She looked old; I’d been told she was my father’s younger sister—she was not even thirty years old—but she looked older than him; older than my mother, even. As a child I imagined there were only three ages anyone could be—young like me, old like my parents, or very old like my grandparents in the North or the women in black dresses who came to see my father. But this woman was none of these things.
My mother ushered me toward our guest. I waited for her to lift me—to hug me and pinch my cheeks the way all our visitors did. Rarely did anyone come by the house without a present for me. The very old women in the black dresses—who called me the miracle of the miracle—would often take me aside and give me crisp hundred-dollar bills. But this visitor did nothing. Not knowing how to respond, I hugged her leg.
She stood motionless. I felt my mother lift me up.
“It’s past his bedtime,” she said. “I’m gonna take him upstairs. Come in, Sarat, come in.”
Our guest looked at the house as though it were made of thorns.
“Whose is this?” she asked.
“It’s ours, Sarat,” said my mother. “It’s yours. We tore the old one down a few years ago when things got better, after…” She paused. “Come on in.”
But she was looking elsewhere, to the eastern edge of the property, where the seawall curled south past three greenhouses and the broken old shed.
“Why’s that wall there?” she asked.
“The levee? We put that in around ’91,” my mother said. “Used to be the river would flood and wreck the greenhouses three, four times a year.”
“The river don’t run that way,” our guest said. “That’s land for another ten miles. I used to walk out there.”
“Sarat, the river moves,” said my mother. “It ate all that land a long time ago.”
I thought I caught a twinge flash across her face, but quickly it was gone.
She seemed to dismiss our home entirely. Everyone always said there was no finer piece of property in all of northern Georgia than the Chestnuts’ place. But she barely noticed it at all.
“We got a room for you all ready,” said my father. “It’s a nice room.” He looked to my mother, who nodded.
“That’s right, a nice room,” my mother said. “I think you’ll like it, Sarat. It has a view of the river, just like your old room did.”
Our guest seemed to retract slightly at the mention of the river, as though some primal mechanism of defense deep within her had been triggered. I had no idea then of what water had done to her.
She pointed at the old shed. “I’ll stay in there,” she said.
“Sarat,” my mother pleaded, “there’s nothing in there but old glass panels and leftover wood. Come inside.”
“I’ll be fine in there.”
I saw my mother look at my father, who seemed not to find our visitor’s request at all unreasonable. I wondered if he even heard what she said, or if he had drifted to his clouded place.
“All right, Sarat,” my mother said, “wherever you’re most comfortable. We’ll bring the spare bed out from the basement, and some sheets.”
“No,” she said. “It’s fine as it is.” And then she was walking past the rosebush to the shed I’d only ever seen the gardener use to store his mower.
I watched her move. She shuffled on stiff knees, the soles of the feet barely lifting. She reminded me of my pet turtle, every step a pained, deliberate undertaking. I wanted to stay up all night and see whether she would really sleep in that leaning, weathered shed, but my mother ordered me back to bed.
My bedroom faced the rose garden and the driveway. The eastern side of the house obstructed my view of the shed. My bedroom window, which my mother always kept locked, made faint the humming of the solar panels and the sound of the river.
But I lay awake in the dark, listening. Not long after our guest disappeared into the shed, there came from the place a loud cracking noise, like the structure itself was coming undone.
Eventually I heard my parents whisper-arguing about it. I couldn’t make out any of the words, but I could always tell when they argued—it was something in the sharpness of the sounds, but only the ones from my mother’s mouth. I’d never known my father to be anything but tranquil, his keel perfectly even no matter the situation. The way other grown-ups treated him—alternating between overt gestures of sympathy and barely suppressed impatience—made it seem as though he was not supposed to be this way, that there was a fault, a failing deep within the workings of him. But in my eyes he was simply kind.
I heard my mother go down the stairs. I heard the front door open and close.
MANY YEARS LATER, when her letter led me to the place of her buried memories and I read the pages she left behind, I learned all about the moments that filled in the blanks between those things I’d witnessed with my own eyes. And by the time I was done reading, I’d learned every last secret my aunt had to give. Some people are born sentenced to terrible inheritance, diseases that lay dormant in the blood from birth. My sentence was to know, to understand.
MY MOTHER WENT to the shed. Inside she found our visitor tearing the floorboards from the ground.
“What are you doing, Sarat?”
“I want to sleep on the soil,” she said. “Go back inside, Karina.”
“All right, that’s fine,” my mother said. “You want some help? I think we have a crowbar or something in one of the greenhouses.”
“I’m fine—go back inside.”
My mother ran her finger along the underside of the upturned planks resting against the wall. The wood was filthy and bleached a faint green from years pressed against the soil.
“You remember back when you first hired me to take care of the old house?” my mother said. “You sat me down and you went through this long list you’d written of all the things I couldn’t do: ‘Don’t go near the shed, don’t go near the cellar, don’t open the boxes those boys on the boats deliver, don’t wake Miss Dana when she’s sleep…’?”
My mother paused. “Anyway, I remember when you were finally done, I didn’t know if there was anything left for me to do. Only thing you never said not to do was take care of that brother of yours. Guess I’ve been doing that ever since.”
Our guest looked up from where she knelt on the floor. “How much of him is left?”
“You don’t have to say it that way, Sarat.”
“How much of him is left?”
“He has plenty of good days,” my mother said. “He has plenty of really good days, when you wouldn’t even know it. Sometimes he gets lost in himself a little, sometimes he has trouble remembering new things, a few times he’ll forget old things. But he’s not…he’s good.”
Our guest stared at my mother, unflinching. Then she returned to ripping the boards from the floor.
WHEN I WOKE the next morning she was still in her shed. I sat on the steps of the kitchen door and waited for her to come out, half-convinced the image of her in my head from the night before was the doing of some strange dream. Inside, my mother and father sat at the counter.
“It’s coming up on noon,” my mother said.
“Just let her sleep, Karina,” my father replied. “It’s her first night out of that place in seven years.”
“It’s not sleep I’m worried about. How do you know she hasn’t”—my mother caught sight of me on the steps—“how do you know she hasn’t done something?”
My father stood and kissed my mother on the forehead. I knew she hated when he did that during their arguments, as though it were some kind of counterpoint to whatever she had to say.
“It’s going to take a long time,” he said.
“Fine,” my mother replied. “But I’m not cooking a second breakfast. She wakes up now, she wakes up at midnight, she gets this.”
A plate sat on the kitchen counter, piled with fried eggs fresh from the coop my mother kept near the rows of our numbered greenhouses, as well as asparagus from House Six and strips of real Virginia bacon.
“Fair enough,” my father said. “I’m not asking you to wait on her. Just treat her as if she was your family.”