10

Jeremy wakes up on New Year’s Day feeling about two tons lighter than he did yesterday. January, finally. The holidays are over. Thank God. Mom’s birthday is in March, and that’s going to be horrible, but he has a few months before then. A reprieve.

He rolls and stretches. As his Christmas gift to himself, he bought a good queen-sized mattress, although it’s just sitting on the floor because he couldn’t be bothered buying a box spring and frame for it. He doesn’t understand why those things are so expensive.

He’s in Mom’s room now; he’s using her bureau, because it’s bigger than his, and he couldn’t bring himself to touch the paint job because he remembers how she agonized over the colors and then went through all the hassle of putting down dropsheets and using brushes and getting paint in her hair. She was so proud of the results. He made fun of the green and purple then, and he’s still not crazy about them, but doesn’t hate them, either. They’re pale. Subdued, but a bit too dark to be pastel, so they don’t look too girly, whatever VB said. After a while, you don’t even notice them. He can live with this color scheme, even if it clashes with his posters.

He’s moved in his old desk—a door on top of two small filing cabinets—and his bookshelves, with all his CC issues and books and action figures neatly arranged, for once. Jeremy knows it won’t stay neat for long, but still, Mom would be proud, even if she never managed to tame her own clutter. For that matter, CC would be proud. Maybe Jeremy’s not entirely a Minion yet.

He could have put his desk and shelves in Mom’s study instead, and maybe someday he will, but he hasn’t been able to tackle the study yet. That was Mom’s haven—her sanctum sanctorum, Aunt Rosie called it—and right now, moving the furniture around would feel like killing Mom all over again. He doesn’t even know for sure what’s in there. One of his New Year’s resolutions is to find out, to start going through her files, anyway.

He’s glad Mom always gave Tom copies of her really important papers, the will and whatnot. That’s spared him having to tackle the files before now.

His other New Year’s resolution is to get a job. Maybe at the local comic store, Symbolia, if they’re hiring. Maybe even at the library. Or maybe he can work in the UNR bookstore, if they have openings. He doesn’t know if anybody has openings, the way the economy’s crumped, and it’s not like he has any particular skills. But he knows his CC, which could make him useful at Symbolia—although a lot of people know their CC, which is what makes it CC—and he figures he has an in at the library because of Mom, although he doesn’t know if he could stand working there and having to deal with people talking about her, or not talking about her, or wanting to talk about her but not doing it for fear of hurting his feelings, and tiptoeing around him instead, or talking in whispers behind his back. Too much like seventh grade. Too much like the funeral. Too much like the interminable, horrible fucking holidays.

Thanksgiving was tolerable, barely. He went to Aunt Rosie’s house, the way he and Mom always had, and even though the two empty chairs—Mom’s and Uncle Walter’s—gaped at everybody through the whole meal, he got through it by focusing on his plate and eating. He likes to eat, and Aunt Rosie’s a good cook, and he would have had to eat that day anyway. And Thanksgiving’s just about food: no gifts or trees or carols.

Of course, it’s also about gratitude, or it’s supposed to be. The toughest moment at Thanksgiving was when Aunt Rosie very quietly asked people to name what they were grateful for, “even though it’s been a really hard year.” There followed a bunch of high-minded, noble statements about being grateful for community and healing and yada yada yada, and Jeremy knew that when the obnoxious exercise got to him, he should say he was grateful for everybody who’s helped him. But he couldn’t. He still can’t. If the world were working right, he wouldn’t need their help. He doesn’t want to need their help. Their help hurts.

So instead, looking at his plate, he said, “I’m grateful for good food,” and dug in before Aunt Rosie even said grace. Rude, he knew. Very opinionated. But nobody scolded him. They were cutting him slack because of Mom. Jeremy figures that if people are going to cut you slack, you might as well use it.

The next morning, opening his fridge to see all the leftovers Aunt Rosie had sent home with him, he felt mildly ashamed. Not enough to call and apologize, though.

Christmas was much worse than Thanksgiving. For one thing, there was all the crap that went along with it, commercials and lights and reminders everywhere you turned, so you couldn’t ignore it even if you wanted to. And it had been Mom’s favorite holiday, and she’d thrown a Christmas party every year, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to do that, but should he decorate? Get a tree? What would he put under it? Should he go to church on Christmas Eve, the way he and Mom always had? That was the one service all year he liked. Pretty candles. Nice music, and everybody got to sing, plus it was at night so you didn’t have to drag your ass out of bed at the crack of dawn and get yourself ready to be polite to a bunch of church ladies before your brain had even kicked in for the day.

He’d almost decided that he’d go to the service when Hen called to ask him about the Percy-plant. That fucking little tree. The Sunday school kids wanted to decorate it and use it in the Christmas pageant. Was that okay with Jeremy? Did he want it at the house instead?

No, he didn’t want it at the house, and sure, the kids could use it. But he promptly decided that if the Percy-plant was gussied up for Christmas, no way was he going to church. He found himself hoping that the sapling would droop and die under the weight of Sunday school ornaments, like the pathetic tree in A Charlie Brown Christmas.

That was another thing. He and Mom had watched the Peanuts special every year, and why was he kidding himself even thinking about going to church? The minute the choir started singing “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,” he’d lose it. He and Mom had always sung along to that with the Peanuts gang at the end of the show.

