8

A week after Percy’s death, a thank-you note arrives from Reno. It’s on church stationery, handwritten like Anna’s own note.

Dear Anna,

I am writing on behalf of Jeremy and all of us who loved Melinda to thank you for the lovely sapling. Sending it was an extraordinarily thoughtful gesture. We have not planted it yet, but certainly will when we feel led to the right location. Please know that it will be loved and cared for.

I can’t imagine what you must be feeling now. Whatever our children have done, we love them, and this is the worst loss any parent can face. My heart breaks for you, and I hope your friends and family are supporting you. May the God of mercy and compassion enfold you and help you find healing.

In sorrow, The Rev. Dr. Henrietta Alphonse-Smith, Rector, St. Philip’s Episcopal Church.

Anna, who has slogged out through the ever-present rain to get the mail on the day the note arrives, never shows it to William. William doesn’t know about the tree. She paid for it with her own credit card, not one of the ones they use jointly. She doesn’t know where the impulse to keep it secret comes from. She can’t think clearly about anything right now. She wonders if she’ll ever think clearly again.

She can’t even remember when she decided to send the tree, or why. That was before Percy died, before Karen showed up at their door with Bart, and everything before that moment has faded, become impossibly distant. The world has fractured.

Anna has become a dumb animal. She sleeps, eats, and relieves herself. She weeps. She finds herself walking in circles, finds herself in rooms she doesn’t remember entering and doesn’t know why she entered.

She has not gone into Percy’s room. The police searched it, seized his journal and computer, impounded the luggage he took to Mexico to examine it for forensic evidence. She can’t imagine why they have to do this. They know he killed Melinda Soto. What else do they need? And yet another part of her hopes they find some answer, some reason, so she’ll have one, too.

In any case, she has not yet been able to bring herself to go back into his room. William, meanwhile, seems barely able even to remain in the house. He vanishes for hours. Not to work, Anna knows—he’s closed the gallery for a month “due to family emergency”—and he comes home every night, at least, but he won’t tell her where he’s gone. Maybe he doesn’t know. Maybe he doesn’t remember. He gets in the car every morning and drives away, and when Anna checks the odometer she sees that he’s clocked hundreds of miles. She thinks he simply drives, the way she simply wanders the house.

William isn’t home when the note comes. Anna tucks it into the zippered pocket of her Gore-Tex jacket. By the time William does get home, she’s in bed: not asleep, exactly, because sleep is difficult if not impossible now, but in that gray twilight where it is easier to pretend to be asleep than to open her eyes, to speak, to ask him where he’s been.

The next morning, William—eerily like Percy—is already gone when Anna gets up. She makes herself coffee and tries to eat some toast, which might as well be cardboard. Then she puts on sweats and her Gore-Tex slicker and walks the dog.

William, who adored Bart when Percy was still alive, will have nothing to do with him now, won’t even touch him. Of course, he also won’t touch Anna. Anna walks the dog because Bart has to be walked, and out of some obscure feeling that it isn’t fair to punish the animal for the complete collapse that has befallen the family. Bart can’t possibly understand any of this—neither can Anna, and she has what she’s always been told is a first-rate primate brain—and he’s dependent on his human keepers. William and Percy promised to take care of him when they brought him home as a puppy. Percy can’t keep that promise anymore. William, for whatever reason, won’t.

Anna’s the only one left. And the dog’s demands are simple: food, water, exercise, affection. The first three, Anna can provide. The fourth is harder. Bart’s size and smell, the sheer dogginess of him, have always oppressed her, although she knows that as dogs go, he’s unusually calm and well behaved. Bereft of the men, he fastens himself to her, follows her everywhere, rests his enormous head in her lap and looks up at her with liquid brown eyes.

There are times when she finds this unbearable, when she wants to shove him away, give him away, sell him, kill him, tie him up outside in the rain, take him into the city and abandon him. Several times, she’s been on the verge of calling their vet, or the Humane Society.

But she doesn’t. Percy loved this dog. Her last memory of Percy is of watching him nap with Bart. And Bart is the last of them who saw Percy alive.

Sometimes at night, Bart begins to howl, and William mutters and pulls his pillow over his head, and Anna gets up, fuming and cursing, determined to be rid of the dog by morning. But then she remembers what Karen said, and she pictures Percy wading into the water. She can all too clearly see Bart howling after him, straining against his leash, watching Percy disappear. He kept howling, Karen said.

And Anna, throat thick with tears each time she imagines this—Anna who wants to howl, too, and sometimes does—gets up and goes to the dog and strokes him, her sobs mingling with his whimpers, until he calms. Sometimes she talks to him the way she’d talk to Percy if he were here, if he were still alive. “Why did you do it? I know you did, they tell me you did, and the way you acted makes me believe that, but I don’t understand. Why, Percy? What happened?”

Whatever happened, it was some terrible aberration. It was not Percy. Her private theory is that someone drugged one of the beers he drank that night. The police have shown her the tab from the hotel bar. He only had four beers: not enough to get terribly drunk, much less psychotic, and so she thinks someone put something in his drink and he reacted terribly to it. She thinks the drug made him a monster. She thinks that when it wore off, Percy couldn’t live with himself, couldn’t even bear the idea of confessing to his parents.

