Cordelia recognized the woman instantly. She was younger then, but still past middle age, poised elegantly on the parlor settee, a swath of stark white hair pinned atop her head. Her face was full, shaped more like Eustace’s. But she was pale, with a dour quality to her expression, which lacked a smile. Her black turtleneck cloaked her square shoulders and long neck. Beside her stood a slender man with a receding hairline. He had her same heavy lower lip and blank expression, but not her strength or severity. Gordon’s term—The White Lady—came sharply into focus. It was the same woman she’d seen in the window back home.
“Yes,” Cordelia told her. “That’s Aunt Augusta.”
She scanned the collection of images, fearful of more surprises hiding behind them. In one, she recognized Maggie’s small nose and Augusta’s proud bearing, a woman who couldn’t have been a day over twenty. Her hair spiraled around her face like Eustace’s but had their mother’s ginger coloring. Her eyes were laughing here as she smiled into the camera, but only momentsago Cordelia had seen those same eyes white and glassy like pale marbles. It was the levitating girl, her face now clean and familiar. She had to be their grandmother, who, according to their mother, hadn’t survived Maggie’s birth.
But it was another picture that stood out to her, of a thin woman in a drop-waist dress, a flash of pearls clutching her neck, dark hair knotted behind one ear. She held a strange animal in her arms, with a thick black coat and beady eyes, a pointy nose and long tail—the fisher-cat from downstairs, clearly still alive when the photograph was taken. Her face was serene with sensitive, shadowed eyes.
Cordelia picked the picture up.
“Who’s that?” Eustace asked.
“I’m not sure.” Though she knew she’d seen her already, leaning over the stair railing, squeezing her own throat. She quickly put the photo back where she’d found it.
All these faces she couldn’t name, with eyes like hers or a jawline like her sister’s, a chin that matched their mother’s. It would take time to sort them out. And time went against everything Cordelia had planned on her way here. It should be a quick listing, a fast,as-issale. She intended to be back in Texas next week, paying Busy Mazzello to stay as far away from her as possible, which didn’t leave room for poring over family albums.
And yet, something in herwantedto know them, wanted to know why her mother had left them all behind.
“Do you think this washerroom?” Eustace asked suddenly, indicating their great-aunt.
Cordelia could smell Augusta in the space with them—jasmine and black pepper—obvious as a forgotten word you’ve spoken hundreds of times before. She opened a top drawer and nodded. It was full of folded cashmere sweaters, all black except for one that was such a dark purple it may as well have been. “It would seem so.”
But it wasn’t just their aunt clouding the space around them. Another presence lingered beneath that one, lower down, sinking like carbon dioxide, odorless, invisible but no less real. Cordelia ran her fingers along the edge of the dresser, past one shining frame after another, until they stopped before a brass box, twitching like they did right before she got a call. She tapped the elaborately etched lid, a pattern of twining flowers so thick they reminded her of the wild garden outside.
“What’s that?” her sister asked.
Cordelia picked the box up off its dainty feet and carefully lifted the lid. The notes poured out slowly, hauntingly, a trickle of music old and revered, a tune she knew she’d heard before. It reminded her of the holidays and heartbreak and wine poured from tall decanters, with necks like giraffes.
“‘Greensleeves,’” her sister whispered.
Cordelia snapped it shut. “What?”
“It’s ‘Greensleeves’—an old English folk song. They used to play it in our high school orchestra.”
“How do you know?”
“I slept with one of the cellists,” she said with a shrug.
Cordelia set the box down and opened it again, the melody encircling her like an embrace, a choke hold. Inside, a small packet of Polaroids had been tied together with black velvet ribbon, a lock of orange hair tucked beneath it. She pulled them out, tugging at the bow, letting the ribbon drop to the floor, lifting the hair to her nose—traces of cinnamon and viburnum:Maggie—and then setting it aside. Shuffling through one photo after the next, she could feel the blood draining from her face, throbbing in her fingertips.
“What is it?” Eustace asked, leaning in.
“It’s Mom,” Cordelia said, closing the lid to stop the music and laying the pictures on top. “This belonged to Mom.”
Eustace scowled. “Let me see.” Her hands made quick workof the pictures, no more than five or six. She held the last one up. “Are you kidding me?”
Cordelia felt the wind go out of her and slide back in again, her lungs slack as old rubber bands. In the image, their mother was around twelve or thirteen, wearing a simple gingham skirt and bikini top with a lopsided smile, a raggedy black cat hanging from her arms, floppy and tame as a cloth doll and clearly just as beloved. Someone had writtenMagdalena & Atticusat the bottom. Behind them, the crypt loomed, the roses blurring to a magenta mass.
“I guess she wasn’t always opposed to pets,” Cordelia said weakly. “Or cemeteries. That’s the family crypt behind them.”
“Or music for that matter,” Eustace said with a pointed glance at the box, flipping through the Polaroids again. She held up another one for Cordelia to see, a teenage Maggie staring back at her, laughter rimming her mouth, eyes lit like fireflies. Beside her stood a man, rail-thin, head turned, transfixed.
“Who is that with her?” Cordelia asked. He wasn’t familiar exactly, but something in the way he was looking at their mother felt familiar, as if she’d seen it before.
Eustace frowned. “Who the hell knows? But does that look like a woman who is suffering to you?”
“Well, no,” Cordelia concurred. “But it’s just a handful of pictures. Moments really.”
“Happy moments,” Eustace said sharply. “Not a sickly little girl with blistering headaches or someone being abused.”
