Lydia was a restless sleeper, so a ringing cell phone set to vibrate was more than sufficient to rouse her.

Squinting at the screen through a veil of mid-length dark hair, she read the caller's name, squinted harder, then extricated herself from her husband's gentle embrace.

     Grasping his wrist, she lifted his arm from its home about her ribs, and laid it beside him as she sat up. For his part, Samuel, who was as attuned to her sleeping patterns as Lydia was sensitive to errant stimuli, woke from a dead sleep while pawing clumsily at his eyes and asked her what was the matter.

Dad. The three letter monosyllable bounced gently at the bottom of her phone's screen while the slab of metal shivered in her hand. She always let his calls go to voicemail. It was petty. It was manipulative. It was part of the emotional walls she had erected in her teens and had yet to allow therapy to help her deconstruct.

     But he never called at 2:17 in the morning.

     Her father, Peter Coleman was a creature of manners and routine. He believed phone calls after nine p.m. were tantamount to indecency. And given the strained distance in he and Lydia's relationship, he also viewed calling her more than once a month as similarly rude and intrusive.

     Dad, repeated the phone screen.

     "Who is it, love?" Samuel asked around a yawn.

      Lydia tried to speak. Failed. Swallowed hard and forced herself.

     "It's my father," she managed, and then answered the call. Her hands trembled as she held the phone close to her ear. Pulling her knees up to her chest, she hugged them with one arm and braced herself against them. Beside her, she felt Samuel sit up. Felt his gaze on her. Felt the concern in his expression. Felt him hold himself away from her in the uncharted limbo of her emotions. He wouldn't touch her unless she reached for him first.

     "Dad..." she asked, the trembling infecting her voice as well as her hand. There was a heavy pause on the other end of the line, but she could hear a gently labored inhale and exhale of her father's voice. He sounded choked. "Dad, I'm here."

     "Lydia..."

     His voice. She'd never heard it like this. Or maybe she had. No. She definitely had. She'd heard him this upset, but even then...there'd been fear and anger in it as she'd stumbled from a cab and crawled into his arms in the middle of their neighborhood street. But this...this was despair.

     "Dad, I'm here. What is it?"

     "It's mom...Dee...she's...oh God...I can't get ahold of your brother. He won't answer his phone..."

     "I'll call Mason, Dad. What's wrong with Mom?"

     "Car crash. The goddamned idiot ran a red light... asleep at the wheel... I don't know..."

     "Dad. Just tell me. What's happened to Mom?" When his only answer was a choked sob, the cold pit in her stomach clenched. She bit her lip to stifle the urge to bully him into a coherent answer.  He's hurting, she chanted mentally. He's hurting so bad he can't even talk. But he was making himself anyway. That she could relate to.

     "She's dead, Lydia." The answer was the quiet plaintive cry of a child whose innocence has just crumbled at its feet, so it bleats to its mother, why?

     Her grip tightened on her phone, but to her own surprise, she didn't dishevel. She'd must have known when she heard his ragged breathing. No. No lying to yourself. When she'd seen his name beside those cold, unfamiliar morning hours.

     "Where are you?" she asked, shocked at how the tremble vanished from her voice now that she knew what she had to do.

     "In the hospital."

     "Are you hurt?"

     "They're keeping me here...say I have a concussion...and my blood pressure's low...they won't let me see her."

     "I'm coming."

     "I don't remember what happened after we were hit..."

     "Dad. I'm coming. Thirty minutes. And I'll call Mason. He'll be there even sooner."

     "I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

     "We're coming, Dad. I have to go."

     "I'm sorry, Lydia. I love you."

     She hesitated. "I'll be there soon."

     Hanging up, she dropped the phone to the bed sheets, then hugged herself and shivered from head to toe.

     "Lydia, what's the matter!" the pleading note in Samuel's voice dragged her back to the present. She couldn't look    at him when he sounded like this. Those huge brown eyes and his round brown face filled with fear and concern. The edge of panic behind it all. Without looking at him, she grasped his hand and squeezed it hard to reassure him she was present and functioning.