In the end, he survived the month between Christmas and New Year’s simply by putting his head down and barreling through. He did a lot of cooking for himself, splurging on good meat and expensive olive oil, losing himself in recipes and aromas. This is the best thing about being back home; he couldn’t cook in the dorms. He watched movies, even had some friends over to watch with him—although they all scattered the second the movies were over, because they had no idea what to say to him about Mom—but he barely turned on the TV or radio, because he knew he’d be buried under Christmas commercials and jingle-bell kitsch, endless exhortations to shop. Instead of shopping, he got the last stuff out of his old room and cleaned like a demon.

On Christmas Day itself, he went to Rosie’s house for brunch. Tom was there, too, and Hen and Ed, and VB. He didn’t want to go, but he couldn’t say no, and staying home would have been worse. Aunt Rosie had told him very firmly that he didn’t have to give anyone gifts, but he would have felt crappy if he hadn’t, since he had a strong feeling he’d be getting stuff. And it was a chance to give away more of Mom’s things that he didn’t want, anyway. They were nice things, or at any rate things she’d loved, and someone should have them.

So he gave Aunt Rosie a bunch of Mom’s old flowery teacups, and she cried. She gave him a nice Lands’ End down vest, one of Uncle Walter’s, “because he can’t use it in the nursing home, and he’d want you to have it.”

He gave VB the Little House on the Prairie books Mom had read when she was a kid and had lugged around with her ever since, and VB cried. She gave him an Amazon.com gift card.

He gave Tom a bunch of Mom’s books about geology, because Tom likes rocks, too, and Tom didn’t cry but cleared his throat and coughed and stammered a bit and finally managed to say thank you, he’d enjoy these very much. Tom gave Jeremy a gift card to Emerald City, the café two miles from the house.

Jeremy gave Hen Mom’s Book of Common Prayer, even though he supposed that Hen already had ten million of the things, and Hen cried, and then he gave Ed some of Mom’s seed packets, because Ed’s a gardener, too, and Ed didn’t cry—thank God—and then Hen and Ed gave Jeremy a nice woolen hat and scarf, with a card saying that they hoped the gift would feel like a warm hug and remind him he was loved, and to his absolute humiliation, he cried, and everybody else cried too this time, even Ed, and it was by far the soggiest Christmas Jeremy had ever experienced, and he hated it.

And then, finally, they were done with presents, which was a little awkward because Jeremy didn’t have anything for Uncle Walter. He felt rotten about that, but he had no idea what the guy could use. Everybody told him not to feel bad: anything Walter needed, he already had. But Aunt Rosie cried.

Then they all stopped crying and ate, which was the only decent part of the day. Jeremy had baked some beer bread and made a cheese soufflé, and bread pudding for dessert. He hadn’t had the energy to cook anything for Thanksgiving, so he tried to make up for it at Christmas. Everyone said how delicious his food was, and seemed to mean it, which made him as happy as anything could.

The week between Christmas and New Year’s was a blur. He listened to a lot of music. He pigged out on a gift basket Mom’s coworkers at the library had sent, which was really damned comradely of them, and even roused himself to write a thank-you note. He watched DVDs, including all three of the extended editions of The Lord of the Rings, which made an entire day vanish in a surfeit of clashing swords, hairy hobbit feet, and travel-brochure vistas of New Zealand. It was a perfect way to lose a day, but he could only do it once. The four Comrade Cosmos movies are the only ones he’s ever been able to keep on infinite loop, but he saw the first one with Mom, and refused to see the second one with Mom, and got the DVDs of the last two from Mom, so he can’t watch them right now without thinking about her even more than usual, which means he can’t watch them. He wonders if he’ll ever be able to watch them again.

Mom’s a constant background buzz in his brain. White noise. TV static.

That week between holidays always felt like dead time even when Mom was alive. This year, it was torture.

And then New Year’s Eve: a quiet dinner at VB’s, old movies like Bringing Up Baby and North by Northwest until midnight, and then apple cider, because VB doesn’t like champagne. Jeremy actually agrees with her on this, although he doesn’t like the cider either. It’s too sweet.

And now, finally, January. He gives one last stretch, rolls out of bed, and goes downstairs to make coffee. It’s good French roast—none of that flavored crap Mom liked, hazelnut and peppermint and whatnot—and he has some German stollen from Aunt Rosie to eat with it. After his breakfast, he showers, throws on sweats, and steels himself to begin unearthing Mom’s study.

He can’t even remember the last time he was fully in the room. When they were both still living here, he’d often stop in the doorway to tell her whatever he needed to say—that he was going out, that he was back in, that he’d finished unloading the dishwasher—but he rarely crossed the threshold. There’s only one chair in the room, a rolling office job Mom could scoot wherever she needed to go. Consciously or not, she designed the space to be perfect for her, but not to welcome anyone else.

He stands on the threshold now, bare toes clenched on the hardwood floor, and scans the room. Two windowed walls meet at right angles; Mom staked out the space because of the light. The windowsills are cluttered with rocks and paperweights and plants, mostly cacti, which is good because he hasn’t been in here to water them. It’s all pretty dusty, but it was dusty even when Mom was alive.

