After lunch, Nana Jean and Ziggy came back out to the porch and sat quietly, the old woman in the wicker chair, the boy on the concrete step, the ferret bouncing between them like a feather duster. Sometimes she pulled him close, and he sat there, stiff and unmoving, which made me so sad, I almost couldn’t bear it. If Nana Jean belonged to me, she would pet my hair and I would pretend to fall asleep. I would breathe deep, smelling her homey smell, the scent of starched dresses and rising bread.
She filled his afternoon with chitchat about the weather, the meal she would make for their dinner, easy topics that poufed around them like pillows, making a warm hum that I loved so much to hear, I wished I could spy on them forever. It was clear that the one thing in this world Nana Jean most wanted to give Ziggy was the gift of everydayness. If the boy wanted to be stiff, he could be stiff. If he wanted to stay silent, he could stay silent.
“He’s been through a lot lately,” Nana Jean said to Lucy and Heather Anne when they came down the road with a plate of their mother’s homemade Toll House cookies. Lucy held out the plate and smiled, but Ziggy’s idea of a thank-you was to raise both shoulders up to his ears and growl menacingly at her, wiggling his fingers like he was casting an evil spell, and then turn away so all they could see was the back of his scruffy head and the triangular white face of the ferret peeking out from behind the mane of red hair, blinking at them in the sunlight.
Lucy stopped smiling. She made one huge sniff through her nose, smelled the ferret, and made a stink face, handing the plate to Nana Jean in a huff. She grabbed the smaller hand of Heather Anne, who stood blinking beside her, and stormed off the porch, dragging her sister behind her, to stomp back down Trowbridge Road to the Delmato house, her feathered hair so stiff with hair spray, it barely moved at all, despite all that stomping.
In the summer, six o’clock was dinnertime on Trowbridge Road. That’s when the fathers started coming home from work, pulling their brown station wagons into their driveways, walking up their back steps with tired brown shoes to kiss their wives and close their doors behind them.
Six o’clock was also when mothers started calling their kids in for supper, when everyone left whatever they were doing to slump back indoors to wash their hands and faces and sit at the table when all they really wanted was to go back outside to the nicest time of any summer day, the last few hours of sunlight before bed.
At six o’clock, Nana Jean put her arm around Ziggy Karlo’s skinny shoulders and walked him back inside the house with slow, easy steps. Just before he went in, Ziggy turned back around and squinted up into the copper beech tree at me. I stayed perfectly still and hid behind the curtain of leaves.
Ziggy shook his head like he was cleaning cobwebs out of his eyes and followed Nana Jean into the house. Then the screen door slammed, and I was left alone in the copper beech tree looking out on an empty neighborhood filled with closed doors and families inside their houses together, eating on plates with knives and forks and glasses clinking.
At six thirty, when everyone had already been sitting at their dinner table for half an hour, I climbed down the trunk of the copper beech tree, quiet and slow as a sloth so nobody would notice a difference when I walked the one, two, three houses down and across the street to my own sighing house with the gray shutters. The lawn needed mowing. Crabgrass reached its knotty fingers up to my kneecaps, and raspberries grew wild all along the edge.
The kids in the neighborhood thought my house was haunted. It was something about the ivy twirling up to the windows. It didn’t help that most of the time, the curtains were drawn, and no one appeared to come or go from its large locked doors, not even me, June Bug Jordan, quiet as a shadow, slipping off her sandals on the sighing porch, letting herself in at six thirty-two on the dot, and then closing the door very gently behind her.
The deep red notes filled the old house with echoes and made the shadows seem even darker.
I let the outside air dissolve into the familiar closed-in scent of old wood and ninety-degree days. I leaned my body against the banister that curved up the stairs, trying to wipe the last trace of the world from my skin before I entered the white room where Mother hid.
The only time that Mother ever looked connected to the earth was when she was playing her cello. She always seemed so calm when she practiced. Her hair was unfastened and loose around her shoulders. Her arms were relaxed for once, her spine straight, her two bare feet planted on the floor like the roots of a tree.
I climbed into the four-poster bed we shared and lay on my stomach with my chin in my hands to watch how the music changed her, smoothing the lines of her face, making her breathe easy and slow. Mother said that the Prelude from Bach’s first suite is the most beautiful piece of music ever written for cello. It’s filled with echoes, one voice singing lullabies to itself. The line glides from deep low notes to middle to high, sighing like a swan gliding over waves.
She raised her bow and let the last note shimmer in the stale air.
I sighed when it finally disappeared because the world seemed emptier without it.
Mother looked at me and smiled. She put her cello and bow down and then scuttled back to the safety of our bed.
I made room for her.
“I like that piece,” I told her. “It makes me feel so peaceful.”
“It always has,” she said. “I used to play it when I was pregnant with you. Used to quiet you right down. Kicking stopped. Stirring stopped. And you’d just kind of float in the darkness, listening.”
She motioned for me to turn onto my side so she could hug me from behind the way she always loved to do. When I was little, I loved it too. I was the baby and she was the mommy, and we were safe together in our nest. But lately we hadn’t been fitting together so well.
My stomach growled. We both heard it.
I held still and tried not to breathe.
“Mother,” I said.
She didn’t answer.
“Mother,” I said, louder. “Is there anything to eat?”
I scrambled to my knees and looked down at her. She was still curled onto her side, holding herself now instead of me. I could see the planes of her face, the hollow of her neck, the long arms and legs jutting beneath her white nightgown.
How long had it been since she’d eaten?
My stomach growled again.
“Can you make me something?” I asked.
My voice echoed strangely in our little room.
“I don’t think there’s much food down there,” said Mother. “But Uncle Toby comes with groceries on Saturday. I made him a list. Guess what’s on it!”
Suddenly I was a little girl naming all the foods I loved.
“Popsicles?”
“Yup.”
“And strawberries?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And cheddar cheese and oranges and hot dogs and yogurt?”
“Yes, yes, yes.” Mother reached up and touched the tip of my nose. “And cold cuts and yellow apples and pickles and rye bread and salami and all sorts of yummy things for my baby girl to make so she can eat all she wants.”
“Like grilled cheese?”
“Of course,” said Mother. “You know how to make grilled cheese. It’s easy.”
“But I’m hungry now.”
Mother’s face looked strained on the pillow. “Oh, honey,” she said.