     "It's mom. She's...died."

     "What! Jesus, Lydia..."

     "Car crash. Dad's alone at the hospital with her."

     Her husband cupped her shoulders between his hands and held her till she faced him.

     "Alright then," he said quietly, his dark eyed gaze holding hers, "We're gonna get up. Get dressed quick as we can, and go."

     "Right."

     "I'm driving," he added.

     She shook her head. "I'll hate just sitting there."

     "Call your brother. It’ll give you something to do."

     "Right."

     "You okay?"

     "I'm okay."

     He gently squeezed her shoulders, then kissed her forehead, just at the hairline. The pressure was as intimate as he could make it. A rare flare of feeling filled her chest, and she took his face between her hands, chafing her thumbs through his trim, black beard. Then she kissed him. It wasn’t often she was capable of such open affection during crisis. She couldn’t waste it.

     When she stopped and he sighed softly, she tried not to feel guilty. Her distance wasn't intentional from selfishness. It was necessity. Didn't stop her feeling horrible every time her husband allowed the pain of his so often unrequited physical longing for her to show. God, I must look like such a tease, she thought. Stop. Stop it. You've been together five years. Married for two. He's never once complained. He gets it. So stop it.

     "Come on," he said, distracting her from her mental self-flagellation.

In the car she took Samuel's advice and called her brother. When the photo she'd set for Mason’s ID flashed into view, she almost cringed. There was his thin face with its features all too big for it that somehow still managed to be inexplicably handsome. He was grinning. Smile lines creased round his big, brown eyes. He was grinning because he had his long limbed skinny self wrapped around his blonde, bubbly girlfriend who, rather than looking at the camera, had her head tilted back while she looked up at him and smiled. This adorable happy couple picture, a favorite of Lydia's in point of fact, suddenly felt blasphemous. Her mother was dead. She'd never again look at her father the way Billie was looking at Mason. Right, because Mason can help that, you twit. He doesn't even know this is happening and you're judging him for a picture? Don't be selfish. Don't project. She swallowed back the bile in her throat and tapped the call icon.

      It rang through to voice mail.

      "Mason, pick up your phone," she said. She could feel the cautious disapproval wafting from her husband. She flicked to the texting screen. Her thumbs tapped out a message at a pace that mirrored the tone of voice she'd used in the voicemail. It read PICK UP YOUR GODDAMN PHONE. She flicked back to the call screen and poked the redial so hard the screen flickered. Again, it went to voicemail. "Call me now."

     "Are you sure hostile's the best approach right now?" Samuel offered.

     "If it gets a result."

     "Ends and means and all that."

     "Not now, Samuel. Please."

     He didn't push the point. He didn't need to because Lydia realized he'd achieved his aim as an old conversation with her therapist about how justifying toxic means just lead to perpetuating poor habits. You don't have to manipulate him because he won't pick up his phone, she thought. She ticked through her coping mechanisms. Don't hyperfocus on how not answering makes you feel. Don't imagine his motives because you don't know them or if he even has any.           He's a reasonable person. He doesn't actively seek to hurt people. Put your focus on empathy. What will he feel when he hears about Mom?

     "Devastated..." she whispered.

     "What's that, love?" Samuel asked.

     "I was trying to empathize with my brother instead of imagining slapping the hell out him for not answering his phone at two thirty in the morning."

     Her husband nodded. She could tell by the set of his mouth he was fighting a small smile. Don't be annoyed because he wants to laugh. You're the one pulling sarcasm.

     "You're right though," he said.

     "About what?"

     "He will be devastated."

     On cue, her phone buzzed.

     "What, what, whaaaat do you want?" Mason's said through a yawn laced with anger.

     "Mom and Dad were in a car crash." The immediate weight of silence on the other end said he was good and awake now. She tried not to give into a flash of triumph.

     "How do you know?"