Her desk sits diagonally between the windows. She spent a fortune on that desk. It’s a wooden rolltop with ornately carved legs, designed to look old, and Jeremy has always thought it would suit VB better than Mom. It’s new, though, and has built-in file drawers and a slide-out keyboard shelf and openings for computer cables in the back. Whenever Jeremy’s seen the surface of the desk, it’s been a blizzard of papers and stickies and paper clips and Mom’s ever-present rocks. Sometimes he thinks she went to library school because it forced her to be organized, but she always said that the beauty of the rolltop was that you could just close the lid on all that.

The lid’s closed now. He wonders what he’ll find underneath.

Every available bit of wall space has shelves piled with books. Some of the shelves are stand-alone units, often bought at yard sales; Mom always gloated over these, since, chronically short on bookshelves herself, she could never imagine why anyone else would sell them. The books are shelved two and three deep, with piles of more books teetering in front of them whenever there’s enough space. There are lots of natural-science books, especially about botany and geology and astronomy. Lots of other nonfiction stuff, especially art and design and local history. There’s a whole shelf of church books, a slew of C. S. Lewis and Bonhoeffer and Barbara Brown Taylor, although Mom kept her Book of Common Prayer, along with Laura Ingalls Wilder, in her bedroom, which is why Jeremy had those to give at Christmas. There’s a fiction section: the Mitford series, the Narnia series, a really battered set of Oz books from when Mom was a kid, Kristin Lavransdatter, George Eliot. And there are at least four shelves of books about kids, about adoption, about Guatemala.

Jeremy knows he has to go through all of it, but he’ll save those shelves for last.

In front of the desk, flanked by all those bookshelves, is a round table. Mom couldn’t close the lid on this one, and it’s heaped with stuff, papers stacked every which way, her checkbook on top of a pile of something that looks like bills—although Tom must have paid them, since the power hasn’t been turned off—a bunch of maps and library books, mostly about Mexico. She must have been studying them before she left. Jeremy looks at the teetering pile and nearly despairs. Just cleaning off this table is going to be a nightmare.

All right. Start with the computer. Along with compulsively collecting rocks and books, Mom made constant to-do lists, usually discarded and replaced with new ones before she’d crossed off half the items, or even any of them. When Jeremy was younger, a perpetual drift of lists—lists on counters, on the fridge, taped to walls—was part of the landscape of the house. But about two years ago, Mom started keeping one master list on her computer. It covered everything but groceries; that list still lived on the fridge. If he can get some sense of what her priorities were, maybe he’ll know where to start in here. If he’s lucky, maybe her reminders to herself will be directions for him.

He takes a deep breath and steps into the room, talking himself through it. Over the threshold: good. Past the table of doom. Quick glance out the window at the dead garden—he has a narrow, fleeting sense that in a few months it will be green and growing again, but the vision vanishes too quickly to be called hope—and then turn to the rolltop desk. Fuss with Mom’s chair, a super-adjustable mesh thing that looks like an alien exoskeleton, so it will be high enough and deep enough for you. Fix it so you can lean back if you need to, so you can recline and breathe, take a break from the desk to stare up at the ceiling.

Open the rolltop desk.

It sticks a little, and for a panicky moment Jeremy’s afraid that she locked it and that he’ll have to search for the key, a quest that could take years, but then, blessedly, it gives. The top rolls back with a clacking noise, like a stick dragged along an iron fence.

Rocks, stickies, books, papers, paper clips, rubber bands, index cards, file folders. Another map of Mexico. Pens and pencils and scissors and tape, a stapler, a hole punch. He doesn’t know how all of this can even fit on the desktop, but it’s about what he expected, with the computer monitor plunk in the middle of everything, surrounded by strata of crud. No wonder Mom loved looking at striped cliff faces so much.

He turns on the computer and waits for it to boot up, and then stares in dismay at the screen. “Shit.” The computer’s password-protected, and he has no idea what the password is. He doesn’t know how many tries he has before the system shuts him out. He could look for it in Mom’s files, but he doesn’t think even Mom was naive enough to have a file labeled “Computer Password.” If she wrote it down at all, it’s probably scribbled on one of the bits of paper in the study. Jeremy could call Tom and ask if he knows it, but he decides to save that as a last resort. Today’s a holiday.

He stares glumly at the blinking cursor. Okay. What would Mom pick as her password? He thinks for a minute, and then, on a whim, types his own name: Jeremy.

Logging in, the computer tells him, and then the homescreen appears.

Oh, Mom.

You aren’t supposed to use anything as obvious as an only child’s name as your password. Mom knew that. She’d done it anyway.

Sighing, he opens the “My Documents” folder and sorts by date. Sure enough, there’s “Todolist.doc,” right at the top. Jeremy opens it.

After Mexico: dentist, pick up dry-cleaning, make ALA res, oil change, finish Xmas shopping for J.

Finish. Which means she’d started. Yes, of course she had. As disorganized as she was about everything else, she started her Christmas shopping in January, because of the sales. Jeremy always left his until the last minute, but she was usually done in March. She wrapped stuff as she got it, which meant sometimes she didn’t remember what she’d bought. One year he’d gotten two of the same CC action figure. He was surprised that this late in the year, she’d had any shopping left to do at all.

He realizes that somewhere in the house, she must have hidden wrapped presents for him. Of course she did. Why hasn’t he thought about that until now? It never occurred to him. He thought about Peanuts and her party and the Christmas Eve service, but not the hidden presents? Why?

Because it hurts too much.

