Mark laughed. “Okay, I won’t open the box. Gotta go. Teresa just got here.”
“Okay. Hey, thanks again for staying home with Mother.”
“No problem. I enjoy her company,” he said.
We said good-bye, and I hung up, keeping my eyes on the house.
“Let’s do this,” I said out loud, my own private pep talk as I approached the stone front steps, the steps I’d climbed thousands of times going back and forth between home and school, or out to play in the yard and the woods behind the house.
As I walked in, I felt like a little kid again, tiptoeing so my mother wouldn’t hear me, wouldn’t caw out, “Who’s there?”
I never knew who I would meet up with when I stepped off the bus and crossed the threshold. Would it be Fun Mom, who had brownies waiting for me and wanted to hear all about my day at school, or Drunk Mom, squinting at me like I was an intruder in her life, someone who didn’t belong? “You again?” she’d say, a mix of surprise and profound disappointment in her voice, maybe with a not-so-hidden trace of loathing, like I was something she’d scraped off the bottom of her shoe.
“Where have you been?” Drunk Mom would ask accusingly, eyeing me over the rim of her martini glass even though it was only three thirty in the afternoon.
“School,” I’d tell her, adjusting my backpack.
“Is that so?” she’d ask, as though there were other options, other places for a kid to go each day from seven thirty to three thirty, picked up and dropped off by a yellow bus.
“I’m not myself today,” my mother would sometimes say. “So it’s best if you don’t bother me.”
“Of course,” I’d answer, ever obedient.
Then I’d watch her stagger off to her art studio, the large room at the end of the house that had once been an enclosed porch, which she’d had converted to a year-round work space. I remembered it as being the only room in the house where the curtains were always open. Yet even with sunlight streaming in, my mother’s studio had often felt oppressive and terrifying—a place so full of her that even when I’d been invited in, I felt I didn’t belong, like the room itself wanted to spit me back out.
As I stood now in the front hall, I could almost hear the ghosts of both versions of my mother calling me simultaneously:Is that you, Ali Alligator?andWhere have you been, useless girl?
I could feel her presence all around me, as if some part of her was still here, in the walls, the floor, the old plaster ceiling.
Something in the house shifted. There was a low creak.
“Hello?” I called.
But there was nothing. No one.
I reminded myself that my actual mother was back at my house in Vermont, sick in bed, dying. There was no one here to jump out of the shadows, drag me off while hissing, “Where have you been?” in my ear.
Where have you been?
“Away. I went away to save myself from you.” I said the words out loud, talking to the ghost version of my mother, the mother of my childhood. But she only laughed mockingly, whispered:
And yet here you are.
I flipped on the lights, did a quick circuit of the living room, the kitchen and pantry. It was all just as I remembered it. The same simple Shaker furniture. The same plain pale-gray walls. The same blue pottery dishes in the cupboards. I opened the refrigerator. Not much except a jar of olives, some fancy mustard, and curry paste. The tiled floor in the kitchen was polished, the granite countertops shimmered. It looked and felt like a place no one actually lived in—as if everything was there just for show. Even with the lights on, the room felt dark, cave-like, and airless. The back door in the kitchen was locked, and I went and looked out the window at the flagstone patio, remembering how it was this door I’d escape through wearing my father’s coat, carrying my brother’s BB gun. For an instant, I was sure I caught a glimpse of her—the ghost of my little girl self—a shadow slipping into the woods.
I turned and walked away.
There were no plants downstairs that needed watering. Nothing alive that needed to be cared for.
The house looked and smelled clean; no doubt the housekeepers were still coming once a week to mop, dust, and vacuum. There was a service that had been coming for years. Did they have their own key? I’d have to find a way to get in touch with them.
I left the kitchen and moved to the dining room, where the polished cherry table stood surrounded by six chairs, awaiting one last dinner that would never happen—not in this house, anyway. It was the table at which Ben and I had sat as we suffered through countless meals.
At the end of the dining room stood the door that led to my mother’s studio. I put my hand on the knob, hesitating. Growing up, it and my mother’s bedroom were the two places deemed off-limits. We weren’t to enter unless invited, and if we dared break the rules, there were terrible consequences.
I pushed open the door and stepped inside.
Because it had once been the sun porch, there were large windows on three sides and a door leading out to the backyard. The room should have been filled with natural light, but heavy blackout curtains now kept it entombed in darkness. I went to the far wall and drew open the curtains, letting in the winter light.
