“I didn’t mean that.”
“It’s all right. I know what you mean.” Jessie brushes a roll of dust off his shoulder, one of those gray caterpillars that float down from the beams. She’s not sure how she’ll be spending her hours here alone. But she doubts that coffee mornings are about to become a priority. There’s too much to do on the house. “And I’ll be very busy. Don’t worry about me.”
His gaze roams over her face, seeking more reassurance. “Call me if there’s any problem with Bella, won’t you?”
“Bella will be fine,” she insists, aware, as he is, that it’s the first time she and the girls have been alone for more than a night here without him. Also, Bella, anxious about starting a new school, has pitched into one of her darker moods again, her emotions pinballing, looking for places to land. She sleepwalked again a couple of nights ago: Will found her wandering along the top floor landing like a ghost. “Me and the girls will have a ball without you. Really.” She kisses him, her nose lingering close to his cheek, trying to store his scent. “Now go. Or you’ll miss your train and we’ll go bankrupt trying to buy out Jackson and have to live like thirteenth-century rural peasants forever.”
“Don’t think I don’t know that’s what you really want, Jessie,” he calls over his shoulder.
She watches him drive away until his car is lost to the fog.
Jessie’s surprised by how much she misses Bella. Applecote feels too quiet without the stomping and door slamming and sideways dry humor. This is it for now, she realizes, just me and Romy in this huge silent house on our own. In Bella’s room, Jessie puts the laundry basket on the rug and walks over to the little round window, peers through its crossed pane: it gives a bird’s-eye view, or a teenager’s, the way it detaches and elevates, shrinks everything else to insignificance. The fog has finally lifted. The stones in the meadow are like dorsal fins in a distant sea. She feels a real yearning to be out there in the long, wet grass, not in this intense airless room with the memory of herself pressing Mandy’s caftan against her body, greedy for a dead woman’s allure. “Come on, Rom,” she says distractedly, then glances back over her shoulder. “Oh, you fruit loop. What are you doing?”
Romy has Bella’s black sports bra on her head, furtively rooting through the laundry basket. Jessie laughs, grabs the bra. “Bella will kill you. No, you can’t wear that, either. Oh my goodness, you munchkin. Scoot.” She removes the basket from Romy’s reach and puts it in the middle of Bella’s bed, eyeing the two boxes wedged between the bed and the wall, wondering what might be left inside them.
Romy wanders over to the dressing table, the curios Bella’s arranged into an artistic still life: the heart-shaped button, the old newspapers from ’59, a pretty chipped teacup decorated with little gold flowers, and a new discovery from the Wilderness, a rather unnerving long white bone that is too big to be a rabbit’s.
“Don’t mess it up this time, sweetheart.”
Having been fiercely chastised by Bella for rummaging through her things in recent days—“You’re disrespecting my privacy, don’t you understand?” Bella hissed, and Romy nodded solemnly, not understanding at all—Romy inspects it all at a distance, her little fingers twitching over her adored big sister’s objects, not quite daring to touch them. Jessie smiles, then picks up a stack of Bella’s underwear, turns, opens the top drawer of Bella’s chest of drawers. And there they are. Letters.
Jessie immediately knows she mustn’t look at them, which is part of their appeal. But they aren’t tucked right at the back, not like something private would be, but at the side of the drawer, propped up against socks, almost as if they’ve been put there on purpose for her to find this morning.
Jessie glances at Romy, still absorbed by the objects on the dressing table, and curiously pushes the stack to see the handwriting. Will’s. Letters home to his daughter? Oh, and someone else’s, a strong, immaculate hand. In that instant, she knows the letters are from the boxes. She starts closing the drawer quickly, then hesitates, the woman who picked up the caftan that day slipping into her once more, like an oily black shadow, sliding her hand into the gap.
Sent over the years from various locations Jessie knows Will visited for work—Brussels, Copenhagen, Paris—in the days before he scaled back his travel to be around for Bella, the letters are stung with longing and soft with marital tenderness—What did we do in our past lives to be so blessed? he writes—and an erotic intimacy that makes Jessie blush, dispelling any hope that Will’s marriage to Mandy might have cooled into something affectionate, habitual. Eyes blazing, she skim-reads the letters written by Mandy: funny, opinionated, so obviously more articulate than anything she could ever write, they hop from global political issues to the sweetly domestic: Bella splitting a lip on a swing, the scandalous appearance of a mistress at a neighbor’s barbecue, how she misses them holding hands as they sleep. Nicknames, jokes, shared conundrums, the letters reveal the intricate, private world that Jessie and Will never talk about. And then there is the physical fact of them, not texts or e-mails, but letters, old-fashioned and romantic. Blinking back tears, Jessie feels the words settle inside her like tiny fragments of swallowed glass. And it is only the sight of Romy, finally succumbing to temptation and deftly picking up the heart-shaped button, that makes Jessie snap back into the room, realize what she’s doing, and hurriedly stuff the letters back into the drawer, trying to leave them exactly where she found them, but unsure where that was.
Jessie is flaying off old wallpaper in the room that will be her studio when she hears the front door slam. Romy, who is drawing wiggles in the dust on the floor with the handle of a paintbrush, stops and looks up. “Bell Bell home.”
Jessie nods, her arm still above her head, dust sugaring her hair. She took letters from her stepdaughter’s underwear drawer and read them. She is that person. If Bella put them there deliberately to test her, will she know just from looking at her that she’s done it?