Jeremy sits in his mother’s insectoid chair and hugs himself. Should he look for his gifts? Does he want to? They must be in here, in the study. Should he look now, or leave them hidden, a surprise to be discovered in the course of sorting through the monumental volume of crap in here?

But his eyes have already gone to the cabinet doors under one of the bookshelves, which used to be an entertainment unit. His presents have to be there. It’s the only place in the room she could have hidden them.

*   *   *

Melinda sits cross-legged on the living room floor, wrapping one of Jeremy’s Christmas gifts. It’s September, and he’s been living in the dorms for a month. As little as they’ve been talking lately, she desperately misses having him in the house.

She’s been watching a popular-science program, BBC’s biography of the planet. Last night she learned that the moon is slowly creeping away from the Earth, getting a centimeter farther away every year. This news fills Melinda with melancholy. The moon can’t be mended, and it’s slipping away, a scarred child trying to leave its parent. Jeremy’s doing the same thing, although—given the state of the economy—a centimeter a year may be all he can manage.

Wrapping Christmas gifts comforts her. In a few months, he’ll be home for winter break.

She never knows what to get him anymore, though. He’s still into Comrade Cosmos, but his tastes have changed. For his birthday this year she got him a T-shirt that showed CC standing defiantly, holding up a hammer and nails, while EE loomed as a swirling mist behind him. She thought it was a great image, but Jeremy sneered at it. “Mom, that’s Sally Honu’s work, and she’s a totally second-rate artist. Victor Evans and Erica James are so much better.”

Clearly, she no longer has the chops to choose good gifts, although to be fair, he might have sneered at anything she gave him. “You can return it,” she told him, unable to keep from snapping. “I kept the receipt.” She felt both vindicated and ashamed when he blushed.

“Sorry. I’m sorry, Mom. It was nice of you to try. It’s one of Honu’s better panels, really.”

He liked the chocolate she gave him, and he really enjoyed their meal at Fourth Street Bistro, an extravagance she allowed herself because it was his last birthday before he left for school. He savored the food, exclaimed over the seasoning, asked smart questions when the owner stopped by the table to see how they were enjoying their meal. He’s never liked Melinda’s cooking—with the notable exception of her lasagna, which she cooks for him but won’t eat herself, since it contains meat—but it turns out that he loves nouvelle cuisine.

Today at Sundance Books she saw a cookbook from Tra Vigne, a swanky Northern Italian restaurant in Napa she and Rosemary and Walter went to once during a winery tour. She bought it for Jeremy and wrote on the inside cover, Their food’s a little like Fourth Street’s; maybe you can learn to cook your own! Happy eating! Love, Mom.

Jeremy’s never been an academic superstar. He’s certainly bright enough, but he’s a classic underachiever, and she worries about him in college. He barely even got into UNR, which is a decent state school but no Harvard, and as desperate as he’s been to get out of the house, he had no interest in applying anywhere else. The way Veronique slides around any discussion of how he’s doing in her class is sufficient indication that Melinda’s worry is well-founded. He enjoys cooking, though—he’s always been happy to make breakfast or whip up batches of cookies for church coffee hour, even after he stopped going to church—and she hopes the cookbook may nudge him to think about being a chef, or at least pursuing the hobby more seriously.

She hopes it isn’t too much of a nudge. She knows she has to be careful. He’s so prickly these days, so resentful of any suggestion that she has an agenda for him. She doesn’t know how much of this is normal growing pains and how much is his continuing issues with the adoption.

She reminds herself that he’s an adolescent. If he didn’t have issues with the adoption, he’d have issues with something else, and thank God his physical health has always been good. If there are any lingering developmental delays from the orphanage, Melinda can’t detect them. He’s an indifferent student, but so are lots of kids who didn’t spend their first few years institutionalized in war-torn countries.

Sighing, she smooths the Christmas paper around the book and tapes it. Then she clambers to her feet and walks into her study. There’s too much stuff on the floor right now for her to sit and wrap in here. She really needs to straighten up.

She always needs to straighten up.

Laughing at herself, she opens the cabinet under the shelves of geology books—this unit was one of her better yard-sale finds—and pulls out the shopping bag of Jeremy’s gifts. She’s wrapped them already, but she recognizes them by shape and size. More chocolate, a gourmet assortment of fair-trade dark ranging from 65% to 90% cacao. A red woolen pullover, since red has always been Jeremy’s favorite color. The soundtrack of the Charlie Brown Christmas special. That one’s a bit of a risk, since any day now she expects him to disdain their old tradition as childish, but the CD was on huge sale at Borders last January.

She puts the wrapped book in the bag and replaces it in the cabinet. Since he’s not living at home, she probably doesn’t have to be so careful about hiding stuff in here, but this way he can’t stumble across anything on his rare visits, and she doesn’t have to worry about reminding herself to hide the bag before he comes home on Christmas break.

She closes the cabinet, stands, and rocks back on her heels, stretching her lower back. There are still a few things she wants to get him, small stuff. Stocking stuffers, really: things she knows he’ll use. Some of his favorite razors, socks, a pencil case since he’s been keeping pens and pencils in a Ziploc bag in his backpack. And of course she’ll bring something back from Mexico for him, probably a souvenir for right away and something a bit nicer for Christmas.

