Invisible by Carla Buckley Page A

frown puckered between her eyes. Was there something wrong with it? But Dana said, “It’s perfect,” dropping it into Peyton’s palm and closing her fingers over it. Her knuckles were rough. Peyton’s mom had the softest hands. She always said it came from having to wear surgical gloves all the time. “It’ll look beautiful with the dress you picked.”
    Peyton hadn’t picked the dress, but whatever. She closed the lid and set the box on her mom’s nightstand, beside the magazine her mom had been reading, rolled open to the page she’d stopped at. The library book. A box of tissues. The spiral notebook she’d been carrying around for the past weeks.
    Her mom never let Peyton read over her shoulder as she wrote in it; she closed the cover whenever Peyton entered the room, so Peyton figured it must be some sort of diary. She’d thought it was weird that her mom would start a diary now, after years of writing nothing but grocery lists. Maybe she used to keep one as a kid; after all, she had given Peyton a million journals over the years, pretty books that sat bare-paged on a shelf in Peyton’s room.
    She placed her palm against the cardboard cover. Her mother had been in such a hurry to leave for the hospital on Friday that she’d left this behind. Peyton shouldn’t be reading her mother’s private thoughts. A corner of paper peeked out from between the pages. Peyton opened the notebook to slide the loose paper back in and found herself staring at the first page.
    Her mom’s handwriting, all generous loops and swirls, filled the lined page, but there was no date printed at the top, no entry that started
Dear Diary
. It was just an orderly list of names and addresses. “Oh.” She felt curiously deflated.
    Dana leaned close to Peyton. She smelled good, like shampoo and soap, the way her mom used to smell, before she started washing her hands with that harsh lime-scented hand sanitizer every five minutes. “What’s that?”
    “These people.” She frowned at the list. “I don’t know who they are.”
    “Well, your mom was a nurse. Could these have been her patients?”
    “She only worked in Black Bear. Some of these addresses are over in Hawley.” She turned the page. There were dates and abbreviations, phone numbers, things crossed out and added in later, in a different-colored ink. “Here’s Martin’s name.”
    “Martin Cruikshank.” Dana’s voice warmed. “How’s he doing?”
    “Okay, I guess.” Peyton liked the old guy. He told her stories about her dead grandma and made her mom laugh. “He works with my dad at the plant.”
    “Maybe I’ll stop by. Does he still live beside your mom’s and my old house?”
    Every so often, her mom would slow the car as they passed the house down on Vintage Street, and remark,
Oh, look, Peyton, they took down the tire swing
or
they planted azaleas
. Her whole life, Peyton had thought of the little white house as her mom’s childhood home; now here was Dana, crowding in. “Yes,” she said, curtly. “But he’s probably at dialysis.” They didn’t stop dialysis for anything, not even holidays, and today was Martin’s dialysis day. Same as it had been her mom’s day. She scowled and flipped the page.
    “Dialysis?” Dana said.
    Peyton studied her mom’s handwriting. The words swam before her. Yes, Martin was on dialysis. He was way older than her mom, but that’s where he was, at dialysis, while her mom was at the stupid funeral home.
    “Would you like to come with me?” Dana asked. “The clinic’s downtown, right? We could walk, maybe have lunch somewhere.”
    Like Peyton would ever want to spend another second in that horrible place. As if she wanted to spend another second yakking with Dana about who lived where and what her favorite subjects were at school. Like she could even possibly eat. “I can’t.” She said it with a vicious satisfaction. “My dad wants to take me to the nursing home to see my grandma.”
    First time she’d ever