     "Dad called me. You wouldn't pick up." Stop it, you're accusing him. Why the hell was it she always fixated on the petty things that didn't matter? "Mom's died," she added before she continued to lash out irrationally.

      "What!" Mason's choked cry sounded so like her father it made her skin bristle with gooseflesh. "How...Jesus, Lydia..."

      She swallowed and made herself interrupt him with as reasonable a tone as she could muster. "Just get to hospital. He'll need us. We can worry about the details there." Mason sobbed out his agreement. He'd be ugly crying now. All snot, tears, and spit. She could hear it in the pitch of his voice. It occurred to her that she had still yet to cry.

 

#

 

      They'd placed her father in a geriatric ward because the rest of the hospital was so full.

      "Idiotic government budget cuts," Mason muttered. Mentally, Lydia agreed with him. But she was too busy counting door numbers in search for the right ward.

      "Here," she said, ducking through a set of double doors painted a color that might charitably be called condemned-day-care yellow. To her left was a nurses' station which she ignored while remaining dimly aware that Samuel had occupied a place at its counter while he questioned the charge nurse. Lydia was too busy scanning the faces of the patients in search of her father.

      She found him in the closest to a secluded spot the wall-less space had. He was staring out a grime dimmed window. The pale gray light that seeped through blanched his normally sky blue irises colorless. His skin was pale, and the lines on his face looked like they'd been carved into him by a sculptor with a grudge. A big bandage covered most of his left temple at his hairline, and Lydia could see the ghostly beginnings of a dark red bruise running diagonally over his collar bone. Seat belt. She winced as she realized the ugly bruise would cover his whole torso. He was lying stone still, which completely unsettled Lydia. He should have at least been toying with his curly hair, a habit that was normally so compulsive that her mother had developed a tick of gently tapping his wrist whenever he took to twisting a stray silver coil. The man on the bed didn't look like her father. He looked like a frail and empty shell.

     Go. Go up to him. She repeated it to herself three, four more times, and yet her limbs stayed rooted as if they'd been cast in cement. The past doesn't matter here. She's dead. We've all lost her. Move. Peter blinked and tears ran down his cheeks. Her body finally obeyed her.

     She walked to the end of the bed, nipped round its edge, and knelt beside it.

     "Dad," she whispered. He looked at her, and as their gazes met she realized it had been years since she'd looked the man in the eye. Nearly a decade of shame had kept her scanning ceilings and corners of rooms and furniture every time they spoke directly. Oh, she spent plenty of time watching him interact with everyone else, especially Mason with whom he had such an easy rapport, but this…actually looking into her father's eyes…she'd had no idea how long she'd avoided such a simple intimacy. The distant echo of conversations with her therapist sounded in her ears.

      Do you still struggle with wanting your father's approval? 

      No.

      Why not?

      Because I don't deserve it.

      How do you know that?

      The question of deserving may have been an invention of her depression, but the fact she wouldn't look at him said she'd swallowed her own lie.

      Now they looked at one another in silence for a long moment. Unblinking. She watched tears fill his eyes and spill down his cheeks. She laid a hand to his face and stroked the tears away with her thumb.

      "You look like her," he whispered.

      Her throat caught, and she pulled him close and hugged him, looping her arms around his neck and shoulders.

It had been years since she'd done that too.

      Then she felt Mason's hand on her shoulder.

      Without releasing her father, she looked up at her brother whose face was already crumpling into a mask of grief. Lanky creature that he was, it was easy for him to kneel beside her and wrap his arms around both she and Peter. Her father trembled in her arms while he cried softly. Mason cried so hard he gave himself the hiccups.

      She looked across the ward at Samuel. She was completely dry eyed.

 

#

 

     They had to take Peter for surgery around seven a.m.. It turned out that the drop in his blood pressure was from an extremely slow brain bleed. Slow enough that relieving the pressure building in his skull would allow him to heal.

     Trouble was this life saving procedure was also life-threatening.