The holidays always go so fast. She’s glad she’s planned this Mexico trip, though. Part of her current sadness, she knows, is the annual advent of shorter days, whatever the moon’s doing. By October, sun and warm water will be just what she needs, a final taste of summer before winter kicks in.

*   *   *

Still in her bathrobe, hands wrapped around a mug of coffee, Veronique sits at her tiny kitchen table and stares balefully at her calendar. January 1. That means that the holidays are over. Tomorrow, she’ll have to start prepping her spring classes. It’s not like this will be a tremendous amount of work—she’s teaching a Women & Lit class she’s done a million times and a nineteenth-century British survey, one of her bread-and-butter courses—but just thinking about it makes her chest ache. In a little over two weeks, she’ll be back in the classroom, dealing with a new crop of blunted brains.

Melinda always took her out to dinner on the first day of class. It happened by accident the first time; they’d been trying to find a time to have dinner, and that night just happened to work. Halfway through the meal, Veronique made some offhand comment about how nice this was, a little reward for making it through the first day of classes, and Melinda promptly said, “Well then, we’ll have to make it a tradition.”

And so they had, for what, seven or eight years now? The first day of classes, both spring and fall semester—and the one year Veronique was foolish enough to teach summer school, which left her feeling like she’d been flattened by an army tank—they invariably went out for Thai food. The tradition had become more important each year, as Veronique’s boredom with teaching morphed into active hatred of it.

Classes start in two weeks. What’s she going to do?

She’s weeping now, furious at herself but still flummoxed by the question, which feels like a real and pressing problem. She could take herself out to dinner, but that would feel like an exercise in misery. The real problem is that she dreads returning to the classroom. Her courses this semester are essentially prepped, but that’s because she’s taught them so often that they bore her into somnolence.

She could get in her car tomorrow, drive to Canada, and vanish. Go AWOL. Who cares how cold it is this time of year? Maybe the weather would deter people from looking for her. She pictures herself leaping across ice floes to reach freedom, like Eliza in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

She seriously entertains this fantasy for a moment, picturing what she’d pack—which of her shoes would work best on ice floes?—and then discards it. She has to take care of the cats, who would not consider a road trip to Canada, with or without ice floes, a good time. Her knee’s hardly up to leaping. And God knows that if she could afford to just pick up and leave her job, she would have done it years ago. No, that won’t work.

She takes a long swallow of coffee, sweet and creamy. Her doctor’s been on her for years now to cut down on sugar and cholesterol, but she’s never planned to live forever and she needs her pleasures. Savoring her French roast, she forces herself to think about work. The 19c Brit syllabus is pretty much dictated by the department; not much leeway there. But Women & Lit’s an open topic. She can teach it however she wants.

Since the middle of last semester, it’s been advertised as Women & Work, a topic that allows her to teach everything from Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with its oppressed slave women toiling away under the lash, to Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, with its oppressed Wal-Mart employees sorting endless piles of Jordache jeans. The topic resonates with the students, most of whom are working their way through school. For a long time, it was one of Veronique’s more popular courses, which is why she keeps teaching it. But she’s tired of it, as of so much else, and as she’s grown more bored, so have the students. Time for a change.

All right, so what would be more interesting?

Women & Tourism.

Women & Murder.

Women & Abandonment.

Veronique feels encased in lead. What’s she thinking? She can’t prep a new course, with an entirely new set of books to be ordered, in two weeks. That’s insane.

Women & Violence.

She blinks. Trendy. Relevant. Related, God knows, to Melinda, which means Veronique will have some emotional energy invested in the work. She can still use the Stowe, the first book on the syllabus, which will leave a month for the other books to come in, if she orders them in the next few days.

The students won’t have signed up for this topic. On the other hand, Women & Lit satisfies both college and departmental requirements and always fills: she’ll have students no matter what she teaches.

She pushes herself away from the breakfast table, already making lists as she heads upstairs to search her shelves, and the library database, for good fits. Stowe. Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers.” Beloved. Bastard Out of Carolina, or I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Something by Kingsolver, who’s always a hit with students.

That’s a thin list, but it’s a start, and she’ll find others. Maybe she can do this. Maybe she can force herself through another semester.

*   *   *

Gone, finally. Anna waves the detested rental car out of the driveway and goes inside to collapse onto the couch. William’s parents have been in Seattle for a month and a half, from before Thanksgiving to now, New Year’s Day. Even if she felt close to them, even if the visit hadn’t come at such a hideous time, having them here for so long would have been a strain.

The one blessing is that they stayed in a hotel, not at the house. William spent a lot of time with them, which meant that Anna didn’t have to, although it also meant she didn’t see much of William. But that was true even before his parents descended on Seattle.

She suspects she’ll see even less of him now.

She knows they have to talk. She’s afraid to talk to him, afraid of guilt and accusations and recriminations, most afraid of having to witness his pain, since her own is vast and unsupportable and inescapable, the air she breathes and the lungs she breathes it with. She can’t face what happened yet. She can’t face talking to William about any of it, having to witness his own grief. His only son, his boy. Percy.

She hasn’t been able to face anyone else, either. Her New Year’s resolution is to get back into the world again: to help William with Kip’s postponed opening, to go back to her knitting group, to turn her energies back to the Blake board, which will be meeting in a few weeks.

Before Marjorie and David came, all of that would have seemed unbearable. Now it will be a relief.

