“Are you washing it?” Loo asked.
“No,” said Mabel. “I’m turning it blue.” She set the twist of yarn onto a small wooden rack. “Indigo is the hardest color to get right. Yellows, greens, reds—they’re more reliable.” She uncovered the other pots and revealed boiling vats of primary colors, the yarn floating and turning like some kind of strange soup. “Blue has to be added in layers. You dip it over and over and over again, forty or fifty times, until you get the darkness just right.” She turned down the burners to simmer, put the lids back on and pushed the goggles to her forehead. Then she handed Loo a bar of Ivory soap and the towel she’d been using.
“You should clean your face, at least.”
Loo took the towel and soap over to the sink and wet them both. There was a small hand mirror nailed to one of the kitchen cabinets. She leaned down and went to work. The red lipstick had rubbed off. There was a deep scratch on her forehead that was bleeding, dark mud smeared across her face and neck and a rash of mosquito bites on her left cheek. Loo cleaned herself as best she could, then wet her hands and ran them through her hair, shaking out burrs and twigs and even a beetle that landed in the sink and began frantically running in circles, flapping its tiny iridescent wings. Loo turned the water on and watched the bug get swallowed down the drain.
“That’s better,” said Mabel. “You looked like some kind of swamp monster. I thought you were the police—otherwise I wouldn’t have answered.”
“You called them?” Loo asked.
“Of course I did. That party was getting out of control. I keep track of things around here. People think no one’s watching, but I always do.”
The old woman said this while folding and refolding the towel, and Loo began to wonder if she was touched. There was something off about the way Mabel Ridge moved, her fingers reaching out like a spider feeling around a corner.
“What’s all the yarn for?”
“People order my hand-dyed yarn from all over the country. It’s simple, but it pays the bills. Kept me in this house after Gus lost all our money.”
“Gus?” Loo asked.
“Lily’s father.”
My grandfather, Loo thought. “Does he live here, too?”
“He’s dead,” said Mabel Ridge. “Thank God.”
Her blue fingers pushed open a door next to the sink. Behind it was a bathroom about the same size as the one in Loo’s own house, but instead of pictures and scraps of memories it was filled with color. Skeins of yarn stretched across sets of wooden racks—green, purple, yellow, orange—dripping and mixing hues onto newspaper spread across the floor. Loo reached out and touched one of the loops, and her fingers came back stained. When she glanced up the old woman smiled.
“Come on. I want to show you something.”
Mabel led her back down the hall, then sat on the bench in front of the loom. She motioned for Loo to join her. There were pedals underneath the machine, and Mabel pushed them with her feet. Each pedal lifted a different set of strings, creating a pattern.
“Try it,” she said. “It’s like a piano.”
Loo sat down. She ran her fingers across the beater and shifted it back and forth. It was like the safety bar on the Galaxy Round Up.
“What are you making?”
“A blanket,” said Mabel. “This pattern, it’s called an overshot. You pass the shuttle like this.” She took up an oval-shaped piece of wood, with a bobbin of blue yarn wrapped tightly inside. She pressed one of the pedals, one of the harnesses lifted and a pattern of cords rose through the teeth of the comb. With one quick movement, Mabel eased the shuttle underneath, until it slid out the other side. She took Loo’s hand and placed it on the beater. “Now use this to bring it all together.”
Loo slid the beater forward and pressed the yarn into place. It felt both odd and familiar, like everything in this house.
“If you want, I can teach you,” said Mabel Ridge.
When Loo didn’t answer the old woman’s mouth set into a hard line. “I thought you’d want to learn something about your family.”
“Do you have anything of my mother’s?” Loo asked.
Mabel exhaled loudly, then got up from the bench and opened a closet in the hallway, removed a cardboard box, lifted the lid and took out a pair of black lace gloves. They were cut short at the wrist, in the style of the 1940s. “Here,” she said, passing them over.
Loo slid one of her hands inside. The fingers were longer than hers. It was like putting on someone else’s skin. “I thought only old ladies wore these kinds of things.”
“Lily was artistic. She could have gone to art school.”
“Why didn’t she?”
“She got into trouble instead. The kind you fell into tonight.”
The old woman frowned, and for the first time Loo understood that her mother had once been a teenager who had also lied to her parents, and made out with boys in the woods, and snuck out to parties. Her mother had touched this loom, looked in that mirror nailed above the sink, knocked the pineapple knocker. Every object began to glow with possibility. Starting with the gloves on Loo’s own fingers.
“She’d do anything to make herself different. Anything that was dangerous. She was like her father that way. The Coast Guard arrested her once, for jumping off the breakwater and swimming laps in the harbor, cutting back and forth between the boats in the shipping channel. We fought about it. We fought about a lot of things. But she thought it was funny.”
“Funny,” Loo said.
“She had a wicked sense of humor.”
Mabel continued rummaging through the box, pulling out books and tins of drawing pencils. A silver belt buckle in the shape of an arrow. Postcards from Alaska, North Carolina and Wisconsin. A couple of scrapbooks. Loo opened and closed her fingers, feeling the gloves tighten against her skin, and tried to memorize it all.
“This one is my favorite.” Mabel Ridge held out an old photograph, bent on one side, and Loo leaned in to see. There was her mother, around eleven or twelve. She was covered head to toe in seaweed, like something washed up on the beach, the creature from the Black Lagoon. Her eyes were rolled back, her arms clawing at the camera.
“Can I have this?”
“No,” said Mabel Ridge.
Loo tightened her grip on the photo. “She was my mother.”
“In her will she left me all of her possessions. Her clothes and her notebooks and pictures,” said Mabel Ridge. “Why do you think she did that?”
“I don’t know,” said Loo.
“I was her mother. Her family,” said Mabel Ridge. “Not him.”
Loo thought of the scraps on the walls of their bathroom. How carefully Hawley took them down and replaced them each time they moved.
“Is that what you said, that day we came here?” she asked.
Mabel pressed her palms together. “Your father wanted me to see you, but I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be ready.”
Loo bent the gloves into fists. “I thought you hated me.”