Things changed slowly, the way ice goes out of a lake in spring: not all at once, but in long groaning cracks and sudden open patches of dark water, and then, some morning when no one is watching, it is simply gone.
There were the Tuesday evenings at Dr. Okafor's office on Pine Street, a small room with a sagging couch and a box of tissues on every surface, where the four of them sat in a row and said things to each other that had gone unsaid for years. Some weeks were terrible. Once, in February, her mother got up and walked out in the middle of a session, and Claire sat in the car afterward and cried with her forehead against the steering wheel while her father rubbed her back and said nothing. But the next week Diane came back. She sat down on the sagging couch and said, "I'm sorry I left. I'm going to try to stay this time," and she did.
There was the afternoon in March when Diane called her sister in Arizona for the first time in eleven years. Claire didn't hear the conversation. She only saw her mother afterward, sitting at the kitchen table with the phone face down in front of her, looking stunned.
"She said she always thought I was the lucky one," Diane said. "She said Mom never let her do anything but pageants. She said she used to watch me read in my room and wish she could just be left alone." She shook her head slowly. "All these years. We could have talked about this thirty years ago."
There was Madison, who quit the volleyball team and the dance company in the same week and took a pottery class instead, and came home every Thursday with clay under her fingernails and a lopsided bowl that she presented to someone in the family with tremendous ceremony. Claire got the first one. It was green.
There was Mrs. Delaney at the bakery, who cried when Claire gave her notice in July, and pressed an envelope into her hand on her last day with a hundred dollars in it and a note that said, For books. Come back at Thanksgiving and I'll put you on the pie line.
And there was August, and her father's car packed to the roof, and her mother standing in the driveway in the early morning holding a travel mug of coffee she had made for Claire just the way she liked it, which she had learned by asking. Diane hugged her for a long time. When she pulled back, her eyes were wet, and she said, "Call me. Not just Sundays. Whenever you want. I'll pick up." And she did. She always picked up.
Claire's first semester at UVM was hard and cold and wonderful. She took a literature seminar with a professor who wrote "Yes!" in the margins of her essays. She made two friends on her floor who were as quiet as she was, and together they discovered that three quiet people in a dorm room at midnight could be very loud. Every other Sunday, she took the bus forty minutes south and spent the afternoon at the farmhouse, splitting kindling and losing at gin rummy and listening to her grandmother's stories, which never seemed to run out.