“Please, Willa. You will know soon enough. Just tell Papa that Maggie and I need to talk to him. Tell him to wait for us in the viewing parlor. Then take Alex to the sitting room and close the doors. Please?”
There is a pause. I can’t raise my head to look at Willa. She will hate me after this.
“All right,” Willa says.
A moment later she is gone. Evie moistens a washcloth and then helps me to my feet. She wipes away the vomit and perspiration from my face.
“I need to get something from my room,” she says.
I put a drinking glass under the tap and then force myself toswallow some water. When Evie returns a minute later, she has in her hand the little box that she’d taken out of her coat pocket when she got home.
“What is that?” I say, loathing it even though I don’t know what it holds. It’s somehow related to Alex being a boy named Leo—I’m sure of that at least—and I hate it.
“It’s Ursula’s. There is a picture of their mother inside. Alex deserves to see it.”
We hear the pocket doors to the sitting room close, our cue that Willa has taken Alex inside. He won’t see our ashen, tearstained faces as we come down the stairs.
“Come,” Evie says to me, taking my hand.
“I can’t,” I whisper.
“Yes, you can.”
I look at the box in her hand. “Can I see it? The picture of their mother?”
Evie opens the box and withdraws a sepia-toned photograph of a dark-haired woman with long curls and kind eyes. She is sitting on a chair with her hands in her lap. A little girl with ringlets stands next to her with her hand on the mother’s left shoulder. The mother’s torso is angled toward the girl, as if perhaps she’d wanted to have her arm around the girl’s waist but the photographer told her to leave her hands folded in her lap. The woman is pretty and young and her slight smile is serene.
This was the woman I saw dead on her bed the day I found Alex. This woman.
His mother.
I hold the photograph to my breast as Evie and I descend the stairs and make our way to where Papa waits for us.
