Alone in the house for the first time, I walked through it slowly, the way you walk through a museum of your own life. The living room: Mark's golf trophies on the mantel where my mother's photographs used to be. I found the photographs eventually, on a back shelf in the hallway — my father, my grandparents, me at my college graduation — dusty, facing the wall. I turned them around. I dusted them with my sleeve.
The study door was locked. It had never been locked in my life. I stood in front of it for a long moment, my hand on the knob, and then I walked away, because I was not ready to know what was behind it, and because some part of me already knew.
My mother's bedroom was the only room that still felt like hers. The quilt she had made twenty years ago. The lamp with the crooked shade. On the nightstand, a regiment of pill bottles — I counted eleven — and a framed photograph of my father, young, laughing, his arm around a Margaret I barely remembered, a Margaret with unlined eyes.
I picked up one of the pill bottles and read the label. Then another. Pain medication, blood pressure, something for sleep. Eleven bottles for a seventy-one-year-old woman who scrubbed floors on her knees, and I thought about the word "groggy" before I had any reason to think it — just a daughter's instinct, prickling at the back of my neck. I put the bottles back exactly as I had found them, in their exact order, because I am my mother's daughter in that way too, and I sat on the edge of her bed and I cried, quietly, the way you cry when you are thirty-eight years old and you have flown nine thousand miles to discover that you have failed at the one thing you told yourself you were doing right.
I cried for the swing that was gone and the trophies on the mantel and the photographs facing the wall. I cried for the locked study door. But mostly I cried for the pill bottles, lined up like soldiers, and for the terrible, dawning understanding that whatever my mother had signed eighteen months ago, she had signed it in a fog — and that everyone in this house had known it but me.
At dinner, Mark held court. He talked about the dealership, about a boat he was thinking of buying, about the new fence he wanted to put up. Margaret ate little. Josh answered questions in monosyllables. Tina cleared the plates before anyone was finished.
After dinner, Margaret went to bed early. I helped her — I insisted — and as I tucked the quilt around her, she caught my wrist. Her grip was stronger than I expected.
"Don't fight with your brother," she whispered. "Please, Diane. He has a temper when he's cornered. Just — let it be."
"Mom, did you want to sign the house over to him?"
Her eyes filled. She turned her face toward the wall.
"Go to sleep, honey," she said. "You're tired from the trip."
I lay awake in the storage-room cot until two in the morning, listening to the house settle, and I made a list in my head, the way I make lists for projects at work. What I knew. What I did not know. What I needed to find out.
What I knew: my mother had signed something eighteen months ago. Mark called himself the owner. Tina would not meet my eyes. My mother scrubbed floors on her knees and apologized for it.
What I did not know: whether my mother had understood what she signed. Whether anyone had witnessed it. Whether the papers were even real, or whether Mark was bluffing the way he had bluffed at poker as a teenager, all confidence and empty hands.
What I needed: the documents. My own copies were in a storage unit in Singapore, eight years of careful filing, but I needed what was here — the deed, the closing papers, anything with my mother's signature. And I needed someone who had been here, in this house, on this street, for the eighteen months I had missed. Someone whose memory I could trust more than my brother's smile.
Eleanor, I thought. Eleanor Vance, who had waved at me from her roses like a question. Twenty years a neighbor. The kind of woman who notices everything and forgets nothing.
I fell asleep with the list unfinished, and dreamed about Singapore, about glass towers and harbor lights, about a life that had felt, until that day, like a success. In the dream I was in my office on the forty-first floor, and the phone was ringing, and I could not reach it, and when I finally picked it up there was only the sound of a sponge squeaking on tile, over and over, and my mother's voice humming underneath it, tuneless and far away.
Chapter 6: Breakfast, Carefully