I’m in a mood—all impatient and jittery and nervous and scared at the same time. I’m dying to get up and poke around a little, but Agnes won’t stop with her insane praying. I figure leaving the room is a better option than leaning over and strangling her, so I head out to the kitchen and pour myself a glass of limeade. Then I climb up on one of the counters and sit there for another hour, staring out the window. I wait for Agnes to come out and start yelling at me for one thing or another, but she doesn’t show. It’s very dark outside. The drapey branches of Lillians’s tree look like fingers behind the glass. I reach into my pocket and feel around for George. Just having him in my hand makes me feel better. Eventually I creep back into the living room. Agnes is asleep. Finally.
I start in the living room first. It doesn’t take very long, since the room itself is about the size of a shoe box. The only piece of furniture aside from the couch and the rocking chair is a rickety old bureau pushed against the far wall. In the center of the bureau is a small glass bowl filled with seashells, sitting atop a delicate square of blue scarf. There are three small drawers underneath.
I pull the first one open with shaking hands. I don’t even know what I’m looking for. Worse, the thing pushing me to find it might not even be valid. It might just be some kind of weird, screwed-up hunch. But what if it isn’t? What if … ? I glance inside the drawer. My heart sinks. It’s packed with old, dusty Christmas ornaments—gold and silver balls, ropes of beat-up garland, a half string of lights. The second drawer contains blue-penciled drawings on large, slippery sheets of white paper. I pull one out. It looks like the inside of someone’s house. The rest of the drawings are similar looking. I put them back in, my heart starting to plummet.
But my breath freezes in my throat when I open the final drawer. It’s full to the brim with pictures. Hundreds and hundreds of Polaroid pictures, loose and scattered, piled on top of one another. I remove the one from the top of the pile. It’s of Agnes and me, when we were about four or five years old. We’re sitting on the stone steps in front of the nursery, sticking our bare legs and feet at the camera, giggling hysterically, the way we used to do when things like stinky feet and toe jam were the funniest things in the world. I lean in closer, studying Agnes’s face. Blue eyes crinkled at the corners, tiny button nose scrunched up, teeth as small and white as pearls. I haven’t seen her face look like that in years.
I dig my hands through the rest of the pictures, letting them fall like leaves over my outstretched hands. Every single one has me in it. Some are just me alone, but most of them are with Agnes and Benny. They are all hot-weather shots, taken at the pool or in the frog pond. We are dressed in bathing suits and T-shirts and shorts, flip-flops and sometimes no shoes at all. There are pictures of us in the nursery, pictures of us on our bikes, pictures of us at the Field House, digging through the iris garden. My brain races. Nana Pete is the only one all of these years who has taken pictures of us. Of me. Every summer when she came to visit. So why are they here, in this drawer, inside Lillian’s house? What does it mean that Agnes’s aunt has an entire drawer full of … me? I scoop up a handful of the photos and race upstairs. If I can find just one more thing …
Tiptoeing quietly into Lillian’s room, I place the pile of pictures on the bed and look around. It’s a tiny room, almost completely filled by the bed. Nana Pete is on her back, as still as a shadow. Next to the bed is a dresser and then another door, which turns out to be a closet. I open the door, pushing the hangers aside slowly, and get down on my knees, feeling around in the dark. There are at least six pairs of sneakers, two pairs of brown work boots, and all the way in the back, a beat-up pair of black heels. I shove them aside impatiently and lean in farther. When my hand comes into contact with it, my whole body freezes. Slowly I pull out the violin case and rest it across my knees. It’s smaller than I imagined it would be. The black leather surface is smooth and pebbled at the same time. I open the lid carefully, gazing at the slender instrument, my eyes filling with tears. Then I stand up. I need to know everything, right now. All of it, before Lillian comes home and …
But I stop cold as I turn toward Nana Pete. Something is wrong. There is no snoring coming from the bed, in fact, no sound at all. It is so quiet that it’s like someone turned off a switch. Slowly, I put down the violin case and walk up to the bed. I know even before I crawl up on top of her. I scream and holler, beg her to wake up, but I know.
Agnes doesn’t believe me when I tell her Nana Pete is gone.
“Get off!” she screams again. “You’re hurting her!”
I slide my straddled legs off slowly, one by one, without taking my eyes off Nana Pete’s face. Her eyes, frozen in their sockets, are slightly open, and there is a faint, blue pallor to her skin. I reach out to close her eyelids, but Agnes shrieks.
“Don’t touch her! Don’t you touch her! You don’t even belong to her!”
My heart cleaves in two when she says that. It’s the meanest thing she’s ever said to me. Ever. I catch sight of Benny suddenly, who has awakened from the noise and is standing behind Agnes.