She knows that she will never know if this is true. She has a hazy sense that the drugs that might have this effect don’t last in the body long. She doesn’t research the issue; she doesn’t want to learn that she’s wrong and have this fragile explanation shattered. She’s glad that Percy’s body was cremated, although she hasn’t had the strength to go pick up his ashes. His remains are past any possible testing. She can maintain her theory in whatever now passes for peace.

William identified the body. She couldn’t, although already she feels guilty for sparing herself that one last glimpse of the child she bore. She feared that the sight of Percy’s bloated and discolored corpse would, like acid, erase all other memories.

She and William have not talked about a funeral. She and William have barely spoken. The house phone rings and both of them ignore it. The doorbell rings and both of them ignore it.

She knows that William has spoken to his parents, knows that they want to fly out from Boston. She’s told William she can’t handle that right now, can’t deal with them. She knows they’re family, but she’s always found them suffocating. William knows that.

William’s clients have sent tactfully minimalist condolence cards. Several times, this first week post-Percy, Anna has opened the door to find offerings on their doorstep. A roast chicken from their next-door neighbor. Flowers from Karen, with a scribbled note on pink paper dotted with tear stains.

I read about it in the paper. I can’t believe I’m the one who brought your dog back. I’m so sorry.

Flowers, notes, food. Anna and William eat the food, when they remember to eat and can stand to eat, but the flowers die, and Anna opens the notes haphazardly, letting them pile up and then ripping through five or ten of them until she can’t stand it anymore. There aren’t that many, anyway.

Whatever small gestures the outside world has made, they are encased in silence. Right now, that’s what Anna wants. Carl, she knows, has gone to some effort to minimize media coverage, although some shots of Percy from Stanford have wound up in the papers and on the Internet. She can’t bear to read the reader comments on the news stories.

She wonders if the people who loved Melinda Soto feel encased in silence.

Anna has never had a great many friends—she has many acquaintances, but otherwise centered herself on William and Percy—and those she has, some old friends from college and a couple who used to live in the neighborhood but moved away, are scattered across the country. She probably has e-mail from them, or maybe some of the messages from the unanswered calls are from them, and she will appreciate their thoughts when she has the time and energy to deal with them. Right now, she doesn’t and can’t.

Her moat has been breached, terribly. She’s trying to raise the drawbridges again.

She’s glad she isn’t working now. Before Percy was born, and sporadically thereafter, she did freelance writing and consulting work for nonprofits. But between the gallery and the money she inherited from her parents, she didn’t really need to work. She stayed busy caring for her husband and son, keeping her house, knitting and reading and traveling. She has never felt bored or lonely. She has led a simple, quiet life, and has loved it, and if the quiet now seems more suffocating than soothing, well, she suspects she would feel that way whatever she’d spent her time doing. At least she knows how to enjoy her own company, how to treasure silence.

The morning after the note arrives from Reno, Anna walks the dog, as usual. When she gets back to the house, there’s a strange car in the driveway.

Anna, still half a block away, stops, nerves taut. The car’s a blue Prius. She doesn’t know anyone who drives a blue Prius. If the car were a police car, she’d keep walking, hoping that maybe the police have brought Percy’s ashes home. But she doesn’t know who this is, can’t imagine who it might be.

Bart, next to her, looks up inquiringly. “I don’t know,” she says. “Sit, Bart.”

Bart sits. It’s impossible to own any dog as large as an Irish Wolfhound without investing in a great many obedience classes, and Bart is exquisitely trained.

Anna stands squinting at the blue Prius. Is anyone inside? If she moved a few feet closer to the house, she’d be able to tell if someone’s at the door, but she feels paralyzed. And then she sees someone emerging from behind the car, someone waving and calling out to her. “Anna! There you are!”

An elderly woman wearing a garish orange and green plaid coat, her slight frame topped with a frizzy mass of snow-white hair. William’s mother.

*   *   *

Two weeks after the funeral, Jeremy moves back into the house. He doesn’t feel right staying at Hen’s anymore, although she and Ed say he can stay as long as he likes. He doesn’t want to go back to the dorm, either; he might not want that even if he had any interest in returning to school.

VB helped him get in touch with the proper people on campus, who expedited his withdrawal with a full refund. It usually wouldn’t be a full refund; there usually wouldn’t be any refund, this late in the semester. But the proper people mouth platitudes about Extraordinary Circumstances, and pull strings, and give him his money back. Or Mom’s money. It was hers; now it’s his. Like the house, and everything inside it.

Technically, it’s not quite his yet. Technically, it’s in trust until he’s twenty-one. Tom’s the trustee. Tom’s also taking care of the bills until Jeremy can, as Tom puts it, “get your feet back under you.” Jeremy supposes moving back into the house is part of getting back on his feet, but he doesn’t feel very steady.

Tom and Hen and Ed and Rosie and VB all offer to come with him, the first time he goes back to the house. He doesn’t want anyone else there, though. So Tom picks him up at the dorm, packs all his stuff into a station wagon, and helps him unload it onto the front porch. “You sure you don’t want me to stay?”