     I'm not going to lose them both. Lydia was sitting curled against Samuel's body, his arm draped around her protectively while she burrowed into his side. She picked compulsively at her cuticles. Every so often, Samuel would close his hand over her fingers, then kiss her knuckles to remind her to stop. I'm not going to lose them both. She repeated to herself. She'd been doing so for the better part of the hour and a half that Peter had been in surgery. She knew better. Her habit of willing things to happen was a destructive one. Recognizing her powerlessness in the scheme of things had been easy. Accepting it was still something she was working on in therapy. The world doesn't revolve around what you want. It was an obvious concept. One most people got over by age eighteen or so. But Lydia hadn’t and instead had cloaked the habit of thinking so in the self-delusion that she was simply determined and liked to have her own way. The seeming innocuous vices had become tools for demeaning herself when things went wrong. Well I must be complete shit if I can't do this right or make it work this way. It had taken a long time to recognize the thoughts as unhealthy. Samuel's easy going nature had been a good example. Instead of willing things to go the way he wanted, he simply rolled with reality as it met him. No expectations. He'd taught her a lot. 

     But grief, she was finding, had a nasty way of resurrecting bad habits.

     Her mom wasn't her first loss. Up until the age of fourteen, she'd been the youngest in her parents’ set of three children, and the only girl. But her brother Ben had suffered from Epilepsy severe enough that a seizure had killed him shortly after his twentieth birthday. That had been the start of the worst of her issues with depression and self-destruction. Before Ben died, she'd spent most of her life jealous of the attention his disease demanded from the rest of her family.  While the imbalance of interaction from her parents couldn't justifiably be termed negligent, she'd spent most of her teens building up a thorough resentment towards her whole family. A resentment that had immediately transformed into a pit of self-loathing whose slopes she'd greased with destructive behavior. Recreational drug use. Casual sex. Unhealthy, unequal friendships. After a sexual assault that was the culmination of the worst of her actions finally pushed her into therapy, she'd started learning to care for herself. And then Samuel had come along.

So this loss was her first since her recovery, and the ghost of her struggle against her old controlling tendencies had, Marley like, pulled up a chair by the fire of her insecurities.

     I can't lose them both. I won't lose them both. Stop it! She shook her head physically to interrupt the litany in her mind. At this rate it would be safer to let her thoughts wander than to repeat that impossible controlling phrase until she believed it.

     Think of something else. Someone else. Anything else...

     Of course the only thing that sprang to mind was Ben and the night he died. She pictured the night they'd come home from the hospital after Ben’s final seizure. Before the incident she’d been playing scrabble with her brother. The board they’d had been playing with had still been in the floor when they’d come home. The cardboard had been split up the middle with its two halves dangling by a ragged strip. The bone white letter tiles scattered like a victim's teeth in a boxing match. Peter had knelt beside the board. She pictured him. Silent. His shoulders twitching, while he sat limp and slumped beside the board, and then the awful staccato whimper that finally broke the silence as his body tried to give voice to the grief.

     Lydia sat up, abruptly dislodging Samuel's grip. "I have to go to the house," she said. Both her husband and brother sat up, startled and confused.

     "What are you talking about?" asked Mason.

     "Dad's house. I have to get to Dad's."

     Confusion laced her husband's features, while suspicion lit Mason's, but Samuel's unfailing patience had him laying a gentle hand on her shoulder.

     "What are you talking about, love?" he asked. Mason scowled and rolled his eyes.

     "No one's been back to the house since the accident," she said. "They were both hurt, so they brought them both here. No one's been to the house. It'll look just like it did when they left it. When they left together...just thinking it was any other night."

      Relief washed through her as comprehension settled over both men. Samuel had already taken to his feet and was pulling on his coat.

      "You'll hold down the fort, right bud?" he said to Mason. Her lanky brother nodded.

      "You'll know what I know when I do," he answered.

       Samuel held out Lydia's coat by the shoulders. "Alright then." She slipped into it then pelted for the elevator at a hybrid walk-run.

