Detective Thomson leaned forward as well. He cradled his coffee in his two hands, the missing part of his finger camouflaged by the others.
“Well, she doesn’t want anyone to know,” I said, keeping my voice low, eyeing my mother on the couch, her knees pressed together at the hem of her Lilly Pulitzer skirt. “About us.”
“About who?” the detective said. “You and Jane?”
“Oh, good heavens,” my mother said, slapping her lap, rising to her feet.
Detective Thomson leaned away, a flush rising from his collar. I waited a moment, watching my mother. “It’s true,” I said. “We had a little crush on each other, Jane and I. Maybe it was more than that. Do I have to tell you everything?”
My mother’s jaw tightened and she sat back down, smoothing her skirt. “Is this what you wanted to know, Mr. Thomson? Is this what you’ve been digging around for? Some scandal? Some schoolgirl relationship between my daughter and her childhood friend?”
The detective had kept his eyes on me. Where once he might have smiled indulgently, this time he did not. “Are you saying you don’t like boys,” he asked.
“I’m saying if I had a crush on anyone, it was Jane. Not some boy I didn’t even know.”
“You’re a clever young woman,” he said.
It was July, and the drapes on the living-room windows blew in, carrying in the smell of salt, the tones of the Spiritualists’ organ. Detective Thomson shifted in the chair, and the antique joints groaned. Outside, the Sound broke forcefully against the seawall. A strange little bird chirruped in the crab apple.
“No,” I had said, cupping my upturned hands in my lap. “Del was the clever one.”
Now, beyond my mother’s profile at the wheel of the car, Route 79 wound alongside green swaths of hills still damp from the recent rain. This was an isolated valley with a poor yearly sunlight allotment and haphazard cell phone reception—another version of a sanatorium, a place my mother could tuck me away, the way you pressed a photograph into the back of a drawer—and be free of me. But I might be free of her, too, and I might find someone else to love me.
3
All the dorm rooms were filled by the time the university accepted me, so I’d rented an apartment in an old house, where a great elm cast a dark shadow over the porch. The house stood on a street of similarly grand old places, each shaded by a tree, their roots disrupting the cement sidewalks in front. Mine was a brick Italianate house with a wide cornice and elaborately carved brackets and window caps. The apartment was up a staircase that once might have been glamorous when the house was still a single-family residence. The place had been advertised as a “studio.” I would be living in one room with a twelve-foot ceiling, a decorative fireplace, and an efficiency-sized stove, sink, and refrigerator—so small they seemed like playhouse furnishings. My mother, decorator extraordinaire, seemed not to have found any inspiration in the room, or else she didn’t see the need to apply her skills to it. She scoped the space out, and then we left and found a used-furniture store nearby and purchased a couch that folded out into a bed.
“This will serve a dual purpose,” she said. “You’ll have room to move around once you fold it up.”
She paid the man to deliver the couch bed, along with a table and chairs, which, when she tried to gain my opinion, I said were fine. In the short time since I’d arrived in town I’d changed my mind about being there, and I didn’t care what we purchased. I went along, glumly, feeling myself resist confessing that we should forget the whole thing and head home. When Detective Thomson had stood, slowly, and, stepping toward my mother’s front door, paused to look back at me, I’d felt that same small twinge of fear I’d felt five years before, the first time he’d come, and I knew returning home was no longer a choice.