“I’m sure.”

“I can sit in the car, just stay to make sure—”

“Tom, I’m okay, okay? I just— I need to do this by myself. I’d be more comfortable if you left.” He knows it may take him a while to get through the front door. He doesn’t want Tom watching. He doesn’t want to feel eyes at his back. He’s glad the front door is hidden from the sidewalk by a huge juniper bush, but he still doesn’t want Tom in the driveway.

“You have my cell number?”

“Of course.” Just go already. “I’ll call you if I need to, I promise.”

“All right.” Tom turns and gets back into the car. He sits in the front seat, watching Jeremy through the windshield, until Jeremy makes waving motions. Go. Shoo. Get out of here. Then, finally, he starts the car, and pulls out of the driveway, and drives away.

Jeremy feels his knees go weak. There’s a garden bench on the front porch, mostly covered by boxes now, but he moves a few of them and sits down. He takes a deep breath, smelling juniper, watching the quail in the yard. Then he gets up again.

In the end, it takes him only the normal amount of time to get through the front door, because he suddenly has to pee. He tries not to look at anything as he hurries to the bathroom, tries not to smell anything—Mom’s lavender sachets, the dusty smell of all the books in the house—tries not to hear the silence. Usually she’d call out as soon as she heard the front door open. “Hey, Jer! Welcome home!”

That used to drive him nuts. She’d welcome him home if he’d just walked down the hill for potato chips, if he’d just come in from raking or mowing the lawn, if he’d gone out to get the mail. Anytime he crossed that threshold, however briefly he’d been gone, she yelled her cheerful greeting. He used to wonder what drugs she was on.

Now he’d give anything to hear her voice.

He’s determined to empty his bladder without crying. He manages that, blessedly—a small three-minute victory—but as he turns to wash his hands, he’s ambushed by the soap dish, an ugly clay slab with a long-necked head and four round blobby legs: a dinosaur. He made it for Mom for Mother’s Day when he was, like, five or something. When he was into dinosaurs and fossils. It’s painted a muddy purple, with one streaking green eye, and he’s begged her a thousand times to toss the fucking thing, for God’s sake, but she won’t. Wouldn’t.

“It’s your house now,” Hen told him when he was still at hers. “Make it your house, Jeremy. Don’t turn it into a Melinda Museum. It’s all right for you to change things. I know you probably won’t want to do that right away, but remember that you can redo the place the way you want to when you’re ready.”

Shortly after she said that, it occurred to him that he would now, at last, be able to get rid of the hideous dinosaur soap dish. He’d imagined hurling it against a wall and watching it explode into dust and shards; he’d even pictured what a pain in the butt it would be to sweep up all the pieces.

But now he can’t touch it. He can’t even use the soap it holds, a girly handcrafted artisanal lavender-and-oatmeal bar from someplace in California. Mom was probably the last person who touched this bar of soap. Some of her molecules may still be clinging to it. He can’t wash them away.

So he goes into the kitchen, where he knows there’s ordinary hand soap in a dispenser at the sink, and washes his hands there. The kitchen’s a Mom-mine: the café curtains she made hanging in the window, rocks she collected lined up on the windowsill, an avocado pit, suspended by toothpicks and sprouting roots, in a glass of water. The glass is almost empty. Jeremy refills it. At some point someone will have to plant the pit—that’s clearly what Mom wanted to do—but he doesn’t know how or where. He’ll give it to Aunt Rosie. She’ll know.

He should send it to Seattle.

The baby Christmas tree is still in Hen’s office. Hen says she wrote a thank-you note, but that it would be fine if he wrote one, too. He has no intention of doing this anytime soon, if ever.

Jeremy opens the fridge, as empty as it always is when Mom’s on a trip—at least he won’t have to worry about whether to discard or memorialize her leftovers—and checks the shopping list held to the door with a magnet. “Quinoa, sprouts, tofu, yogurt, blueberries, granola, bananas, soy milk, coffee, artichokes.” He snorts. Rabbit-Mom, with her grains and greens. The only tastes he shares with her here are the fruit and coffee. He tears the list from the pad, ready to crumple it, and then stops.

She wrote this list.

Stupid, Jeremy. What are you going to do, bronze the thing?

But he can no more throw it away than he could shatter the hideous soap dish. With a sigh, he folds the note and shoves it into a junk drawer overflowing with miscellaneous debris. Speaking of which, time to bring the boxes in from the porch.

That keeps him busy for twenty minutes, good physical work, undemanding and satisfying. He stacks the boxes neatly in the front hall and then, feeling a little more cheerful, dons a backpack full of clothing and picks up a similarly stuffed suitcase. He knows his clothing will go in his room. This is an easy task.

Going up the stairs, he hears the familiar creak on the sixth and tenth steps, remembers countless weekend mornings when, as he lay in bed, that squeaking warned him that Mom was coming upstairs to rouse him for breakfast. Time’s a wasting.

His eyes are wet again. His bedroom, at least, should be safe. His bedroom’s full of him, not Mom. But when he shoulders his way through the door, he sees, neatly folded on his narrow single bed, a small pile of laundry.

