straight through til Christmas and she was more than content to sit with her daughter on the cold ground that long, if that’s how long the picture took.
***
Photo by Tamara Gak on Unsplash
Heartbreaking and beautiful. Thank you.
This was such a bittersweet story. Jacqueline is a great mother.