For ten seconds, I stood in the middle of it all—the cereal soup and Phoebe’s shrieks and gagging noises and Adam’s increasingly dramatic account of the sweatshirt ownership—and it was noisy and exhausting and completely, ordinarily perfect.
Then I opened the front door to get the newspaper, and the morning was over.
Two police officers were on the porch. Their car was parked at the curb with the lights off. The older one held his hat in his hands. The younger one stared at the ground.
“Are you Rowan?” the older one asked.
I’d seen enough movies to know what that meant. I’d read enough news reports. I understood the grammar of the situation: the hats, the posture, the particular way they weren’t quite meeting my gaze. But the brain resists knowledge it doesn’t want, and for a long, strange second, I just stared at them.
“There’s been an accident,” she said quietly. “Your parents didn’t survive.”
Behind me, the sounds from the kitchen continued for exactly three more seconds—Tommy still stirring, Phoebe still moaning, Sybil still jumping—and then some frequency in the air shifted, like when something invisible moves, and the noise stopped.
Seven pairs of eyes were watching me. Waiting.
I closed the door halfway behind me so they couldn’t see the officers’ faces.
“Everyone,” I said. My voice came out firmer than I had any right to expect. “Sit down.”
Phoebe’s voice was already trembling. “Where are Mom and Dad?”
I stood there on the threshold of my childhood home, eighteen years old, the newspaper still in my hand, and opened my mouth to tell her.
But nothing came out. Not yet. Not the right words. There were no right words.
I would find them. In a moment. I would find them and say them, and we would all survive whatever came next.
That was the only thing I knew how to hold onto, in that first unbearable moment.
