There was my old bedside table with a lamp on it. The wind-up alarm clock with the glowing hands, silent now. And on the shelf below the lamp and clock was the illustrated children’s Bible that Aunt Frances had given me.
Aunt Frances, who had never really approved of my mother, had rarely visited after my father’s death, sending Ben and me cards on our birthdays with quotes from Scripture and five-dollar bills tucked inside.
Aunt Frances, whose funeral I had attended just last April.
I backed out of the room, having the strangest sense that if I stayed a moment longer, I’d be trapped there, sucked back through time to my childhood self, and I’d have to live through it all again.
I closed the door, heart lurching in my chest.
I thought I heard something: a faint scuttling in the walls. Mice? Rats?
“Check all the rooms and go,” I told myself aloud as I made my way down to my mother’s room at the end of the hall.
I opened the door and squinted into the darkness, but I sensed immediately that I was not alone. The shades were drawn, not letting any light sneak through. I groped along the wall until my fingers found a light switch.
I’d been right—I wasn’t alone.
There were eyes watching me.
Bobbi’s eyes.
My mother’s painting of Bobbi.
I hadn’t even realized that it wasn’t where I remembered it last being, hanging on the living room wall beside the television. Now it hung above my mother’s bed, so Bobbi could watch over her each night as she slept.
Bobbi and her cut-open chest, revealing the stone heart.
What did my mother see when she looked at the painting? What did it make her think of? That Bobbi had hardened her heart to her, that she’d left her, gone off to California, gotten married, chosen some other life? Or did she look at Bobbi, then at the stone on her nightstand, and think she’d gotten her lover’s heart at last?
Bobbi stared at me, the stone in her chest seeming to pulsate, to beat itself back to life. I realized the truth of the painting that I’d somehow missed as a child: the look on Bobbi’s face, the quiet hunger, the intimacy. The look that said:We share a secret, you and I. I am yours and you are mine.
Had my father truly known about their relationship?
And once Bobbi died, how was he supposed to measure up to the ghost of my mother’s true love? Did he watch the way she stared at the stone she kept beside their bed? Did he hear her talking to it, begging to have Bobbi back?
I turned away from the painting, from Bobbi, immortalized forever at twenty-one years old, her chest opened up to reveal her clear stone heart pierced with needlelike strands of black tourmaline.
I went to my mother’s closet, opened the door, and breathed in the smell of her clothing, her perfume. I looked at the row of shiny dress shoes she’d never again put on for an opening at a gallery, and my chest ached. I imagined one day soon coming back to this closet, packing up all the shoes, the dresses and blouses still smelling of her perfume, boxing them up and sending them off to a charity shop.
There was a quilt folded on the top shelf. I remembered it from my childhood—snuggling with my mother under the zigzag pattern of curved blue and white fabric pieces. Her own mother had made the quilt; my mother explained that the pattern was called the Drunkard’s Path. We’d trace the weaving steps of the drunkard with our fingers, laughing while my mother told me about her own mother—how she was an artist too, but she worked with fabric instead of paint.
Now I took the quilt down, thinking I’d bring it home, surprise my mother with it.
That’s when I noticed that tucked behind it were two boxes, about the size and shape of shoeboxes.
I blinked stupidly at them.
They had been labeled neatly in black Sharpie. One saidBEN, the otherALISON.
I reached for the box with my name on it, my fingers hesitating, not sure that I really wanted to see.
But I needed to know.
I took down theALISONbox and set it on the bed. I lifted the lid. A musty smell drifted up.
“What the hell?” I muttered as I peered down into it.
Inside was a strange nest woven together from what appeared to be hair and scraps of cloth. I reached in, felt something hard inside. I pulled back the hair and fabric, sure I recognized the pattern—I’d had a favorite dress with those same yellow and white stripes. And was that my hair? Tucked inside were three baby teeth, a dried flower, and a little roundpiece of wax with a simple design carved into it: a box with an X in it and four dots in each triangle made by the X.
