She pursed her lips. “Do I need to do that with you?”
I followed her down the stairs to the porch, and then out to the street. A breeze picked up, moving the elm’s heavy branches. A dog barked nearby, and I feared the scratch of its nails on the pavement, the jangle of its tags coming closer.
“Are you sure you should go?” I said. “It looks like it might storm.”
And then in the flickering elm shade a woman appeared, as if produced from its shadows. She stood to the right of my mother’s car in a coat far too heavy for the summer day—an eggplant-colored down coat, woolen gloves, a pretty cloche hat. Her dark hair held the semblance of the curls from her poster, but ice matted them together. Her fingernails were bitten to the quick, and she played with her necklace—an amethyst pendant, the kind of necklace I’d seen in my mother’s Spiegel catalog as a child. The missing Mary Rae. I felt a jolt of excitement—I almost called out to my mother, who had already climbed into the car, “She’s here! I’ve found her!”
But one look from the woman stopped me from saying anything. Any hopefulness I’d entertained about a new start dimmed. Her round eyes were blue, thickly lashed, and they stayed on me, beseeching.
“Now, Martha, I want you to be happy,” my mother called out the car window. The Cadillac idled by the curb. She’d put on her large-framed sunglasses. Her lipstick was cracked, and her face lined under its makeup, and one day I would be older, as she was, and, like her, have no idea how vulnerable it made me seem. “I am! I am happy!” I said. The heat of the car’s exhaust and of the sun on the hood were stultifying, and I leaned in and kissed her dry cheek, which smelled amazingly the same as when she would enter my room in the dark and bend down to kiss first me good night, and then Del, and say she was sorry for telling us she wished we’d never been born. We felt chastened when she did this—as if we’d forced her to make the declaration. And hadn’t we, with our squabbles, our messes, the work that tending us required?
Under the covers I’d have on a floral, flannel nightgown with a lace ruffle on the bodice that scratched and sleeves that were too short. Del, in the twin bed beside mine, wore a matching nightgown. In winter, the heating registers clanked, snow piled up on the roof, and we were children.
“I think I can easily make it back by nightfall,” my mother said, sounding like a character in a fairy tale. She rummaged in her purse and made a sound of surprise. “Oh,” she said. “I almost forgot.” She handed me what looked like a cosmetic case—tan leather with brass trim.
“It’s a travel alarm clock,” she said, brightly. “Your grandmother gave it to me years ago. I thought you could use it.”
She gave me a smile, and her eyes brimmed with what Del and I always called happy sad. I didn’t beg her to stay. I knew it was no use. Beyond the car, Mary Rae seemed rooted in the shade of the elm. My mother’s car pulled away, and I felt entirely forsaken.
4
Up in my apartment, the porcelain taps to the bathroom sink and to the shower were cracked, and a small sign posted above the bathroom sink informed me, in what I assumed was Geoff’s careful printing, that the pipes would make a loud noise when I turned on the shower, but that I should keep turning the taps and the noise would stop. At the spot where the water dripped from the faucet into the tub, there was a dark stain. Combined with the groaning pipes, the tub seemed the scene of a gruesome crime. I would get used to it soon enough, I supposed.