Of course. He came over two weeks before Mom’s trip to do laundry, but he got pulled into a discussion on the CC boards and never got around to it, so he left it here. He figured he’d do it when Mom got back from Mexico, and he had enough other clothing in the dorm, so it wasn’t crucial.

Mom did it for him.

Aching, he looks around the room and suddenly hates it. It’s too small, too cramped with bookshelves and boxes of CC issues, too childish. There are still plastic dinosaurs sitting on a shelf, and there isn’t even room for a real desk in here. That’s one reason he wanted to live in the dorm, because he felt like he’d outgrown this room. Mom offered him the guest room or the attic, but moving everything was too complicated when he was getting ready to start college at the same time. He told her he’d move over the summer, but privately he believed that he’d never live in this house again, that he’d move into an apartment at the end of the academic year, maybe a frat house or something, and after college he’d get the hell out of Reno and go someplace where he wouldn’t feel so self-conscious, someplace more diverse. San Francisco. Seattle. He knew he’d have to share living space for a long time, but at least he wouldn’t be sharing it with her.

Now he’d give anything to be sharing it with her.

He wishes he could leave Reno now, but how would he pay for it? The thing’s impossible, and anyway he has a hazy sense that it’s important to stick around for a while, to let his insides settle as much as they ever will.

He can move within the house itself, though, switch things up at least that much.

Mom herself naturally had the nicest bedroom in the house—she’d lived here for years before he showed up, after all—and Jeremy realizes that if he wants to, he can move in there. That room has windows on two sides, a big walk-in closet, even a little verandah. From the windows, you can see trees and mountains, and Mom hung a finch feeder from the eaves, so the birds congregate there, bright spots of yellow and orange and red. “Flying flowers even in winter,” she called them once.

It’s a great room. It has space for everything Jeremy will want. He stands in his old bedroom, dreaming. He’ll leave the finch feeders there. He’ll get a cat—he and Mom had a cat once and both adored it, but it died when he was a junior in high school, and Mom decided not to get another one because she wanted to travel and he’d be going to college soon—and he and the cat can sit in Mom’s rocking chair, the one her grandfather made for her grandmother, and watch the flying flowers, and sunlight will dapple the floor and the breeze coming in through the windows will smell like sagebrush and juniper.

This is a summer fantasy, he realizes. He’s thinking about the future. He’s thinking about a life without Mom. Grief and guilt swamp him again. Too soon, too soon.

*   *   *

Rosemary, aching, pulls into Melinda’s driveway. No: not Melinda’s driveway anymore. It’s Jeremy’s driveway now.

Veronique, next to her, unbuckles her seat belt. “Before I forget, what do you want me to bring to Thanksgiving?” The holiday’s next week. None of them feel remotely festive, but gathering for the holiday is better than being alone. Veronique has been included for years, because Melinda wanted her to be; Rosemary has inherited her now.

I want you to take away the two empty chairs, Rosemary thinks grimly. She and Walter have always hosted, fed Melinda and Jeremy and Veronique and sometimes a few stragglers from church. Walter’s empty place would have been hard enough, this year. Now she’ll have to deal with Melinda’s, too.

“Salad,” she says. “Salad or a side, whatever you prefer. Just let me know.”

“I’ll do my usual, then, that salad with cranberries and walnuts.”

“That’s great. Thanks.”

Veronique, hand on the car door, looks over at her. “You know, if you’re going to get out, you’ll have to take off your seat belt.”

“Right,” Rosemary says, pulling the buckle. “I knew that. I just—I’m not sure I’m ready for this.”

“Of course not. How could we be? But Jeremy thinks he is, and we promised to help him. Come on: you can’t expect a nineteen-year-old kid to know what to do with his mother’s shoes and clothing.”

“I guess not.”

“Dibs on that jacket she got in Montana. The boiled-wool one with the southwestern design and the concho buttons. If it fits me. Rosemary, get out of the car.”

She does, finally. Vera waits next to the car until Rosemary crosses in front of it to stand on the front walk, and then she comes up behind Rosemary, on her right, and nudges her slightly. “Good. You’re out of the car. Now walk.”

Vera the sheepdog. Rosemary complies. Waiting won’t make this any easier.

Jeremy calls, “Come in,” when they ring the bell. They find him waiting in the kitchen. He’s made tea and laid out a plate of cookies, Pepperidge Farm Mint Milano, on one of Melinda’s good plates. When he sees them, he offers up a passable imitation of a smile. “Thanks for coming. It’s nice of you.”

He looks terrible: drawn, too thin, his warm brown skin an ashen gray, as if he hasn’t slept in days. Rosemary moves in to hug him; he smells slightly sour.

How do you tell a murdered friend’s bereaved son that he needs to take a shower?

You don’t.

Rosemary steps back, away from him, and opens her mouth to ask him how he is, but Jeremy says, “Don’t ask me how I am, okay? For one thing, I don’t know. For another, well, what is there to say?”

“Good,” Veronique says briskly. “Thank you. I wasn’t going to ask, because I assume you’re about how we are, which is lousy, but I didn’t want you to think I was being rude. Or uncaring.”