Marjorie and David, of course, arrived with an agenda. Communication. Openness. Transparency. They wanted everyone to share feelings, to use the incomprehensible horror of what Percy did and how he died as an opportunity for personal growth. They wanted to help William and Anna through the holidays, which they knew could be meaningful even in grief, and they wanted to help plan Percy’s funeral as a community celebration of life. They hadn’t been especially close to their only grandson, mostly because they lived in Massachusetts, but in this case, that was a blessing, because it gave them clearer heads with which to supervise their son and his wife.

Anna didn’t want to be supervised.

She found their ideas about growth and transparency and celebration obscene.

She knows they meant well. They always mean well. But they always mean well in such a high-handed, officious, controlling way that it makes her want to scream. The funeral is none of their business. They kept telling her and William that it was important to have a service for closure, but Anna isn’t sure she wants closure, even if she should. How can you have closure on the death of your only child? How is that possible under any circumstances, let alone these? She’s simply not up to the ordeal of a memorial service, especially one that includes any form of the word “celebration.” She suspects William feels the same way, although they haven’t discussed it directly. They’ve only discussed it through his parents.

In any case, the date’s now fixed. Percy’s memorial service will be on July 24, which would have been his twenty-third birthday. That’s going to be a brutal day anyway: they might as well have the memorial then, and pack all the misery into as short a span as possible. At least it’s a Saturday, the most convenient day for such an event.

Marjorie and David wouldn’t leave Seattle until the date was set. They’ll come back in July, for the service. Anna fervently hopes they won’t stay another six weeks.

She’s closed her eyes in sheer weariness, but she feels a wet nose nudging her hand, which rests on one knee. “Hello, Bart,” she says without opening her eyes; a warm tongue licks her palm in response. She hears soft thumping now, the dog’s tail beating a tattoo against the carpet.

“Don’t get your hopes up. The days of nonstop walks are over.” While Marjorie and David were here, she took Bart on three, four, five walks a day: to get away from them when they were in the house, and to relieve her stress through exercise when they and William were off somewhere without her. As much as she longed to be alone, she couldn’t stand being in the house by herself; she kept finding herself listening for Percy’s footsteps. So she’d fidget and pace and wind up taking the dog out, again. A few times, Bart even refused the leash, flopping down with his long head on his lanky paws. If you want to go out again, human, do it by yourself.

But David and Marjorie are gone, finally, and the weather’s at its most wretched, and the dog will just have to cope with the old, two-walk-a-day regimen while Anna tries to resume her old life. She’s pretty sure that no one in her knitting group or on the Blake board will want her to share her feelings about Percy. That’s the upside of the isolation she’s felt: the common decency of privacy.

Marjorie and David kept pestering her about how she needed to find a support group. There are bereavement groups for suicide survivors, they told her, and she’s sure that’s true, but she doesn’t think she could deal with a room full of other people’s overwhelming grief and anger, that maelstrom of sheer agony.

William, who knows her horror of touchy-feely group therapy, suggested a psychologist during one of their infrequent conversations. He’s seeing one himself. He’s on medication now, and thinks it will help her—although to her he seems flat and foggy, blunted and blurred—but she doesn’t need to talk to a shrink and she doesn’t need to be on drugs. What she needs is to know that other people whose children have committed horrible crimes have survived the experience, have made sense of it somehow and gone on with their lives.

That’s the support group she really needs, but she doesn’t think it exists. She can’t find Mothers of Murderers Anonymous in the phone book. If Marjorie were in this situation, she’d start up a chapter herself, and probably organize a national charitable foundation of some sort into the bargain. But Anna isn’t Marjorie. She never has been, never will be. William skipped the section in the manual explaining that men are supposed to marry women who remind them of their mothers.

In lieu of group therapy, she kept reading everything she could find about Melinda Soto. She read articles about the funeral, read the online archive of library newsletters Melinda edited, read the online guestbook set up by the library: note after note talking about how wonderful she was, how incomprehensible her death is.

Many of the notes express rage at Percy. Anna keeps reading them anyway. She understands the rage. She shares it.

So much pain, pain that overwhelms the words meant to express it.

The dog’s still licking her hand. The sensation was soothing at first, but now it’s as grating as if her hand were being raked over glass. Anna pulls away from Bart’s slobber, gets up, and makes her way into the bathroom to clean the dog spit off her skin. Her hands yearn to knit; she craves the softness of yarn and the familiar, reassuring movements of the needles. She hasn’t knit since Marjorie and David showed up. She knows the rhythm of the stitches will calm her, help her think more clearly again. Knitting is a promise that she can still function, still do useful work.

Her knitting bag’s where she left it the night Melinda Soto was killed, half under an easy chair in the living room. She’s heading back into the living room to collect it, to resume work on the Frost Flowers shawl, when the phone rings. She picks up in the kitchen, hoping it’s not David and Marjorie saying that their flight’s been delayed, or offering yet more ideas for the memorial service. Please, be anyone but them.

It’s Miranda Tobin.

Watch what you wish for.

“Anna, dear, I’m just calling to find out how you and William are doing.”

Anna doubts this very much, and she wouldn’t know how to answer the question even if it were sincere. She and Miranda have never been close. She fumbles for words and comes up dry.

“Anna? Are you there?”

“Yes, I’m here. It’s—a hard question to answer. I don’t have words for it.” Only the silent scream. “It was kind of you to call, Miranda.”

