Peter had recently extended me the privilege of walking to Mrs. Blott’s house, so long as I took the main road, called ahead to tell her I was coming, avoided conversation if I came across a traveler, and brought Marlowe. It was a gesture of his faith in me. He and Mrs. Blott had taken me on occasional chaperoned outings, to her house, to Mother Farrow’s, once a picnic by the sea, but only lately could I set out on my own.
I was not yet a woman, in the scientific sense, and several months prior I had brought this to Peter’s attention, having realized that my own biological progression was delayed after finishing a remarkably dry essay on anatomy. Did this mean that I would never be grown, was condemned to always be my father’s child? Flustered at first, Peter had rerouted my questioning to a more general discussion of adulthood, and together we’d determined my new boundaries. His was a sort of illusionist’s trick, loosening my lead so that I might not notice the bit in my mouth. And it worked; I was elated. I forgot the subtle swelling of my breasts, stopped searching for the blood that would mark me as grown. I ignored the dreams, those scarce remembered snatches, in which my body became liquid with desire.
I brought Peter his tea and bundled into my raincoat and wellies, for it was raining that day, a persistent sort of drool. I called Mrs. Blott’s house, and when she did not answer I left a quick message: I was concerned. I’d be there soon. I walked for twenty minutes on the road and rang her buzzer when I got there, my fingers stiff and purplish from the cold. I shook droplets of water off my boots and the hood of my jacket. After a minute, when Mrs. Blott still hadn’t come, I rang again.
By this time the foreboding indigestion in my chest had sunk into my stomach. It wasn’t like Mrs. Blott to sleep this late into the morning. It wasn’t like her to be tardy. I fished in my pocket for her key, a little silver thing that she had given Peter years ago in case of emergency, and that we’d never had cause to use before. It felt strange to be letting myself in. I felt dizzy and intrusive as I twisted the key in the lock and the door opened inward with a pleasant creak.
The house was dark. It was a cottage, really, two levels with five small rooms and uneven flooring. She’d decorated in pastel florals, each room curtained and cushioned in a different muted bloom. It had been sixteen years since her husband passed, but Mrs. Blott had not replaced him, her only companion a mottled brown-and-orange tabby cat named Abingdon, who mewed when I entered and sauntered up to greet me. The entrance was dark. I stepped back.
“Hello?” I whispered. Abingdon hissed at Marlowe, who followed me through the kitchen and up the stairs to Mrs. Blott’s bedroom door. “Hello?” It was slightly cracked, and so I pushed it open.
There was Mrs. Blott, slumped in her rocker. Her face had swollen into something alien and doughy. A blanket lay draped across one side of her body, covering one of her legs, but had slipped down to expose her flannel nightgown, her pasty ankle, a bouquet of plump veins curdling up under her skin. Her eyes were still open.
My instinct was to touch her: just the pad of a finger, a gentle stroke upon the cheek. My hand drifted toward her, and I let it linger until the knock of a tree branch against the upstairs window startled me back to my senses. Peter would not like it if I touched her, not without his permission. I’d disobeyed him in the past, but never so directly, never to such momentous effect. I lowered my arm.
Abingdon mewed again, and I jumped to avoid his slinking across me. I realized that his food and water bowls must be empty. I closed Mrs. Blott’s door and in the drizzly morning light proceeded down the stairs to feed him. Once Abingdon was gleefully crunching away, I went to the telephone by the window and called my father.
Peter didn’t use a mobile phone, having neglected to ever recharge the old model he’d gotten when I was a child, which meant he had to tear himself from his desk and make the walk into the hallway to answer. Not until my third time dialing did he pick up, and then he sounded confused, as if he couldn’t fathom why on earth someone should be trying to reach him through such a ridiculous contraption.
“It’s me,” I said, and his nerves seemed to settle. “I think that Mrs. Blott is dead.”
It will seem strange, I’m sure, that I, at sixteen, should speak so nonchalantly. Mrs. Blott was the closest thing I’d had to a mother; her loss would bring repercussions I could not foresee. But I’d grown in death. We were bedfellows, friends. Though I’d not yet called in for collection, I was certain that we owed each other favors.
Surely, I thought, I would revive Mrs. Blott, once Peter came and gave permission. And he would give permission—in that first hour of shock and denial, I could not imagine otherwise. Peter’s rules explicitly forbid me from touching a dead thing, not a dead person. Not someone with a name we knew, a purpose. I had touched her before, as a baby and at seven when I reached to get a toy and brushed her ankle. It did not seem to me that this particular circumstance was any different, that my life would change at all, save the excitements of the day. For all of my informal education, I had lived in an experimental bubble where cause and effect were entirely reversible. Mrs. Blott had always been there, so to me it seemed she always would be.
I HUNG UP the phone to discover Marlowe and Abingdon the cat circling each other warily, sizing each other up. Marlowe was attempting to nuzzle poor Abingdon, who wanted none of it and bared both teeth and claws. I watched them with amused detachment as I waited for Peter, who’d said he would come promptly. I knew that even if he took the car or his bicycle it would still be some time before he’d gathered himself and made it out the door.
My eyes fell on Mrs. Blott’s bookshelf. At age twelve I had discovered that by placing a pile of heavy textbooks atop an ottoman in Urizon’s library, I could see the books that Peter had deliberately shelved out of my reach, a rather comical selection, including recent children’s literature and school stories that might give me too great an understanding of a more conventional childhood. Most were books I had outgrown by the time that I found them, but the right angle and a careful stretch might bring one down, upon which the contraband nature of its content would excite me far more than a tale of young Bill’s boarding school days should. Some of them were marked with initials, and I imagined they’d been paged through by my mother. I pictured her as a child, devouring these stories, setting aside her favorites in the hope she’d someday share them with her daughter. I pretended she was reading them aloud to me. But I had never heard her voice, and could not settle on its tone: sometimes I heard her sweet and lilting, sometimes throaty and mysterious. This became yet another reminder of my loss.
I had not inspected Mrs. Blott’s library on previous visits, and now that I did I saw that it had little in common with ours. I sidestepped Marlowe and Abingdon to scan it: mostly novels with lovers gazing lustily across their tattered covers, many of which I recognized, having taken them from Mrs. Blott’s handbag to read by flashlight under my covers and then guiltily returned, eager to research the difference between viscount and duke, the finer points of male circumcision. Among these familiar titles I now noticed that the lowest shelf held new ones, the novels double-shelved to make room for experimental manifestos, books of mathematical proofs, a massive tome titled Principles of Genetics. I looked at these with curiosity. Something was afoot.
Abingdon’s purrs revved like an engine, and he padded closer toward the kitchen door, where a key turned in the lock.
Peter, I knew, did not have a key, as our copy sat snug on the key ring in my pocket. I froze, my left hand reaching toward Principles of Genetics. I listened as the door squealed open and some heavy bags were dropped. A throat cleared.
“Why hello,” a voice said.