I Came Home Early and Heard My Parents Planning It

The Greyhound let me off at the corner of Weller and Ninth, which was a mile and a half from the house, because the driver said the bridge was out and he wasn't taking the bus any further south. I didn't mind. I had been sitting for six hours and my knees ached, and the evening air smelled like cut grass and somebody's charcoal grill, and I was so happy I could have walked ten miles. I was supposed to arrive Saturday. It was Thursday. I had finished my last final that morning, packed in forty minutes, and caught the first bus out of Alder Creek because I wanted to see the look on my mother's face when I walked in a day early. She always made a production of my homecomings. She would stand on the porch with her arms crossed and pretend to be annoyed that I hadn't called, and then she would hug me so hard my ribs hurt. The house was a two-story colonial on Marrow Lane, painted the same faded butter yellow it had been since I was eight. My father had been promising to repaint it for a decade. The shutters were crooked on the left side and the porch steps creaked on the third one, and I knew all of that the way you know the shape of your own hands. I let myself in with my key. The kitchen smelled like coffee that had been sitting since morning. There was a stack of mail on the counter and a bowl of lemons that had gone soft, and I stood there for a second just breathing it in, feeling like a kid again. Then I heard the car. It was my father's sedan, the one with the bad muffler that sounded like a lawnmower, pulling into the driveway. I looked at the clock on the stove. Ten past six. They were home early too. And I don't know what came over me. I really don't. Maybe I was still sixteen in my head. Maybe I wanted the surprise to be bigger than just standing in the kitchen like a normal person. There was a coat closet in the front hall, but that was too obvious. The one in their bedroom was deeper, the one my mother used for her winter things, and it had a door that latched but didn't lock, and I could hear everything from inside it. I dropped my duffel by the stairs and slipped into their room. My mother's perfume hung in the air, that lavender stuff she'd worn my whole life. I pushed aside a rack of wool coats and stepped in and pulled the door shut, and the latch clicked, and I stood there in the dark with my heart going like a rabbit's. I was grinning. That's the part I can't get past. I was standing in my parents' closet with my hand over my mouth to keep from laughing, waiting to hear my mother say my name. The front door opened. I heard their footsteps in the hall, and my father's keys hitting the little dish by the stairs, and my mother saying something I couldn't make out. Then the bedroom door closed, and the room went quiet, and I held my breath. My mother spoke first. She didn't sound like herself. She sounded like she was reading from a page. "Emily gets in tomorrow," she said. "Have you figured out how you're going to do it?" I thought I had misheard. I thought maybe they were talking about a car, about selling the sedan, about some problem with the house. My brain reached for anything that fit. My father let out a long breath. The kind of breath he let out when the taxes were due or when the roof leaked. Tired. Resigned. "I've thought about it," he said. "Tomorrow night works. She'll be tired from the trip. I'll do it when she isn't looking. One moment, and it's done." "And you're sure you can manage it without a mess." "I've run it through. It'll look like an accident. People will feel sorry for us." "That's the part that matters," my mother said. "We have to come out of it looking like we tried." I don't know how long I stood there. I know that at some point my legs started to shake, and I put my hand over my mouth, and I pressed my back against the wall of the closet because there was nowhere to sit. The smell of lavender got into my throat and I thought I was going to be sick. They kept talking. They talked about an insurance policy that my grandfather had set up when I was born. They talked about a fund, something with my name on it, something my mother said we could not touch while I was alive. My father said the paperwork was already in place. My mother said all they had to do was wait. I heard the sound of a chair. I heard my father walk to the window. I heard him say, "She doesn't suspect anything. She never has." And my mother said, "That's the only reason this works." Two hours. I stood in that closet for two hours. They came in and out. My mother took a shower. My father watched something on television in the other room and I could hear the low murmur of it through the wall. At one point my mother opened the closet door and I nearly screamed, but she was only reaching for a scarf, and she didn't look down, and she closed it again and went away. At nine o'clock they left. I heard the garage door, and the sedan, and then nothing. I counted to five hundred before I moved. My legs had gone numb from the knees down and I had to hold the wall to keep from falling. I pushed the closet door open and stood in my parents' bedroom and looked at their bed and their books and the picture of me on the nightstand, grinning in a graduation gown that was two years old. Then I walked out of their house, and I did not run, because I was afraid running would make a sound.