If the call’s really a compassionate gesture, Miranda will recognize this as dismissal and get off the phone. Of course she doesn’t. “Toby and I were talking just last night about how terrible it all is. We just can’t understand it.”

“No one can understand it,” Anna says. Her mouth tastes like blood, and her hand hurts from gripping the phone. If Percy had to kill someone, why couldn’t he kill Miranda Tobin?

Anna recognizes this as humor too black to share with anyone, even William. Especially William. She clears her throat and says, “We’re having the memorial service on July 24. It would have been Percy’s birthday. It would be lovely to see you and Toby there.”

“Oh, we’d love to come, but I’m afraid we’ll be in Europe then. It’s Toby’s last free summer, really, because things will heat up so much in his second year at Harvard Med, so we thought we’d take the chance to see France and Italy.”

I cannot, thinks Anna, believe that I’m having this conversation. She wonders if Miranda expects her to ask about the trip, or say that she hopes they have a wonderful time. “Well, I’m sorry you can’t be there. It was really very kind of you to call, but—”

“Anna, dear, I’m sorry to be the one to have to tell you this, but, well, we had a board meeting last night—”

Ah. “I’ve taken a leave of absence from the board,” Anna says, “although I’m thinking of coming back. Weren’t you told?”

“Yes, of course, we all know that, and of course you would, you have to, I can’t even imagine what this must be like for you, but Anna, dear, I thought you should know. There’s talk about asking you to resign.”

The room shifts slightly, and then settles. “Resign?” Anna says. “They’re asking me? Or telling me?”

“Well, you know, because it’s a school, and well, we want the public to focus on the fine young people who attend Blake.”

And not on the rapist murderers, Anna thinks grimly. She can’t even blame them, but she’s shaking anyway. All the work she’s put into that place, the hours of meetings and events and fundraisers and school functions, not to mention the tuition she and William paid for Percy’s very fine education. “I understand completely,” she says, trying to keep her voice under control. “I’m a PR liability. If it were Toby, I’m sure I’d have come to the same conclusion about you.”

Miranda coughs, sounding a bit strangled, but then regains her dovelike tones. “I thought it was cruel, just to send a letter. I thought someone should tell you in person.”

The hell you did, Anna thinks. You wanted to gloat. She’s so angry she can barely form syllables. “Well, I have the message now. Thank you.”

“I just didn’t want you to be blindsided, Anna. When you get the letter.”

This time it registers. A letter. They’ve written a letter? Already? Percy’s only been dead six weeks. They couldn’t have waited another few months? Or, if they couldn’t wait, they couldn’t send someone to tell her in person?

Miranda’s still talking, but Anna can’t make it out, doesn’t want to. She hangs up.

She no longer has the slightest desire to knit. She entertains a brief fantasy about strangling Miranda Tobin with her yarn, and then dismisses it. She knows the Blake board made the decision they had to make, but the way they’ve done it still enrages her.

All right, she’ll preempt them. She’ll send out a letter of resignation before she can get their letter firing her.

Halfway down the hall to her study, she stops. No. She can’t do that. Because Miranda will know the truth, and will tell everyone else, and then her own letter will merely look thin and desperate, as indeed it would be. There’s no good way to handle the situation, but giving Miranda Tobin another reason to gloat would definitely be a bad one.

The silent scream bubbles into unspoken words. I wasn’t a bad mother I wasn’t I don’t know why this happened but it’s not my fault, it has to be but it can’t be, how can it be my fault that my child did this thing I can’t even bear to think about?

Anna feels a huge shudder pass through her body. She swallows. She’s standing in front of Percy’s bedroom.

It’s not like this is unusual. She walks past this door too many times each day to count. She hasn’t gone inside. She’s told herself that she’ll do that when she’s ready. There’s no hurry. Nothing inside is going anywhere.

She stands in the dark hallway, looking at Percy’s doorknob. It’s just a room, now. He’s not in it. The police have returned what they took, six big boxes worth, which William lugged back into the room. They’re still there, Anna supposes, sitting on the floor or the bed: pieces of Percy’s life, torn out of context.

She can’t bring Percy back. She can’t undo what he did or comfort the people who loved Melinda Soto. She can’t restore his good name at the school he attended from the ages of five to eighteen. But she can put his things back where he kept them, back where they belong. That tiny bit, she can make right.

She opens the door and turns on the overhead light. Someone—William? the cops?—lowered the blinds, making the room even gloomier than it would be anyway. Resolutely, stepping around boxes, Anna crosses to the windows and raises the slats, allowing such daylight as there is to filter into the room. Then she turns on Percy’s desk lamp and bedside lamp.

There. It’s a little more cheerful now. She takes a deep breath and looks around. He was a neat kid. Too neat? Should his neatness have alarmed her? His comic-book posters march across the walls, lined up with architectural precision, interrupted only by a Stanford pennant and his framed diplomas. On his desk, a small wooden one he’s had ever since he started junior high school, his GMAT study book sits centered, flanked by a row of pencils, a calculator, an eraser. Ordinarily his computer would be on the desk, too, but it’s not; she supposes it’s in one of the boxes, since she knows the police took it. She doesn’t believe they found anything interesting on it, although William talked to them in much more depth than she did. Surely William would have told her if anything had turned up, though. Even in his present state, he wouldn’t have withheld any information that would explain any of this.