“It’s good of you to come,” he says again. They’re all standing around the table. He nods at it. “Please have some tea, because otherwise it will just get cold, and I won’t drink it, and that would have driven Mom nuts. If you don’t want the cookies, though, I’ll eat them. I was going to bake, but I bailed instead. That would have driven Mom nuts, too.”

Rosemary feels herself relaxing. He still has his sense of humor. Good.

They sit, nibble cookies, sip tea. Veronique asks if he’s thought about when he’ll come back to school, and he shrugs. A year or two, he says, when he figures out what he wants to do. He bends his head, shoves his cookie around his plate with one finger. “Mom tried to get me to take some time off after high school. She said I was too unfocused. Pretty ironic I’m doing it now, huh?” His voice is thick.

“It’s a good idea,” Rosemary says weakly.

Veronique chews her cookie, swallows, takes a long slurp of tea, and puts her mug back on the table with a decisive thunk. “I think we’ve reached the end of the small talk. The tea and cookies were good, Jeremy. Shall we tackle your mother’s room now?”

Rosemary follows the other two up the stairs; Vera evidently doesn’t feel the need to herd her this time. Melinda’s room is painted in shades of green and lavender; Jeremy’s piled a stack of broken-down storage boxes in the middle of the floor, with packing tape and scissors next to them. Such a pretty room. Rosemary looks around at the framed dried flowers, the cross-stitch sampler Melinda got at a yard sale—she always claimed she was hopeless at any needlework herself, although she admired it—the collection of baskets and ceramic boxes on top of the bureau.

Veronique’s looking around, too. She wipes a tear from her cheek, as briskly as she always does everything, and says, “You’re going to repaint when you move in here, I assume? More macho colors?”

“I dunno. I haven’t gotten that far. Whatever I do, we need to deal with her clothing and stuff, right?”

Rosemary realizes she’s shaking. She feels almost nauseous. She can’t stand the idea of disassembling the room. She hasn’t been able to pack up Walter’s things, either, except for what he needs in the nursing home. If she keeps everything the way it is, she can pretend he’s coming home.

If only they could leave this room alone. If only Melinda were coming home. But this is what Jeremy wants to do, and Veronique’s right. They promised to help him.

It will get easier, Rosemary tells herself. Once we’re doing the work, once everything’s packed up and the room’s dismantled, it won’t be so hard. All right. Time to dive in.

She picks up a box. “Where do you want me to start, Jeremy? Closet, or drawers?”

Veronique nods approvingly. “You take one. I’ll take the other.”

“You could flip a coin,” Jeremy says.

“No.” Veronique shakes her head. “I’ll take the dresser. It’s likely to be more straightforward. And Rosie’s the one with the fashion sense, so she should take the closet. But mind you put that jacket aside for me, if you find it.”

They split up. Rosemary’s calmer now that she has a clearly defined task. The closet will probably be more work than the bureau— it’s a large walk-in with two tiers of hanging clothing, plus boxes, and it’s stuffed—but Vera can help when she’s done discarding underthings no one else will want.

Rosemary has always loved clothing, and while she and Melinda never had terribly similar tastes—Melinda’s ran to Birkenstocks and hemp, and what skirts she wore were long, baggy, and embroidered—Rosie still expects to enjoy the process of packing up the garments for use by someone else. She’ll drive them to Goodwill, or call the local women’s shelter to see if they can be used there; she can even bring some to the hospital, since with winter coming, there will be more homeless patients in the ER who need warm garments. There are fewer female patients in this category than male, and anyway the ER staff doesn’t like to keep too much around—their compassion is tempered by prudent caution against becoming known on the streets as a source of free loot—but Rosemary can stow some sweaters and jackets in a storage room and let a few of the staff know they’re there.

She believes that such recycling, like Holy Communion, transforms loss and brokenness into food. But even as she tells herself this, she has a sudden, unwanted memory of an article she read about a Holocaust survivor. The woman’s job was to sort the piles of shoes and clothing left behind by inmates heading into the infamous showers of Auschwitz. She stole items she thought her friends in the barracks could use, and she survived the work by concentrating entirely on how she was helping her friends. She didn’t, couldn’t, allow herself to think about where the items came from.

Rosemary wants to think only about all the people this clothing will help, but she doesn’t know if she’ll be able to keep herself from thinking about Melinda. Does she even want to?

She’s always pitied the Holocaust survivor, scorning the woman’s delusion. Now she finds herself admiring the discipline involved in maintaining it.

You said you’d help. You promised. She steps into the closet, turns to reach for the nearest item, and finds herself grasping a fuzzy purple cardigan covered with beaded flowers. The thing’s hideous, but Melinda loved it. She found it in a thrift store in Philadelphia when she was there for an ALA conference, and shipped her find home even though it was high summer at the time and she wouldn’t be able to wear the sweater for months. Every year, she delighted in the first day cold enough for her to wear it. Over the years, she bought turtlenecks and earrings, and even a pair of purple suede boots, specifically to match it.

This can’t go to strangers. It just can’t. Rosemary wouldn’t be caught dead in it, though. She takes it carefully off its hanger and carries it out of the closet, back into the bedroom proper, where she expects to find Jeremy and Vera busily at work.