 

#

 

     The house was a gauntlet of memories crouched in corners, clinging to walls and table tops, all awating Peter's return like thugs lying in ambush.

     Deeana Coleman had never been a meticulous housekeeper. Clean, but vaguely cluttery. That had been her default, and so Lydia found her childhood home looking much as it ever had. Littered with evidence of her mother's absent minded progress through the house. If one knew Dee’s habits, one could look at the little trail of objects and chart her activities like clockwork. On the kitchen counter stood a ceramic tea-cup. A lumpy monstrosity of moss colored clay with the words "wurld's best MOM" scrawled into it by a six year old Mason's clumsy handling of a toothpick. The tag from the tea bag still dangled over the side. Taylor's of Harrogate. Lady Grey. Lydia couldn't read the tag at this distance. She didn't have to. A random black sock lay crumpled at the foot of a door in the hallway. She'd done laundry. Dropped a sock. Forgotten to go back and check for strays. A copy of Black Coffee by Agatha Christie was propped open on the arm of the striped settee by the window. It was one of several books within a short radius of the bookshelf that was propped open at the spine. The woman never seemed to have a bookmark. And finally in the chair which faced the television was a basket of yarn across which was draped, hook still stuck in the beginnings of what might eventually be a tea cozy. Some fellow teacher's birthday must have been coming up since the pastel pink yarn was the antithesis of her mother's taste.

     Lydia stood just inside the door thinking of her father in his hospital bed and his hollow eyed stare. If he was a shell, this would break him.

     "What do we need to do?" asked Samuel.

     "Tidy up. Just a little," she said quietly.

     "You're sure about this?" he asked. "You don't think he might feel like somebody snuck in and erased her without him knowing?"

      It was a fair query. As she considered it, she again pictured her father on the night of Ben’s death. His silent, shattered weeping.

     She swallowed. It felt like her throat had turned to sandpaper. "Mom always had it spit shine once a week. Everything would stay put away on Fridays and then go back to this the rest of the time." She faced Samuel. "I just want him to be able to walk in and go straight to sleep. Not get...fixated." Her husband nodded. "Why are you smiling?" she asked.

     "Just...funny."

     "What's funny?"

     "The two of you. You're more alike than either one of you gets."

     "You put up the books, I'll get the kitchen."

 

#

 

     Peter came out of surgery at ten fifteen a.m.. They discharged him from hospital later that evening.

     He rode in Mason's car at Mason's suggestion. Lydia had surprised herself by feeling annoyed over it. But she didn't tell Samuel that as they followed her brother's squat Mini through the streets of her old neighborhood. Instead she gnawed her fingernails and made a mental list of all the perfectly valid reasons Mason had to justify his assumption she wouldn't want her Dad in the car with her.

     The red glow of Mason's brake lights chased away the memories.

     Lydia was out of the car and holding open the passenger side before Samuel had even properly applied his brakes.

     "You're gonna get a foot taken off one day, you impatient thing." said Samuel as he joined her.

     "Sorry," she said.

     Mason was helping Peter to his feet, his hands braced at Peter's ribs while the older man pushed on his son's shoulders for leverage, eyes shut tight and teeth clenched against the pain. Once he made it to his feet, he patted Mason's shoulder. "I'm alright," he said. They all shuffled inside.

     Once across the threshold, Lydia held her breath and watched her father. He didn't look around. Instead he walked straight to the chair across from the TV in which he read most evenings. With a heavy, pained sigh, he sank into the seat and closed his eyes. He took long, even breaths. He was breathing through the pain. Their car had wrapped itself around a streetlamp, instantly crushing Deeana and trapping Peter until emergency workers could pry open the vehicle. His injuries might have been tally-able, but Lydia imagined everything must hurt.

     "I'm just gonna sleep here," he said, eyes still closed. "I don't wanna try the stairs right now, alright?"