One narrow bookshelf is full of textbooks and a few beat-up novels. The other bookcase, much larger, houses Percy’s comic collection, each issue stored in a plastic slipcase, each year of issues boxed and labeled. William, who deals regularly with art collectors, says that many of them are more passionate about the act of collecting than about what they collect. Had they fastened on stamps or coins or bottle caps, they would be equally driven. Percy, says William, fastened on a comic book, which worked out well, because the comic book is popular and ubiquitous and inexpensive.

She walks to the closet and opens it. Button-down shirts and slacks hang neatly from the racks. There are a few ties, a collection of shoes in a rack on the door. The shelves are empty; she suspects she’ll find whatever was there in the police boxes.

Percy’s dresser, too, holds only what you’d expect. Socks, briefs, polo shirts, jeans, sweatpants. Everything looks rumpled, so the police must have searched it.

Her first cursory inspection completed, Anna looks around the room again. There’s a small photo frame on the desk. Percy, thirteen or fourteen—no, he was fourteen then—his arms around puppy Bart, who licks his cheek as Percy laughs, eyes closed and face to the sun, oblivious to the camera. William took the photo.

How did this sunny, joyous kid turn into the person who killed Melinda Soto? What didn’t Anna know about Percy?

Almost everything, she thinks. But couldn’t any parent say the same? Couldn’t she and William say the same of each other, especially now? Do any of us really know the people we love? Anna thinks bleakly that she probably understands Bart, that simple and reliably demonstrative creature, better than she does any of the people in her life.

It occurs to her that this is a reciprocal principle, that the people in her life also don’t understand her, but she shoves that thought away. It will only lead to self-pity, which is entirely too imminent a threat right now anyway, now that her rage over the Blake mess has, at least for the moment, faded to a dull ache.

All right. What can she do now, after the fact, to deepen her knowledge of her son?

She looks around the room again. Those ghastly posters, rank upon rank of blinding primary colors and over-exaggerated gestures. The carefully preserved comic books. She’s never understood this Comrade Cosmos phenomenon, which bores her almost literally to tears, but something about it meant a great deal to Percy.

All right. Every day, she will unpack one box—which should take an hour or two—and read as many of the comic books as she can stomach, starting at the beginning. The second process should keep her busy for a long time.

*   *   *

Wearing an Irish fisherman’s cardigan Walter gave her for Christmas five years ago, Rosemary carefully pulls the last ornament off her tree. It’s antique glass, opalescent and fragile, and belonged to Walter’s grandmother. It’s the first ornament to go on the tree and the last to come off, taking pride of place even over the treetop angel. She packs it carefully into a thickly padded box and sets it aside. She keeps it in her bedside drawer, fearing that catastrophe would befall it in the garage.

New Year’s Day is always something of a relief, but always leaves her feeling desolate, too: the warmth of Christmas fled even though, according to the church calendar, the season lasts until Epiphany on January 6. January 1 is a dull dud of a holiday, a dead spot in the year designed to allow people to recover from hangovers. Since Rosemary doesn’t have one, she simply winds up feeling tired and out of sorts.

She enjoyed New Year’s Eve at Vera’s; that’s always a pleasant, civilized evening. She was glad, if surprised, that Jeremy joined them. She’d thought he’d want to be with his friends, but he’d merely explained with a shrug that he wasn’t really into hard partying, especially now.

That’s good, Rosemary thinks. He isn’t using alcohol or drugs to try to escape. Melinda always fretted that he was a late bloomer, sullen and unfocused, but Rosemary thinks he has good instincts.

She missed Melinda desperately last night, although not, she’s sure, half as much as Jeremy did. Somewhat less desperately, she missed Melinda’s weekend-before-Christmas party, an interesting mix of library people, church folk, and fellow adoptive parents. Most of all, though, she missed Melinda on Christmas itself, all the more because she also missed Walter so much.

After everyone left, she forced herself to visit him again. She brought him some stollen, which he’s always liked, and a fleece jacket because he gets cold so easily. The nursing home was decorated for the holidays, of course, and there were many more visitors than usual, including volunteers singing carols. Some of the residents sat smiling, spruced up in red and green outfits, in their wheelchairs. Others seemed agitated, bewildered by too many strangers.

Walter was asleep, turned toward his window. Rosemary sat with him for a while, remembering all the Christmases they’d spent together, remembering—because she knew he couldn’t—his many years as Santa Claus at his firm’s holiday party, and his delight in touring the neighborhood Christmas decorations, and how much he always exclaimed at the gifts she gave him.

If he’d woken up, she’d have told him those memories as a story, the way she’d told him about Melinda as a story. That tale had sparked a moment of recognition. Would this have done the same?

But he didn’t wake up, and after an hour of listening to his deep, even breathing, her need to be out of the building suddenly rose to an intolerable level. She left the jacket on his bedside table and fled, and she hasn’t been back since.

All the ornaments and lights are off now. She folds up the little tree and puts it back in its box. Christmas has been relegated to the garage for another year. The house is empty, too large. Echoing.

Before next Christmas, Rosemary thinks, shivering despite her thick sweater, I have to do something just for myself. Travel, or take a class, or schedule a retreat. Do something I’ve never done before, something I can’t associate with Walter or Melinda. I have to learn how to be by myself, before everyone else is gone and I have no choice.