Jeremy’s sitting on the bed next to a half-packed box of tchotchkes, cradling a glass bottle. Hand-blown, from the looks of it: swirling brown ridges. “She got this in Guatemala when she went down there to meet me the first time,” he says. “There was some snag and she had to wait an extra day to meet me and she was really antsy, so she went shopping to distract herself, even though adopting me was costing a fortune and the last thing she needed was to spend more money. But she found this in a little shop and it was cheap, and she loved the shape and the color, so she bought it, and then she went back to her hotel room and sat on her bed holding it on her lap, just like this.” He shakes his head. “She kept rubbing the bottle, because she liked how the glass felt, and then the phone rang and it was the adoption people telling her that everything was going ahead, that she could come meet me. She called this her magic bottle. She said she rubbed it and I came out, like a genie.”

Rosemary’s heard the story, but she’s never seen the bottle. She didn’t know Melinda still had it. Jeremy looks up at her and says, “If I keep rubbing it, do you suppose I’ll get Mom back?”

He’s trying to be funny again. It’s not working. Rosemary retreats into chaplain mode. What would she tell the son of a dead patient at the hospital?

“No, but you’ll get your memories of her back. You can keep that, you know. You don’t have to pack everything.” She holds up the sweater and turns to Vera. “One of us has to keep this. I’ll never wear it. Will you?”

“Oh, Lord. That old thing.” Vera sighs and puts a stack of bras into a trash bag. “I guess I’ll wear it, if no one else will, but I can’t wear it at home because the cats will either shred it or shed all over it, or both. I could keep it in my office, I guess. Maybe even wear it to teach. Would that wake everybody up, Jeremy?”

He shrugs, rocking the glass bottle, and Vera sighs again. “All right, kids. Here’s my show-and-tell item.” She waves a flowing blue scarf, billowing silk, like a piece of parachute. “Remember this?”

“Of course,” Rosemary says. “Her strip-of-sky scarf.” If Melinda wore the sweater on cold days when she delighted in the change of seasons, she wore the blue scarf during gloomy weather—rare enough in Nevada, the sunniest and driest state in the country—when she needed to remind herself what good weather looked like.

“I’ll wear the hairy grape sweater if you’ll wear this,” Veronique says.

Rosemary prefers her scarves a bit more understated, but she can see herself wearing this. She can’t see herself wearing the hairy grape. “Deal.”

“Did you find my boiled-wool jacket?”

“No. Not yet. This is as far as I got.”

Vera snorts. “We aren’t being very efficient, are we? I think we should get Ed and Tom to do this. We could supervise them—watch from across the room and tell them what to keep and what to toss—but they wouldn’t get bogged down in memories of why Melinda wore whatever, and where it came from, and what she said about it.”

Rosemary walks to the bed and sits down next to Jeremy, the old mattress sagging under the double weight. Melinda really should have been sleeping on a better bed. “I don’t think efficiency’s the point. You know, this feels like liturgy. It should be liturgy. We have house blessings, after all.”

“We do?” Veronique asks. “You do? I’ve never heard of that.”

“It’s in the Book of Occasional Services. There’s a gorgeous one in the New Zealand prayer book, too. Anyway, there are house blessings, and there’s a service for the deconsecration of a church, and some clergy are doing divorce liturgies now, which makes sense.”

Veronique looks skeptical. “How would it work? What would you call it? The Goodwill Liturgy?”

Jeremy lets out a sharp bark. “That’s pretty good, Prof Bellamy.”

“It’s not bad.” Rosemary hugs the hairy grape. She closes her eyes so she can think better. “Mmmm … A service for the Blessing of Belongings, maybe? Anyway, a lot of people would show up to help, kind of like a barn-raising, and whenever they found something with a story attached, they’d go ring a bell in the middle of the room—or maybe they’d all have their own little bells—and that would be the signal for everyone else to stop so the person who just rang the bell could tell the story about whatever they just found.”

Jeremy groans. “That would take forever.”

“Maybe. It would take a while, sure. It would take as long as it needed to take, and people could come and go. It would be open-ended. It would be a way to get the packing-up done and honor the memories of the community and support the mourners.”

“I dunno, Aunt Rosie. The open mike at the funeral was bad enough. And I don’t think I’d want everybody from church crammed into Mom’s bedroom, you know?”

“Not everyone would come. It would be a self-selecting group.”

Jeremy snorts. “Yakking women. No offense.”

“Interesting idea,” Veronique says, “but I take our young man’s point. How would you limit how long each person spoke? Would there be priests in the house, too? What would they be doing? Would the family have a way of kicking everyone out when they’d had enough?”

Rosemary shakes her head. “I don’t know. This just occurred to me.” She looks down at the hairy grape, runs her fingers carefully over the delicate beaded flowers. “Okay, how about you ring the bell and then you only have a minute to tell the story? To keep the process moving so the packing actually gets done?”

Vera purses her lips. “Maybe. It needs work.”

