The house next door is yellow, as it has always been, although the new occupants have removed the shutters for some reason, denuding it. The former owners had moved into the neighborhood the same year as Helen. One of the daughters had been in school with Rufus and went on to become a successful prosecutor. The parents were themselves professors, always somewhat disheveled, driving a wood-paneled station wagon and letting the house slide into neglect. After the children were gone, they retired to Maine of all places, and Helen had been heartened to see a young family replace them. They would renovate, she was certain, and bring the property up to neighborhood standards. She’d walked over with a batch of peppernuts and introduced herself. The young woman who answered had seemed harried, almost rude. The husband had not even come to the door. Peering inside, Helen had been discouraged to see the front hall still littered with moving boxes, a baby crawling on the dirty floor.
Now, the husband appears to be gone. His diminutive black sports car, with two white stripes like a skunk, no longer pulls out of the driveway in the morning. Helen no longer sees him on warm evenings, drinking beer on the back deck. She sees only the mother, in tight jeans and fur-collared jackets, her blond mane tousled, rushing her daughter to and from a white Toyota. At night, she lounges in her lighted window like an Amsterdam whore. On some days, babysitters make an appearance, girls no older than twelve. On other days, the little girl roams the property alone, wearing shorts in the unmowed grass, her bare legs exposed to deer ticks. Playthings are left out in all weather, gathering puddles in their plastic gullies.
As Helen mounts the neighbor’s porch steps with the girl, she puts a hand to the original wrought-iron railing, its curves shamed by a rash of rust. There is a piece of paper stuck to the door.
My mom told me I have to go home. Sorry. Avis is playing outside. —Olivia
Helen whistles softly through her teeth. No ring sounds when she presses the grimy doorbell button, and after a moment she opens the screen door and knocks with her knuckles. When there is no answer, she tries the door handle, finds it unlocked. The hall, now divested of boxes, is stark and uncarpeted, toys scattered across the floor like land mines. There are patched places on the wall where pictures should hang. She calls out uselessly.
Back outside, she pulls the note off the door, puts it in her pocket, and takes the girl around the house’s exterior, as if the babysitter might be hiding in a bush. The heels of her brown leather pumps sink into the moist grass, and she pauses to roll the cuffs of her slacks. The girl follows at a distance as Helen goes past the birdbath with its slimy basin of stagnant water, past the blue plastic toddler slide, faded by the sun.
“I’m hungry,” Helen hears a small voice announce behind her.
She turns and looks at the girl. She is not a bad-looking child: blue-eyed and honey-haired, but with chubby limbs like bratwurst links.
“Well.” Helen bends slightly at the knees, to approach the girl’s level. “Why don’t you come to my house and have a little snack while we wait for your mommy to come home?”
Helen instructs the girl to remove her muddy sneakers at the front door. After a moment’s pause, she leans down to help with the shoelaces, ineffectual with her own long fingernails, and is suddenly revisited by the impatience of motherhood.
Inside, they sit quietly at the table where Helen has left her cup of tea. The girl gingerly eats slices of green apple, looking out the window at her own deserted house. Perhaps this is a good but unlucky child, at the mercy of lazy upbringing. Helen’s husband dislikes her tendency to point out every set of incompetent guardians they encounter in public. It is none of her business how people raise their children, he tells her. But it matters, she answers. It matters more than she can explain.
“So, your name is Avis?” Helen asks.
The girl nods.
Helen smiles, cocks her head. “What an interesting name.”
It is possible—though unlikely—that the girl’s parents have named her for the Latin avis, or bird. If so, the name would be almost elegant. Rara avis. It seems to her that the inspiration here, more probably, was the car rental company.
After the apple, Helen brings the girl to the room where she works on her dollhouses. Avis is silent for a moment, then says, “Can I play with them?”
“These are not for playing,” Helen answers. “I make these houses by myself. I make the furniture, too, and the little people.”
The girl stares at the collection in front of her, and for the first time Helen sees it the way a child might. There are seven dollhouses in this room, painted shades of ice cream—pale pink, mint green, yellow—and frilled with sugar gables. A paradise.
Helen smiles. “Would you like to help me paint?”
The girl nods her head savagely.
It is easier than Helen might have thought. The girl is careful with the paintbrush, dipping it timidly into a jar of ochre. Helen has given her a simple chair to paint, a throwaway piece, one of several. She herself works on a canopy bed, gluing the blankets and floral-cased pillows into place. They sit in silence together, and it strikes Helen that perhaps it is just as simple as this. Children are, after all, wonderfully malleable at this age. All the girl needs is a model. Already, she is absorbing something of Helen, learning the virtues of quietude, focus, discipline. This, Helen muses, is how she might have spent time with a daughter, if she’d had one. Instead, in some perverse joke, she’d been given a son. If she were thoroughly religious, she might have viewed this as a test from God, customized to engage her individual shortcomings.