     "Course not," said Mason. "Wouldn't let you if you did, anyway," he added, gently gripping Peter's shoulder. His father reached up and patted his hand. Lydia watched tears well and recede in both men’s eyes. She blushed with shame at the nothingness welling behind her own.

     "We're staying," she heard herself blurt out. Mason raised an eyebrow at her. She shrugged back, every bit as surprised as he. She addressed her father. "Don't want you to be alone, okay?"

     Peter, who still sat with his head laid back and his eyes shut, nodded. "Thank you."

     "There's only one guest room," said Mason. "I'd kinda thought what with Dad sleeping down here, I'd stay in it. In case...well. In case."

     "We can sleep in my room," said Lydia.

     "Hasn't it still got your old teenager bed in it?" said Mason.

     "There's a blow up mattress in the closet, right Dad?" She looked to Peter, who'd finally opened his eyes and was staring at her with an unreadable expression.

     "Yeah," he said.

     "That's it then," she said. "Come on, Sam. Let's go dig it out. Then we'll head back to ours and pack a bag." she said. Crossing quickly to Peter's chair, she dropped to her knees and hugged him. She could feel him wince.

     "Sorry. Did I hurt something?" She asked.

     "Not your fault," he said. "Damn seatbelt..."

     "See you soon."

     "See you. Drive safe please..."

     She leaned back out of the hug and locked gazes with him. Tears were threatening round the edges of his eyes again. "Samuel's driving," she said. Don't worry, the dysfunctional one isn't driving, she thought, then mentally kicked herself. Stop it. He's scared for you. She died in a car wreck you passive aggressive twit.

     "Same difference," he said quietly. Lydia leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek.

 

#

 

     That night in her room upstairs, she and Samuel worked together to shift her furniture to the edges of the room.

     "You sure this is what you ought to be doing, love?" asked Samuel.

     "Dad doesn't need to be alone," she said, kneeling and affixing the mattress port to the mouth of a hair dryer.

     "Point is he wouldn't be. Mason's here."

     "Mason hovers," she said.

     "So what's this we're doing?"

     "Being present."

     He was quiet, but worry screamed from his movements as he unfolded the bed linen they'd raded from a hall closet. He snapped the folds from the sheets and almost punched the pillows into their cases. You're going to have to answer him in more than monosyllables at some point, she told herself. With the patience he's shown, he deserves more from you than cryptic one-liners.

     At long last, the rubber mattress drew taut and full, so she clicked off the hair dryer and helped Samuel to stretch the fitted sheet over top. Then she dug through her overnight bag for the nightgown she'd packed. Ordinarily a pajama girl because bottoms made her feel less vulnerable, she'd finally admitted some of her grief in by choosing the white, satiny thing. Mom had always worn nightgowns. She yanked it over her head, slipped in beside Samuel, and looped an arm over his chest. She tapped the pad of her index finger against his temple, feather light against the skin. "I can hear your brain ticking away over there," she whispered. He grunted in reply. "I don't know if I'm okay either," she said. He turned to face her, a measure of relief in his eyes. She shrugged. "She was my best friend and now she's gone. And I haven't even cried yet. I don't know why."

     He took her hand. Chafed his thumb across its back. "Well,” he said, “You've been pretty good at distracting yourself all day."

     "What do you mean?"

     "You've been focusing on your Dad, not you. I don't think it's really hit you yet." He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed her knuckles. "And that's okay. I'll be here when it does. You can bawl your guts out and throw stuff at my head all you want when the time comes."

     She smiled softly. "Good to know."

 

#

 

     She woke around two a.m. to a blade of yellow light on the wall.

     They'd left the bedroom door open to minimize noise should either of them need to get up in the night, an exercise she'd had to mentally steel herself for. It had been years since she'd gone to bed without locking her bedroom door, even now that she lived with Samuel. An unlocked door at a friend’s party had admitted a rapist into her room back when she was sixteen. Just the thought of an unlocked door was typically a solid trigger for panic attacks. But compassion seemed to be a weighty counter to trauma. Peter needed to sleep. Sleep was going to be impossible. It had been thirteen years since the rape. She could leave the damn door open.