“I know,” Rosemary says, but even as she folds the hairy grape and puts it on the bed, even as she stands up and gets ready to renew her battle with the closet, the idea plucks at her. She’ll have to talk to Hen about it. She turns to Jeremy and holds her hands out for the bottle. “Let me put that in the other room for you, okay? Where it will be safe? And then we can get back to the packing?”

“Here,” he says, and shoves it at her.

She takes it. The glass is warm from his hands. “Do you want to stop? It’s okay if you aren’t ready yet.”

“I’m ready,” he says. “At least I think I am. I want the room to be cleared out, you know. I just don’t want to go through the process of doing it. But I don’t want other people to do it for me, either. So I guess I just have to hang tough.” He sighs. “I know she’d want me to move into the room, to enjoy it. It makes me feel like The Bird Who Cleans the World, that’s all.”

*   *   *

When Jeremy is still very small, four or five, Melinda reads to him from a slim volume of Mayan fables called The Bird Who Cleans the World. The author, Mayan himself, explains that his mother told him these stories when he was a child. They’re mostly animal stories, moral fables and creation myths.

Melinda originally plans to read Jeremy one story a night; at that rate, the book will get them through a month of bedtimes. But she rejects some of the tales because they’re too sad, or too baldly about the horrible fates meeting disobedient children, and Jeremy seems uninterested in many of the others.

He responds to only two of the tales. One describes a huge flood that covers the earth, leaving only one house standing on a mountaintop. Inside the house, animals of every species take refuge. When the waters begin to recede, a buzzard is sent out to survey how much land has been uncovered, and in the bird’s greed and hunger it eats the bodies of the dead animals that it finds, and ever after is cursed, or blessed, with the task of cleaning the world by eating carrion and corpses, the reeking and rotting.

“We heard that story in Sunday school,” Jeremy says. “’Cept it didn’t talk about the buzzword.”

“Buzzard, honey.” Where did he get the word “buzzword”? Or has she, trying to interpret his childish speech, transformed his syllables into a word she knew? “It’s not quite the same story. It’s a little different.”

“The aminals are in a house, not a boat.”

“Animals, honey. Yes, that’s right.”

“And in Sunday school it’s a pretty white bird that flies out. It comes back with a flower.”

“An olive branch, to show that things are alive. That’s right.”

Jeremy sucks his thumb thoughtfully for a moment, and then says, “This one doesn’t have a rainbow.”

“No.”

“So it could rain again. God didn’t promise to be good.”

She smiles. Yes, come to think of it, the rainbow is God’s promise to be good, even if people aren’t. “Well, this story doesn’t talk about God. It doesn’t say why the flood happened.”

“So maybe nobody was bad? It just rained for no reason?”

“Maybe. We don’t know.”

“The dead animals weren’t bad?”

“We don’t know if they were. The story’s not really about them. It’s about the b— the buzzard.” She almost said “big bird,” but doesn’t want him to get the scavenger in this tale confused with the friendly yellow creature on Sesame Street.

“He was bad.” Jeremy frowns now, clearly concentrating very hard. “Because he ate the dead animals?”

“No. Because he didn’t fly right back to the house, the way he was supposed to.”

“So he was punished. He had to eat dead things. But he liked eating dead things.”

“Yes, he did. And he was doing a good thing by eating them. He was cleaning the world. But the other animals didn’t want to be around him, because he smelled bad. So he had to be lonely.”

He looks utterly perplexed, and Melinda reaches out to smooth the soft bangs off his forehead, realizing belatedly that the seemingly simple tale has led them into thickets of ambiguity that many adults would find bewildering. Terrible things happen for no reason, and only the lucky survive. The buzzard is bad for doing something good, and he’s punished by being forced to keep doing what he wants to do, but in isolation. The bird that cleans the world is held in contempt, shunned, rather than honored. She thinks of a line from the Psalms: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” Isaiah’s suffering servant, and Christ’s agonizing crucifixion after his friends abandon him.

This is dark stuff, grown-up stuff. She wonders, as Jeremy resumes sucking his thumb and drifts off to sleep—at this stage he’ll wake again if he feels her weight lift from the mattress, so she’ll sit a while longer—if the fable was composed before or after the Mayans were exposed to Catholicism. Liberation theology. This is the worldview of a people who’ve seen too much suffering and death, as far from the complacent triumphalism of right-wing American Protestantism as you can get. No easy answers here, no assured salvation, no rainbows: just paradox and the stench of corpses.

The next night she reads him another fable, one she’s chosen for its simplicity and happy ending. A cricket disturbs the rest of some jaguars who dislike his singing, but he and a rabbit, his friend and ally, defeat the jaguars by gathering gourds of wasps, which chase the predators away by stinging them.

Jeremy likes the story, and asks for it again the next night. It has Christian subtexts, too: the last shall be first, the smallest shall be greatest. Jeremy doesn’t understand that part yet, of course. He only knows that the cricket and the rabbit, for all their tininess, are smart, and that their quick thinking keeps them safe.

A week or two later, Veronique and Rosemary come over for Scrabble. After the game, Melinda shows them the book. “You know, for anybody who survived the civil war, that second story must have seemed like a joke. No wasps defeated the army when it overran the Mayan villages. The little guys lost.”

