When we arrive at the house, he walks me up the stoop stairs and kisses my hand. “We could have a wonderful life together, Maggie. You and I. Alex, too.”
I nod and say nothing.
“Good night, my darling.” He steps away to hail a passing cab and then turns to smile at me as he gets inside it.
When I step into the house, I am enfolded by all that is comfortable and dear to me, and I at once feel the tugging of the two lives that beckon: the one I have and the one being offered me. I hear music in the sitting room. Willa is at the piano, singing and playing—something she is doing a lot these days. She seems lost in her beautiful music, playing as if to charm demons into benevolent supplicants. I cross the foyer to peer inside and I see Papa and Alex involved in a chess game. Papa is explaining all the moves and Alex is listening with rapt attention, fingering the ebony horse head of one of the knights. Behind me on the other side of the entry, I hear Evie in the kitchen at the sink. Everyone is home tonight. Even Mama’s presence seems to warm the house as everyone goes about the evening’s activities. It’s as if she is right there, sitting in the armchair with a book. I long to tell someone what Palmer asked of me. My heart is bursting with the need to share it.
I imagine telling Papa and him being both happy and sad, and then the look on his face when I tell him I want Alex to come with me. Or telling Alex and having him stare up at me with equal parts excitement and apprehension and responding wide-eyed with “We’re leaving?” I look to Willa and imagine telling her and hearing her say I’m selfish to even suggest taking Alex. Then I look at the armchair by the fireplace, and its emptiness pierces me.
I turn toward the kitchen, knowing it is Evie I must talk to first. Wise Evie.
I make my way quietly to the kitchen so that the others in the sitting room will not hear that I’m home from being out with Palmer. Evie is drying her hands on a towel. The carcass of the chicken I had put in the oven earlier for their dinner still lies on its platter, now picked of its meat and ready to be thrown out.
She turns toward me. “Did you have a nice meal?” She looks tired. I cannot guess how many hours she spends at that asylum every week.
“I did.”
Evie nods and picks up the teakettle. “Care for some?”
“Yes. Please.”
She fills the kettle from the tap at the sink. As she sets it on the flame, I tell her. “Palmer is taking a new job in New York. He wants me to go with him.”
Evie turns her head, an eyebrow raised.
“He wants to marry me.”
For several seconds my sister says nothing. She is thinking. This is Evie’s way, and it’s why I’ve come to her instead of anyone else. She doesn’t hear that I’ve said Palmer has asked me to marry him; she hears what I’m really saying. She hears that I don’t know how I feel about Palmer and his proposal.
“Do you love him?” she asks.
“I might. I’m not entirely sure.”
Evie reaches for the tea tin in the cupboard. “What did you tell him?”
“That I need some time to think.”
“And what about Alex?”
Here again she knows without my saying it what burdens me just as much as not being sure if I’m in love with Palmer. What would my marrying and moving away mean for Alex? Can I take Alex away from his home here? Should I?
“Palmer says we can bring him with us. We can raise him as our own, alongside our own children.”
Evie closes her eyes for a moment, her hand motionless atop the tea tin. She is imagining what I have been picturing in my head the last half hour. Alex leaving this house with me. Alex saying good-bye to her and Papa and Willa. And for whose ultimate good? Mine or his?
“I don’t know what to do,” I say. “I can’t imagine leaving Alex, and I can’t imagine taking him from Papa. And you and Willa. I don’t know what to do!”
Evie exhales deeply as she opens the tin. “Don’t you?” she asks gently.
“No! I don’t. I think I love Palmer. But I’m not sure. Shouldn’t I be sure? I don’t even know what this kind of love between a man and woman is supposed to be like.”
And there it is. This is what is perplexing me and tying my stomach into knots. The only love I had ever had for a man is the old one that belonged to Jamie Sutcliff, someone I barely know and whom I haven’t seen or heard from in six years. In the first week after meeting Palmer, I’d spent more time with him than I had with Jamie Sutcliff in all the years I’d known him. And yet a buried part of me still yearns for Jamie.
“I don’t know what this kind of love is supposed to be like,” I say again, more to myself than to Evie.
My sister opens Mama’s tea infuser in the shape of a cat and plunges it into the tea leaves.
“Yes, you do,” she says, practically whispering.
I just stare at her.
Evie withdraws the infuser, fat with leaves, and clasps it shut. She stares at it for a second and then turns to me. “I think you do. I think we both do.”
I open my mouth to ask her how she can know that, but Papa and Alex are suddenly there, having come into the kitchen so that Papa can make them both hot cocoa.
I wait for another chance to speak with Evie alone, but it doesn’t present itself before she excuses herself and goes to bed.
Later, when I have tucked Alex into his bed, the light in her room is off and all is quiet behind the door.
I head to my own room with her earlier words swirling about in my head, challenging me to believe they are true.