     Didn't stop the strip of light from igniting white hot terror in her chest. I'm at Dad's. Samuel's beside me. Air mattress. Wearing weird PJs. I'm twenty nine. I'm with my family. I'm safe. When her heartbeat slowed and her vision adjusted to the light, the outlines of her room coalesced and grounded her back in the present.

     But where was the light coming from?

     Gently, so as not to wake Samuel, she shifted and looked out the door. For some reason she expected it to be the bathroom light, but instead it flowed from the gap under her parents' bedroom door.

     Oh, Dad...

     As carefully as she could, she rose from the bed, fetched her house robe from the overnight, then crept down the hall.

     It turned out the source was deeper than her parents' room, which when she entered it was still swathed in half shadows. Instead the light from bathroom inside the master bedroom was on, streaming out of the open door. From her angle, Lydia could see the mirror which took up the whole wall, but no one was reflected in the glass. Fear tightened its grip in her chest again, but she muscled it down as she crept towards the door. And then she saw him.

     Her father was sitting in the bathroom floor, his back to the tub and his knees pulled up to his chest. Propped upon them was her mother's makeup case, an old, bulky, plastic relic from the eighties that had been a fixture on the bathroom counter for all of Lydia's life. He was staring at the contents, tears dripping off the end of his nose and chin. One hand toyed absently with a make-up brush.

     "Dad..." Lydia called quietly.

     He looked up. When he caught sight of her he inhaled sharply and visibly winced.

     "Dad are you alright?"

     "Sorry...you looked like your Mom just there..."

     Biting her lip, she hesitated. Maybe she should just leave him alone. Let him do whatever it was he was doing in here, work through whatever strange facet of grief had him in its grips...

      "What are you doing?" she asked, kneeling beside him. He shrugged and stroked the soft bristles of the makeup brush.

     "I woke up and just...needed to be near her. But she's not here. I tried looking at her clothes but they're empty." His throat clutched. Lydia cupped the back of his skull with her palm. "I wanted to feel her. Smell her. Something. So I came in here looking for her perfume and saw this thing." Again, he petted the brush. "It touched her face." He reached into the case and fished out a lipstick. "This touched her mouth every day. Every day..."

     And then the tears came again, falling in a steady unbroken stream while his breathing hitched and spasmed. Lydia wedged herself into the corner beside him and looped her arm around his shoulders. She held him tight while he cried, but it only seemed to make it worse.

     "I just want one more moment with her. It all happened so fast. She was dead before they even got me out of the car." Lydia could feel the beginnings of a knot of grief in her chest, right at the center, swelling to crowd her lungs and labor her breathing. Peter gave a quiet sob. "One more moment...just to touch her. Kiss her...just one…"

     Find something. Help him. Don't be useless, she told herself. Glancing into the makeup case, she saw he'd dropped the lipstick tube. An impulse she could not explain to herself gripped her, and she reached into the case and grabbed the lipstick. Turning to face her father, she gently patted his cheek, prompting him to look at her. Then she took the lid off the tube and twisted the color up. It had a sweet, waxy scent. One she suddenly recognized from a thousand goodbye kisses at the bus stop where her mother had daily embarrassed her all the way to her teen years by kissing the tip of her nose. The color was a neutral, slightly mauvey tint that had been becoming. It was so familiar Lydia had stopped realizing her mother was even wearing lipstick when she had it on. It was shade that smeared every tea cup and wine glass they'd owned. It touched her mouth, Lydia thought. She didn't say it, but he seemed to hear the words anyway as father and daughter looked at each other. With one hand holding his face, and the other wielding the lipstick, Lydia traced the color onto her father's mouth.

     When she'd done, they sat for a moment staring at the open tube of makeup. Then Lydia's vision blurred as tears flooded her eyes.

     She felt rather than saw Peter lay aside the case before he pulled his daughter to his chest where she laid her head and sobbed.

 

The End.