Mind Games

“A lot of people,” Caleb confirmed. “When they’re all in here, if y’all just need to get away from them for a little bit of a while, just want the quiet? Then you go on up to your room and take that quiet. If you need something else, you just find me or Waylon.”

“Give me your list, Mama, and I’ll do your fetching. How about taking a ride with me in Grammie’s truck, Rem? You, too, Thea, if you want.”

“That’s okay. I want to put my things away. And I want to help make the apple stack cake. I want to learn how. I’m going up now, Grammie, to put my things away.”

And to think a little, she added to herself. To think about how many people would come to the house. She needed her grandmother to teach her how to hold back all that grief and mad. She felt so much from her uncles. As calm as Caleb made himself look and sound, she’d felt as much grief and mad from him as Waylon showed on his face.

All from them, from her grandmother, from Rem, inside herself got so heavy.

It hadn’t been like this before, not before that night. She needed to know how to hold some of it back because it almost felt like it could crush her.

She needed to learn.

She waited to ask until Lucy came to tuck her in that night.

“You said there’d be a lot of people.”

“Yes.”

“You said the gift doesn’t want to hurt me, and I should open myself to it. But when we were all talking after lunch, and a couple of other times today, it—it did hurt, Grammy. Uncle Caleb feels the way Uncle Waylon does, even though he doesn’t show it as much. And with lots more people—”

“I understand. Sometimes you have to close a window.”

She nodded to the open one letting in the night air.

“If you closed that window, you’d still see outside, see the rain if it’s raining, or the sun or the wind in the trees. But you wouldn’t feel it nearly as much as you would if that window stayed open. This is the kind of time where you need to close that window.”

“How?”

“You’ve done it plenty already. Maybe not as thoughtfully or deliberately. Accepting what you have doesn’t mean you have to use it every day. If you need more than a window, imagine a door, close it up, turn the lock. It’s yours, Thea. Maybe you decide, all right, I can open the window a little bit, or leave the door ajar. Or you don’t because you need that quiet Uncle Caleb talked about.”

“Do you leave it open or closed?”

“Oh, I guess mostly a little open. Sometimes all the way open or all the way closed.”

“If I can, I want to keep it closed when we have the funeral.”

“Then that’s what you do. And if you need help, you come to me. All right now?”

When Thea nodded, Lucy leaned down to kiss her. “Dream something happy now, or something full of adventure. Don’t carry weight into sleep.”

Thea closed her eyes, imagined a window. It stormed outside. The rain, the tears. The wind, the grief. The thunder, the mad.

And imagined herself closing the window.

* * *

On the day of the funeral, Thea put on the black dress she and her mother had picked out for the spring chorus concert at school. She’d felt so grown-up wearing it, and the shoes with the short, stacked heels.

She knew she’d never wear either again.

She braided her hair, and put on the earrings the police had given back to her uncles.

Granny had come with her well-to-do second husband everybody called Stretch. She’d heard her grandmother, and her mother, too, call Carrie Lynn O’Malley Riley Brown a force of nature.

Standing a full six feet tall with a long spill of bright red hair and sharp green eyes, she looked like one.

She’d cried, and when Thea let the window open a crack, she saw a heart that carried deep scars.