Veronique looks up from the illustration she’s been studying. “Your little guy won. And this author, Victor Montejo”—she raps the book with her knuckles—“it says he wrote another book about watching a village being destroyed. But he included the wasp story anyway.”

“I still like the buzzard one better. But it’s hard.”

Rosemary grimaces. “Yup. No meaning in disaster: only in the work you do afterwards, even if no one says thank you.”

*   *   *

Bone-weary, Veronique puts the shopping bag from Melinda’s house on her own bed. She and Rosemary just packed this bag, and now she has to unpack it again. Why does so much of life seem like useless repetition, like an utterly random reordering of insignificant bits of matter and energy? Move a sweater here, move it there. Teach the same classes to different generations of students who all begin to blur into one dully staring face. Grade new stacks of papers, which all begin to blur into one dull essay, distinguished only by increasing numbers of sentence-level errors.

She really needs to retire.

She really can’t retire.

She really needs to put away the things in the bag, or they’ll become another burden, another weight on her shoulders.

At least they aren’t in a mystery story anymore. They know who killed Melinda. In a mystery novel, that would be a happy ending.

Veronique isn’t happy. She doubts anyone else is, either.

She reaches into the bag and pulls out the hairy grape, which in her current enervated state feels as heavy as a full-length mink coat. She has to hang this in the closet, at least, although she’ll only take it out again the next time she goes to campus, so she can put it in her office. But she needs to put it away now so the cats won’t have their way with it.

She’s closed her bedroom door to keep them out, and they’re wailing and mewling outside, butting the door with their heads. You never feed us. You have never fed us. Not once in the last thousand years have you fed us.

She feeds them twice a day, fed them just before coming upstairs. They’ve already forgotten this, or abandoned the offering as unacceptable. Rummaging in her closet for a hanger while the cats mourn outside, Veronique thinks it might be nice to be a cat, for whom each opening of a cat food can is unprecedented cause for rejoicing, rather than the same damn thing all over again.

The hairy grape is safely stowed. Next? Veronique peers into the bag—how can she already have forgotten what it contains?—and spots a woven basket. She didn’t really want this, but Jeremy insisted she take some of the items cluttering Melinda’s nightstand and windowsills and bureau, and the basket’s innocuous enough. She’ll find some use for it.

Inside the basket is a small white box holding a pair of earrings, silver with opal and lapis inlay. These, Veronique genuinely likes. Melinda had lovely taste in jewelry.

And below that, a scarf: not the billowing blue thing Rosemary took, but red chenille, a spot of brightness. It glowed like a ruby when Veronique came across it in Melinda’s bottom dresser drawer, and the color lifted her heart for a moment even as her fingers treasured the soft fabric. For those reasons, she claimed the scarf. She rarely wears scarves, but she’ll wear this one.

She hauls herself upright and walks to her own dresser, across the room. The scarf goes in the top drawer, next to neatly folded socks. The earrings go in her small jewelry box. That leaves the basket. Indecisive, she holds it in both hands. She doesn’t know where to put it. She can’t think of a spot in the house where it will look right, and anyway, the cats are as likely to claw and chew this as they are to savage the hairy grape. Finally she goes back to the closet and stands on tiptoe to deposit the basket on an upper shelf.

There. The rearranging’s done. Melinda’s possessions have been integrated with Veronique’s.

The bedroom door shakes, and Veronique opens it. The cats erupt inside, crying and winding themselves around her ankles, distraught and bereft. You never love us. You have never loved us. Not once in the last thousand years have you loved us.

She bends to pat them, her knee screaming almost as loudly as they are, and then speaks aloud. “Cats, we’re going downstairs now. I’m going to sit on the couch. You can join me, but you have to let me get downstairs without tripping me.”

She accomplishes this by gripping the bannister with both hands, a maneuver she knows would look ridiculous were anyone else here to see her. For the first time in a long time, she permits herself a stab of self-pity that no one is.

Chocolate. Just one square, medicinal. That’s what she needs. She keeps a bar of Trader Joe’s 72% cacao in the kitchen for just such emergencies.

Settled on the couch with one cat in her lap and the other curled next to her, the chocolate on a napkin on the side table, Veronique looks around her living room: clean uncluttered lines, clean uncluttered surfaces, Danish modern and Georgia O’Keefe. It occurs to her, as she takes the first nibble of chocolate and one of the cats begins to purr, that Melinda’s possessions are indeed a collection of stories: belongings as books, as a library accessible only to a select clique of readers. She, Rosie, and Jeremy know the story of the brown bottle. To the rest of the world, it’s just a piece of glass.

Veronique looks around her living room again. There’s a large set of bookcases along one wall, holding volumes readable by anyone who speaks English. What other stories are here? When she dies, who will come to divvy up her belongings, and what tales will they tell?

She bought the furniture at various stores, the O’Keefe prints online. Aside from the literal books, the place is as devoid of narrative as the showrooms where she bought the furniture. She might as well be sitting in a doctor’s waiting room or an airline departure gate.

Despite the warmth of the small mammal stretched across her lap, despite her satisfying sugar buzz, Veronique feels a sudden chill. She finds herself longing for the heft and comfort of the hairy grape.