When it finally passes — and it does pass, the way weather does — I'm hollowed out and headachy and strangely light, like something enormous has been carved out of my chest and I'm still learning to stand without it.
"She said something to me," I tell Iris's collarbone. "Grand-mère. At the end of the letter."
"What did she say?"
"Stop leaving before people can leave you."
Iris is quiet for a moment. Then: "That's very rude."
I laugh — wetly, horribly, and it turns into a hiccup. "She was very rude."
"She was right, though."
"Yeah." I close my eyes. "She was usually right."
We stay like that as the room goes dark, my mother's last words folded on the bed beside us, and for the first time in my life the silence in my head isn't asking me what I did wrong.
23
IRIS
It takes us a week to open the door.
Neither of us says why. We just don't — not the night Duval brings the key, not the morning after, not any of the days that follow, while Cat moves through the house quiet and hollow-eyed and slowly, visibly, putting herself back together. The little iron key sits on the kitchen windowsill above the sink, and every day we both look at it, and every day neither of us picks it up.
On the eighth morning, Cat sets down her coffee and says, "Today."
"You're sure?"
"No." She picks up the key. "Doing it anyway."
The lock is stiff. She has to work the key back and forth, and I stand behind her with my heart going like a bird, and then something gives and the door swings inward.
The smell comes first. Lavender, of course. But underneath it, paint and old paper and the particular still air of a room that has been shut for four years. The smell of time holding its breath.
The curtains are drawn. Cat crosses to the window and hauls them back, and the light comes in all at once.
Oh,I think.
A wide bed with a faded quilt, still made. A vanity crowded with perfume bottles standing in ranks like soldiers. Bookshelves so overloaded the spines have gone soft.
And the paintings. God, the paintings.
They cover nearly every inch of wall — Hélène's, unmistakably, but not the landscapes that hang in the sitting room for company. These are different. These were never for anyone else.
Marguerite as a young woman, her face turned into the light, wearing an expression I have never once seen on my own mother. A wash of purple and gold that shouldn't look like anything and somehowisthe lavender at dusk, entirely and exactly. And by the bed, small and unframed, two pairs of hands laced together — one weathered and square, one slim and paint-stained.
"She kept the best ones," Cat says quietly. "Just like Monique said."
"They were too personal to hang." I move closer to the little canvas of the hands, and something in my chest folds over. "This was theirs. This whole room was theirs."
The chest is on the bed, half-buried in pillows. Initials carved into the lid, deep, by someone with a steady hand and a lot of time.
M.B. + H.V.
"Her journals," Cat breathes.
We look at each other. This is the last door — the final layer of a woman who spent her life keeping herself out of reach.
